masterpiece of brilliant style and finished dialectics.

Writing as a historian, Mr. Seeley exhorts us to look at the
eighteenth century in a new light and from a new standpoint, which he
exhibits with singular skill and power. We could only wish that he had
been a little less zealous on behalf of its novelty. His accents are
almost querulous as he complains of historical predecessors for their
blindness to what in plain truth we have always supposed that they
discerned quite as clearly as he discerns it himself. 'Our
historians,' he says, 'miss the true point of view in describing the
eighteenth century. They make too much of the mere parliamentary
wrangle and the agitations about liberty. They do not perceive that in
that century the history of England is not in England, but in America
and Asia.' 'I shall venture to assert,' he proceeds in another place,
'that the main struggle of England from the time of Louis XIV. to the
time of Napoleon was for the possession of the New World; and it is
for want of perceiving this that most of us find that century of
English history uninteresting.' The same teasing refrain runs through
the book. We might be disposed to traverse Mr. Seeley's assumption
that most of us do find the eighteenth century of English history
uninteresting. 'In a great part of it,' Mr. Seeley assures us, 'we see
nothing but stagnation. The wars seem to lead to nothing, and we do
not perceive the working of any new political ideas. That time seems
to have created little, so that we can only think of it as prosperous,
but not as memorable. Those dim figures, George I. and George II., the
long tame administrations of Walpole and Pelham, the commercial war
with Spain, the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, the foolish prime
minister Newcastle, the dull brawls of the Wilkes period, the
miserable American war--everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of
greatness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and in
affairs.' This would be very sad if it were true, but is it true? A
plain man rubs his eyes in amazement at such reproaches. So far from
most of us finding the eighteenth century uninteresting, as prosperous
rather than memorable, as wanting in greatness, as distressing by the
commonness and the flatness of its men and its affairs, we undertake
to say that most of us, in the sense of most people who read the
English language, know more about, and feel less flatness, and are
more interested in t