all but English lawyers, who ought to be silenced by the consciousness that the same barbarous disproportion of a penalty to an offence is sanctioned, in the like case, by their own law." Those who may be led away by the notion that absolute power can be any thing but the worst of evils, even in Denmark, where it was formally surrendered by the nation to the sovereign, and where absolute government has been represented as so full of comfort to the people, should peruse this article: "It became a fashion," says Sir James, among slavish sophists to quote the example of Denmark as a proof of the harmlessness of despotism, and of the indifference of forms of government:- Even in Denmark,' it was said, 'where the king is legally absolute, civil liberty is respected, justice is well administered, the persons and property of men are secure, the whole administration is more moderate and mild than that of most governments which are called free. The progress of civilization, and the power of public opinion, more than supply the place of popular institutions.' These representations were aided by that natural disposition of the human mind, when a good consequence unexpectedly appears to spring from a bad institution, to be hurried into the extreme of doubting whether the institution be not itself good, without waiting to balance the evil against the good, or even duly to ascertain the reality of the good. No species of discovery produces so agreeable a surprise, and, consequently, so much readiness to assent to its truth, as that of the benefits of an evil. There are no paradoxes more captivating than the apologies of old abuses and corruptions. "The honest narrative of Falkenskiold, however, tells us a different tale. The first of the despotic kings, jealous of the nobility, bestowed the highest offices on adventurers, who were either foreigners, or natives of the lowest sort. Such is the universal practice of Eastern tyrants. Such was, for a century, the condition of Spain, the most Oriental of European countries. The, same characteristic feature of despotism is observable in the history of Russia. All talent being extinguished among the superior classes, by withdrawing every object which excites and exercises the faculties, the prince finds a common capacity for business only abroad, or amongst the lowest classes of his subjects. Bernstorff, a Hanoverian, Lynar, a Saxon, and St. Germain, a Frenchman, were among the ablest of the Danish ministers. The country was governed for a hundred years by foreigners. Unacquainted with Denmark, and disdaining even to acquire its language, they employed Danish servants as their confidential agents, and placed them in all the secondary offices. The natives followed their example. Footmen occupied important offices. So prevalent was this practice, that a law was at length passed by the ill-fated Struensee, to forbid this new rule of freemen. Some of the foreign ministers, with good intentions, introduced ostentatious establishments, utterly unsuitable to one of the poorest countries of Europe. With a population of two millions and a half, and a revenue of a million and a half sterling, Denmark, in 1769, had on foot an army of sixty-six thousand men; so that about a ninth of the males of the age of labour were constantly idle and under arms. There was a debt of nearly ten millions sterling, after fifty years' peace. An inconvertible paper money, always discredited, and daily fluctuating, rendered contracts nugatory, and made it impossible to determine the value of property, or to estimate the wages of labour. The barren and mountainous country of Norway, out of a population of seven hundred thousand souls, contributed twenty thousand men to the army, nine thousand to the local militia, and fourteen thousand enrolled for naval service, forming a total of fortythree thousand conscripts, the fourth part of the labouring males being thus sét apart by conscription for military service. The majority of the officers of the army were foreign, and the words of command were given in the German language. The navy was disproportioned to the part of the population habitually employed in maritime occupation; but it was the natural force of the country. The seamen were skilful and brave, and their gallant resistance to Nelson, in 1801, is the greatest honour of the Danish name in modern times. Their colonies were useful and costly. "The administration of law was neither just nor humane. The torture was in constant use. The treatment of the galley slaves at Copenhagen caused travellers who had seen the Mediterranean ports to shudder. One of the mild modes of removing an unpopular minister was to send him a prisoner for life to a dungeon under the Arctic cirele. "The effect of absolute government in debasing the rulers was remarkable in Denmark. One of the principal amusements of Frederic V., who sat on the throne from 1746 to 1766, consisted in mock (matches at boxing and wrestling with his favourites, in which it was not always safe to gain an advantage over the royal gladiator. His son and successor, Christian VII., was either originally deficient in understanding, or had, by vicious practice in boyhood, so much impaired his mental faculties, that considerable wonder was felt at Copenhagen at his being allowed in 1768 to display his imbecility in a tour through a great part of Europe. The elder Bernstorff, then at the head of the council, was unable to restrain the king and his favourite Stolk from this indiscreet exposure. Such, however, is the power of the solemn plausibilities of the world,' that in France this unhappy person was complimented by academies, and in England works of literature were inscribed to him." The remaining, and the most important, literary works of Sir James Mackintosh, are the unfinished History of the Revolution of 1688, contained in the present volume; "A general View of Ethical Philosophy," begun in the first, and completed in the second, volume of the Edinburgh edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica; "The History of England, from the Roman Conquest of Britain to the Sixteenth Year of the Reign of Elizabeth;" and the "Life of Sir Thomas More," both published in the Cabinet Cyclopædia. Of the merits and character of the first-mentioned work here presented to the reader nothing need be said. The dissertation on the progress of ethical philosophy not only sustained but advanced his reputation, already eminent in speculative science. Less studious or ostentatious of the graces and ornaments of composition than Dugald Stewart, less negligent of them than other writers, his style has in general * a sustained and simple elegance * This qualification may appear invidious or unjust; it is however called for by such exceptions as the following illustration of the system of Hobbes:-" The moral and political system of Hobbes was a palace of icè, transparent, exactly proportioned, which becomes the subject, and charms the reader. The first and last impressions left upon the mind by the perusal of this essay is that of his vast reading and deep meditation on the principles of morals. He neither starts a new theory, nor throws his weight, at least decisively, into either scale, where he considers the more modern controversies of adverse schools. It is true that he maintains the existence of perfectly disinterested benevolence, and—with some qualification-of the moral sense. But it may be said, on the whole, that he rather views and wanders over the surface of the science in its progress from the earliest time, and from its earliest cultivators, to the most recent,-characterising the principles, or examining the writings, of the chiefs of sects and schools, from Epicurus to Bentham. It should be observed, that his view chiefly and professedly respects the progress of ethics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, giving naturally, and perhaps reasonably, his main attention to its cultivation in the United Kingdom. He begins by distinguishing and defining, as follows, the physical and moral sciences: "But however multiplied the connexions of the moral and physical sciences are, it is not difficult to draw a general distinction between them. The purpose of the physical sciences throughout all their provinces is to answer the question, What is? They consist only of facts arranged according to their likeness, and expressed by general names given to every class of similar facts. The purpose of the moral sciences is to answer the question, What ought to be? They aim at ascertaining the rules which ought to govern voluntary action, and to which those habitual dispositions of mind which are the source of voluntary actions ought to be adapted." After some preliminary observations, he glances over ancient ethics. The following coup d'œil is admirable. No one endued with the least sense of the beautiful in morals, or in style, could bring himself to curtail it: "It was not till near a century after the death of Plato, that ethics became the scene of philosophical contest between the adverse schools of Epicurus and Zeno, whose errors afford an instructive example, that, in the formation of theory, partial truth is equivalent to absolute falsehood. As the astronomer who left either the centripetal or the centrifugal force of the planets out of his view would err as completely as he who excluded both, so the Epicureans and Stoics, who each confined themselves to real but not exclusive principles in morals, departed as widely from the truth as if they had adopted no part of it. Every partial theory majestic, admired by the unwary as a delightful dwelling; but gradually undermined by the central warmth of human feeling, before it was thawed into muddy water by the sunshine of true philosophy." is, indeed, directly false, inasmuch as it ascribes to one or few causes what is produced by more. As the extreme opinions of one, if not both, of these schools have been often revived, with variations and refinements, in modern times, and are still not without influence on ethical systems, it may be allowable to make some observations on this earliest of moral controversies. 666 'All other virtues,' said Epicurus, 'grow from prudence, which teaches that we cannot live pleasurably without living justly and virtuously, nor live justly and virtuously without living pleasurably.' The illustration of this sentence formed the whole moral discipline of Epicurus. To him we owe the general concurrence of reflecting men in succeeding times, in the important truth, that men cannot be happy without a virtuous frame of mind and course of life; a truth of inestimable value, not peculiar to the Epicureans, but placed by their exaggerations in a stronger light; a truth, it must be added, of less importance as a motive to right conduct than to the completeness of moral theory, which, however, it is very far from solely constituting. With that truth the Epicureans blended another position, which, indeed, is contained in the first words of the above statement; namely, that because virtue promotes happiness, every act of virtue must be done in order to promote the happiness of the agent. They and their modern followers tacitly assume, that the latter position is the consequence of the former; as if it were an inference from the necessity of food to life, that the fear of death should be substituted for the appetite of hunger as a motive for eating. 'Friendship,' says Epicurus, is to be pursued by the wise man only for its usefulness, but he will begin as he sows the field in order to reap.' It is obvious that, if these words be confined to outward benefits, they may be sometimes true, but never can be pertinent; for outward acts sometimes show kindness, but never compose it. If they be applied to kind feeling they would, indeed, be pertinent, but they would be evidently and totally false; for it is most certain that no man acquires an affection merely from his belief that it would be agreeable or advantageous to feel it. Kindness cannot, indeed, be pursued on account of the pleasure which belongs to it: for man can no more know the pleasure till he has felt the affection, than he can form an idea of colour without the sense of sight. The moral character of Epicurus was excellent; no man more enjoyed the pleasure or better performed the duties of friendship. The letter of his system was no more indulgent to vice than that of any other moralist.* Although, therefore, he has the merit of having more strongly inculcated the connexion of virtue with happiness, perhaps, by the faulty excess of treating it as an exclusive principle, yet his doctrine was justly charged with indisposing the mind to those exalted and generous sentiments, without which no pure, elevated, bold, generous, or tender virtues can exist. "As Epicurus represented the tendency of virtue, which is a most important truth in ethical theory, as the sole inducement to virtuous practice; so Zeno, in his disposition towards the opposite extreme, was inclined to consider the moral sentiments which are motives of right conduct, as being the sole principles of moral science. The confusion was equally great in a philosophical view; but that of Epicurus was more fatal to interests of higher importance than those of phi-` losophy. Had the Stoics been content with affirming that virtue is the source of all that part of our happiness which depends on ourselves, they would have taken *It is due to him to observe that he treated humanity towards slaves as one of the characteristics of a wise man. Ούτε κολάσειν οικετας, ελεήσειν μεν τα και συγγ VæμNY TIVI ĚŽELV TWV σTroudaιOV. (DIOG. LAERT. lib. x. edit. Meibom. I. 653.) It is not unworthy of remark, that neither Plato nor Epicurus thought it necessary to abstain from these topics in a city full of slaves, many of whom were men not destitute of knowledge. a position from which it would have been impossible to drive them; they would have laid down a principle of as great comprehension in practice as their wider pretensions; a simple and incontrovertible truth, beyond which every thing is an object of mere curiosity to man. Our information, however, about the opinions of the more celebrated Stoics is very scanty. None of their own writings are preserved. We know little of them but from Cicero, the translator of Grecian philosophy, and from the Greek compilers of a later age; authorities which would be imperfect in the history of facts, but which are of far less value in the history of opinions, where a right conception often depends upon the minutest distinctions between words. We know that Zeno was more simple, and that Chrysippus, who was accounted the prop of the Stoic Porch, abounded more in subtile distinction and systematic spirit. His power was attested as much by the antagonists whom he called forth, as by the scholars whom he formed. 'Had there been no Chrysippus, there would have been no Carneades,' was the saying of the latter philosopher himself; as it might have been said in the eighteenth century, 'Had there been no Hume, there would have been no Kant and no Reid. Cleanthes, when one of his followers would pay court to him by laying vices to the charge of his most formidable opponent, Arcesilaus, the Academic, answered, with a justice and candour unhappily too rare, 'Silence, do not malign him; though he attacks virtue with his arguments, he confirms its authority by his life.' Arcesilaus, whether modestly or churlishly, replied, 'I do not choose to be flattered.' Cleanthes, with a superiority of repartee as well as charity, replied, 'Is it flattery to say that you speak one thing and do another?' It would be vain to expect that the fragments of the professors who lectured in the Stoic school for five hundred years should be capable of being moulded into one consistent system; and we see that, in Epictetus at least, the exaggeration of the sect was lowered to the level of reason, by confining the sufficiency of virtue to those cases only where happiness is attainable by our voluntary acts. It ought to be added, in extenuation of a noble error, that the power of habit and character to struggle against outward evils has been proved by experience to be in some instances so prodigious, that no man can presume to fix the utmost limit of its possible increase. "The attempt, however, of the Stoics to stretch the bounds of their system beyond the limits of nature, produced the inevitable inconvenience of dooming them to fluctuate between a wild fanaticism on the one hand, and, on the other, concessions which left their differences from other philosophers purely verbal. Many of their doctrines appear to be modifications of their original opinions, introduced as opposition became more formidable. In this manner they were driven to the necessity of admitting that the objects of our desires and appetites are worthy of preference, though they are denied to be constituents of happiness. It was thus that they were obliged to invent a double morality; one for mankind at large, from whom was expected no more than the xanov, which seems principally to have denoted acts of duty done from inferior or mixed motives; and the other, which they appear to have hoped from their ideal wise man, is xaroplaμa, or perfect observance of rectitude, which consisted only in moral acts done from mere reverence for morality, unaided by any feelings; all which (without the exception of pity) they classed among the enemies of reason and the disturbers of the human soul. Thus did they shrink from their proudest paradoxes into verbal evasions. It is remarkable that men so acute did not perceive and acknowledge, that, if pain were not an evil, cruelty would not be a vice; and that, if patience were of power to render torture indifferent, virtue must expire in the moment of victory. There can be no more triumph when there is no enemy left to conquer. "The influence of men's opinions on the conduct of their lives is checked and |