The Quarterly Review (Volume 117)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. III.?Sir John Eliot: a Biography, 1590-1632. By Jolra Forster. 2 vols. London, 1864. 'VX7HEN Tocqueville published his excellent book on the ' Ancien Regime ' and the Revolution, most people were surprised to find how closely the period of terror and anarchy had been connected with that which preceded it. The tree which had shot up with such rapidity, when once above the surface, had been long collecting its strength and fastening its roots in the soil below. The author himself begins by observing that the French in 1789 had tried, as it were, to cut their destiny into two parts, and to place an abyss between that which they had been and that which they were afterwards to be. He adds that they had been less successful than they themselves supposed in this singular enterprise; and he then goes on to show that the Revolution was the just and natural result of the state of things which the tyrannical centralisation of Louis XIV. and the reckless profligacy of the Regency and of Louis XV. had produced in France. No one can understand the true spirit of the French Revolution without looking carefully at the institutions of the country as they were already administered in practice, and considering the condition of its people in the preceding century. The coherence of events is perhaps still more obvious with reference to our great rebellion in the seventeenth century, inasmuch as the growth of disaffection to the Crown, and the increase of the popular power were more gradual, and admit of being more distinctly traced. The epoch of the Stuarts, from the accession of James I. to the ignominious flight of his grandson, is a story or great drama complete in itself, and only to be understood as a whole. To comprehend the struggle of the Civil War and the final catastrophe of the...