Page:Books and men.djvu/225

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THE CAVALIER.
215

to Macaulay, who can hold his own easily enough without any assistance whatever. When Sir James Stephens published, some years ago, his very earnest and accurate vindication of Sir Elijah Impey from the charges so lavishly brought against him in that matchless essay on Warren Hastings, he expressed at the same time his serene conviction that the great world would go on reading the essay and believing the charges just the same,—a new rendering of "Magna est Veritas et prævalebit," which brings it very near to Hesiod's primitive experience.

As for Mr. Morris's book, it is a carefully dispassionate study of a wild and stormy time, with a gray shadow of Claverhouse flitting faintly through it. In his wholesome dislike for the easy confidence with which historians assume to know everything, its author has touched the opposite extreme, and manifests such conscientious indecision as to the correctness of every document he quotes, that our heads fairly swim with accumulated uncertainties. This method of narration has one distinct advantage,—it cannot lead us far into error; but neither can it carry us for-