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    through that poetic and apocryphal form with which it has been the fashion to adorn history ; to cultivate ' a taste for simple details ; to disbelieve many things and doubt many more ; to pass all through the ordeal of severe investigation ; to turn the other end of the glass and see how differently the same / subject often looks when viewed through another medium or with an altered power of observation . The tale of the struggles between contending sects , in which stout hearts and honest feelings were doubtless mixed on each

    side with baser matter , can well bear to be retold , and redargued , and to have its minutest points brought to the test of investigation and original authority . We are not at this time proposing to enter into an examination of Dr * Lingard ' s works . He has been attacked on all hands ; and what is established after the scrutiny which our history has lately sustained from such inquirers as himself , Mr . Turner , Mr . Hallam , and ( for a later period ) Mr .

    Brodie , will be a much more trustworthy foundation than we have yet had to build upon . But they are none of them calculated , as popular and general historians , to take the place of Hume , who , hollow and faithless as he is , unfortunately occupies a position as one of our classics , from which it is not easy to remove him . A strong hand and an honest pen have a noble work before them when the time is ripe for their employment .

    Among the hottest of Dr . Lingard's antagonists is a writer in the Edinburgh Review . A good deal of vigour , mixed with somewhat of a bitter and rancorous spirit , characterizes the two attacks made in that journal ; directed against some of our author ' s doubts , which it is easy to select out of a large work as marks around which to skirmish . It would be difficult to guess the reason for so much feeling on the subject in that quarter ; but reviews can be resorted to for unworthy purposes , and the private scandal of literature

    points to an author , to whom it assigns no very creditable motives for his zeal . The principal object of the pamphlet before us is to defend , against the Reviewer , Dr . Lingard ' s opinion , expressed in a note to his History , that the massacre of St . Bartholomew owed its execution to accident , and was , perhaps , not so premeditated as has heen generally' believed . — ¦ a a . « « -v tm v m < b «« mm ^ m «

    The Reviewer is rebuked strongly , but rebuked in a spirit far more becoming than that of the attack . The matter in dispute is obviously not one for dogmatisni , either on the one side or the other . Perhaps , after all , its decision is of no vast consequence . Dr . Lingard will not have done much if he prove his case , in removing the guilt of planning what it is certain there were hearts to execute ; and his Reviewer will have achieved no great

    triumph , if , in a case of so much obscurity , he shall succeed so far as to incline his reader to affix the deepest stain of blackness to the crime of the French Court ; especially if the indirect object of his zeal be the disingenuous one of involving modern Catholics in the guilt of an unprincipled Court in a barbarous age . Such ungenerous arts rather prejudice than serve the cause in which they are used . Catholicism , had as it is , finds unwilling foes , nay , almo 3 t advocates , even in a Protestant country , when attacked by such

    weapons . The rest of the pamphlet is devoted to Mr . Todd ' s defence of Cranmer . Mr . Todd " maintains that religious prejudice has rendered Dr . L . unjust to the merits of the Archbishop . " Dr . Lingard " suspects that religious partiality has rendered Mr . Toad blind to the frailties of his hero . " Perhaps a little of both charges may be true ; but we are inclined to think with Dr . Lingard , that he has delineated Cranmer " as he was , not as his admirers may wish him to be . "

    Untitled Article

    118 Review . —Lingyrd ' s Vindication .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1827, page 118, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1793/page/38/