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Untitled Article
it is a most positive one—he is no canter . He does not think it necessary to profess to be shocked , or terrified , at opinions or modes of conduct contrary to what are -deemed proper and reputable in his own country . He does not guard his own
respectability by a saving clause , whenever he has occasion to name or to praise even a Mirabeau . We should never think of this as a quality worthy of particular notice in a mind accustomed to vigorous and independent thought ; but in whatever mind it exists , it is evidence of that which is the first condition of all worth , a
desire to be rather than to seem . Having said thus much on the favourable side , turn we to the other column of the account , and here we have to say simply this , that , after reading both these volumes carefully through , we are quite completely unable to name any one thing that Mr . Alison has done , which had not been far better done before ; or to conjecture what could lead him to imagine that such a work as he has
produced was any desideratum in the existing literature on the subject . It is hard to say of any book that it is altogether useless ; that it contains nothing from which man , woman , or child can derive any one particle of benefit , learn any one thing worth knowing ; but a more useless -book than this of Mr . Alison ' s , one which
approaches nearer to the ideal of absolute inutility , we believe we might go far to seek . We have not often happened to meet with an author of any work of pretension less endowed than Mr . Alison with the faculty of original thought ; this negation of genius amounts almost to a positive quality . Notwithstanding , or , perhaps , in consequence of , this deficiency , he deals largely in general reflections : which
accordingly are of the barrenest ; when true , so true that no one ever thought them false ; when false , nowise that kind of false propositions which come from a penetrating but partial or hasty glance at the thing spoken of , and , therefore , though not true , have instructive truth in them ; but such as a country-gentleman , accustomed to be king of his company , talks after dinner . The same want of power manifests itself in the narrative . Telling his
story almost entirely after Mignetand Thiers , he has caught none of their vivacity from those great masters of narration ; the most stirring scenes of that mighty world-drama , under his pen turn flat , cold , and spiritless . In his preface he apologizes for the 1 dramatic air' produced by inserting fragments of speeches into his text : if the fact were so , it would be a subject of praise , not
of apology ; but if it were an offence , we assure Mr . Alison that he never would be found guilty of it ; nothing is dramatic which has passed through the strainer of his translations ; even the eloquence of Mirabeau cannot rouse within him one spark of kindred energy and fervour . In the humbler duties of a historian he is equally deficient $ he has no faculty of historical criticism , and no research ; his marginal references point exclusively to the
Untitled Article
510 The French Revolution .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 510, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/70/
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