268 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



Time" have lately appeared in German and Italian. But " we 

 would entertain the conjecture" that this never would have hap- 

 pened, if Higgons had not been the devoted champion of those poli- 

 tical vitalities which are still warmly fostered in the bosom of many 

 an absolutist on the continent, " with whom the original taint 

 transmitted down from King James the First remains still in the 

 full strength of its malignity."* 



To be duly qualified for his censorian task, Higgons should have 

 been possessed of a great fund of historical knowledge, conjoined 

 with a discriminating judgment. In both these requisites he is 

 strikingly deficient. There may be shrewdness in some of his ob- 

 servations, and the truth of the inference he has drawn from some 

 insulated facts is, perhaps, not to be questioned. Yet no impartial 

 man can look into his pages without perceiving that, under the 

 semblance of truth, he is an artful bigotted partizan, and one who 

 acts the sophist rather than the fair enquirer ; so that a person 

 would no more be able, by perusing his volume, to form a correct 

 estimate of the History of his own Time, than he would of the 

 meridian splendour of the sun by seeing it under an eclipse. We 

 reiterate our opinion, then, that his strictures would have been con- 

 signed to the land of forgetfulness, if he had not been more eager 

 to excite or aid the ambition of despotic power, than to damp and 

 discourage it. And because, in Burnett's account of James, there 

 is not that blindness to the manifestation of truth and duty which 

 would entirely overlook his most palpable acts of mis-government — 

 his most glaring iniquities and errors — the bishop is arraigned by 

 Higgons in a strain of vituperation suited only to the abettors or 

 zealots of the grossest corruption. An impartial recital of facts 

 thus assumes in the eyes of this most malignant of traducers the 

 aspect of an invective. We shall, however, bring a supplementary 

 set of them to show — and facts, according to the proverb, " are 

 stubborn things" — that Burnett had no desire to throw a cloud of 

 detraction over the imputed merits of James, but was more inclined 



par une Soci^te de gens de lettres a Paris, chez Micaud, 1817, we are in- 

 formed that Higgons was born at Kelso in 1670, and early distinguislied 

 himself for his attachment to James II., whom he accompanied to Paris, and 

 remained with him till his death in 1701. After this he returned to 

 England, and to propitiate the government of William, he published " The 

 Generous Conqueror." This political trimmer then became Professor of 

 History at one of our Universities, and gave to the public, beside this 

 tirade upon the History of his own Times, an abridgment of the History of 

 Enr/land. 



* See Bolingbroke's Dkxcrtatiou upon Parlies, vol. iii., p. 132. 



