[99] Croker's 'Boswell,' pp. 767, 8vo. ed.
[101] Mr Lowell's Address at the dedication of the Free Public Library, Chelsea, Massachusetts.
Art. IX.--1. _Popular Government. Four Essays._ By Sir Henry Sumner Maine. Second Edition. London, 1886.
2. _Democracy in America._ By Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by Henry Reeve. New Edition. London, 1862.
3. _On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789._ Translated by Henry Reeve. Second Edition. London, 1873.
4. _Correspondence and Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau W. Senior, 1834-59._ London, 1872.
5. _On the Government of Dependencies._ By Sir George Cornewall Lewis. London, 1841.
6. _On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion._ By the Same. London, 1849.
7. _A Dialogue on the best Form of Government._ By the Same. London, 1863.
8. _The English Constitution._ By Walter Bagehot. Revised Edition. London, 1883.
Of the latest Work on the Characteristics of Democracy we are precluded from speaking, as Sir Henry Maine's valuable Essays first appeared in the pages of this Review. But we desire on the present occasion to call attention to some writers on the subject, who are almost unknown to a younger generation, or known only by occasional references made to them by those who were well acquainted with the writers and their works. And among these half-forgotten names few perhaps will recur more frequently in the recollections of the best-informed men of from forty-five to sixty, or more surprise those who have entered on life since their owners left it, than those of Alexis de Tocqueville, Nassau William Senior, and Walter Bagehot. Among the statesmen of the last generation, few who will fill so small a space in history are so often or so reverently quoted by those who remember Lord Palmerston's Government, the Crimean War, and the Indian Mutiny, as Sir George Cornewall Lewis. Most men under forty will hear with surprise that in the City, at least, he was deemed a sounder and safer financier than Mr. Gladstone; honoured as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who first redeemed the financial reputation of the Whigs from the discredit that had clung to the party of retrenchment and reform for a whole generation. Of the small minority who know him as the founder of the English school of historical sceptics, how many have heard of his multifarious literary and political works, or his shrewd, genial, two-edged, criticisms on public and social life? It seems too probable that our grandchildren will retain nothing of his save the characteristic saying, that 'life would be very tolerable but for its pleasures;' and _that_, probably, will be assigned to some more famous and far less wise _causeur_ or phrasemaker, losing half its force in the transfer. Even Mill is known to the passing and the rising generation by different works and diverse characteristics. To the one he is little more than the greatest, most original, and most heretical of English economists; a standard author on logic and metaphysics. The other prefers to remember him by his later and lesser writings; those sexagenarian and posthumous Essays, in which the riper wisdom of a mind, very slow to learn the lessons of practical life, was gathered, and the wilder errors of his earlier theories modified or corrected. Much of that which is really best in his thought and teaching, set forth in these last writings, bears a close analogy to the views of Tocqueville Senior, and Bagehot, and shows that a tardy, hardly-acquired, unwillingly accepted, knowledge of men and women, of the real and ineradicable tendencies of human nature, brought the giant of the closet into nearer accord with the practical philosophy of a man like Sir George Cornewall Lewis, wise, calm, and judicial, by natural temper, wiser yet by the closet-study which had analysed the experiences of the literary, business, and political, world, of administration, Parliament, and the Cabinet.