affection. When the duke was sacrificed to a faction, the prince, commissioned by the emperor, came over to London to expostulate with the queen, and to prove that the war-which she had not yet announced her intention of abandoning-could not be successfully prosecuted without her great general, whose name had become a word of terror to the French, and an assurance of victory to his own troops. Eugene failed in his mission, and witnessed, with an almost incredulous astonishment, the lengths and excesses, the calumny and the ribaldry into which party spirit could transport Englishmen; but he had the enviable satisfaction of passing much of his time with his old comrade in arms and councils, and of testifying, in that season of eclipse and disgrace, the veneration in which he held him.

Whatever may have been his political duplicity and previous tergiversations, from the time Marlborough assumed the supreme command of Queen Anne's forces in the War of Succession, his course, both as a statesman and soldier, appears to have been honest and direct. The late and much-lamented General Sir George Murray (than whom a better military authority could not be quoted), while engaged in editing the Marlborough Dispatches, said that, after an attentive study of the whole matter, or of all the campaigns from 1702 to 1712, he could not detect a single instance in which the duke had not acted most honourably by England and her allies, or one in which he had not done his very utmost as a soldier for the cause in which he was engaged, and for the great object held in view-a satisfactory, an honourable, and a lasting peace, based upon a fixed and durable limit to the power and ambition of France. And, shortly afterwards, Sir George Murray, in concluding his editorial labours with a brief sketch of the disgraceful events on' the theatre of war, which followed the dismissal of Marlborough, said that the duke's letters and dispatches, which authentically detailed the separate transactions of the war, "would exhibit on the part of the British general, who was the soul of the confederacy, a union of extraordinary abilities, of indefati

gable activity, of unvarying steadfastness of purpose, and undeviating rectitude of conduct."*

Admitting all his faults, it will still be easy to prove that Marlborough had many of the qualities of a good patriot and a good man. His friend the Lord Treasurer Godolphin and himself appear, of all their contemporaries, to have been most free from the virulent spirit of faction and most sincerely devoted to the true honour and interests of their country. The attachment of Marlborough to the tenets and principles of the Church of England was sincere and pure; he was unaffectedly a person of strong religious feeling; and the example which, as a commander, he held out to his troops and enforced in his camp, of a piety without fanaticism, was as salutary as it has been infrequent. His high personal courage, which the inconceivable baseness of faction affected to doubt, assumed in his later years the calm and collected spirit of the Christian hero. In public action he was ever as humane and merciful as towards personal enemies he was placable and magnanimous. The profligacy of the court and beau monde, which Charles II. had made fashionable, did not cease with the Revolution; it was, in fact, but little amended until the accession of George III. Yet, in private life, if we except the stain of parsimony, Marlborough's conduct, at least after his marriage, was a pattern of moral virtue. His temper was imperturbably sweet, gentle, and affectionate; and he was but too fond a husband, too confiding a friend, and too indulgent a master.

The biographies of the great general are rather numerous, though not one of them can be cited as a very able or thoroughly satisfactory work. In 1808, there was published at Paris, 3 vols. 8vo., 'Histoire de Jean Churchill, Duc de Marlborough,'-a signal foreign tribute to his greatness, since it was composed by order of Napo

"The Letters and Dispatches of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, from 1702 to 1712. Edited by General the Rt. Hon. Sir George Murray, five vols. 8vo. London, 1845." Vol. v., p. 590.;

leon Bonaparte, and written, with a few exceptions, in a fair and candid spirit. In 1818-19 the late venerable Archdeacon Coxe published, in London, in three large quarto volumes, his Memoirs of John duke of Marlborough' a work of which the chief value consists in a great mass of original correspondence, published from the family papers at Blenheim and other sources. But the best existing monument to Marlborough's fame is the collection of his own letters and dispatches, published from the originals, by Sir George Murray. Official occupation and his rapidly declining health rendered it impossible for Sir George to do much in an editorial capacity; nor did he, indeed, consider that very much was necessary to be done. His notions were-that the best service to be rendered to Marlborough's reputation would be to print fully and correctly the dispatches and correspondence bearing on the War of Succession, by the exploits in which the great captain won his imperishable fame;-that the work should serve as a book of reference for soldiers and statesmen, and as a contribution of the most authentic materials for the use of future historians and biographers. And, in these respects, the work is invaluable. We have but too few published materials of the kind. In every extensive library Sir George Murray's five volumes will find a place by the side of the Wellington Dispatches, published by Colonel Gurwood. The wonderful resemblance between the style and matter of the two greatest of our military heroes will strike every reader; nor will the following facts be uninteresting in military and literary history-the able QuarterMaster-General of the Duke of Wellington, the sharer in the glories of the Peninsular war, and one of the most accomplished, scientific soldiers of the nineteenth century, so soon as these original Marlborough dispatches were discovered in the lumber-room of an old house at Woodstock-to which the culpable and well-nigh criminal negligence and indifference of the successors of the great man had consigned them-devoted all his leisure time to the subject, and urged on the publication as a tribute due to Wellington's illustrious predecessor; he corrected by

himself and often while suffering the agonies of disease -every proof-sheet as it was sent him; he saw the whole work through the press,-and saw that it was correctly printed; and then, a few months after the completion of his task, Sir George Murray died.

CHRISTOPHER WREN, the most celebrated of British architects, was born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, October 20, 1632. His father was Rector of that parish, Dean of Windsor, and Registrar of the Order of the Garter his uncle, Dr. Matthew Wren, was successively Bishop of Hereford, of Norwich, and of Ely; and was one of the greatest sufferers for the royal cause during the Commonwealth, having been imprisoned nearly twenty years in the Tower without ever having been brought to trial. The political predilections of Wren's family may be sufficiently understood from these notices; but he himself, although his leaning probably was to the side which had been espoused by his father and his uncle, seems to have taken no active part in state affairs. The period of his long life comprehended a series of the mightiest national convulsions and changes that ever took place in England-the civil war-the overthrow of the monarchy-the domination of Cromwell-the Restoration