Boswell's Political Career by Frank BradyReview by: Charles F. MullettThe American Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Jan., 1966), pp. 561-562Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1846403 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 10:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:08:11 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Modern Euirope 56I

STATESMANSHIIP AND PARTY GOVERN1MENT: A STUDY OF BURKE AND BOLINGBROKE. By Hlarvey C. Aansfield, Jr. (Chicago: Universitv of Chicago Press. i965. Pp. xii, 28I. $7.50.)

THE closely reasoned arguments in this book consider more seriously than some Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents as well as Bolingbroke's Disserta- tion upcn Parties, Letters on the Spirit of Patriotism, and Idea of a Patriot King. In his Thoughts Burke was counteracting the influences of Bolingbroke in the 1760's. Mansfield adds, with perhaps more than one meaning, that such influence is seen "not so much in collected manuscripts of private transactions as in pam- phlets offered at large." To these pamphlets he gives considerable attention. The Bolin,broke theory, described in the passage of the Thoughts in which Burke identified it with those who made "professions of supernatural virtue," aimed at the elimination of party. This was because it contemplated a return to true first principles, and tlhese by definition could not be partisan. Burke, who would not accept such abstractions as the basis of politics, preferred party government. He was the first Enalishman to assert the respectability of party. This was essentially a defensive maneuver; yet, says Mansfield, it had a revolutionary character in its implications of resistance to tyranny, a character that Burke successfully con- cealed.

This conflict between Bolingbroke and Burke was in reality the conflict be- tween statesmanship or the creative individualism of great men and party govern- ment with its emph-asis upon the "settled responsibility" of a group. In his dis- cussions of the necessary tensions between the ideals of statesmanship and party government, MIansfield, it seems to me, gives too little attention to party leader- ship as a form of statesmanship and as a means of lessening the tension. Burke was aware of the possibilities of tension and, as Mansfield shows when discussing Burke's later political thought, attempted to assuage it. The analysis of Burke's thought displays its consistency. As an opponent of abstract first principles of gov- ernment, and as a thinker who preferred prescription and the rules of prudence, that is conservatism, to statesmanship, Burke was able comnfortably to accept the idea of party government as the solution to the discontents of his time.

Historians may not be fully persuaded by this book, in spite of the boldness and forcefulness of its arguments. Mansfield's premise that "party government is chiefly a matter of opinion regarding party" and the assertion that Burke's case for the respectability of party was important in the formation of this opinion de- serve attention. But it is not easy to abandon, with Mansfield, the view that the development of party government depended upon acceptance of the idea that opposition is not only tolerable but virtuous. As we have been recently reminded, political practice as well as political theory contributed to making party and op- position respectable, and for understanding this, close attention to the historical record ought to go along with acute analysis of political writings.

University of Kenitucky CARL B. CONE

BOSWELL'S POLITfICAL CAREER. By Frank Brady. [Yale Studies in Eng- lish, Volume CLV.] (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. I965. Pp. xv, 200. $5.00.)

WHEIHER Dr. Johnson or Yale owes most to Boswell warrants a symposium; and

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:08:11 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

562 Reviews of Books

what Boswell owes to Yale can scarcely escape the attention of a Ph.D. candidate. Indeed, in all propriety, Yale should award James Boswell a PH.D. (Doctor Post Humous). Although this "political failure" is known to hundreds of thousands to whom Lonsdale, "Earl of Toadstool," and "Boss" Dundas are no more than names in a footnote, one may query if the present volume is not one more instance of a subject worth an article and blown up to a book. Are we to anticipate volumes on Boswell's financial status, religious belief, career as a joiner, and attitude toward nature? Admittedly, Dr. Brady informs us about Scottish politics, a brew no less troubled and bubbled than that confected before Macbeth, and breathes life into a diversity of men known only to the initiate. Yet while he explains certain mat- ters in detail, the parchment barons, for example, he also introduces the interesting and important George Dempster quite inadequately, refers to the "Douglas Cause" without explanation, and irrelevantly, perhaps improperly, sets off Boswell against "another political failure, Gibbon."

The political failure of Boswell, a "Tory with Whig principles," to have an M.P. annexed to his name, though not of itself cause for dismissal, does not possess sufficient general interest to warrant lengthy examination. Temperament and ambition alike made him a weather vane, and he could quite as well have been described as a Whig with Tory principles. He chiefly wanted to join the best club in England, whether, as Dempster put it so aptly, taken as a business, an amusement, or the means of learning wisdom, acquiring knowledge of men, and formirng connections. To that end Boswell wooed Dundas, Lonsdale (think of Bozzy as one of Lowther's ninepins), or anyone else-if the mackerel may be said to "woo" the whale-who might assist his ambition. To that end he submitted to insults, plenty of them, knowing them for what they were, and got his own back with squibs of various sorts, but he never got to Parliament; nor did he come very close. He was used, not rewarded, by men who presumably agreed with an anony- mous Ayrshireman that his "petulant vanity and violent versatility" all too con- spicuously marked him out an "object of contempt and ridicule." Perhaps his admirers should rejoice that he did fail: fulfillment of his political ambitions must have consigned to another the role of The Biographer.

University of Missouri CHARLEs F. MULLETT

HORACE WALPOLE'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH THE COUNTESS OF UPPER OSSORY. In three volumes. Edited by W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace, with the assistance of Edtwine MI. Martz. [The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, Volumes XXXII-XXXIV.] (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. I965. PP. lxv, 4I2; Viii, 588; 502. $17.50 each.)

THE opinion of an eighteenth-century publicist that the "history of a literary person consists chiefly of his works" is amply confirmed by the most voluminous letter writer of that century. There is no need to claim greatness for Horace Walpole, but no one can deny that he was greatly situated or that he left personalia beyond the resources of statistics, eighteenth-century statistics at any rate. He knew every- body who was anybody, and many who were not. The recipient of these present letters was a somebody, if not in her own right, at least in her station. She is most quickly identified by her first husband, the Duke of Grafton, who even as first minister thought, in Walpole's own words, "the world should be postponed to a

This content downloaded from 141.101.201.103 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:08:11 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions