Martyrs of the Revolution : 1649: Prints : King Charles
L and the Heads of the Noble Earls, Lords, and others, who suffered for their Loyalty in the Reballion and Civil Wars of England : with their char- acters engraved under each Print, extracted from Lord Clarendon. Taken from original Pictures of the greatest masters, many of Sir Anthony Vandyke's, and all the heads accurately engraved by Mr. George Vertue. London, 1746.—This is a reproduction by Messrs. Bickers and Son, of Leicester Square, of an ultra-Stuart, not to say Tacobite publi- cation, of the Anne and early-Georgian period. We suppose its appear- ance at the present time is one of the manifestations of that sickly Stuart sentimentality which has become fashionable of late, and of which the successful drama of Charles L was another outpouring. To moot such productions with serious argument, in our present stage of historical knowledge, is out of the question. They are based on and trade upon the uninstructed fancy of a section of the general public, and the tribunal to which they appeal is not that of reason, but of blind prejudice and sentimentality. The value of the judgment of men and things which is set forth in this volume may be judged of by the little motto at the bottom of the curious medley of portraits of Royal Stuarts which faces the title-page :—
"In their time Rich Industry sat smiling on the Plain, And Peace and Plenty told a Stuart's reign."
Above are the portraits of the four older Stuart Kings. Queen Anne, on a larger scale, occupies the central place, and at the bottom is Queen Mary, the Duke of Gloucester being substituted as her companion por- trait for her husband, William HL—whose delinquency is thus signally marked—though we fear Queen Mary herself would not have appre- ciated the distinction. The selection of Cavalier portraits contains repre- sentatives of various phases of Royalist martyrdom, from the arch- conspirators against the liberties of England, Strafford and Laud, to such non-entities as the Earl of Kingston. It also includes in one category such unreasoning royalism as that of the Earl of Northampton and Sir Charles Lucas, with the fantastic but unsympathising allegiance of a Carnarvon, and the ill-assorted, discontented, and recreant Puritan- ism of a Falkland and a Hopton, with the more ambiguous ap3stacy from the Constitutional cause of a Montrose and a Derby. The only value of the volume, such as it is. lies in its merits as a work of lino art. As such its claims vary very much. Some of the impressions are very good, others equally bad. Historical pictures, however, of whatever merit, always possess some interest, and no doubt there is just enough about the present collection, apart from Stuart sentimentality, to command a sale of the book.
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