into the hands of some skilful bookmaker, who speedily dresses them up in the form of an attractive autobiography. This was done with the papers of Brissot, Robespierre, Marshal Ney, Fouché, and a great many others, all of which appeared with the name of their authors, and richly stored with these private papers, though it was morally certain that they could not by possibility have written their own lives. In England nothing of the kind is attempted. Scarcely any of the eminent men in the last age have left their own memoirs; and the papers of the most remarkable of them have been published without any attempt at biography. Thus we have the Wellington Papers, the Marlborough Papers, the Nelson Papers, the Castlereagh Papers, published without any autobiography, and only a slight sketch, though in all these cases very ably done, of the author's life by their editor. The lives of the other eminent men of the last age have been given by others, not themselves as that of Pitt, by Tomline and Gifford; that of Fox, by Trotter; that of Sheridan, by Moore; that of Lord Eldon, by Twiss; that of Lord Sidmouth, by Pellew. There is more here than an accidental diversity: there is a difference arising from a difference of national character. The Englishmen devoted their lives to the public service, and bestowed not a thought on its illustration by themselves; the French mainly thought of themselves when acting in the public service, and considered it chiefly as a means of elevation and self-laudation to themselves.

In justice to the literary men of France, however, it must be stated that, of late years at least, they have been exposed to an amount of temptation, and of food for their self-love, much exceeding anything previously seen among men, and which may go far to account for the extraordinary vanity which they have everywhere evinced. In England, literary distinction is neither the only nor the greatest passport to celebrity. Aristocratic influences remain, and still possess the deepest hold of the public mind; statesmen exist, whose daily speeches in parliament render their names as household words. Fashion exercises an extraordinary and almost inexplicable sway, especially over the fairest part of creation. How celebrated soever an author may be, he will in London soon be brought to his proper level, and a right appreciation

of his situation. He will see himself at once eclipsed by an old nobleman, whose name is fraught with historic glory; by a young marquis, who is an object of solicitude to the mothers and daughters in the room; by a parliamentary orator, who is beginning to acquire distinction in the senate house. We hold this state of things to be eminently favourable to the right character of literary men for it saves them from trials before which, it is all but certain, both their good sense and their virtue would succumb. But in Paris this salutary check upon individual vanity and presumption is almost entirely awanting. The territorial aristocracy is confiscated and destroyed; titles of honour are abolished; historic names are almost forgotten in the ceaseless whirl of present events; parliamentary orators are in general unpopular, for they are for the most part on the side of power. Nothing remains but the government of mind. The intellectual aristocracy is all in all.

It makes and unmakes kings alternately; produces and stops revolutions; at one time calls a new race to the throne, at another consigns them with disgrace to foreign lands. Cabinets are formed out of the editors of newspapers, intermingled with a few bankers, whom the public convulsions bave not yet rendered insolvent; prime ministers are to be found only among successful authors. Thiers, the editor of the National and the historian of the Revolution; Guizot, the profound professor of history; Villemain, the eloquent annalist of French literature; Lamartine, the popular traveller, poet, and historian, have been the alternate prime ministers of France since the revolution of 1830. Even the great name of Napoleon cannot save his nephew from the irksomeness of bending to the same necessity. He named Thiers his prime minister at the time of the Boulogne misadventure, he is caressing him now in the salons of the Elysée Bourbon. Successful authors thus in France are surrounded with a halo, and exposed to influences, of which in this country we cannot form a conception. They unite in their persons the fame of Mr Fox and the lustre of Sir Walter Scott; often the political power of Mr Pitt with the celebrity of Lord Byron. Whether such a concentration is favourable either to their present utility or lasting fame, and whether the best school to train authors to be the instructors

of the world is to be found in that which exposes them to the combined influence of its greatest temptations, are questions on which it is not necessary now to enter, but on which posterity will probably have no difficulty in coming to a conclusion.

But while we fully admit that these extraordinary circumstances, unparalleled in the past history of the world, go far to extenuate the blame which must be thrown on the French writers for their extraordinary vanity, they will not entirely exculpate them. Ordinary men may well be carried away by such adventitious and flattering marks of their power; but we cannot accept such an excuse from the first men of the age-men of the clearest intellect, and the greatest acquisitions-whose genius is to charm, whose wisdom is to instruct the world through every succeeding age. If the teachers of men are not to be above the follies and weaknesses which are general and ridiculous in those of inferior capacity, where are we to look for such an exemption? It is a poor excuse for the overweening vanity of a Byron, a Goethe, a Lamartine, or a Chateaubriand, that a similar weakness is to be found in a Madame Grisi or a Mademoiselle Cerito, in the first cantatrice or most admired ballerina of the day. We all know that the professors of these charming arts are too often intoxicated by the applause which they meet with; we excuse or overlook this weakness from respect due to their genius and their sex. But we know, at the same time, that there are some exceptions to the general frailty; and in one enchanting performer, our admiration for talents of the very highest order is enhanced by respect for the simplicity of character and generosity of disposition with which they are accompanied. We desiderate in the men who aspire to direct the thoughts of the world, and have received from nature talents equal to the task, the unaffected singleness of heart, and sterling good sense, which we admire, not less than her admirable powers, in Mademoiselle Jenny Lind.

The faults, or rather frailties, we have alluded to, are in an especial manner conspicuous in two of the most remarkable writers of France of the present century-Lamartine and Chateaubriand. There is some excuse for the vanity of these illustrious men. They have both acquired an endur

ing fame-their names are known all over the world, and will continue to be so while the French language is spoken on the earth; and they have both, by their literary talents, been elevated to positions far beyond the rank in society to which they were born, and which might well make an ordinary head reel from the giddy precipices with which it is surrounded. Chateaubriand powerfully aided in crushing Napoleon in 1814, when Europe in arms surrounded Paris : with still more honourable constancy he had resisted him in 1804, when, in the plenitude of his power, he executed the Duke d'Enghien. He became ambassador to London for the Restoration-minister of foreign affairs, and representative of France at the Congress of Verona. He it was who projected and carried into execution the French invasion of the Peninsula in 1823, the only successful expedition of the Restoration. Lamartine's career, if briefer, has been still more dazzling. He aided largely in the movement which overthrew Louis Philippe; by the force of his genius he obtained the mastery of the movement, "struggled with democracy when it was strongest, and ruled it when it was wildest;" and had the glory, by his single courage and energy, of saving the character of the revolution from bloodshed, and coercing the Red Republicans in the very tumult of their victory. He has since fallen from power, less from any known delinquencies imputed to him, than from the inherent fickleness of the French people, and the impossibility of their submitting, for any length of time, to the lead of a single individual. The autobiography of two such men cannot be other than interesting and instructive in the highest degree; and if we see in them much which we in England cannot altogether understand, and which we are accustomed to stigmatise with the emphatic epithet "French," there is much also in them which candour must respect, and an equitable spirit admire.

The great thing which characterises these memoirs, and is sufficient to redeem a multitude of vanities and frailties, is the elevated and chivalrous spirit in which they are composed. In this respect they are a relic, we fear, of the olden time; a remnant of those ancient days which Mr Burke has so eloquently described in his portrait of Marie Antoinette. That is the spirit which pervades the breasts

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of these illustrious men ; and therefore it is that we respect them, and forgive or forget many weaknesses which would otherwise be insupportable in their autobiographies. It is a spirit, however, more akin to a former era than the present; to the age which produced the crusades, more than that which gave birth to railways; to the days of Godfrey of Bouillon, rather than those which raised a monument to Mr Hudson. We are by no means convinced, however, that it is not the more likely to be enduring in the future ages of the world; at least we are sure it will be so, if the sanguine anticipations everywhere formed by the apostles of the movement of the future improvement of the species are destined in any degree to be realised.

Although, however, the hearts of Chateaubriand and Lamartine are stamped with the impress of chivalry, and the principal charm of their writings is owing to its generous spirit, yet we should err greatly if we imagined that they have not shared in the influences of the age in which they lived, and become largely imbued with the more popular and equalising notions which have sprung up in Europe during the last century. They could not have attained the political power which they have both wielded if they had not done so; for no man, be his genius what it may, will ever acquire a practical lead among men, unless his opinions coincide in the main with those of the majority by whom he is surrounded. Chateaubriand's earliest work, written in London in 1793-the Essai Historique-is, in truth, rather of a republican and sceptical tendency; and it was not till he had travelled in America, and inhaled a nobler spirit amid the solitudes of nature, that the better parts of his nature regained their ascendency, and his fame was established on an imperishable foundation by the publication of Atala et Réné and the Génie du Christianisme. Throughout his whole career, the influence of his early liberal principles remained conspicuous: albeit a royalist, he was the steady supporter of the freedom of the press, and the extension of the elective suffrage; and he kept aloof from the government of Louis Philippe, less from aversion to the semi-revolutionary spirit in which it was cradled, than from an honourable fidelity to misfortune, and horror at the selfish corrupt multitude by which it was soon surrounded.