with a notion, then very generally prevalent in France, that all men were equal. Numerous and opulent, such an order seemed well designed for securing the state from despotism on one side, and licentiousness on the other; and it was eminently calculated to engender that public spirit which leads to enterprise in agriculture, manufactures, and commerce, and to perfection in all the arts which minister to the wants, or embellish the enjoyments, of life.

But the late alterations in the law of election have stripped the middling classes of so great a portion of their preponderance, that in the scale of political influence they are now become subordinate to the minister, and to that aristocracy of office and rank with which the government has surrounded itself, strengthened as it is by the overwhelming majority which it commands in the Chamber of Deputies. This artificial influence, which has been created by the intriguing energies of M. de Villele, promises to extend itself every day through the nobility, among whom it will in time be naturalised; and they seem destined to recover nearly all the authority which they exercised before the Revolution. Upon the probable consequences of this important change in the political condition of France, M. DROZ offers no distinct opinion. The inclination, however, of his mind on this subject may be gathered from the following observations, which are full of good sense.

• England has wonderfully well understood the art of attracting the aristocracy to the public interests. I am not ignorant that there are those among us who reject all examples borrowed from England, with as much indignation as if they were drawn from the Revolution. When I was told, thirty years ago, that the English were not free, I smiled with regret; in the same manner I smile to-day when I hear it asserted that the English are unacquainted with the means of consolidating power.

The true aristocracy is that which is in its nature protective, which places itself at the head of every thing that is useful or ornamental to the country. No good can come of a foolish and false nobility. I had occasion some short time since to observe in a provincial town, that the children of the middling classes were brought up with great care, while the children of the nobles received the most insignificant education imaginable. Seeing this contrast, I asked myself how it could happen in the next generation, that the ignorant should rule the enlightened? what would be the result of this subversion of the natural order of things? Doubtless such a small and obscure town as that to which I allude may not be taken as a model of all others, and I know that in Paris many distinguished families take care that their children are brought up in the best manner. These families are aware, that now, more than ever, personal prerogatives must be sustained

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by personal merit. Their children will one day fill an exalted station without exciting remark, because they will be capable of maintaining their rank. The wider the aristocracy is diffused, the more it requires that each of its members should be men of information, talent, and virtue. An ignorant and low aristocracy composed of lordlings and the sweepings of the court is odious when in power, pleasant when it is lashed by the satirists, pitiable when it comes in contact with a turbulent faction.'

M. DROZ pursues this subject to some length, and with great force, for the purpose of pointing out the duties which have devolved upon the nobility in the new order of things which has recently sprung up in the world, and which he well observes has rendered the present age as different from all those that have preceded it, as the oak is from the acorn. He sums up the astonishing improvements which have been recently made in every branch of commerce and the arts, and then proceeds to what in France must be considered a peculiarly delicate part of his subject, the influence of the clergy upon the social state of that country. He insists strongly upon the necessity of their being educated in the most liberal manner, in order to secure to them that just influence which it is intended they should exercise over the people committed to their care, and that their minds should be raised above those two most injurious enemies to all religion, superstition and fanaticism.

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With an enlightened clergy,' he observes, and with a popular aristocracy, France might aspire to the highest destinies. If the ignorant, and egotistical portion of the nobility and clergy obtain an ascendancy, there is good reason to apprehend that gloomy prospects await us. Those who entertain these forebodings found them on two contingencies, both equally disastrous. In case an oppressive aristocracy should be established, they believe that year after year industry will languish, and that ignorance, with its attendants misery and vice, will ravage the land; not that Frenchmen would ever fall into the brutalised condition of Spain, they would be more likely to sink into the depravity of Italy. In the contrary case, supposing that the aristocracy fell to the ground in consequence of the violent indignation of the country, we would then be exposed to new vicissitudes. Nor could we hope to prevent them, by calling to our aid the recollections of the Revolution; recollections are speedily effaced : neither could we depend on the strength of the Holy Alliance; alliances are not indissoluble: nor on the measures of wisdom, for these will not prevail against that law of nature which renders a people so formidable who are driven to despair.'

These are, it must be owned, gloomy prospects for France, and unless her government takes a serious lesson from the de

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feat which it lately sustained in its attempt to put down the voice of a free press, it will inevitably bring about the realisation of these and infinitely worse apprehensions, at no distant period. We cannot sympathise in the consolation which M. DROZ reserves for himself, in thinking that if a day of intestine danger should arise, the King is likely to avert its consequences by summoning a new chamber of deputies on an enlarged principle of elective right. It is the misfortune of monarchs that they uniformly feel as if they were forfeiting their own prerogatives, by consenting to any measure which would extend the liberty of their subjects; whereas if they rightly understood their duties, as well as their interests, they would know that every new security given to the people, or won by them, is, if properly regulated, a fresh bulwark for the throne.

In a chapter dedicated to the subject of False Glory,' M. DROZ takes occasion to express his opinion upon the character of Buonaparte.

Buonaparte possessed two qualities, which of all others best enabled him to gain an ascendancy over his equals: he had a strength of resolution which defied every obstacle, and a prodigious activity of mind, which perhaps no other man ever displayed to so great an extent. These two qualities, the effects of which are always important, though in themselves indifferent to good or evil, deserve veneration or hatred according to the direction which they receive. The quality which Buonaparte most essentially wanted was high-mindedness. Almost all his feelings were centered in himself, very few inclined towards justice, none towards humanity. He was born a warrior, as others are born gamesters. Led away by that convulsive pleasure which is experienced on the field of battle and at the gaming table, from the alternations of fear and hope, that pleasure which renders one insensible to every other enjoyment, he hazarded every day all that he had gained the night before. Although the close of his career would seem to detract from his abilities, he had nevertheless a wonderful talent for the art of war. Fortune, without genius, could never have given him twenty years of uninterrupted success. He had not, however, that particular military talent which implies a great mind; he had not that quality of great commanders, which taught them to be parsimonious of the blood of their soldiers. Buonaparte looked upon France as an inexhaustible source of human beings; he consumed myriads of soldiers and demanded more; these he consumed and still demanded fresh supplies; and when he returned to Paris for the last time, he came with renewed demands for more victims. That trait in his character which posterity will most admire, was that he knew how to compel men to live in peace, who were distracted by different interests and ideas, and still burning with the recent frenzy

of the Revolution. But his want of greatness of mind here again showed itself. He gave to the mind of Frenchmen no noble tendency; he was desirous only of exciting their enthusiasm by his victories, and of making himself their idol; he did not change their opinions, he taught them only to bely their own conscience; he united them, but it was in one common bond of oppression and disgrace. His morality and his politics were in perfect accordance; he reduced morality to subservience to himself, and his politics consisted in rendering every man venal. When an individual is without elevation of mind, he wants also justness as well as depth of idea. Buonaparte might have considerably accelerated the march of civilisation, he might have opened a new era of which he should have been himself the first example; instead of doing that he sought for models in the barbarous ages, and scarcely thought of any thing except the repetition of what others had done before him. He made himself a conqueror, an emperor; sometimes he became even a servile copyist; it was particularly ridiculous to observe the care with which he enforced the minutest forms of etiquette practised in the vieille cour. His views were sometimes absolutely mean, sometimes gigantic; now he must have chamberlains around him, now he must grasp the sceptre of the world. The man of truly great mind is in advance of his age. Napoleon was behind his. As if an internal voice had informed him, that he was not sufficiently great for an enlightened age, he sighed with regret when thinking of those times of ignorance when he might have been deified. His grandeur abroad consisted in vaunting himself as the conqueror of countries which he had desolated; at home in following with perseverance a system of centralisation which placed in his hands all the inhabitants, all the liberties and revenues of the nation. His government was a master-piece of despotism, but let it be remembered that despotism affords the least indication of genius in the founder of an empire. How barren is that glory which hath not its basis in the public good! This man who saw his ensign float on the ramparts of Lisbon and the domes of the Kremlin, perished on a rock, insulted by the jailer of a power which he abhorred, leaving behind him as his only panegyric a collection of civil laws, and a few public monuments !"

This portrait is not too severely drawn. Public opinion is fast beginning to pronounce upon Napoleon the judgment of posterity; and the farther we advance from the period of his reign, the less are we disposed to exalt his character. Indeed the faithful representation given of this "great Captain" in Segur's Account of the Russian Campaign demonstrates him to have been the most empirical as well as the most insane being that has ever yet wielded "the rod of empire." We have been induced to notice this work at some length, as it is the best specimen which we have recently met of French political discussion unbiassed by party views, and framed Bb 3

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solely for the purpose of enlightening public opinion. It is written throughout in a clear philosophical style, in the purest idiom of the language, and is arranged in so lucid an order that it may easily be comprehended by the meanest capacity.

ART. VI. Lascaris; ou, Les Grecs du Quinzième Siècle, suivi d'un Essai Historique sur l'Etat des Grecs, depuis la Conquéte Musulmane jusqu'à nos Jours. Par M. VILLEMAIN, de l'Académie Française. 8vo. Paris. 1825.

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UR notice of this volume shall be brief: but we shall have difficulty in saying as little of it as it deserves. For the pompous essay of a member of the French Academy, it is, in truth, a sadly unmeaning production: but it has been ushered into the world by a certain literary party in France with such loud notes of preparation, and has been long preceded by so many flourishes of windy eulogium, that we feel ourselves in some measure bound to record the important fact of its publication, lest we should be thought wanting in attention to a part of our literary duties.

The volume is divided, as its title imports, into two parts of a distinct and opposite character: the first, Lascaris, being a tale of imagination; and the second bearing the more dignified pretension of an historical essay on the condition of the Greeks, from the epoch of the Mussulman conquest of their country to our own times. Of the first piece, Lascaris, we really can scarcely attempt to define either the exact objects or tendency. The scene, however, is laid in Sicily and Italy; and the tale opens in the year after the fall of Constantinople to the victorious arms of Mahomet II. The principal personages are a party of fugitive Greeks; who, escaping from the sack of their capital, seek an asylum on the shores of Sicily. The most distinguished of these exiles, and the hero of the piece, is Theodore Lascaris, the descendant of a noble family which had once been invested with the imperial purple of the East; and not altogether, as the Italian scholar knows, a fictitious character, for the name has some celebrity among those expatriated Greeks of Constantinople, who communicated the language and literature of their country to the Latin world. Lascaris is not the only historical personage whom M. VILLEMAIN has pressed into his pages. Cardinal Bessarion, the Medici, Bembo, Alfonso the Magnanimous, and other great contemporary names in Italian literature, all figure or rather are disfigured — in our author's narrative.

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