termined, notwithstanding this narrow escape, to abandon his wife and children, to share the captivity of his master in the Temple: a design which, whatever may be thought of his preference of a superior or a secondary duty, is at least to be praised as a courageous and disinterested act of devotion and fidelity. He solemnly committed his family to the protection › of his brother, and succeeded in obtaining admission into the: prison of the royal family. While he was thus voluntarily› incarcerated, our author's trials also commenced. He appears at great trouble to explain, and very unnecessarily, why he did not emigrate at this period; and, as if he felt it to be, even to this hour, a crime in the eyes of his royal pro-> tectors to have longer breathed the air of his regicide and polluted country, he labours most strenuously to justify himself for not having violated the dearest claims upon his affections. He remained, supporting his brother's family, his mother, and his own wife, until he was, during the reign of terror, himself denounced, and compelled to fly from the neighbourhood of the capital. Then commenced a long series of hair-> breadth escapes, and strange vicissitudes in his fortunes. For his first means of security he was indebted to the benevolence of a stranger, a contractor for bullocks for the army, who, at Valenciennes, concealed him among his cattle in the disguise of a drover. Here, however, as he tells us, the whiteness of his hands betrayed him, and he was on the point of being denounced and guillotined, when an accidental rencontre with a friend, employed in the commissariat department, again saved him, and prepared his second course of prosperity. It was the season of strange elevations and levellings; and we have no space to recount the caprice of fortune by which Hanet, the valet-de-chambre, the speculator of mills, and the cattle-drover, suddenly became M. Hanet, inspector-general of provisions for the army.

During the reign of terror no individual of any party was safe for an hour from fanatical suspicion or private malice; and these Memoirs well describe the dreadful state of feverish anxiety, excitement, and suspense in which men held their lives, by a thread; ultimately, however, both our author and his brother escape all the horrors of that period: the former emigrates to re-join the remains of the royal family, and dies in exile in 1809; but our author continues with the army, serves in the commissariat department under Pichegru, Moreau, and Massena, obtains the regard of those celebrated men, and becomes at last general contractor for the supplies of the whole armies of the Rhine, Switzerland, &c.

4

Here

Here he appears already to have amassed a very considerable · fortune, when he was as suddenly overwhelmed by a long train of reverses. He was unable to obtain a settlement of his accounts from the republican government: he was violently pursued by his creditors; and in the issue he found himself completely ruined, after (by his own account) a succession of zealous and valuable services to his country. In this part of his work, he gives an interesting account of the public transactions in which he was engaged; and relates, in particular, some pleasing traits of the humanity of Moreau, and the stern republican disinterestedness of Rapinat, who has rendered his name detestible by his spoliations of the Swiss, for the benefit not of himself but of his nation.

In the utter ruin of his affairs, our author now fled from Paris, and resolved to try his fortune in St. Domingo during Le Clerc's expedition. Here he passes through many adventures and disasters, which we cannot enumerate; until at length he is taken prisoner, and brought to England. Of his residence on parole in this country, he gives a curious relation. This is intermingled with so many mis-statements and evident exaggerations, that, judging from it alone, we should not form a very high opinion of his general veracity.

After a detention of two or three years in England, our author was released under a cartel, and returned to France, where he entered the service of Napoleon, still in the commissariat department of the army. But there is little to interest in this concluding part of his Memoirs. It is filled only with complaints of unmerited distresses, and unrequited services, The return of the Bourbons, and the kind recollection of the present Dauphiness, raised him to the office of inspector-general of forests at Corsica, only to lose his place again with his usual ill-luck, or improvidence; and it appears that he is now, in declining years and straitened circumstances, supported principally by a bounty which does honour to the enduring patronage of his royal benefactress.

ART. XI. Tableau des Maurs Françaises aux Temps de la Chevalerie: Tiré du Roman de Sire Raoul et de la belle Ermeline, mis en Français moderne, et accompagné de Notes, &c. &c. Par L. C. P. D. V. 4 Vols. 8vo. Paris. 1825.

WE

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E have some difficulty in discovering the exact character of the Romance of the Sire Raoul and the fair Ermeline,' which is here made the vehicle, or apology, for the introduction of a mass of second-hand and common-place notes

upon the institutions and customs of chivalry in: France. But we feel much less embarrassment in determining that, in any case, the whole publication is absolutely unnecessary and worthless. In a tedious preface, remarkable only for attempted vivacity and real dulness, the commentator, or author, has been at great labour to mystify the question of the genuineness of his romance. In a mingled strain of assertion and equivoque, he seems strenuously to insist upon its authenticity. If he is pleased to banter, he is very solemnly jocose; if he be in earnest, he has very adroitly contrived to leave his assurances open to the heavy suspicion of a jest. He has, in short, altogether avoided giving any satisfactory history of his romance; and he has attempted to produce no explanation, or evidence, of the antiquity of the piece, except the remark, to which, certes, no literary antiquary will have the least hesitation in acceding, that it cannot be older than the close of the fourteenth century. But whether this wearisome romance be his own production or not, is fortunately a doubt of the utmost insignificance. One conclusion we shall pronounce, without the slightest apprehension of error: the piece is certainly NOT a composition of the chivalric times. Its tone of thought, and description, and narrative, has none of the racy vigour and quaintness of those times, and is altogether so different, as at once to satisfy our minds that the piece is a mere imitation. The appeal, in the preface, to the peculiar character of antique originality, which it is declared to offer, as an internal evidence of authenticity, is therefore rather unfortunate; and the hardiness of the challenge betrays either the ignorance of the commentator, if such merely he be, or the defective invention of the author, if author and commentator be one.

But if, indeed, this composition be really any thing more than the leaden coinage of some modern brain, it is only one of those numerous heroic romances, or imitations of the proper tales of chivalry, which were concocted by the vicious taste of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These heroic romances were the worst legacy which the genuine mind of chivalry bequeathed to succeeding ages. The passion for chivalric fiction long survived the decline of chivalric achievements; and the feeble successors of the minstrels and jongleurs of the olden time knew no other mode of renewing the exhausted stores of popular amusement than by eking out the stale and elaborate repetition of favourite incidents. Thus the interminable romances of later days recorded only a monotonous succession of single combats and amatory distresses, knights lost in a labyrinth of absurd adventures, and damsels perplexed with a thousand suits of tender idolatry. APP. REV. VOL. CVIII.

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Thus,

Thus, too, love was sublimated and passion volatilised into flights of extravagant sentiment. But who, in a word, that has ever steeped his sense of the ridiculous in the exuberant wit of Cervantes, needs be told the absurd character of these long-drawn heroic romances?

Whatever be the age of the Sire Raoul and the fair Ermeline,' its wearisome verbosity and endless incidents are at least such as might have fatigued the unquenchable thirst of the Knight of La Mancha himself. But to expect the languid readers of these days to wade through the monotonous farrago of four such volumes, is really estimating modern patience rather too extravagantly. We tolerate the length of such a tale as Amadis de Gaul for its celebrity, and the influence which we know it once held over the fancy of society: we read of the prowess of Charlemagne and his paladins, or of our own Arthur and his companions, for the high romantic associations by which these fictions are entwined with our poetry: but we shall not equally tolerate the illustration or composition of mere jejune and secondary adventures. If the writer before us had really designed to illustrate the state of chivalric manners in France by a commentary upon some genuine romance, he should have selected the well-known tale of Perceforest, the favorite of St. Palaye, which abounds above all others in references to those manners: or he might, with almost equal advantage, perhaps, and certainly with more novelty to the French reader, have preferred the romance of Percival, the exemplar of that wretched production, the Ritterzeit und Ritterwesen of Büsching. Either of these would have afforded him numerous pegs whereon to hang the precious shreds of antiquarian lore, which he has torn from their lawful owners, and converted into a parti-coloured pendant of notes for his romance.

Of these notes we must say a few words before we dismiss the goodly compilation altogether. They profess to illustrate the general and private wars of the chivalric times: the relation of the great vassals with the king, and with their inferior vassals, all which, by the way, is a mere feudal, and not a chivalric point of enquiry: to comment on the ban and arriere ban, also a feudal subject; on the oriflamme, banners, cries of arms, kings at arms, and heralds; on combats to the utterance, judicial and otherwise; on tournaments, jousts, and passages of arms; on fraternity of arms and adoptions; on knights, esquires, damsels, and pages; on the trouveurs and troubadours, minstrels and jongleurs; on the languages of Oyl and Oc; on the chase, festivals, &c.

Now, of all these notices, it is sufficient to say that they are, without a single exception, pilfered from other writers,

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with

with only a general admission of the fact. We have detected the commentator helping himself most largely from the stores of St. Palaye, and copying ten times without acknowledgment, for once where he confesses his obligation; also, from the earlier and less remembered pages of Colombiere, without any acknowledgment at all; and even from contemporary writers, Millot and Raynouard, with only the poor salvo to his conscience of a general reference to their works. What he abstracts, he seldom avowedly borrows; what he honestly does borrow, he never improves; and the reader who has the misfortune to be seduced by the attractive title of his volumes will find only in them a negation of those three most essential qualities, instruction, interest, and amusement,

ART. XII. Edouard. Par L'Auteur d'Ourika. Tomes II. Paris, chez Ladvocat. Imported by Dulau and Co., Soho-Square. 1825.

THO HOSE who have read Ourika, cannot fail to remember the peculiar charm that was imparted to a tale of great simplicity, by the beauty of the language in which it was told, and the purity and ardour of the sentiment by which it was inspired. It was in itself a little world of elevated thought and intense feeling, to which a variety of incident would have been an interruption rather than an auxiliary. We followed Ourika into the recesses of her heart, and communed with that secret spirit of love, which she cherished with so much ardour, which ought to know, as she imagined, no distinction of colour, or difference of rank or fortune. Hers was the history of an angelic woman, prevented by her African descent from taking that station in civilised society, which her intellect and her manners were so well calculated to adorn. Edouard is her brother in every respect. His mind is the counterpart of hers: his heart is consumed by a similar passion, and it terminates in a manner equally unfortunate and touching. He is not indeed a "child of the sun;" nor has he to reproach his destiny with any outward singularity of form or feature, which should disqualify him for social happiness. His passion, too, was returned by a being, who, though in purity of sentiment she was much inferior to Ourika, yet was worthy, from her rank and accomplishments, to be the object of his homage. The impediments, however, which oppose the felicity of these lovers, arise from a cause equally powerful in France, as the darkest hue of Ourika's countenance, a difference in the descent of the parties. Their souls were drawn to each other by an irresistible power, but the barriers of conventional man

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ners