great facts; but the narrative is in general diffuse and superficial, and in its smaller details trivial and inaccurate to a strange degree. He relieves himself in a great measure from the embarrassments of consecutive order and logic by cutting up his narrative into short paragraphs, or, as one of his French critics, in allusion to the poetic character of the work, pleasantly calls them, 'strophes.' This we suppose is in imitation of the short chapters of Tacitus, but they remind us rather of the stanzas of Tasso; and indeed the whole account of the capture of Paris in 1814 has very much of the air of a canto of the Gierusalemme Liberata. Each of the fifteen books is broken into twenty, thirty, and even sixty of these fragments, capriciously as it seems, and with no other visible reason than, here and there, the opportunity of closing them with something which the author thinks smart and striking—an epigrammatic point. For instance, he will begin a subject of an extent and interest which in ordinary writing might occupy a considerable chapter, but M. Lamartine will end it abruptly at the tenth line with a coup de marteau:—

"The cannon alone negotiated!'-b. 2, xviii. p. 56.`

One of these epigrammatic epilogues has been particularly quoted and admired, and we may therefore venture to produce it as a favourable sample of this peculiarity. It is the wind-up of the story of the murder of the Duc d'Enghien, which M. Lamartine details, in his usual diffuse and pretensious style indeed, but with an indignant abhorrence which does him honour :-

"The murderer has but his hour-the victim has all eternity.'b. 12, xxi.

Now we would humbly ask what this means? An hour of what? an eternity of what? Nothing certainly of the same category. Of whatever-we presume sympathy, pity, or commiseration—the victim has an eternity, the murderer has assuredly not half an hour. Of material success and guilty triumph the murderer had, not one but, ninety thousand hours, and the victim not an instant. The phrase is like hundreds of M. Lamartine's attempts at apophthegmatizing-pure nonsense: and something like the converse of what he has said would probably be nearer what he meant that such a victim has but an hour of suffering, while the murderer has an eternity of infamy.

His ambitious anxiety to embroider a threadbare subject with something of novelty makes him fond of introducing minor accidents and anecdotes-a practice which we should not only make no objection to, but very much approve, if only the statements were in themselves always authentic, and if the reflections and commentaries with which he loves to gloss upon them were not so often futile and sometimes so untrue. We are almost ashamed

ashamed to give specimens of the niaiseries to which he condescends-but we will venture to select two or three samples which relate circumstances more likely to remain in the recollection of English readers than his foreign gobemoucherie. His microscopic eye can see a system of policy in the cut of the old King's coat.

• Louis XVIII. exhibited to observation, in his external appearance, this struggle of two nations and two tendencies in his mind. His costume was that of the old régime, absurdly modified by the alterations which time had introduced in the habits of men. He wore velvet boots reaching up above the knees, that the rubbing of the leather should not hurt his legs (frequently suffering from gout), and to preserve at the same time the military costume of kings on horseback. His sword never left his side, even when sitting in his easy chair-a sign of nobility and superiority of arms which he wished always to present to the notice of the gentlemen of his kingdom. His orders of chivalry covered his breast, and were suspended with broad blue ribands over his white waistcoat. His coat of blue cloth participated, by its cut, in the two epochs whose costumes were united in him.'p. 289.

How poor would be this attempt at jumbling together Tacitus and a tailor, even if the facts were true!-but there are still many amongst us who remember the King, and can testify that he never wore a velvet imitation of jack boots, such as kings wore on horseback.' He wore gaiters, indeed, of the size and shape common to gouty gentlemen; and as he wore them in evening as well as morning dress, they were of black velvet. He never wore his sword on any occasion in which swords were not then —and are not still-generally worn, that is, in ceremonious costume. He wore his orders of chivalry no otherwise than any other knight of the St. Esprit and the Garter usually wore theirs; and we cannot but smile at M. de Lamartine's wonder that the ribbons of these orders should be broad and blue.' Has M. de Lamartine never dined or spent an evening in the company of a knight of either of these orders, or does he believe that cordon bleu means really nothing but a good cook?

The triumph of his sagacity is to find motives and results where other folks only see the most common circumstances of life; even the house where one may happen to lodge is a theme for his philosophising. Louis XVIII. resided for a time in the style of an English private gentleman at Gosfield Hall, in Essex, a house lent him by the Duke of Buckingham

'But at length the fortune of Buonaparte broke down under its own weight, and the King, perceiving that its downfall would be as rapid as its elevation, drew nearer to London, to exercise a closer observa

tion on forthcoming political events. He removed to Hartwell in Buckinghamshire.'-p. 284.

Gosfield happens to be about the same distance from London as Hartwell, and still nearer to the Continent, and the King's removal, which was altogether a matter of private convenience to the Duke of Buckingham, took place two or three years before the march to Moscow, and of course while Buonaparte's power was still in its ascendance.

Again, in narrating the King's approach to Paris in 1814, he describes him

'At the isolated château of St. Ouen, an old residence of M. Necker, in the plain of St. Denis, near the gates of Paris-as if he had wished, by his choice of this place of conference, to recall to the nation the memory of a popular minister whom he himself had formerly supported.'-p. 424.

Unluckily for this sagacious theory, the house that the King occupied on this occasion was not the old residence of M. Necker; and M. de Lamartine's blunder is as if one were to confound Pope's Villa with Strawberry Hill, because they are both near Twickenham. In great things a writer should endeavour to sketch broadly-in small things accurately. M. Lamartine does neither-but always affectedly. When the mere locality of an accidental residence is so pregnant with deep political meanings, we are not surprised that under his plastic hand the human physiognomy should be still more suggestive; but we do a little wonder at such gallimatias-such_phébus-as his portraits of the two rivals for the throne of France. Of Napoleon he says—

countenance.

'An excess of bile mingling with the blood gave a yellow tint to his skin, which, at a distance, looked like a varnish of pale gold on his His solid bony chin formed an appropriate base for his features. His forehead seemed to have widened from the scantiness of thin black hair which was falling from the “moiteur" [mold-absurdly translated moisture] of continual thought. It might be said that his head, naturally small, had increased in size to give ample scope between his temples for the machinery and combinations of a mind every thought of which was an empire. The map of the world seemed to have been incrusted on the orb of that reflective head.' p. 6.

The profundity of the observation that his chin was the base of his features' can only be equalled by the rationality of discovering in the orb of his expanding head a map of the world.' Those only who are unluckily old enough to remember poor old Louis des huîtres will be able to enjoy fully the following portrait of that rather plain and neither very expressive nor very attractive countenance:

• The

The beauty, the nobility, the grace of his features, attracted the regard of all. It might be said that time, exile, fatigue, infirmity, and his natural corpulence had only attached themselves to his feet and his trunk, the better to display the perpetual and vigorous youth of his countenance. His high forehead was a little too much inclined to the rear, like a subsiding wall, but the light of intelligence played on its broad convexity. His eyes were large, and of azure blue (bleu du ciel), prominent in their oval orbits, luminous, sparkling, humid, and expressive of frankness. . . . . The healthy tint and the lively freshness of youth were spread over his countenance-he had the features of Louis XV. in all their beauty, lit up with an intelligence more expanded, and a reflection more concentrated, wherein majesty itself was not wanting. His looks alternately spoke, interrogated, replied, and reigned, pointing inwards as it were, and displaying the thoughts and sentiments of his soul. At any expression displayed upon his countenance, at once pensive and serene, abstracted and present, commanding and gentle, severe and attractive, one would say'Tis a king, but 'tis a king who has not yet experienced the cares and lassitude of the throne-'tis a king who is preparing to reign, and who anticipates nothing but pleasure from the throne, the future, and mankind in general.'-p. 290.

....

If the high' forehead inclining like a subsiding wall,' and the eye of sky blue, and the look that pointed inwards,' told all this, the countenances of Garrick or Talma were dumb in comparison. M. de Lamartine consistently enough adds that these looks once seen would be for ever engraved on the memory.' We think so too; and as our memory presents nothing at all like this description, we are obliged to take it for another of M. Lamartine's inexplicable rhodomontades. As he takes occasion to tell us that he has now only just attained the middle of life-which, at the Psalmist's computation of three score and ten for the whole life of man, may be set down at 35-and as the picture he is drawing professes to be that of Louis XVIII. at Hartwell,' that is 37 years ago, the natural conclusion indeed would be that M. Lamartine's appeal to memory could be nothing better than an appeal to his fancy. But so far from being only at the mezzo termin, according to the biographical dictionaries and heraldic manuals in our hands, M. Lamartine was born in October, 1791-so that he must well remember the King's return to France, though one might well doubt, from the portrait, whether he could ever have seen him.

Amidst these dreams of what he calls his own memory he sometimes mixes up his schoolboy recollections of antiquity, and becomes a pedant-minus the learning. He appears to have read in his early days, or at least to have heard, of one Hannibal, who, though he seems not to know much about him-omne ignotum

pro

pro magnifico-has the honour of being his favourite hero, and fills as many different characters in his drama as Maître Jacques in L'Avare. Buonaparte it seems was—

"the Hannibal of the aristocracy '-p. 247.

whatever that may mean;-hardly, we suppose, the same thing as'Mr. Pitt was the Hannibal of Anti-French European patriotism.'p. 287.

Or as this

The Duke of Wellington is the English Hannibal.'-p. 389.

And by and by we find that this eternal Hannibal is no other than a noun of multitude representing the whole British people -in short, John Bull!

"Napoleon menaced England both by sea and land, and thus created the hatred of a Hannibal against his nation and his dynasty.'-p. 244. When Master Elbow, in Measure for Measure, reviles his adversary as a most wicked Hannibal, the commentators conjecture that he probably means cannibal—but we think the commentators would be sorely puzzled to affix any meaning to M. Lamartine's very promiscuous use of the name.

He has also a partiality for Alcibiades, which he shows by discovering that he too is Hannibal in disguise.

'M. Pozzo di Borgo was a veritable Athenian Alcibiades long exiled at the court of Prussias' (sic).*—p. 522.

It has been hitherto supposed that King Prusias of Bithynia lived about two hundred years later than Alcibiades, and that it was the Carthaginian and not the Athenian hero that was exiled at his court; but M. Lamartine a changé tout cela'—and at best leaves us to guess which of the two it was that our old friend Pozzo resembled. And this question becomes still more puzzling when we find that in the gluttonous old lawyer Cambacérès M. Lamartine sees also

'Alcibiades grown old !'-p. 19.

He might just as well have said Hannibal again.

Though M. de Lamartine does not profess the vulgar prejudices of most of his countrymen against England, and even distinguishes us, as we have just seen, by the pet name of Hannibals, he knows very well that the chief pretensions of one of the rival candidates for the Presidentship is his supposed hostility to England; and, though an instinct of decency and good manners, and perhaps a

* The translator absurdly makes Alcibiades an exile in Prussia,' being probably led into this blunder by M. Lamartine's misspelling of the name. We may here remark that the translation is a very poor one. M. de Lamartine's preface tells us that it was made under his auspices and partly by his own pen,--this makes its blunders the more noticeable.