which excites fallacious horror or morbid admiration, but we should be able to derive from so interesting a spectacle of human vicissitudes the moral lessons that are altogether lost in the present confusion and obscurity. The analysis of that period contained in one volume indicates the researches of years; the author himself relates that the facts of a page were sometimes the only result of months of labour. In the reports of the Intendants who ruled France with despotic authority, in the transactions of the provincial and parochial assemblies, in the petitions of the nobles against the functionaries, the complaints of the public officers against both nobles and peasantry, in the mutual remonstrances of class against class to the central government, De Tocqueville found inexhaustible proofs of a state of society to which Providence could only allot a rapid dissolution or gradual decay. In the political sphere, he portrays an aristocracy whose powers had been usurped by the Crown, whose wealth had devolved on the bourgeoisie, whose education was no better than their neighbours', and who still lived in a perfect world of real and fantastic privileges; a monarchy doing its best to awaken the nation to a sense of its grievances, holding out hopes of infinite reforms, and day by day taking upon itself enormous responsibilities, which it must either discharge or perish; and the whole body of the people with the chains of villeinage still clanking about their necks, and yet possessed with that envious spirit of equality and that fierce demand for fraternity which vented itself in the Reign of Terror. In the moral order, he represents the intellects of Frenchmen sharpened by incredulity and greedy for new and unripe knowledge, their feelings excited by appeals to their outraged sympathies and despised affections, and their sensualities let loose under the sanction of a material philosophy. Thus studied and illustrated, we no longer see a fatalistic drama standing apart in history, but a long day of judgment and retribution, the evening of which is not yet come. Of the volumes which were to comprehend the series and links of consequences extending through the Revolution and the Empire, only two fragments are given as referring to the period of the Consulate. M. de Beaumont intimates that other materials, more or less connected, were left by the writer, which he does not think he would be justified in producing. He is so strongly impressed with the regard which his friend ever manifested for completeness of form and correctness of diction, that he feels it a duty to withhold whatever is left imperfect, and to permit no broken thoughts or phrases to lie strewn about the polished edifice. We cannot submit patiently to this loss; for although we fully prize the noble modesty and just pride which induced De Tocqueville to keep back his most precious thoughts until he was thoroughly contented with their arrangement and expression, yet, as he esteemed the truth and the fact far beyond any mode in which they might be conveyed, we believe his fame would not suffer by any accession of knowledge or of reflection by which his cause might gain. Is not this very correspondence a judicious selection of the fragments of his intelligence and of the gleanings of his wisdom? and if these letters, loosely composed and without a thought of meeting the public eye, are nevertheless so interesting and valuable, why may we not expect an equal brightness and originality in other remnants of his mind? He tells us in the preface to the first volume that even at that time a portion of the second essay was sketched out, and adds the pathetic doubt whether it will be granted him to complete it:-The destiny of man is still far more obscure than that of nations;' and yet he seemed to prognosticate his own. He had passed the winter of 1851 at Sorrento, in the genial companionship of Mr. Senior and M. Ampère. Of the conversations that passed between them in long sunny walks and beautiful resting-places, the latter asks, "Why did I not record them?' to which Mr. Senior answers, 'I did,' and they fill many pages of this second volume. Another winter he spent in the neighbourhood of Tours, which, to the mildness of the climate, added the advantage of a collection of provincial archives, that increased his store of antiquarian knowledge, and contributed to the completion of the first part of his work. But each of these residences gave him only a respite of existence. Allied as he was to England by his deepest sentiment and his most confirmed opinions, it is strange that his visits to this country were so few and his sojourn of such short duration. The first time, in 1835, he was received with the ordinary kindness due to his name, his introductions, and his agreeable presence. Two years later, after the publication of his chef d'œuvre, he was welcomed with esteem and respect by all ranks of society, though his inclinations naturally led him into contact with men who, like himself, had not dissevered the interests of politics and literature. And of these he found several in this country, notwithstanding the notion so sedulously propagated of late years by aristocratic ignorance and successful mediocrity, that the man who has thought long and earnestly on a subject is the least capable of carrying into execution the practical measures connected with it; and that literary labour, the hardest and most exact form of business, incapacitates the mind for the simpler and less accurate duties of official routine. To persons, such as the Historian of the Democracy of Greece,-as the philosophic critic who com 6 bines his scholarly pursuits with at least as successful a management of great public affairs as that of other statesmen who find no time even for pleasure-as Mr. John Mill, to whom he was, from the first, attached by a singular congeniality of intellect-as Mr. Henry Reeve, who became his interpreter to the British public-as Mr. William Greg, Mr. Nassau Senior, Mr. Monckton Milnes, and Mr. Charles Buller-and, moreover, to such of our well-instructed and thoughtful countrywomen as Mrs. Grote and Lady Theresa Lewis, he was at once attracted, not only by their clear appreciation of his views and their sincere approval of his moral aims, but by an intellectual sympathy, perhaps even more entire than he could find in his closest coterie at home. It was in the depression of declining health that he wrote, that though he had relations and neighbours and friends, his mind had not a family or a country;' but we have already observed how, throughout his whole career, he was bound to other Frenchmen by any ties rather than those of mental association. With the best Englishmen it was different. He was much pleased by one of them; who complimented him on having avoided general ideas while handling such extensive subjects. M. de Beaumont, in recounting this anecdote, adds, there could not be a greater mistake.' We may observe, however, that in all probability the Englishman by general ideas' meant vague theories, composed from preconceived notions and arbitrary modes of thought, such as generally pervade the German and often the French treatment of political subjects; and that he recognised (though not with very precise expression), in De Tocqueville's writings, the continual subordination to facts and conscientious deduction which find favour with the solidity of our national character, and without which there is something wanting to our satisfaction in the richest imagination or in the most fervent faith. 6 Although De Tocqueville's principal intimacy lay with members of the so-called Liberal party, his own tendencies in English politics were of anything rather than a Radical character. Where the aristocratic element was a living portion of the State and its maintenance an object rather of pride than of envy to the people, his feelings led him rather to desire the extension of its legitimate influence than its injury or degradation. It was with a melancholy satisfaction that he contrasted the political undulations of France with 'A land of settled government, A land of just and old renown, It was with no less interest that he compared the original of our institutions with their magnified and coarsened copy across the Atlantic, and recognised that while here too there was democracy, it only required judgment and moderation in the rulers to provide for its salutary action and to subordinate the caprices of the popular will to the control of the public reason. It was not till 1857 that he repeated his visit, and then only for the professed purpose of consulting the collections on the subject of the French Revolution in the British Museum. These he found even more abundant than he expected, but so arranged as to be utterly worthless for him or any other historical student. The indispensableness of a special catalogue to give utility to these materials has been frequently urged on the trustees, but hitherto in vain. De Tocqueville soon transferred his attention to the contents of the State-Paper Office, which were placed at his disposal without restriction, and where he found much novel matter for his future volumes. The reception that he met with, from all public men, was such as could not fail to be grateful to the wounded spirit of one who, in his home, was a political exile, and whom his fellow-countrymen could hardly honour without censure or esteem without self-reproach. The notice of the trifling courtesy paid to him by the Admiralty in placing a steamer at his disposal to convey him to Cherbourg was excluded from the French journals. The rarity of his intercourse with England is the more surprising from the circumstance that he habitually resided at a gentilhommière in Normandy, almost on the coast of the Channel, a few miles east of Cherbourg, that came into his possession in 1837 by one of those family arrangements, not unfrequent in France, which, in the subdivision of property, devolve the family estate on a younger son. The château itself represented the history of centuries:-a solid tower recalled the times when France and England, being almost one nation, lived in a chronic state of civil war; the remains of a dovecote told of the Seigneurial pigeons that fed on the crops of the villeins, and whose posterity, like that of their lords, perished in expiation of the sins of their ancestors; and a dwelling-house of the date of Louis Douze bore traces at once of the hard hand of the Revolution and of the taste which had gradually transformed it into a most agreeable residence. To this were attached farm-buildings, for De Tocqueville took much interest in agriculture, and lived among the peasantry in the happiest familiarity. Every reader will be touched with the large place that this residence fills in his correspondence. We are accustomed to think of Frenchmen as only connected with towns, especially with Paris; but here we we have a picture of country life, with all its advantages of daily occupation, intellectual leisure, and social hospitality, as fully appreciated and enjoyed as they could be in any part of England. Many of our countrymen, whose names are high in literature, will retain a delightful impression of the hours they have passed there in such intercourse as recalled the age when conversation was a living art, in which the best men gave the best of their minds to those they loved and valued. There were long walks in lanes as deep and shady as those of Devonshire; there were excursions to the neglected port of Barfleur, sacred to the memory of the English monarch' who never smiled again;' to the scene of our naval victory at La Hogue; and to the lighthouse of Gatteville, from which were seen the fine expanse of sea indenting the varied coast and the thick hedgerows making one continued wood up to the sloping hills. There were drives to the châteaux of family connections, old ladies and gentlemen who suited the long broad alleys of the ancien régime,-and to ruined manors whence many generations of Clérels had gone forth to fight their own neighbours and their country's foes. The guests of the autumn of 1858-the last-will not easily forget the brightness of look and heartiness of demeanour which, even after the warning of the previous month, made it impossible either for the old friends who had never seen him gayer, or for the new ones who had never known any one so charming, to look on De Tocqueville as a man about to die. Yet so it was. He left Tocqueville for the south in the autumn, and there passed away early in the following year, after much suffering cheerfully borne. On leaving Paris, he wrote that he expected to study better at Cannes than he could at Tocqueville, which was too agreeable to him to be a good working place, and where the domestic calm repressed those emotions which, like winds, make the flame of thought burn all the brighter.' Vain hope! the intellectual intercourse of friends, such as those conversations with Baron de Bunsen which, he said, 'did more good to his mind than Dr. Séve could do to his body,' was the most that he could now enjoy. Near the end, he summoned M. de Beaumont in the affecting words 'I do not know that anything has ever cost me so much as what I am now going to say to you-I pray you to come here;' and in his last letter, within a few days of his death, he welcomed M. Ampère, who had already set out from Rome to join him, with passionate delight: 'Never could I be more rejoiced to see you, though never could I be less capable of enjoying your society; but come, for nothing is so selfish as true friendship and another passion that now I cannot name.' With such sym pathies |