he makes out his case very creditably, and it is a pleasure to believe him. And, to do him justice, this is the interpretation which accords best with the general tenor of his words and deeds, though there have been exceptions which do not appear in this expurgated edition of his works, revised by himself. For example: in 1801, in publishing the third edition of Atala, he called Napoleon "one of those men whom Heaven sends in sign of reconciliation, when it is weary of punishing;" this phrase is now suppressed. In 1811 again, he made Bonaparte's eulogy a part of his Itinéraire; but afterwards, when it was necessary to find a reason for having praised the usurper, it had been done because he could not "for the sake of his bookseller's interests, refuse an act of complaisance which the minister of the police demanded." His address to the king too, on the 5th September, 1815, at the head of the deputation of the Loire, recommending severity towards the political offenders of the "hundred days," is not in keeping with his present part, and of course it does not appear. More such cases might be cited, and we shall have occasion as we go on to remark a little upon the tone of his religious writings; but, for the present, we merely wish to show that the Vicomte, although really and truly as this world goes a most amiable man, and honest at least by preference, has nevertheless had his ebbs and flows, and that in order to make good his lofty pretensions now of being and having always been above truckling to circumstance, he is obliged to tamper a little here and there with truth. To show what his pretensions in this respect as well as in others are, we shall give his character of himself in his own words. We take it from various parts of his works, to which we refer in the note; but it has an air almost of having been written originally whole, and distributed, to make it go down better, to various places in small portions. If this be so, and the Vicomte has really cut himself up, as it were, and thus taken the proper business of reviewers out of our hands, it is no more than fair perhaps that we should reverse our own spells, and put him together again.

"My life for twenty-five years has been nothing but a battle against whatever appeared to me to be false in religion, in philosophy, and in politics, against the crimes and errors of the age, and against the men who misused power to corrupt or to enslave the people. I have never calculated the degree of such men's elevation, and from Bonaparte who made the world tremble, and who never made me tremble, to those obscure oppressors, who are only known by my contempt, I have dared to utter all to those who dared to act all. Wherever I have been, I have stretched out a hand to misfortune, but I do not comprehend prosperity. Always ready to devote myself to adversity, I do not know how to serve passion in its triumph. I have a cursed love of truth, and a fear to say the thing which is not, which with me overpowers all other considerations. Bonaparte repeatedly threatened me with his anger and with his VOL. XX.-No. 39.

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might, and yet he was swayed by a secret penchant towards me, as I felt an involuntary admiration for what there was that was great in him. I might have been every thing under his government had I wished it, but for success I have always lacked a passion and a vice; ambition, and hypocrisy. Educated as the companion of winds and waves, those waves, those winds, that solitude which were my early teachers, suited better perhaps with the nature of my mind, and the independence of my character. Perhaps I may owe to this education some wild virtue, which otherwise I might never have known. Greatness of mind or of fortune never awes me. I admire the first without being oppressed by it, the second inspires me with pity rather than respect. The face of man will never discompose me (visage d'homme ne me troublera jamais.) I do. not make any boast of my labours, my habitual feeling on the subject of my works is not pride, but an indifference which I carry perhaps too far."

Add to this what he says about his early studies, and we shall see what a prodigy of learning as well as virtue we have to deal with.

"J'aimais passionnement la métaphysique; mais que n'aimais-je pas ? Je me plaisais à l'algébre comme à la poésie, et j'avais pour l'érudition historique le goût d'un véritable bénédictin."Vol. II. p. 116.

There is a good deal of matter for argument in this account of studies, and it may be improved either way, by proving à priori that a man who read in this manner would not learn much, and thus condemning the practice by the vice of the principle; or contrariwise by showing the badness of the principle, by the results in the Vicomte's own case of the practice. He has no doubt read many books, and he most certainly is not a learned man. He has acquired simply what Johnson calls the knowledge where knowledge is," and when he wants to show off on a given subject, he takes down a book, and flings quotations at you whole, hit or miss. His learning is not like golden sands carried along in a pactolus of eloquence, and tinging all its waters; on the contrary, it lies at the foot of his page in notes in solid lumps like a pebbly bottom, and his stream is neither better for it nor worse. He regurgitates with quotation in his learned writings, throwing out unchanged, like a dice-box, what he has just thrown in, taking always good care to make it rattle, but when he attempts to talk learnedly without book, he is in constant danger of a blunder. Take for instance his declaration about the fall of the false gods, (Génie du C. Part I. B. 2. Ch. 4,) when he asks if Serapis did not fall with Thèbes. Now the worship of Serapis came to Alexandria from Pontus two hundred years after Thèbes was destroyed, and it was at Alex

1 See Vol. II. Pref. vi: Vol. VIII. 214: Vol. I. Pref. iii. Vol. VII. 7-21. Vol. VIII. 203. and Vol. I. 2.-In this order.

andria that his worship was most famous for six hundred years, till Theodosius destroyed his temple. And this the Vicomte must once have known, and forgotten, for he quotes Heraclides of Pontus, and Porphyry, only a few pages before, for an oracle of Serapis, which shows he had been exploring the subject, but he let a part of the fruits of his research get a little too old before he used it. Again, in his preface to his travels in America, among a vast number of crude facts relating to every body, that ever travelled any where, serving no purpose but to show that he has read about them all, he tells us that the Rev. John, Campbell penetrated in Africa, setting out from the Cape of Good Hope, to the distance of eleven thousand miles, he does not tell us where this journey ended. With a little searching, probably, one might find any quantity of such cases; but, whoever is curious in these matters may refer to an article on the Etudes Historiques in the Foreign Review for March, 1828, where the question, as to M. de Chateaubriand's pretensions to learning, is definitively settled.

The Vicomte is essentially a coxcomb. Vanity and the love of display are the bases of his character, and these principles have kept his mind all his life in a state of greater excitement than is compatible with sober study, or mature reflection. He has talent enough to shine upon a given occasion, and his writings consequently have almost all had a momentary success, and are all in progress of being forgotten. Every thing he does is theatrical, and there is nothing he delights in more, than in giving a sketch of himself in some interesting attitude, wrapped in his cloak on the promontory of Sunium, and leaning against a column to meditate by moonlight among the ruins, or finishing his "Essai" in the present expectation of death, "dans le "dénûment de son exil, n'ayant pour table que la pierre de son tombeau." Every thing that happens to him is extraordinary; he exclaims constantly, "singulière destinée," upon occasions that are only singular because they happen to him, and which to any one else might seem ordinary enough. And with all his respect for the ancients, and his love of all sorts of reading, the author he has read most, quotes ofterest, and most at length, is himself. You are referred back and forth from one end of his books to the other, and very frequently to save you the trouble of taking down the volumes, you will find long passages extracted from his own Itinéraire, the notes to his Essai, the Génie du Christianisme, &c. Sometimes several pages of one work appear incorporated and used a second time in another, as the account of Marguerite de Valois in the Etudes Historiques, repeated without acknowledgement in Voyage à Clermont, and constantly passages from his travels. This, indeed, is not the worst kind of plagiarism the Vicomte has been

charged with. He incorporated, as it was said at the time, nearly the whole of the natural history, from Beltrami's journey to the sources of the Mississippi, into his Voyage en Amérique, edition of 1826. Beltrami complained in the newspapers, and the reviewer above referred to, who compared the two works, asserts that the palpable plunder amounted to near half of two of the Vicomte's volumes.

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M. de Chateaubriand was born in 1769, somewhere near St. Malo. He was an officer in the French army, at the breaking out of the revolution. When that army became disorganized he left his country, for America, to attempt to execute a project, which his wise head had been a year or two at work upon, of discovering the northwest passage. The plan was very simple, he meant to walk round from California, by the north pole, to Labrador, and thence to New York, keeping along the shore the whole way. Here are his words:

"Je voulois marcher à l'ouest de manière à attaquer la rive occidentale de l'Amérique, un peu au-dessus du golfe de Californie. De là suivant le profil du continent et toujours en vue de la mer, mon dessein étoit de me diriger vers le nord jusqu'au détroit de Behring, de doubler le dernier cap de l'Amérique, de descendre à l'est le long des rivages de la mer Polaire, et de rentrer dans les Etats Unis par la baie de Hudson, le Labrador, et le Canada.”—Voyage en Amérique, Introduction.

It is not very astonishing, perhaps, that a boy at school should conceive an idea like this, but that any person, old enough to travel, should set out with an expectation of being able to make a beginning of executing it, and that too, without any means or forces but his own personal wisdom and strength, is certainly a little difficult of belief. But the Vicomte goes further; he appears to be persuaded, even now, that the conception was a proof of courage and genius, and that it possessed some sort of feasibility; he recurs to it in many different parts of his works, dwells on it with evident complacency, and speculates on the different turn it would have given to his destiny if he had discovered the northwest passage.-"Qui sait même si j'aurois repassé l'Atlantique, si je ne me serais pas fixé dans les solitudes par moi découvertes, comme un conquérant au milieu de ses conquêtes. Il est vrai que je n'aurois pas figuré au Congrès de Verona, et qu'on ne m'eût pas appelé Monseigneur dans l'hôtellerie des Affaires Etrangères, rue des Capucines, à Paris"-(Ubi Supra.). It is rather a good joke to see in one of the prefaces to Atala, where he speaks of this scheme, and dwells upon it, a reference to a note which states that Mackenzie has since executed a part of it."M. Mackenzie a depuis executé une partie de ce plan." Mackenzie's route

resembles the design of the Vicomte just as much as a diameter resembles a circumference, and no more; but as for originality in his first expedition, he was already on his way, in 1789; and is more likely in the second to have acted on plans of his own than to have borrowed any from our lively author.

The Vicomte landed at Baltimore, in the summer of 1791. He was then, as he says himself, full of enthusiasm for the ancients-a Cato who sought for rigidity of manners and morals, and was greatly scandalized to find luxury and dissipation in a great republican city. He is convinced now, he adds, that it is not necessary to freedom that we should reject the arts and sciences, and let our beards and nails grow; but then he thought differently, and this disappointment, by a process of reasoning diffiult of conception, " me donna sans doute l'humeur qui me fit écrire la note satirique contre les Quakers,—dans l'Essai Historique." The note in question is long and bitter, and it has another note fixed upon it, in the later editions, which praises its wit, condemns its "tone," and does not retract its substance. But it seems odd, since it was "élégance," "frivolité," et "luxe," "le bruit des salles de bal, et de spectacle," that disgusted him, that he should have poured out his spleen chiefly on the very people who abjure all those things, whose ideas were nearest his own in regard to them. He waited fifteen days, in Philadelphia, to see Washington; and though he was a little scandalized at him too when he first saw him in a coach and four, "Cincinnatus en carrosse," yet when he went to his house to deliver a letter of introduction, he found "the simplicity of the old Roman." At the interviews, the Vicomte was quite calm,-"visage d'homme ne me troublera jamais"; but Washington was a little astonished, when his visiter told him what were his plans in America. "Je m'en aperçus, et je lui dis avec un peu de vivacité, mais il est moins difficile de découvrir le passage du nord-ouest, que de créer un peuple, comme vous l'avez fait. Well, well, young man! s'écria-t-il, en me tendant la main. Il m'invita Il m'invita à diner pour le jour suivant, et nous nous quittâmes." There is some

thing so excessively naïve in this recital, that one really does not like to dissect it, and yet the change in the sense that will be produced by a few variations, the slightest possible, will be so great, the causes of the Vicomte's blunder too are so obvious, and so characteristic, that it may perhaps be worth while to exhibit them. It is evident he understood, and as he edits the book now unchanged, that he still understands, very little English; though he gives his opinion, in his Melanges Litteraires, very authoritatively, and not very favourably, about Shakspeare. And it is also evident that whatever he did not fully understand he was always ready to interpret to his own