advantage, and that in telling a story, notwithstanding his "maudit amour de la verité," he would not scruple a comma and a note of admiration, and the transposing of an action, and the heightening of a phrase, if all that were required for the effect. He lays his grand plan before Washington, and is a little damped with "monosyllabes françois et anglois," and "une sorte d'étonnement." He gets warm and talks like a fool,why cannot I discover the northwest passage, when you have created a people. Washington stops his mouth with, well well, young man, invites him to dinner, and gets rid of him with a shake of the hand. Now it is only to put a comma between well," and "well," a note of admiration at the end of the phrase, and it means, "Bien, bien, jeune homme !"-and this the Vicomte certainly thinks it does mean. The manner probably puzzled him; however, "s'écria-t-il" helps him along, and then putting the hand-shaking in here, which belongs, no doubt, to the invitation to dinner, and dismissal in the next sentence, me tendit la main," the scene becomes all one could wish. The dinner of the next day is despatched in a few words, which are chiefly to the purpose that Washington had a key of the Bastile, which he believed was genuine, but his visitor did not, but thought it a "jouet assez niais"-a silly toy enough. A parallel between Washington and Bonaparte follows; and we extract a part of it, in the original, as a favourable specimen of Chateaubriand's style and manner, though we scarcely know of two mortals that ever existed, who require less to have their points of difference indicated, than these two.

"Washington n'appartient pas comme Buonaparte à cette race des Alexandre et des César, qui dépassent la stature de l'espèce humaine. Rien d'étonnant ne s'attache à sa personne, il n'est point placé sur un vaste théâtre, il n'est point aux prises avec les capitaines les plus habiles et les plus puissants monarques de son temps, il ne court point de Memphis à Vienne et de Cadix à Moscou, il se défend avec une poignée de citoyens sur une terre sans souvenirs et sans célébrité dans le cercle étroit des foyers domestiques. Il ne livre point de ces combats qui renouvellent les triomphes sanglants d'Arbèle et de Pharsale, il ne renverse point les trônes pour en récompenser d'autres avec leurs débris, il ne met point le piéd sur le cou des rois, il ne leur fait point dire sous les vestibules de son palais

'Qu'ils se font trop attendre et qu'Attila s'ennuie.'

"Quelque chose de silencieux enveloppe les actions de Washington. Il agit avec lenteur, on dirait qu'il se sent le mandataire de la liberté de l'avenir et qu'il craint de la compromettre. Ce ne sont pas ses destinées que porte ce héros d'une nouvelle espèce, ce sont celles de son pays; il ne se permet pas de jouer ce qui ne lui appartient pas. Mais de cette profonde obscurité quelle lumière va jaillir. Cherchez ces bois inconnus où brille l'épée de Washington, qu'y trouverez-vous, des tombeaux ? Non! un Monde! Washington a laissé les Etats-Unis pour trophée sur son champ de bataille.

Buonaparte n'a aucun trait de ce grave Américain; il combat sur une vieille terre environnée d'éclat et de bruit, il ne veut créer que sa renommée, il ne se charge que de son propre sort. Il semble savoir que sa mission sera courte, que le torrent qui descend de si haut s'écoulera promptement, il se hâte de jouir et d'abuser de sa gloire, comme d'une jeunesse fugitive. A l'instar des Dieux d'Homère, il veut arriver en quatre pas au bout du monde, il paroît sur tous les rivages, il inscrit précipitamment son nom dans les fastes de tous les peuples; il jette en courant des couronnes à sa famille et à ses soldats, il se dépêche dans ses monuments, dans ses lois, dans ses victoires. Penché sur le monde, d'une main il terrasse les rois, de l'autre il abat le géant révolutionnaire: mais en écrasant l'anarchie, il étouffe la liberté, et finit par perdre la sienne sur son dernier champ de bataille.

"Chacun est récompensé selon ses œuvres. Washington élève une nation à l'indépendance: magistrat retiré, il s'endort paisiblement sous son toît paternel au milieu des regrets de ses compatriotes et de la vénération de tous les peuples.

"Buonaparte ravit à une nation son indépendance. Empereur déchu, il est précipité dans l'exil où la frayeur de la terre ne le croit pas encore assez emprisonné sous la garde de l'Océan. Tant qu'il se débat contre la mort, faible et enchaîné sur un rocher, l'Europe n'ose déposer les armes. Il expire, cette nouvelle publiée à la porte du palais devant laquelle le conquérant avoit fait proclamer tant de funérailles, n'arrête ni n'étonne le passant: qu'avoient à pleurer les citoyens ?"

There is more of this that we might quote, but we must economise our space, and be content with one phrase where he enumerates, under Bonaparte's advantages, that "il regissoit sur la nation la plus civilisée, la plus intelligente, la plus brave, la plus brillante, de la terre." There are a thousand passages scattered through this writer's works to the same effect; his Indian warriors all have a great respect for the French; the name of the François is in great honour among the Arabs; and when he is in one of his paroxysms of puffing himself, he winds up with "et d'ailleurs quand j'aimérois un peu la gloire, ne suis-je pas François," &c. Now this national vanity is, no doubt, in its proper place in the writings of an author whom vanity, in all her forms, has marked for her own, but it is just as contrary to good sense and good taste as praise of one's own individual self. All the nations of the earth have been accumulating glory since the world began, and where is it? They have used it up in psalms and hymns to themselves, which they have sung by themselves; nobody ever heard, out of France, of the superior bravery of Frenchmen, nor out of England, of Englishmen, and so on. Every man will fight, and victories depend on the general; Bonaparte at least sufficiently demonstrated that. There is a superiority which is recognised beyond the bounds of its possessors, but it is not military glory; it is the superiority of the arts of peace. England has much of it, and many countries have more than France, and one reason why she is so far from being "la nation

la plus civilisée," is to be found in the excess of this mistake she makes in her estimate of herself. She has the ordinary capacities of human nature in climates like hers, no more and no less, but a better use is made elsewhere of equal capacity, by employing on something useful the time she loses in praising herself. She keeps out improvement like the Chinese, and imagines the loss is all on the side of her neighbours, and such self-eulogies as those we refer to, do much to perpetuate the deception.

In three more pages we find our traveller beyond the Mohawk, and when he had at length arrived on the confines of the eternal forest, where the axe had never come, he says he fell into a sort of intoxication, to show the effects of which, he quotes a long note again from his own "Essai Historique." He ran about, it seems, from tree to tree. Here, he said, are no more roads to follow-here are no more cities, no more houses, presidents, republics, or kings. In short, he performed a thousand capricious acts, which put the great Dutchman he had hired for a guide in a rage, and persuaded him, naturally enough, that his companion was mad. His adventures with Indians are now to begin, and they are such as a predestined writer of sentimental savage romances could not fail to meet; the very things he "went out for to see." We extract first, a doleful story, tending to show how susceptible the author's heart was, and also how much he could make by mere embroidery, without invention, out of the plain fact that an Indian woman had a lean cow. First he sees the cow in a meadow near a cabin, and then

"I heard a voice from the bottom of the valley. I saw three men driving five or six fat cows. After having turned them into the pasture to feed, they came towards the lean cow, and drove her away with their sticks. The appearance of these Europeans in so desert a place was very unpleasant to me-their violence made them still more disagreeable. They chased the poor brute among the rocks with peals of laughter, exposing her to break her legs. A savage woman, in appearance as miserable as her cow, came out of the solitary hut, advanced toward the frighted animal, and offered her something to eat. The cow ran to her, stretching out her neck with a low murmur of joy. The colonists, from a distance, threatened the Indian woman, who came back to her cabin. The cow followed her. She stopped at the door of her friend, who coaxed her with her hand, while the grateful animal licked that hand for its succour. The colonists were gone.

"I rose and came down the hill; and crossing the valley, I came up on the opposite side to the hut, resolved to repair, as far as it was in my power, the brutality of the white men. The cow saw me, and made a movement to flee. I advanced gently, and arrived, without driving her away, at the habitation of her mistress. The Indian woman was gone in. I uttered the salutation I had been taught, 'siegoh!' I am come! The Indian, instead of replying by the customary repetition, you are come!

answered nothing. I concluded that the visit of one of her tyrants annoyed her. I began to caress the cow. The woman seemed astonished; I saw on her yellow and saddened visage, tokens of emotion, and almost of gratitude. These mysterious sympathies of adversity filled my eyes with tears; it is sweet to weep over woes which nobody ever wept over." Especially for a writer of sentimental romances.

"My hostess looked at me some time, still doubtfully, as if she feared I meant to deceive her, and then she came and passed her own hand across the front of the companion of her misery and solitude.

"Encouraged by this mark of confidence, I said, in English, for my Indian was exhausted, 'She is very lean.' The woman replied, also in bad English, 'She eats very little.' 'They drove her away rudely,' said I, and the woman answered, We are used to that both.' This meadow is not yours, then?' said I. She answered, 'This meadow was my husband's, who is dead; I have no children, and the white men put their cows in my pasture.'

"I had nothing to offer to this indigent creature. My intention had been to demand justice for her, but to whom should I apply? * * * We parted, the Indian woman and I, after having pressed each other's hands again. My hostess said to me many things which I did not understand, which were, doubtless, prayers for the prosperity of the stranger," &c. &c.

The first touches here, without comment, the solitary hut; and its helpless mistress, and her cow chased from her pasture, are not destitute of the elements of the pathetic, and they suggest associations of sadness we are no way disposed to turn into ridicule. But the Vicomte's scene, gives matters a gayer turn; few readers will get through it, we think, with grave. faces. We come now to a most apocryphal looking story which the Vicomte, it seems, has been in the habit of telling, for he says it is already known, and he quotes it from his own Itinerarie, of his meeting with a certain M. Violet, and the things he saw on that occasion. M. Violet, it seems, had been scullion to General Rochambeau, but he had emigrated westward, and was now "maitre de danse chez les sauvages." The Vicomte found him surrounded by twenty of his scholars, all bedaubed like witches, men and women half naked, with slit ears, crow's feathers in their hair, and rings in their noses. They paid in beaver's fur and bear's hams for their schooling, and their master called them always messieurs les sauvages and mesdames les sauvagesses. All this is vastly entertaining, but the truth is, in almost every thing the Vicomte says about the savages, his professions of romancer and traveller seem to have insensibly blended themselves in his mind, and his "maudit amour de la verité" evidently occasionally relaxes. His accounts of the savage hospitality, of their mode of receiving strangers, and the "danse du suppliant," of their notions of honour, and punishing children by throwing water in their VOL. XX. No. 39.

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faces, and saying "We me deshonores," &c. &c., all these things. appear to be mixed up with puerile inventions and exaggerations; how large a part of them belongs to M. de Chateaubriand we shall not attempt to determine. But when he gives us an extract from a letter which he wrote from the Falls of Niagara, and describes the scene which is round him at the moment, would any one expect him to enumerate the cotton plants, among its ornaments? and since he does, is it not evident that the letter was not written on the spot where he says it was, but merely invented afterwards for effect, in order to introduce more vividly some prettinesses of description? Here is the opening:

"Il faut que je vous raconte ce qui s'est passé hier matin chez mes hôtes, (a tribe of Indians.) L'herbe étoit encore couverte de rosée, le vent sortoit des forêts tout parfumé, les feuilles du murier sauvage étoient chargées des cocons d'un espèce de ver à soie, et les plantes à coton du pays, renversant leurs capsules épanouies, ressembloient à des rosiers blancs."

The Indians are then described in their daily life, and the scenes that pass, with his Dutchman's interpretations, and his own comments and inferences, are sufficiently droll. The children are at play

"Un sauvage d'une trentaine d'années a appelé son fils, et l'a invité a sauter moins fort. L'enfant a repondu: 'c'est raisonnable,' et sans faire ce que son père lui disoit, il est retourné au jeu.-Le grandpère de l'enfant l'a appelé à son tour, et lui a dit: 'Fais celà,' et le petit garçon s'est soumis. Ainsi, l'enfant a désobéi à son père qui le prioit et a obéi à son aieul qui lui commandoit. Le père n'est presque rien pour l'enfant." &c. &c.

This letter is long, and all much to the same purpose. It is followed by an account of an adventure of the Vicomte in scrambling down a rock 200 feet high at the falls, to get to the water at the bottom, the stairs or ladder having been destroyed. There is no such rock there, but as the traveller fell and broke his arm, a little license must be given him. From Niagara he appears to have descended the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, and to have found his way into Florida, but the narrative becomes confused, and takes for a time the shape of a journal, dated by the hours of the day, and for some parts which are missing we are directed to look in "Atala" and "Les Natchez." Then it stops short. We have some long chapters of natural history, the spoils, perhaps, of poor Beltram, and some more upon the customs of the Indians, then a plan which the author once devised for improving the condition of the Spanish colonies, by forming them into constitutional monarchies. Then follows a short chapter which states that somewhere in a log house in the woods he found a newspaper with an account of