all the others "dormoient au fond de leurs piroques." There is nothing for them to do, and the old man grows talkative, and relates his own history. Seventy years ago it seems his tribe made war on the Muscogulges, in Florida, lost a battle, and he fled to St. Augustine,--a good flight from Natchez. A Spaniard, named Lopez, befriended him, and he staid there three years, and then the passion for a savage life returning upon him, he takes leave, with many tears, of his benefactor, and sets out for the Mississippi. The Muscogulges catch him of course, they tie him, and march him a great distance, intending to put him to death with torture, according to custom; several times, they are just going to do it, and do not; and the Vicomte does his best to tantalize his readers with this idea. In the meantime, a daughter of the chief is in love with the prisoner also: of course, they take long walks together, by stealth, at night, and he remembers a great deal about the moon and moonlight scenes, on those occasions. Here is a specimen from one of them:

"La nuit étoit délicieuse. Le génie des airs reconnoit sa chevelure bleue embaumée de la senteur des pins, et l'on respiroit la foible odeur d'ambre qu'exhaloient les crocodiles couchés sous les tamarins des fleuves. La lune brilloit au milieu d'un azur sans tache, et sa lumière gris de perle descendoit de la cime indéterminée des forêts. Aucun bruit. ne faisoit entendre hors je ne sais quelle harmonie lointaine, qui régnoit dans la profondeur des bois ; on eût dit que l'âme de la solitude soupirait dans la profondeur du désert.

"Nous aperçûmes à travers les arbres un jeune homme qui, tenant à la main un flambeau, ressembloit au génie du Printemps parcourant les forêts pour ranimer la nature. C'était un amant qui alloit s'instruire de son sort à la cabane de sa maîtresse. Si la vierge éteint le flambeau elle accepte les vœux offerts, &c."

Atala wishes him to fly, but he will not go without her, and she will not go with him,-there is some mysterious difficulty: the fact is, which the cunning man only brings out in the right place, long after, that Atala is a Christian, and the daughter of old Lopez, the benevolent Spaniard of St. Augustine; her mother, somehow or other, has married the Indian Chief too, but the daughter belongs to the Spaniard. The mother had died recently, devoting her daughter to the Lord, to ransom herself for this sin, and the daughter has sworn on the mother's death-bed, that the vow shall be accomplished. But now she is in love she regrets her compliance bitterly, and hesitates much between her love and her duty. She seems to have been a person of rather strenuous inclinations, as the citations we are about to make exhibit her; they are taken from a dialogue, toward the end of the book; but we are showing the

story on the wrong side for its effect, and of course reversing the author's work.

Ah, s'il n'avoit fallu que quitter parens, amis, patrie, si même (chose affreuse) il n'y eût eu que la perte de mon âme.-Mais ton ombre, à ma mère, ton ombre étoit toujours là, me reprochant ses tourmens, j'entendois tes plaintes, je voyois les flammes de l'enfer te consumer. Mes nuits étoient arides et pleines des fantômes, mes jours étoient désolées, la rosée du soir séchoit en tombant sur ma peau brûlante, j'entr'ouvrois mes lèvres aux brises, et les brises, loin de m'apporter la fraîcheur, s'embrâsoient du feu de mon soufle." Again, addressing Chactas, "J'aurois voulu être avec toi la seule créature vivante sur la terre, tantôt sentant une divinité qui m'arrêtoit dans mes horribles transports, j'aurois desiré que cette divinité se fût anéantie, pourvu que, serrée dans tes bras, j'eusse roulé d'abîme en abîme avec les débris de Dieu et du monde."

Vow.

To resume the narrative, the young couple do at last fly. Chactas makes a canoe, and they go down the Tennessee together, brother and sister like, for the heroine abides by her There comes up a terrible thunder storm, and it is terribly described; they get on shore, and take refuge under a tree, and talk sentiment until Atala's vow begins to fade from her thoughts in the vividness of her love. When, lo! amidst this tempest of passion and the elements, at the moment when he was the most wanted too, a monk appears with a lantern and a dog. He lives half an hour's march off, in a cavern of the mountain, but his dog had perceived the neighbourhood of the strangers at that distance, and informed him of it, and he had come out to seek them, and conduct them to his shelter. The writer makes all possible haste to connect this adventurous benevolence with the religion which he holds up as the principle of his work.

"Vieillard, m'écriai-je enfin, (it is Chactas who speaks,) quel coeur as-tu donc, toi qui n'a pas craint d'être frappé de la foudre? Craindre, repartit le père avec une sorte de chaleur, craindre lorsqu'il y a des hommes en péril, et que je leur puis être utile ? je serois donc un bien indigne serviteur de Jesus-Christ."

We have not space to describe this "chief of prayer" and his wild flock in the Kentucky mountain; suffice it that Atala's internal combats having exhausted her endurance, she poisons herself to put an end to them, and dies very penitent in the hermit's cell. Her death-bed scene is wrought up with all the author's invention, and one circumstance brought in, in accordance with the plan of all the work, is made to heighten the remorse of the sufferer to the last excess, by showing her that she has thrown even her worldly happiness away, for she might have married Chactas after all; the monk would have written to the bishop of Quebec, and got a dispensation from her vow, VOL. XX.-No. 39.

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for her own soul and for her mother's. When she hears this, she falls into a long convulsion, and it is on recovering from this that she cuts off the last hope by confessing that she has taken poison. She exacts a promise from Chactas that he will become a Christian, and dies. Chactas, however, up to the time of the narrative, has never performed his. promise; he has it still under consideration; but to relieve the reader on this subject, the author meets at the falls of Niagara the fugitive remnant of the Natchez, many years after, and among them the grandaughter of Réné; she tells him of the old man's baptism and death, and shows him his bones in a bear skin bag, as well as those of the old missionary, and of Atala herself, which Chactas had gone in search of, hearing that the mission had been destroyed by savages, and the holy father tortured to death. Now he makes no allusion to this in his narrative, so that it must have happened afterwards, notwithstanding his blindness. However, he had a miraculous fawn to show him where the bones were, and, of course, miraculous eyes to see them with could not be far off: he disinterred them and bore them off, "rattling on his shoulders like the quivers of death." Such is the story; what the moral is, we are totally at a loss to discover. When Chateaubriand talks of Christianity, he means exclusively Catholicism; and if Atala shows any thing in connection with that, it is merely that it is a good thing for the bishop of Quebec to have power of absolution from absurd Vows, but how he justifies the system that makes such vows possible, one cannot conjecture. This rantipole production, as we have said, is an episode of the Genius of Christianity. We shall proceed to say a few words of that work, as the author rests his claim to immortality chiefly on it, and vaunts it in note, preface, and quotation, throughout his two-and-twenty volumes. It is comprised in three volumes octavo, in four parts, of six books each, the first part treating of dogmas and doctrines; the second and third of the relations of Christianity with poetry, literature, and the arts, and the fourth of worship, or, in the author's words,

"La culte, c'est à dire, ce qui concerne les cérémonies de l'église et tout ce qui regarde le clergé, séculier et régulier."

We shall cite a page or two to exhibit the whole design.

"It was not the sophists whom it was desirable to reconcile to religion; it was the people whom they misled. They had seduced them by saying that Christianity was a system born from the womb of barbarism, absurd in its dogmas, ridiculous in its ceremonies, the enemy of the arts, of reason, and of beauty." "It was desirable therefore to prove, on the contrary, that of all the religions which ever existed, the Christian is the most poetic, the most humane, the most favourable

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to liberty, to the arts, and to letters. It was desirable to show that nothing can be more divine than its morality, nothing more attractive or more pompous (pompeux) than its dogmas, its doctrines, and its worship. It was necessary to say that it favours genius, purifies the taste, developes virtuous passion, gives vigour to thought, offers noble forms to the writer, and perfect models to the artist."

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"It

is time to show, that, far from cramping thought, it lends itself wonderfully to the flights of the mind, and can charm the spirit as divinely as the gods of Virgil and Homer. We neglect too much, perhaps, in works of this nature, to speak the language of our readers. We ought to be doctors with the doctor, and poets with the poet. God does not prohibit flowery paths when they serve to return to him, and it is not always by the rude and sublime paths of the mountain, that the lost sheep comes back to the fold."

We imagine the Vicomte's manner of making religion poetical may be sufficiently appreciated in these extracts, and from his idea quoted a few pages back, that if Adam had sinned sentimentally instead of philosophically, he might have redeemed himself. His chapter on the Trinity is a good specimen of his manner of dealing with doctrine, or, as he calls it, dogma. Having proved in a preamble that mystery and a little confusion of ideas are indispensable to poetic effect, he now undertakes to show that the Trinity, the first mystery of Christians, opens a vast field of philosophic studies. We translate his words. And these studies, it seems, are mere researches into the records of paganism in all countries, to prove that such an idea as that of the Trinity prevailed, more or less, among them; that an oracle of Serapis spoke of such a thing; that the Magi had a Trinity (Arimanes, the evil principle, made a part of it), that Plato believed one, and Pythagoras, from whom he gives the following as quotation and Latin version

"Honorato in primis habitum tribunal et Triobolum."

As he does not inform us whence this piece of learning comes, nor expatiate at all upon its meaning, we are left to infer that it proves whatever he wishes it should; but as for Plato, he certainly ought to know that Plato's Trinity consisted of unequal persons, as one of his own quotations in fact shows, and that the theologians, who, for some inconceivable reason, have wished to prove that it strongly resembled the Christian Trinity, have fairly given up the point. Cudworth and Ogilvie, we believe, have set this matter at rest. As for the celibacy of the clergy, which he treats in a subsequent chapter, his reasonings are so puerile that one is ashamed to quote them. He holds this principle up gravely as a check to the too great increase of the human race, and refers to China as a proof of the

evils of surplus population, not knowing apparently, or trusting that his readers may not know, that the bonzes in China. are obliged to celibacy by strict laws and severe penalties. The character of the Vicomte's mind is in the highest degree sophistical, and it appears no less in the forced arguments and illustrations of the Genie du Christianisme, than in the forced parallels and strained analogies of the Essai Historique. When he is dealing with matters which he feels at liberty to mutilate, as the events of his own life, or the abstruser part of his learning, he has a sufficient tact at making out a plausible story, by leaving out what makes against him, or throwing it artfully into the back ground. He is the genius of occasion; every thing he writes is well timed, and has a present success. His Essay on Bonaparte and the Bourbons; that published at the death of Louis 18th, "Le roi est mort, vive le Roi ;" his account of the life and death of the Duke of Berri, which the duchess buried with the heart of her husband, and his great work, "Mon premier titre à la bienveillance du public;" the Genie du Christianisme itself; all these things come out upon states of the public mind peculiarly suited to receive them favourably. Even the unlucky Essai Historique itself, had he been enabled to give the edition he attempted to publish in France, when he published the first in England, would also, probably, as a letter he publishes in the preface goes to show, have had at that time 66 un grand succés."

We shall cull one more specimen out of many we had marked, to show the Vicomte's fashion of jumbling poetry and religion; we refrain with difficulty from some others, especially one where he asserts that if Voltaire had been a Christian it would have been a great advantage to his style,-but take one for all :

"Entre plusieurs differences qui distinguent l'enfer chrétien du Tartare, une surtout est remarquable, ce sont les tourments qu'éprouvent eux-mêmes les démons. Pluton, les Juges, les Parques et les Furies ne souffroient point avec les coupables. Les douleurs de nos puissances infernales sont donc un moyen de plus pour l'imagination, et conséquemment un avantage poétique de notre enfer sur l'enfer des anciens." "A la vrité nous n'avons pas d'enfer chrétien traité d'une manière irréprochable. Ni le Dante, ni le Tasse, ni Milton ne sont parfaits dans la peinture des lieux de douleur. Cependant quelques morceaux excellents, échappés à ces grands maîtres, prouvent que si toutes les parties du tableau avoient été retouchées avec le même soin, nous posséderions des enfers aussi poétiques que ceux d'Homère et de Virgile."

We shall now dismiss this writer's works, passing over his pamphlets and speeches, and his poetry, as things of no permanent value or interest, and only remarking generally on his talent, that it is a superficial, gaudy one, occasionally brilliant,