animal appears subject to it, controlled and guided by it, but not to possess and apply it by its own will for its own chosen purposes. We cannot conceive of wisdom apart from reflection and consciousness; there is an absurdity in the very terms of such a statement. The skill and ingenuity, then, which appear in the works of the lower animals are not referable to the animals themselves, but must proceed from some higher power working above the sphere of their consciousness. This assistance is meted out to them for specific and limited ends, and has no effect on the rest of their conduct, which is governed by their own individuality. In its highest functions, the brute appears only as the blind and passive instrument of a will which is not its own. The power is granted to it for a time, but is not susceptible of improvement by practice while in its keeping, is invariably applied in the same way and with perfect success, and is withdrawn as soon as the purposes for which it was given are answered. No moral character is attributable to a faculty which is unconsciously exerted, and no moral aim can exist where progress or change is impossible. When deprived of this extraneous power, or viewed apart from it, the brute appears in its true light, as the creature of a day, born not for purposes connected with its own being, but as an humble instrument, or a fragmentary part, in the great circle of animated nature, which, as a whole, is subservient to higher ends.

ART. IV. The Life of Louis, Prince of Condé, surnamed the Great. By LORD MAHON. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1845. 2 vols. 12mo.

SOME have been skeptical as to the existence of cannibals, not being able to comprehend how man, with the sharpest appetite, can get up a relish for the sort of food attributed to them; and yet, in the nature of things, it must be more excusable to destroy human life for the sake of a dinner, when one is in desperate want of it, than to sacrifice it to mere ambition. And the time will probably come, when readers will find it hard to conceive that creatures ever should have existed, who made it their sole business and pleasure to vio

late the sixth commandment and to murder men by thousands, with no other imaginable inducement than the pleasant excitement of the work, and the satisfaction and honor which an employment so beneficent was sure to bring. But the greatest difficulty of all will be, to understand how men, who are generally selfish and sagacious enough where their own interests are concerned, should have agreed with one consent to lick the foot that trod them down, encouraging the work of mischief by singing anthems to those who beat the breath out of their bodies, and glorifying them in exact proportion to the measure in which they plagued and desolated the world. To be sure, there is something brilliant in such labors; though not strictly benevolent nor beneficial, it is inspiring to see the exertion of mighty powers. So a conflagration which lights up the skies is fearfully beautiful; but men are tolerably alert in their efforts to extinguish it, particularly when their own property is endangered. Still, in this matter of ambition, fire and frying-pan, any and every instrument of torture which the aspirants can employ, seem to be gratefully welcomed, and nothing is thought more natural than that the many should suffer and die, not even for the benefit, but only for the gratification.and glory, of the few.

It does seem, however, as if there were occasional lucid intervals in the public mind in relation to this subject; owing, perhaps, to the influence of the New Testament, a book which, as an eccentric orator once said, contains more common sense than all other books put together, and which occasionally sends a bright ray of light into the minds and. hearts of men; so that, now, they begin to have serious misgivings, - doubting whether it is wise to continue that bounty on scalps, which heretofore they have thought it a privilege to pay, and considering whether it would not be more for their interest to cheer on those who are desirous to serve them, rather than those who trample down and destroy. The matter, when once brought before the mind, is exceedingly clear; when men reflect on it, they wonder at their own insane delusion. They can hardly believe that they have brought upon themselves such multiplied wrongs and sorrows, if it were not evident that the prevailing sentiment is in favor of the same suicide still. There are many, and not fools either, who rejoice at such manifestations of homicidal energy, or rather at such perversion of great power,

They follow

even when they are themselves the victims. such destroyers with enthusiasm while they are in the blaze of their fame, and weep with thoughtful tenderness over them when they are fallen. After their death, they cling to the icy pyramid of their fame as if it were a rock of ages. But it will not always be so. Though there does not seem to be much moral feeling in exercise to condemn such proceedings, it is certain that intellectual fame is fast eclipsing military glory. Men may fight battles at the present day, without the world running wild with admiration of them; it is even doubted whether slaughtering the Chinese like sheep, or hunting out the Indians from their ancient home, is an employment quite creditable to the enlightened and humane. There is a violent suspicion that men of talent and energy might be better engaged; and since our religion has long ago written, where all the civilized world can read it, that the amount of useful service rendered to our race is the only measure of such greatness as shall endure, those monuments of skulls and cross-bones, which have been so much desired, will give place to an architecture less perishable, in better taste, and not so inauspicious to the improvement and welfare of the sons of men.

But while the subject of this memoir was a hero, as his distinctive name "the Great" implies, since men have not yet thought proper to allow that there is any greatness the foundations of which are not laid in blood, it must be admitted that he was not so great a pest to the world as most of that class have been. He did not get up wars for his own personal gratification; it was only when Christians, after their usual fashion, took each other by the ears, that his natural energy prompted him to take part in the struggle, and bore him triumphantly through. Cardinal de Retz has frequent occasion to speak of the prince in his Memoirs, that brilliant and attractive work which is familiar to so many readers; and though Condé was almost always his enemy, having no taste for faction, and not wishing to add to the perplexities of the court nor to the influence of popular leaders, that sharp-sighted man describes him as high and manly in his nature, open and frank in his dealings with others, incapable of any thing dishonorable, and full of disdain for the unworthy. This is no small praise from such a quarter; and there are few who could have deserved it,

in that day of all ungodliness, when high and low, royal and plebeian, soldiers and churchmen, undistinguished from each other save by their dresses and titles, seemed striving to ascertain, with vicious ambition, which should plunge deepest into all depraving corruption. It must be allowed, that Condé was afflicted with an ossification of the heart; but this is the epidemical disease of all the class to which he belongs. He is not to be too severely weighed; since, if he had any heart at all, he is creditably distinguished from some of the number, and it is easier to mention many who were worse than he, than to name even a few who were better.

Apart from the interest which such a biography naturally awakens, on account of the wild and stirring adventure in which it abounds, the period of history is one which attracts the attention of thoughtful observers, since it shows how much the influence of the people had grown and extended even in France, and how powerless courts and princes were, when the populace thought fit to oppose them. Because Louis the Fourteenth overshadowed the nation with the pompous pageant of his power, establishing the delusion firmly enough to last even through the reign of his insignificant successor, many have the impression that the French were wholly unacquainted with freedom and popular influence before the Revolution, as it is called; whereas, the work of De Retz makes it manifest that the Fronde, or Sling, the cabal of which he was chief, which was always opposed to Mazarin, and generally to Condé, relied on the people as the element of their strength, and carried on their warfare, not with pebbles from the brook, but with all manner of involved and selfish factions, created and sustained in the masses of the city by the usual arts and intrigues of ambition. We see that the parliaments, local assemblies though they were, had the confidence of the people, which gave them a dignified consciousness of strength. No reader of the memoirs of that day can forget the first president, always collected and stern in the presence of the greatest dangers, and forcing all, high and low, by his grand and majestic bearing, to respect the office which he bore. The French historical writings are generally personal narratives, which of course describe events within limited circles. Men of action are seldom aware of the great movements of their times; the under-currents of opinion work beneath the surface, and do not NO. 132.

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appear above, though they are gathering strength to sweep all things in their own direction, and preparing for mighty manifestations and results of tremendous interest to mankind. Great houses of the nobility were perpetually tending to their decline; the illustrious line of Condé ends in the ditch of the castle of Vincennes, where D'Enghien was sacrificed to the pitiful policy of a modern hero, who, with all his littleness, is great in the estimation of the world; while the people, catching glimpses of their own rights and powers, are continually growing stronger to assert them, and after various failures and successes, are able to establish the point of great concern, that the elevation of the one shall be reconciled with the feeling and welfare of the many, instead of the many being sacrificed, as in former days, to the ambition, luxury, and selfishness of the one.

But this view, though it perpetually suggests itself in the work before us, is not directly to our present purpose; which is to make some remarks on this life of Condé, written by Lord Mahon, — a judicious and accurate writer, whose faithfulness and good sense may be depended on, though he has not the animation and spirit of style which a work of this kind requires. Still, if this book were more deficient in those respects than it is, we should be inclined to overlook all objections in our respect for the writer's good feeling. He finds his chief attraction, not in the hero, for he evidently has no great enthusiasm for that sort of people, and thinks, as Dogberry gave charge to his watchmen concerning thieves, "that the less one has to do with them the better"; but he delights rather in the hero's wife, who assumed that station at the age of thirteen, and afterwards unfolded traits of character, in consequence perhaps of her husband's neglect and desertion, which give her a clearer title to the name of great than many who have been permitted to bear it.

She was a niece of Cardinal Richelieu; and in the day when that overbearing priest saw the aristocracy of France at his feet, the father of the Prince of Condé, a selfish old worldling, solicited for his son the hand of Claire Clémence, daughter of the Maréchal Duc de Brezé, a widower of a sister of the cardinal. It was one of the most illustrious families in Anjou, and honorably distinguished in the crusades, but not equal to the pretensions of the royal blood.