geon, Lacretelle le jeune, and Fantin-Desodoards. It is sufficiently ample for common purposes; as impartial as can be now expected from a cotemporary French writer; and distinguished by more brevity in the style and closeness of thought than we find in most of the French publications of the age. The Abbé Barruel's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire du Jacobinisme, a work which speedily acquired vast renown, and occasioned the liveliest sensation and controversy, is now scarcely read or even mentioned. It is eloquent and extraordinary, and not destitute of foundation; but abounds with hyperbole, whims, and phantasms. Though the precious Memoirs of Baron de Grimm are usually read for amusement, and prized merely in their piquant chronicles of the theatre and the saloons, much sober and curious instruction is interspersed, relative to the causes and incentives of the subversion of the throne. But there is no source of information so copious, sure, and entertaining, as the Collection Des Mémoires Relatifs à la Revolution Française, which has reached the number of fortyeight octavos. Of these, Sir Walter Scott has not, we think, availed himself to the extent which even his qualified design allowed; and it might be supposed that he did not consult the valuable portion of them before inedited, such as Thibaudeau's two volumes. We have met with no disquisition on the causes of the Revolution, more directly instructive than the tract by Senac de Meilhan, entitled "Du Gouvernement, des Mœurs, et des Conditions en France avant la Revolution." In a few sentences like the following, how just and comprehensive the rationale!

"L'état des Finances a été en France le premier principe de la Révolution; mais cette maladie du corps politique n'a pas été si grave encore, que les remèdes ont été insuffisans ou maladroitement appliqués.

La légèreté d'esprit dans les classes supérieures a commencé la Révolution, la foiblesse du gouvernement l'a laissé faire des progrès, et la terreur a consommé l'ouvrage.

Au moment où le clergé, où l'ordre de la noblesse sont venus se confondre avec le Tiers-Etat, les fondemens de la monarchie ont croulé, et il n'y a plus eu aucun degré, qui séparât le dernier des citoyens du monarque, qualifié alors de fonctionnaire de

l'Etat.

La Démocratie étoit la suite inévitable d'une telle confusion; et l'effusion de sang, les plus atroces barbaries, le résultat nécessaire de l'agitation générale du peuple: enfin les plus mortelles exhalaisons devoient sortir de la lie nationale, remuée par des mains criminelles et téméraires."

Sir Walter has frequent occasion to mention La Fayette, and is not wanting in liberality and respect towards that pure and hallowed patriot,-one of the very few who have emerged from the chaos of folly and crime, unstained by any act of cruelty, apostasy, pusillanimity, or selfishness; free, indeed, from all suspicion of inordinate aims and sinister attachments. His deportment in several emergencies is criticised or questioned; but without harshness, and with credit for his honourable intentions and natural feelings. If he had been himself asked by our author for an explanation of his conduct in ambiguous instances, the inquirer would, no doubt, have been answered, with good faith, and the historian saved some expressions of wonder, and surmises of motive, which are both awkward and erroneous. "La Fayette," it is said, "though fixed in his principle to preserve monarchy, -though it was his object to protect and defend the monarch, in dignity and person,seems to have been always on cold and distrustful terms with Louis, personally." Now, Madame Campan and the Marquis de Ferrières have made it certain by their Memoirs, that the coldness and distrust were, in fact, on the side of the royal pair, who, almost as openly as unwisely, disdained him for a protector or friend. It has been our impression, since we scrutinized the details of La Fayette's conduct during the period of his connexion with the revolution, that his abilities and energy have been underrated; and this, from a common mistake or delusion more reputable to his character than to human nature in general. He truckled neither to the Bourbons, the Jacobins, nor Napoleon; he braved them all, indeed, in support of his tenets. But want of superior talent and spirit is often presumed, when there is not an unlimited, profligate daring as to every object deemed desirable: a ruthless, reckless audacity passes for supreme genius and resolution. Men worship victorious guilt as they applaud prosperous folly-they see all capacity and nerve in the one, all wisdom and tact in the other. Moral principle and moral courage, real, effective merits, busy and sturdy powers, but which compel abstinence from usurpation on national or personal rights, and tenderness of the blood and weal of our fellow-creatures, are interpreted by vulgar minds into pitiable deficiencies and weaknesses; they are accounted obstacles to success in critical junctures, and to the attainment of absolute dominion, deserving rather of regret or contempt, than congratulation or homage. La Fayette was upright, conscientious, and humane; hence, he did not achieve all that opportunity may seem to

have invited: he submitted to the restraints of probity and benevolence; was afraid of unworthy life; satisfied

"In every virtuous act and generous strife,

To shine the first and best."*

And his present situation is an example of the comparative expediency or safety of the course which he pursued: he survives in true glory, in unique felicity:-the supple courtiers, the aspiring demagogues, the ambitious conquerors, the stout conspirators, the merciless and remorseless Robespierres and Dantons, the all-witted, all-grasping, omnipotent Napoleon, with their ready vigour and desperate hardihood, have fallen from the pinnacles, and "pashed themselves in pieces."

Sir Walter severely reproves the arrest and imprisonment of La Fayette, by the allied kings, on his escape from his infatuated army; he stigmatizes, too, like Burke, with his deeply searing, indelible brand, the treatment of the French emigrants generally, at the courts and in the armies of the coalition. Though no friend to the "Church of Rome"-against which, in his first volume, he levels blows, some of which manifestly reach the "Church of England;"-he pays a free tribute to the principled consistency of the vast majority of the French clergy, in devoting themselves to every form of wo and death, rather than take the constitutional oath: he does not spare the infidel fanatics, who threw off God and the Christian religion; and in commemorating the baleful law of divorce, employs language which we cannot refrain from repeating.

"If fiends had set themselves to work to discover a mode of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining at the same time an assurance that the mischief, which it was their object to create, should be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have invented a more effectual plan than the degradation of marriage into a state of mere occasional cohabitation, or licensed concubinage. Sophie Arnoult, an actress famous for the witty things she said, described the republican marriage as the sacrament of adultery."

Along with an evident desire to be tolerant and lenient with regard to the French nation, and all excusable irregularities and extremes, in the inspection of the revolutionary period, our author preserves an unyielding and masculine tone of morality on main and unequivocal points of vice and virtue, which is to be warmly commended. We may incidentally compliment him further, by saying, that we do not remember to have

* See Mignet, vol. i. chap. 5, for a proper panegyric on La Fayette.

encountered, in any of his numerous works-every one of which, we believe, we have read from the title to the colophon-a single lewd phrase or image. Having written no line which, in that respect, he could wish to blot, he was entitled to pass sentence on the Voltaires, the Rousseaus, the Diderots, the Marmontels, the Montesquieus, "from whose works the young and virtuous must either altogether abstain, or peruse much that is hurtful to delicacy and dangerous to morals."

-ART. X.-Almack's; or, Fashionable Life. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1827.

THE unexampled reputation acquired by that long series of productions called the "Waverley novels," has in some measure given a decided direction to the literary taste of the times in which we live. Almost every thing a writer has to say, is now detailed to the world in the semblance of a novel. Religious discussions on points of faith; philosophical disquisitions; party disputes; satirical strictures; and even authentic travels, are now, for the most part, embodied in this seductive form; and scarcely any writer can expect his book to be read, unless it steal upon the world under the fashionable form of a romance, and is animated by a vein of piquant fiction and adventure, sufficient to vivify the intolerable dulness of mere matter of fact. Thus it is that a popular author sets the fashion in literature, as a modish lady does in dress. A complete revolution has been achieved within a few years, in the waists of our fair countrywomen, and the reign of flowers, cuffs, and ruffs, restored by the return of the Bourbons, and the ascendency of the dutchess of Angouleme; while, during the same period, the whole world has been turned into a circulating library, for novels, by the influence of the "Great Unknown." Since it became the whim in high life to be literary, fashion has been substituted for taste, and an author who writes out of fashion, has no more chance of being admired by the beau monde, than a beau or a belle that dresses in utter defiance of the prerogative of the ruling dame or damsel of fashion.

We will not at our outset quarrel with this subserviency of literature to fashion, because if the truth were known, it would probably appear, that although literature be content to go in the train of fashion, it is only in the path where, in the first instance, it was a leader. A popular writer first sets the fashion, to which he and all his disciples are afterwards doomed

to be abject slaves, until the tide changes, and some new author, like some new face just launched upon the town, makes his appearance, and turns the heads and figures of the fashionable world upside down, or inside out, just as the whim takes. Among the infinite varieties of this all pervading species of literature, one of the most amusing, we will hardly say instructive, is that of the fashionable novel, which professes to exhibit and to satirize the beau monde in the persons of some of its notorious and acknowledged leaders. There is something so seductive in great names and high stations, that even their very vices and follies are quite taking; and those who would shrink in utter disgust from the vulgar peccadilloes of a drunken cobbler, will dwell with right marvellous complacency upon the very same peccadilloes exhibited in the person of a right honourable. Hence it is that this species of satirical novels, if written with any tolerable degree of spirit, is ever sure to attract particular attention. The beau monde, which they profess to exhibit, will read for the purpose of seeing themselves or their friends held up to ridicule or contempt; and those who flutter outside the magic circle, will look into the mirror to see what is passing within.

Such works as the one which has been the occasion of these observations, will therefore be sure to find readers, and as a matter of course, writers. Yet, to us Americans, it is quite inconceivable with what freedom these satirists introduce individuals, if not by name, at least in such graphic outlines as that they cannot be mistaken, at least in the society in which they move. The freedom of the press in this country, is almost entirely that of opinion; and such is the decent sense of propriety cherished by the people of the United States, that out of politics and public life, a personal attack on the character, conduct, and manners of an individual, is considered an outrage, always checked by the sentiment of society, or a more summary process on the part of the person assailed. In this respect, there is far more licentiousness of the press in England than in these United States; a license, however, which we think by no means desirable, as it places the feelings of domestic life almost entirely at the mercy of malicious or interested scribblers. The proper sphere of women especially, is that of private life; and it is only when they step out of its hallowed precincts, and recklessly brave the opinions of the world, as well as the forms of society and the decorums of life, that they are fit objects of criticism. They are then public characters-their example and influence operate upon the manners and morals of society, and they become proper subjects for public satire.