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he writes, "by the severity of the judgments, and the tone of assurance and infallibility with which they were delivered; it seemed to me out of the question that a man who talked so well could possibly be wrong." Presently, however, Rousseau fell under the lash, and Rivarol became viciously epigrammatic at his expense. "He is a grand master-sophist, who does not think a word of what he says or writes-c'est le paradoxe incarné: grand artiste d'ailleurs en fait de style . . . . . . il parle du haut de ses livres comme du haut d'une tribune; il a des cris et des gestes dans son style, et son éloquence épileptique a dû être irrésistible sur les femmes et les jeunes gens. Orateur ambidextre, il écrit sans conscience, ou plutôt il laisse errer sa conscience au gré de toutes ses sensations et de toutes ses affections. Aussi passionne-t-il tout ce qu'il touche." "St.-Georges de l'épigramme," as Rivarol was entitled, was now fairly astride his battle-horse, and warming with achieved success, strode right and left across the battle-field of letters, and driving all before the terror of his arms. At every word a reputation dies; scarce a contemporary had the luck to escape the discomfiture of a sarcastic thrust, impalement on a pun, or the sweep of glittering invective. The Abbé Delille was "nothing but a nightingale who had got his brain in his throat;" the luminous phrases of Cerutti were the work of a sort of literary snail leaving a silvered track-in reality, mere froth and drivel Chabanon, a translator of Theocritus and Pindar, was said to have done it "de toute sa haine contre le Grec." Le Brun was sketched sitting on his bed with dirty sheets-a shirt a fortnight old-surrounded by Virgil, Horace, Corneille, Racine, and Rousseau, angling for a word in one or the other to compose the mosaic of his poetry. Condorcet was described as writing with opium on leaves of lead. Mirabeau as a big sponge always filled up with other people's ideas. "Il n'a eu quelque réputation," continued his assailant, "que parce qu'il a toujours écrit sur des matières palpitantes de l'intérêt du moment ;-there are in his big books some happy expressions, but they are borrowed from Cerutti, Chamfort, or myself."

Three hours slipped unperceived away; the sun, regardless of the unfinished oration, went ruthlessly down; and the delighted visitors, armed with a copy of the great man's translation of Dante, a mine of expressions, as he informed them, most valuable to a youthful poet,-heads, hearts, and mouths full of naught but Rivarol, at length took their departure.

Upon a subsequent occasion, Chênedollé was allowed to hear the beginning of the Théorie du Corps Politique; a work which, written unmethodically on separate slips of paper, and once suffered to fall into confusion, defied all the efforts of Ri

varol's posthumous commentators to reduce it into a systematic arrangement. Part of it was stolen, and printed under another name at Hamburg, and a single chapter was published separately by the author himself many years later at Paris. Rivarol's premature death cut short the scheme half way; and we have only the conjectural decisions of friends or foes to tell us how much the world lost by its non-completion. Chênedollé, in unwavering loyalty, believes that his genius was capable of rising to the dizziest heights of political speculation; and, had time but been allowed him, of reducing the bewildering phenomena of the Revolution to lucid simplicity, and even, perhaps, of arresting its course. Catching his master's epigrammatic tone, he pronounces Beaumarchais, Mirabeau, and Rivarol the three most distinguished men of letters at the close of the 18th century: "Beaumarchais, par son Figaro, donna le manifeste de la Révolution; Mirabeau la fit; Rivarol la combattit et fit tout pour l'enrayer: il mourut à la peine." Calmer judges will probably have no trouble in convincing themselves that pretty analogies, nicely-balanced phrases, and fortunate retorts, though cogent in the controversies of the drawing-room, and fascinating to a coterie of fine ladies or aspiring authors, have yet the smallest possible influence on the stern facts of life, the sentiments of suffering classes, the march of a revolution; and that twenty elegant treatises, polished by easy thinkers, like Rivarol, into well-bred gracefulness, and welcomed with all the hosannas of St. Germains, would have done but little towards either explaining or impeding any social convulsion, and would have left the course of things in France very much as they found it.

For two years Chênedollé's trance of admiration lasted; every thought, every faculty, every wish seemed absorbed in the homage of his idol. "The god of conversation" exacted almost divine honours, and the young man was too busy listening to be able either to think or to write. One is hardly surprised to find that an intimacy so extravagant and foolish was broken off at last on a trifle about which two children would be ashamed to quarrel. The hero and the worshipper came to black looks and angry words, exchanged a brief fusillade of snappish notes, and resolved at once to part. Their common friends in vain attempted reconciliation: Chênedollé was immovable. "J'adore le talent de Rivarol," he said, "et j'aime sa personne; mais je ne le reverrai plus." Adoration and love, we may suspect, had sunk to a low ebb, when the first pretext for estrangement was thus readily embraced.

A curious little episode of love, which resulted in the French wit being caught by an Irish adventuress, is worth recording only for the witty language in which the victim expressed

his sufferings: "Je ne suis ni Jupiter ni Socrate, et j'ai trouvé dans ma maison Xantippe et Junon." "Un jour," so runs another of his complaints, "je m'avisai de médire de l'amour, il m'envoya l'hymen pour se venger. Depuis je n'ai vecu que de regrets.' At last a separation ensued, and an illiterate, but very fascinating, young lady consoled the weary husband for his late persecutions. Such a domestic régime throws a somewhat suspicious light upon Rivarol's high moral tone and the theological speculations which advanced him almost to the chair of De Maistre. His views of religion, however, as a political engine and a mainstay of the fabric of society, are sensible and well expressed; the reckless scepticism of his contemporaries affected him with sincere alarm: "C'est un terrible luxe," he said, "que l'incrédulité." "Il ne croit pas en Dieu," he wrote of one of his contemporaries, whose convictions were stronger than his piety, "mais il craint en Dieu." It is, however, with less profound topics that Rivarol's wit played most at ease, and exhibited in the most striking manner its astonishing range and pliability. With a few specimens of this we conclude a notice already, we fear, prolonged beyond the conventional limits.

His brother, whom he styled "ma montre de répétition," served as the butt for a succession of stinging pleasantries: "Il serait l'homme d'esprit d'une autre famille, c'est le sot de nôtre." He appears to have been of a melancholy temperament: "Jérémie," observed his merciless relative, "aurait été un buffon à côté de lui." Once he came to announce that he had been reading a newly-composed tragedy to M. de B-: "Hélas!" was the consoling reply, "je vous avais dit, que c'était un de nos amis.' Of the Duke of Orleans' rubicund features he observed, "que la débauche l'avait dispensé de rougir." Mirabeau was equally little to his taste: "C'était l'homme du monde qui ressemblait le plus à sa réputation; il était affreux." "Ce Mirabeau est capable de tout pour l'argent, même d'une bonne action." Buffon's son, who did little credit to his illustrious parentage, was described as "the worst chapter of natural history his father ever wrote."

"C'est un terrible avantage que de n'avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut pas en abuser.

On lui demandait son sentiment sur Madame de Genlis. 'Je n'aime,' répondit-il, 'que les sexes prononcés.'

Les journalistes qui écrivent pesamment sur les poésies légères de Voltaire sont comme les commis de nos douanes qui impriment leurs plombs sur les gazes légères d'Italie.

Lorsqu'il apprit que l'archévêque de Toulouse s'était empoisonné, il dit, 'C'est qu'il aura avalé une de ses maximes.'"

ART. IV.-LIFE OF BISHOP WARBURTON.

The Life of William Warburton, D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester from 1760 to 1779; with Remarks on his Works. By Rev. John Selby Watson, M.A., M.R.S.L. Longman, 1863. ABOUT fifteen years after Warburton's death, that which his friends wished to be known of his life was given to the world by his confidential disciple and admirer, Hurd, Bishop of Worcester. The same editor and literary executor left ready for press a volume of Warburton's correspondence with himself, which appeared immediately after Hurd's death in 1808. Warburton, who always expressed himself without fear or favour, softening or disguise, about friend or foe, has in these letters left a piece of self-portraiture. The correspondence is the corrective of the Life, and reveals Warburton and the Warburtonians in a thousand characteristic traits which Hurd's decorum had varnished over.

To these two primary sources, coupled with Warburton's own works, which fill thirteen volumes 8vo, Mr. Selby Watson has added a diligent search through the ephemeral literature of the period,-periodicals, pamphlets, sermons, and charges. He does not seem to have enjoyed the use of any new materials hitherto unprinted. Warburton's own letters are understood to have been almost all destroyed by his widow. One cannot help asking, Where are those which were not destroyed? Where are the letters of Warburton's correspondents? Where are the papers from which Mr. Kilvert printed a "Selection" in 1841 ? and where are the collections which Mr. James Crossley has been many years making? No subsidia from these sources are to be found in the present biography. But as this volume is already 650 pages thick, most readers will think they have too much, rather than too little. And, for a complete estimate of Warburton and his doings, we have enough. There may be many letters yet recoverable. But it is impossible that any thing can be now brought to light which could modify perceptibly the well-defined image of the man which may be traced from the materials already in our hands. All that is required for this task, beyond some skill in delineating character, is to place the man in his right relation to the social life and ideas of the time. The biographer must know his way about among religious parties in the latter half of George II.'s reign,-perhaps the least-known portion of the history of the English Church. Warburton belonged to none of these, and came

he

athwart all of them at one period or another of his bellicose career. It is on such invisible attractions and repulsions that the main interest of a career of antagonism such as Warburton's lies. His life was a succession of battles,-battles of the pen. All Warburton's books, like those of St. Augustine, are written against some adversary. But instead of handling the great public themes of Divinity, natural and revealed, Warburton is always defending some peculiar notion of his own, to which no one attached any importance, himself as little as any. The zest lay in the fighting, of which, while he was young, never could get enough. The most famous of Warburton's battles,-and the most serious; indeed the Waterloo of his critical empire,-was that with Lowth. In this celebrated encounter, in which the whole reading public, from the king downwards, participated with the liveliest interest, the points of sacred antiquity debated are mostly of no moment. Or where they are of moment, as, e. g. the date of the Book of Job, the disputants lack the requisite knowledge for throwing even the feeblest ray of light upon them. But though we can learn nothing respecting the Pentateuch and Job, we may glean much to instruct us in the inner history of the Church of England during a period in which that history is very little known to the present generation. What is wanted here, is not so much fresh materials, as the hand to reduce to order and system those which are already extant. The life of Warburton, which was passed wholly on the highways, and open to public inspection, is peculiarly calculated as a mirror of the clerical life of the eighteenth century, or at least of the literary section of it, and contrasts in this respect with the noiseless and inexpressive existence of men like Secker and Porteous.

Though Warburton inherited an ancient name, he was born (1698) to humble, or rather no fortunes. Bred to the law, his passion for literature-though Hurd pretends an early seriousness of temper-led him into the Church at the age of twentyfive. At the age of thirty he obtained from a private patron, Sir Robert Sutton, a living of some value. At this parsonage, Brant-Broughton, near Newark, he fixed himself with his mother and sisters, and spent the eighteen best years of his life in unintermitted study. An athletic frame and a vigorous constitution, seconded by abstemious habits, enabled him to support, at least without immediate injury, this severe tax on the brain. Nature, however, exacted the penalty-a penalty which may be deferred, but is never remitted-at the end of life. Though he lived to old age, his memory became impaired, and some time before death he sunk into a general torpor of the faculties. One of his sisters, Mrs. Frances Warburton, told Hurd that, even at

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