when, some years later, his mortal illness overtook him. The object of the work was to combat the doctrine-which Rousseau had rendered fashionable-of the sovereignty of the people. Defining power to be organised force, sovereignty to be conservative power, and the people to be essentially unconservative, he demonstrated with a lucidity, for which every good Tory should revere his memory, the truth that the true governance of society must be vested in the hands of the aristocratic few. Society, however, still stole him from his tasks; and we have an amusing account of the troubles of an unfortunate publisher who, during Rivarol's subsequent residence in Hamburg, had actually to keep him under lock, to expedite the composition of a long-promised preliminary discourse to a new dictionary of the French language. It was doubtless far more agreeable to dictate to fine ladies than to be the slave of a printer's devil; and Rivarol would not do the one so long as he had the least chance of enjoying the other.

At Hamburg he appears to have lived in an agreeable and somewhat dissolute society. The animal spirits of Emigration, he said, fled thither for refuge; and we may infer that merriment was not the only characteristic of the expiring régime which the high-bred exiles carried with them to their new abode. Rivarol, no doubt, knew extremely well how to enliven supper-parties, where manners were good and morals indulgent, which were graced by the gentle radiance of " des yeux de velours," and the sophistries of controversialists more lovely than immaculate. Once, for instance, we find him parodising the mixed greediness and patriotism of Lally-Tolendal.. “Oui, messieurs, j'ai vu couler ce sang,-voulez-vous me verser un verre de vin de Bourgogne?-oui, messieurs, j'ai vu tomber cette tête, voulez-vous me faire passer une aile de poulet?" &c. &c. One can fancy the glee with which such a scene would be enacted to a royalist audience, and the witticisms which it would suggest at the expense of revolutionary gourmandism.

Here, too, among other excitements, Rivarol fell in with the most fervent of all his admirers. Chênedollé, at this time young, romantic, burning with literary enthusiasm, and a heroworshiper of the devoutest order, was as enraptured as a priest of Apis with a new-found calf, at the discovery of so worthy an object of adoration. Four years before, the young poet had joined the party of the Emigrants, had served for two campaigns under royalist banners, and had arrived in Hamburg, early in 1795, a fugitive from the arms of his victorious countrymen. His zeal for greatness was hot, his temperament of the order that is familiarly described as "gushing;" and the neighbourhood of so great an intellectual celebrity threw him

into a fever of excitement. Already the Héloïse of J. J. Rousseau, the Georgics of the Abbé Delille, the Arcadia of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, above all, the graphic descriptions of Buffon, had excited ecstasies of wonder and delight. All these, however, were as nothing to his latest passion. Several chance meetings with Rivarol at the fashionable restaurant of the city, and a few brilliant expressions stealthily overheard, intoxicated the young votary almost to the verge of insanity. "I saw, I thought, I dreamt nothing but Rivarol: c'était une vraie frénésie, qui m'ôtait jusqu'au sommeil." After six weeks of frantic expectation, an opportune friend volunteered to introduce him to "the king of conversation." The young poet arrived in a ludicrous state of mixed nervousness and satisfaction, which he has delineated with unblushing fidelity, and which M. Sainte-Beuve, in his sketch of "Chateaubriand and his literary friends," has preserved entire. Nothing can be more graphic than the account given by Chênedollé of the much-desired interview, or more characteristic of the inordinate pretentiousness, vanity, and bombast into which the triumphs of society and a long course of flattery can stimulate a nature for which really grave pursuits possess no charm, and which honest criticism has never curbed into decent self-restraint. Chênedollé might well tremble, for Rivarol was not only a great talker, but a fine gentleman, and affected the graceful condescension of one who belonged to the innermost and most refined circle of the Parisian world. He launched forthwith into a friendly criticism of his visitor's latest production, and promised him a speedy growth of power in the invigorating sunshine of his own society. "J'espère," he said, que nous ferons quelque chose de vous. Venez me voir, nous mettrons votre esprit en serre chaude, et tout ira bien. Pour commencer, nous allons faire aujourd'hui une débauche de poésie."" Hereupon began a marvellous display of versatile loquacity. Starting from the first principles of his theme, the orator maintained that the savage and the poet are one: both speak by hieroglyphics, though the latter moves in a larger orbit, and enjoys a more extended range of vision. Armed with this idea, and enlarging it gradually to the proposition, that art should aim at nothing short of the infinite, Rivarol performed prodigies of dexterity, dazzled his auditors with a sparkling cascade of metaphor, analogy, and retort, quenched their occasional dissent with an authoritative "point d'objections d'enfant," and charmed them no less by the melody of his voice than the cogency of his reason into fancying themselves for a while the favoured visitors to an intellectual fairyland. After dinner, however, still greater wonders awaited

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them: the party adjourned to the garden; and Chênedollé has invested the scene with the classical dignity due to a Platonic discussion. The sun was sinking to the west, the sky was clear as that of Greece, the foliage rivalled the plane-trees of the Academy, and the modern Socrates began to talk, and this time upon no abstract theme. Rapidly surveying the writers of the century, he passed a trenchant, searching, and, it must be confessed, somewhat uncharitable judgment upon each. Against Voltaire especially he evinced a sort of personal animosity, and, as his panegyrist observed, "pushed jealousy very far." The Henriade, he said, was nothing qu'un maigre croquis, une squelette épique, où manquent les muscles, les chairs, et les couleurs:" the tragedies are cold and glittering philosophical treatises; in the style there is always "une partie morte:" the Essay on Manners an elegant but barren and untruthful sketch, a miserable parody of Bossuet's immortal discourse. "One must needs," continued the critic, "be very médiocre oneself to imagine that there is nothing beyond the thought of Voltaire: rien de plus incomplet que cette pensée: elle est vaine, superficielle, moqueuse, dissolvante, essentiellement propre à détruire, et voilà tout. Du reste, il n'y a ni profondeur, ni élévation, ni unité, ni avenir, rien de ce qui fonde et systématise." In support of so rigorous a sentence the literary culprit's works were next reviewed in detail, and some stinging sarcasm, like a drop of aquafortis, bestowed on each. Buffon was the next to suffer: "Son style a de la pompe et de l'ampleur, mais il est diffus et pâteux: on y voit toujours flotter les plis de la robe d'Apollon, mais souvent le dieu n'y est pas." Chênedollé's enthusiasm must have died away, as one by one his favourite descriptions were analysed and disapproved. That of the Dog was too long; "not characterised by the splendid economy of style of the old masters:" the Eagle was not sufficiently vigorous or masculine: the Peacock especially provoked the critic's indignation at its insufficiency; it was diffuse, yet incomplete; "cela chatoie plus encore que cela ne rayonne;" to paint this opulent oiseau,' one ought, he said, "to dip one's brushes in the sun, and shed the colours on its outline as rapidly as that great luminary darts its rays upon sky and mountain. I have in my head a peacock, new, magnificent, after a very different fashion, and I would only ask for an hour to beat this one." M. Sainte-Beuve's criticism is too obviously appropriate not to be recorded: "not only," he says, "had he a peacock in his head, but he was the peacock in person when he could speak like this." Frenchmen, however tolerant of vanity, have yet a limit to their endurance, and even Chênedollé was a little shocked. "I was confounded, I confess,"

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 hoinage 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