The book, though written in a republican spirit, was particularly levelled at the members of the Convention, and contained much pointed declamation against the agents and emissaries of the parties which alternately usurped so sanguinary a dominion over their wretched country. In 1806 the undertaking was revived in a shape which it was supposed would prove less obnoxious to the public authorities. The vitriolic acid, to use an expression of the author, was wholly extracted; and particular care was taken to exclude from the biography of the imperial family, and of the chief favourites of the monarch, whatever might be offensive. The better to secure themselves from suspicion, they professed not to pass judgment, but merely to furnish materials for decision, and to embrace, at the same time, the names of all their foreign contemporaries of political note. These sacrifices however were not sufficient to propitiate the favour, or lull the vigilance, of the police. The authors were punished, and the circulation of the book immediately prohibited. The copy now before us was secreted and given to the individual from whom it has passed into our hands.' pp. iv. v.

Additional importance and power of stimulus, are endeavoured to be given by the hint of unexplained difficulties about the copy caught on this side of the water, as we suppose.

A copy was, after considerable difficulty, obtained, but the loan of it, though granted in the kindest manner, was, for important reasons, limited to a period barely sufficient to allow of its being translated, and the work was pursued with that ardour which the emergency of the case, and, above all the awakened curiosity of the public, demanded.' p. v.

The reader may be inclined to fancy that this very grave and large-meaning sort of language, about the very short time it was permitted to retain a printed French book-which most certainly contained no specific for paying off the national debt, or turning bank paper into gold, or even for concealing or protecting the peculation of public functionaries-seems rather to overdo the importance of the concern.

The present work is a translation of part only of the original; the foreign portion of the biography, which is pronounced to be miserably scanty and erroneous,' being

omitted.

Those memoirs alone have been chosen which relate to the greatest events in question, and which claim attention and credit for the authentic sources in which they originate. These sources are, principally, the journals of the legislative bodies, the files of the Moniteur, and the several memoirs published at different times by persons in every way competent to the task of recording the events of the Revolution. A narrative of facts is thus furnished, the authenticity of which cannot be doubted.’

The Biographie Moderne exhibits two great features of impartiality and correctness; it abounds with facts, and is sparingly furnished with comments. The style of the original is not elegant; but it is clear and concise, entirely divested of studied ornament, and free from those tricks VOL. VIII. 3 N

book, that may presume, to tell a little offensive truth about recent and contemporary public characters, that have possessed, or for the time being possess, the powers of govern ment, shall become a thing of such extreme difficulty and hazard, as it is now in France and most other parts of the continent. Our situation in this respect is, perhaps, not entirely what a high-spirited and free people might wish; but still we do, by means of the press, obtain in one way or another many pieces of such information concerning our occupiers of power, as the people of France have no chance of gaining with respect to their high political class. So much at least of the truth is suffered to be told, as ought to keep actively alive that necessary suspicion, that incredulity of official virtue, which no nation can dismiss without surrendering itself to imposition, extortion, and despotism. But in France, the great authorities now existing, and even those that have had their day, seem to be a subject as sacred and iterdicted as the economy of the Grand Turk's Seraglio. A book, that in ever so cool and chronicle-like a style undertakes to state plainly why a certain number of persons claim to be more noted for some time to come than the ordinary currency of names, is seized upon at the printing-office, or intercepted on its way to the publisher's; and if by some accident or legerdemain two or three copies escape, and make their way to the extremities of the empire, and this country, it is through such a series of lucky incidents and hair-breadth turns, as to furnish a little romantic history,-as curious as that of Sir Sidney Smith's escape from durance in France, or that of an enslaved captive, who baffles the precautions, the fetters, and the sentinels of the Dey of Algiers. The original of the present work, it seems, has need of all a thief's dexterity. The account prefixed to this translation is extracted from an article understood to have been contributed to one of our most popular critical journals by Mr. Walsh, the author of the American's "Letter on the Genius and Disposition. of the French Government."

6

This work, under the title of Modern Biography, purports to be a history of all those who, by their rank, their talents, their virtues, or their crimes, have contributed to illustrate or to disgrace the end of the last and the commencement of the present century. The following are the circumstances, which, as we are informed, attended the publication of the work in Paris. In the year 1800, a dictionary similar in form to the present, but characterized by far greater asperity and boldness, was published in the French capital, and immediately suppressed by the police. The authors seem to have had it in view to expose the inconsistency of those who had enlisted themselves in the consular government, after having signalized themselves by their zeal for a democratical equality.

The book, though written in a republican spirit, was particularly levelled at the members of the Convention, and contained much pointed declamation against the agents and emissaries of the parties which alternately usurped so sanguinary a dominion over their wretched country. In 1806 the undertaking was revived in a shape which it was supposed would prove less obnoxious to the public authorities. The vitriolic acid, to use an expression of the author, was wholly extracted; and particular care was taken to exclude from the biography of the imperial family, and of the chief favourites of the monarch, whatever might be offensive. The better to secure themselves from suspicion, they professed not to pass judgment, but merely to furnish materials for decision, and to embrace, at the same time, the names of all their foreign contemporaries of political note. These sacrifices however were not sufficient to propitiate the favour, or Jull the vigilance, of the police. The authors were punished, and the circulation of the book immediately prohibited. The copy now before us was secreted and given to the individual from whom it has passed into our hands.' pp. iv. v.

Additional importance and power of stimulus, are endeavoured to be given by the hint of unexplained difficulties about the copy caught on this side of the water, as we suppose.

A copy was, after considerable difficulty, obtained, but the loan of it, though granted in the kindest manner, was, for important reasons, limited to a period barely sufficient to allow of its being translated, and the work was pursued with that ardour which the emergency of the case, and, above all the awakened curiosity of the public, demanded.' p. v.

The reader may be inclined to fancy that this very grave and large-meaning sort of language, about the very short time it was permitted to retain a printed French book-which most certainly contained no specific for paying off the national debt, or turning bank paper into gold, or even for concealing or protecting the peculation of public functionaries-seems rather to overdo the importance of the concern.

The present work is a translation of part only of the original; the foreign portion of the biography, which is pronounced to be miserably scanty and erroneous,' being omitted.

Those memoirs alone have been chosen which relate to the greatest events in question, and which claim attention and credit for the authentic sources in which they originate. These sources are, principally, the jour nals of the legislative bodies, the files of the Moniteur, and the several memoirs published at different times by persons in every way competent to the task of recording the events of the Revolution. A narrative of facts is thus furnished, the authenticity of which cannot be doubted.'

The Biographie Moderne exhibits two great features of impartiality and correctness; it abounds with facts, and is sparingly furnished with comments. The style of the original is not elegant; but it is clear and concise, entirely divested of studied ornament, and free from those tricks VOL. VIII.

3 N

of eloquence which always mar the effect of a plain tale. The narratives are copiously interspersed with anecdotes at once extraordinary and characteristic; and the portraits occasionally introduced of the principal actors in the Revolution, are sketched with a rapid but skilfu! hand. If there be any instances of deviation from the strict line of impartiality which the authors seem to have had in view, they are to be found in those articles which relate to the present reigning family in France, and to their particular favourites. p. vi.

If the literary character of the original has been faithfully conveyed into the translation, most of these observations are correct. There is very little comment; the memoirs are bare details of fact. There is little attempt at elegance of diction; there is a welcome absence, for the most part, of that vile factitious rhetoric which is so intolerably disgusting in much of the French writing; and there is truly very little favouritism: for, excepting the Annals of Newgate,' and two or three similar repositories of human renown, there never was a biographical work so miscellaneous, and comprizing such a multitude of persons, in which the writers have seemed so uniformly willing for their subjects to be detested or despised.

With regard to the authority of the historical details, as a large proportion of the facts are of such a public nature as must have been put on record in the contemporary journals, there is no reason to doubt, that whoever possesses the Moniteur of those times would be able to verify as much, perhaps, as one half of the particulars stated in this work. By facts of a public nature, we mean propositions, debates, and decrees, in the several national assemblies of the revolution, and in the formidable voluntary societies that so often overawed those assemblies-the acts of official men and administrative bodies and the notorious proceedings of the armies. From the rule of brevity adopted as essential in the plan, and so rigidly adhered to in the execution, of the work, a very large proportion of these facts are in the narration so divested of all illustrative matter, and given so much in the form of mere annals, as to make a very uninteresting kind of reading, while they are acknowledged to be of value in the way of historical docu

ment.

With respect to the portion of these records that more directly displays personal history and character, it is extremely obvious that the collective memoirs of many hundreds of individuals, who were brought into action from all parts of France-many of whom were very obscure, except during a few revolutionary months-some of whom were alternately, or indeed at the very same moment, extolled in terms almost of adoration, and assailed with hootings and imprecations-some of whom were possibly the subjects of base but unconvicted

calumnies-some of whom were implicated in schemes and intrigues never yet satisfactorily developed and all of whom acted under irregular, violent, and almost preternatural inAluences; it is obvious, that such a multifarious assemblage of such personal histories, written by we know not whom, written, we may fairly deem, without personal acquaintance with more than one in ten of the individuals, and published after a great proportion of them were no longer living to contradict erroneous statements, had the work been suffered to circulate,-cannot be accepted as a record on which we can confidently rely, or on the authority of which a future historian can make any one assertion not otherwise to be verified. In attempting to make use of the prodigious contradictory mass of me moirs, laudatory, apologetical, opprobrious and vindictive, that came out in Paris during both the tumultuous and the declining season of the revolution; we may very well know, from the samples that came to this country, that the writers of this work must have found infinite embarrassment, if they were really anxious to give a just view of facts and characters, And at the same time we are left ignorant what use they have made of those memoirs, and which of them they have most relied upon; for there is rarely a formal reference to any of them. One of the first we noticed was to those of Madame Roland, in the article Grangeneuve, expressed in the way of accepting her account. Her work happening to be at hand, we turned to the part where the circumstance adverted to by the Biographie' is related; and it may be just worth while to shew how accurately the present work conforms its representation to that which it refers to, as if it were concordant or identical.

3 Grangeneuve was one of those who, in concert with the ci devant capuchin, Chabot, agreed, in July, to cause themselves to be mangled by men whom they had in pay, in order to exasperate the people against the Court: but at the time of execution he was afraid of being mangled top well, and gave it up.'-Biog. Mod. v. 2. p. 112.

In the course of July, 1792, the conduct and disposition of the court indicating hostile designs, every one talked of the means of preventing or frustrating their execution. On this subject Chabot said with that ardour which proceeds from an excited imagination, and not from strength of mind, that it was to be wished the Court might attempt the lives of some of the patriotic members, as it would infallibly cause an insurrection of the people, the only means to produce a salutary crisis. He grew warm on this head, on which he made a copious comment. Grangeneuve, who had listened without saying a word, in the little society when the discourse took place, seized the first opportunity of speaking with Chabot in private. "I have been struck, said he, with your reasons; they are excellent; but the Court is too cunning ever to afford us such an expedient. We must