rical critics to have consented to the assassination of her husband; and while this might have been an unpleasant reminiscence, her proverbial chastity would have produced too strong a contrast. The Penelopes and Helens were not farther apart on that

score.

The Russian Empress, like Zenobia, and without having had the benefit of such a preceptor as Longinus, was conversant and successful in literature. She composed several comedies; moral tales; an abridgment of the early history of Russia; a book called the Antidote, in reply to the Abbe Chappe's libel on the Russian nation and government; and a celebrated introduction to a legal code, the original of which, in her handwriting, our author saw in the public library of St. Petersburgh, and recognised as a nearly complete summary of Montesquieu's maxims. Her elegant and ingenious letters to Voltaire and the Prince de Ligne, are sufficiently known. She originated and patronised scientific and literary institutions, extensive exploratory expeditions by sea and land, banks, manufactories, &c.; and naturalists performed tours of research under her enlightened and munificent auspices. When the learned Pallas offered his cabinet for sale in order to provide a marriage portion for his daughter, Catherine caused him to be asked at what price he held it, and having received his estimate,-fifteen thousand rubles,—she wrote to him-"You are marvellously versed in natural history, but not at all in the question of dowry. I take your collections at one hundred thousand francs, but I leave to you the enjoyment of them during your life." She exercised the same refined liberality towards Diderot,—or rather more; for she not only insisted upon his remaining in possession of his library after she had purchased it, but appointed him librarian with a comfortable salary. We cannot help breathing here the wish that our Congress had thus acted towards Mr. Jefferson. There are two other incidents related by Ségur, which redound not less to her credit:

"Catherine, at Moscow, was desirous to give, at the Kremlin, balls and fêtes whose magnificence should be proportioned to her rank and dignity; but, all the orders which she had given for this purpose, were countermanded, on her being suddenly informed that the governors of several provinces, having neglected to obey her instructions, and allowed the granaries, which she had established, to be drained of their abundant supply, a dearth of corn, as real as unforeseen, afflicted her people.

'It would be most indecent,' she said, 'for me to appear in the midst of fêtes and enjoyments, while my subjects are suffering under a calamity from which I ought to have secured them.'

I was near her when the arrival of one of these governors, who had been so culpably negligent, was announced. 'I hope,' said Count Bezborodko, 'that your Majesty will address to him publicly, the severe reprimand which he merits.' 'No,' replied Catherine, that would be too humiliating; I shall wait till he is alone with me; for I love to praise and reward in public, and to rebuke in private.'"

Catherine, as well as Frederick of Prussia, particularly encouraged the band of philosophers arrayed under Voltaire and D'Alembert;-her studies and character inclined her to speculative liberalism; she did not hesitate to place her grandsons, for their education, in the hands of a Swiss governor of the liberal school. But the explosion in France, in 1789, alarmed her even for the docility of the Russians; and that she was not without immediate cause for apprehension, may be seen by the following curious passage of the Memoirs, in reference to the demolition of the Bastille at Paris:

"The news spread with rapidity in the Russian capital, and was listened to with very different feelings, according to the condition and opinions of the persons to whom it was communicated. At court, the agitation was violent, and the discontent general; in the town, the impression was altogether the reverse; and, although the Bastille could not assuredly endanger the safety of the inhabitants of St. Petersburgh, I cannot describe the enthusiasm which was excited among the merchants, the tradesmen, the citizens, and some young men, of a more ele. vated rank, by the destruction of that state-prison, and the first triumph of a stormy liberty.

Frenchmen, Russians, Danes, Germans, Englishmen, Dutchmen, all congratulated and embraced one another in the streets, as if they had been relieved from the weight of heavy chains."

Mr. Burke saw things rightly enough, when he wrote, in 1791-"The Muscovites are no great speculators, but I should not much rely on their uninquisitive disposition, if any of their ordinary motives to sedition should arise. The little catechism of the rights of man is soon learned; and the inferences are in the passions." On the journey to the Crimea, the Prince de Ligne informed Ségur that he had overheard the Emperor of Germany and the Autocrat of all the Russias talking very earnestly about "a fine project, the re-establishment of the Grecian republics." The extrication of Greece from the Turkish yoke was, if we may be allowed the figure, an heir-loom in the Russian cabinet; but the idea of republics, in the heads of the two absolute monarchs, sprung, as Ségur remarked, from the humour of the continent at that moment. The French revolution frightened Catherine into other thoughts; the Spanish and Neapolitan insurrections, and the establishment of republics in Mexico and South America, frightened her successor into a total abandonment of the Greeks.

The Count de Ségur is of opinion that the constant distinction and generosity, with which the philosophers and men of letters were treated by Catherine and Frederick, may be ascribed, in part, to their insatiable thirst of praise and celebrity; that order of men being the true dispensers and transmitters of fame. Our author, himself of the number, should have assumed too, for the sovereigns, a liberal sense of the value and dignity of purely intellectual labour and superior intellectual powers; and if they cherished a passion for glory, the aspiration could have no other

than a purifying and ennobling influence on their general dispositions and conduct. According to a great authority in ethics, "a generous ambition of applause for public services and comprehensive undertakings, is one of the best counterfeits of virtue, and supplies its place in a degree." But Catherine, in the judgment of the Count, was precipitate and extravagant in her plans; and her precipitation "destroyed in the end a part of the creations of her genius." "She wished," he adds, "at one and the same time, to form a middle class, to admit foreign commerce, to introduce manufactures, to establish credit, to increase papermoney, to raise the exchanges, to lower the interest of money, to build cities, to create academies, to people deserts, to cover the Black Sea with numerous squadrons, to annihilate the Tartars, to invade Persia, to continue progressively her conquests from the Turks, to fetter Poland, and to extend her influence over the whole of Europe." This was, indeed, enterprise enough for the greatest duration of life which is recorded even in the tables of Russian longevity. Horace, moralizing, directs to the tomb, the attention of those who would build houses; Catherine could hardly have nursed her stupendous projects, without sometimes thinking of the hand that surprised her in the midst of them, and quenched all the fires and dreams of her imagination. She died in 1796, of a stroke of apoplexy, after having taken her coffee as usual in the morning, and was found stretched on the floor of her private apartment. Her son Paul, whom she was supposed to have equally dreaded and disliked, was not long in the possession of the throne, before he caused the remains of his father, Peter III., to be translated from the cellars of the monastery in which they had been unceremoniously deposited, and were with difficulty discovered; and those, also, of his mother, to be brought forth, that they might be mourned and honoured together. When the coffin of the latter was opened, it was discovered that the body had been negligently and imperfectly embalmed, and had become an object of disgust and horror: the glittering and costly ornaments with which it was profusely decked, and the magnificence of its case, conduced rather to aggravate the revolting spectacle of corruption, and emblazon the admonitory triumph of the worms that were rioting on their natural prey. Catherine had paused, and animadverted, and philosophized, with M. de Ségur, on the general dereliction of her lovers, as soon as she was understood to have dismissed them from the post of favourite: we may doubt whether she ever anticipated, in her intoxicating progress to the Crimea, that, when death should extinguish her radiance and power, there would not survive in any of the attendants whom she pampered with both, enough of affectionate. solicitude to ensure the faithful execution of the last customary VOL. I.-NO. 2.

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expedient for the preservation of the poor relics of royal mortality.

In fine, from all that we have read of the lives of female sovereigns, we should draw this corollary,-that an independent throne is not a seat of virtue or happiness for the sex; and that, although it has afforded scope for the display of talents and energies which are too commonly supposed to have been denied, to them, yet, since it has proved almost incompatible with moral excellence and reputation, they may believe the Salique law to be the law of nature, the universal prevalence of which they ought to desire.

ART. X.-Tableau Historique de l'Etat et des Progrès de la Littérature Française depuis 1789. Par MARIE JOSEPH CHENIER. 1 vol. 8vo. Deuxième edition. Paris, 1820.—An Historical View of the State and Progress of French Literature since 1789. By MARIE JOSEPH CHENIER. 1 vol. 8vo. Second edition. Paris, 1820.

Résumé de l'Histoire de la Littérature Française, depuis son origine jusqu'a à nos jours. Paris, 1825.-Summary of the History of French Literature, from its origin down to the present period. Paris, 1825.

THESE works, taken conjointly, embrace an account of the literature of France from its origin down to the present time; an account too slender and desultory to be called a history, but sufficient to convey the degree of knowledge required for the common purposes of literary intercourse. It is not our design to notice the subject in the same extent; we purpose merely to introduce to our readers, in a very compendious and cursory manner, the French writers of the present period; and by means of the volumes above mentioned, and other sources of information, to furnish some materials for an estimate of what the age has contributed, in that interesting country, to the advancement of letters. In so doing, we shall provide a repast useful, if not the most succulent and savoury; for the preparation of which we shall be repaid, should it excite the students of the French language to seek entertainment in the works themselves, which we shall have occasion to mention with encomium. We shall first summarily dispose of those authors who have existed partly in the present age, but whose literary distinction belongs principally to the eighteenth century.

St. Lambert is known for his excellent poem on the Seasons; and Palissot for his Dunciad, his Mémoires Littéraires, and par

ticularly for his comedy of the Philosophers. Laharpe was first brought into notice by his numerous odes and eulogies, and by several dramatic pieces. The best of these are Mélanie, a drama of excellent composition, Warwick, Philoctetes, Menzikoff, Coriolanus, and Virginia; the three former only have sustained their credit at the theatre. His principal title to fame rests upon his Cours de Littérature, or course of lectures delivered before the Lyceum, and published in the seventh year of the Republic. This work, by which he has acquired the appellation of the French Quintilian, as to ancient and French literature, is gene rally creditable to its author; but in reference to modern foreign nations, of which it professes to treat, is extremely meagre and deficient. In the distribution of intellectual merit, his ideas seem not to have strayed beyond the Pyrenees or the Rhine; even upon the ancients, his remarks are often strangely scanty or disproportionate; two hundred pages being employed in the abuse of Seneca, Polybius being barely mentioned, and Julius Cæsar being left out altogether as an author of no account. The English authors he viewed only through the medium of translations, which can confer upon a critic no just title of discrimination; no more than to view the sun through a hazy atmosphere, may qualify him to judge of its meridian splendour.

Laharpe, in his youth, was the disciple and enthusiastic admirer of Voltaire, and belonged to what is called the school of Philosophers; but in his maturer years, he made a solemn renunciation of these attachments, and concluded his life in professions of piety, and in writing sacred odes, much inferior, however, as poetry, to the profane ones that preceded his miraculous conversion.

Lebrun has been dignified, according to the French fashion, and in spite of the admonition of Horace, with the surname of Pindar, yet with good reason is ranked amongst the most distinguished lyric poets of his country. His ode upon the earthquake of Lisbon, and that to Voltaire in favour of the niece of the great Corneille; his two odes addressed to Buffon; and one upon the naval combat and conflagration of the Vengeur, are worthy of high praise; and his ode in celebration of those who fell at Austerlitz, almost reaches, sometimes, the flights of the Theban bard:

"et centum potiore signis Munere donat❞

It is to be regretted that he did not live to finish his poem De la Nature, of which some fragments only have been circulated amongst his friends of the Institute, enriched, it is said, with the most elegant and luxuriant description. He translated into French verse the two episodes of Nisus and Euryalus, and the Aristæus, of Virgil; he is also distinguished in epistolary poetry, and in