proposed would again propose one for a higher situation, and so on, until a regular government was formed. "Now, whom do you propose?""Mr. Biels, to be sure the best friend I ever had."-"You are joking, neighbour; what should he do at the diet? he is no speaker, and withal not overstocked with sense."-" If he does not like to speak, he will not begin any disputes; and as for his understanding, he has had sense enough to offer me money and credit when nobody else did; so that's enough for me."-" Well, just as you please, mistress; but our guild will support Mr. Strap, the currier, and he shall have my vote too. He always takes patience when the cash is not forthcoming, there and then ;' moreover, he is sure to stand up for our trade, and to oppose any tax on leather. Now, woman, if you are wise, get the people in your line to act upon the same principle, and then we shall all be happy." Such are the motives which generally direct popular elections.'-No. 15, pp. 53, 54.

We hope to find something better than this in the remaining numbers, of which six or eight are upon our table.

ART. XIII. Nouveaux Mélanges Historiques et Literaires. lemain, Membre de l'Academie Française. 8vo. pp. 490. vocat. London: Treüttel & Wurtz. 1827.

Par M. Vil

Paris: Lad

We

New Historical and Literary Miscellanies. By M. Villemain. ́ We have been agreeably surprised by the merit of this volume. Some eighteen months since we had occasion to notice a former publication by M. Villemain, entitled "Lascaris, ou les Grecs du Quinzième Sièclé;" and a more empty and ridiculous rhapsody it was never our fortune to encounter. It was a sort of historical and philosophical romance: full only of tumid pompous declamation and sentimental hyperbole; and conveying neither accurate knowledge, judicious reflection, nor entertainment of any kind. spoke of the work at the time as it deserved; and, assuredly, we never expected, after such a miserable exhibition of M. Villemain's powers, to find any production of his pen worth the trouble of perusal. But we are now bound in candour to declare, that the present miscellany has left us with a very different and far more favourable impression of the qualities of this gentleman's mind. How to reconcile so curious an opposition of talent in the same person, we know not: either M. Villemain is, in different moods, the most unequal of all writers; or his present choice of subjects has been less calculated to betray him into his old propensity for ranting and bombast; or else he has had the happiness to discover, and the wisdom to abjure, his earlier errors of taste. But, whatever may have been the causes of the difference, certain it is that the papers contained in his Nouveaux Mélanges' are in general as remarkable for good sense and good judgment, as his Lascaris was for the total absence of all those properties; and it would be impossible for any one to recognise the two works for the composition of the same individual. It will, therefore, be well for

M. Villemain henceforth to forswear all attempts at 'fine writing,' and tales of imagination, and to restrict his graver attention to historical and literary criticism, for which he has here displayed a very respectable measure of ability.

The principal papers in his present volume are a life of the Chancellor de l'Hôpital; an introductory essay to a course of lectures on French eloquence, which he seems to have read before the academy; a literary essay on Shakspeare; and two long dissertations on the polytheism of classical antiquity, and on the Christian eloquence of the fourth century.

Of the life of the Chancellor de l'Hôpital, with which the volume commences, we shall only remark, that it is a very interesting memoir of one of the most virtuous statesmen and upright judges that France ever produced. The name of de l'Hôpital suggests one of the few pleasing remembrances which relieve the revolting picture of French history during the last half of the sixteenth century. Amidst the iniquitous administration of Catherine de' Medici, and the sanguinary fanaticism of the religious wars, l'Hôpital appears almost a solitary example of mild, yet inflexible virtue, labouring ineffectually to preserve the domestic peace of the kingdom, to allay the irreconcilable hatred of the Catholic and Calvinistic factions, and to inculcate principles of mutual forbearance and toleration. Animated by a spirit too good for the unhappy times in which he lived, he encountered the usual fate of those who would temper the fury of religious and civil discord; and his efforts in the cause of charity and peace, were rewarded by the calumny and ingratitude of both parties. Yet he was fortunate in being removed from public affairs before the climax of horrors, which ushered in the wars of the league: he escaped the grief and suspicion of having witnessed and shared in crimes, which he could not have prevented; and he has left to posterity no difficulty in honouring his memory with the praise of irreproachable intentions and incorruptible integrity. His superiority to the fanatical bigotry of his times, the benevolence of his religious views, and his enlightened love of toleration, would make his biography a befitting subject for the] learned leisure of Mr. Charles Butler. We can imagine the congenial pleasure with which the biographer of Erasmus and Grotius would dwell on the character, and elucidate the conduct of de l'Hôpital; and it is in some degree in a kindred spirit of affection for the Christian virtues of his hero, that M. Villemain has constructed his memoir. This is the best praise of the piece for the mere materials for the life of de l'Hôpital were of ready access and easy compilation.

M. Villemain's opening discourse on the study of French eloquence, savours too much of the old prejudices of his national literature. Every thing great and good in modern learning and taste, is here referred to the Augustan age of Louis XIV.' The servile imitation of classical antiquity, on which the productions

of that age were coldly modelled, is stoutly defended, and preferred to the exercise of that more free and original spirit, which, in our own times, has been warmed and rekindled from the romantic creations of the middle ages.

Like all the partisans, among his countrymen, of the same formal and obsolete school, M. Villemain cannot be made to comprehend, that every circumstance in the structure of society more naturally connects the maturity of the modern European mind with its own infancy in the middle ages, than with the departed greatness of classical antiquity. With the institutions of Greece and Rome we have nothing in common: with the institutions of the Gothic and Teutonic nations, every thing. Our governments are the remains of the feudal condition, modified only by the vigorous encroachments of popular liberty; our laws and customs bear the impress of the same origin; our regal state, our aristocratic titles and decorations of honour, our corporate democracies, our heraldic and martial and civic pomp, all tell of the recollections of the middle ages. Our religion interweaves our holiest associations with the kindred enthusiasm of our forefathers: our manners are compounded of the devotion and the gallantry of the crusading and chivalric spirit; our imagination, our tastes, our feelings, all are congenial with the poetical and romantic literature of the people from whom we have sprung. But, with the details of classical antiquity, in what manner can our every day life and associations possibly be harmonised. With the political constitution of the Greek and Roman societies, our condition can have no analogy; with their mythological religions, we can have no sympathies; to the spirit of their manners, customs, and domestic relations, our feelings are altogether repugnant. We study their immortal literature for the grandeur, the strength, the beauty of some of its poetical inspirations; for its stores of philosophical wisdom; for its enduring lessons of historical experience and political application. But we study it as conveying the inspiration and the wisdom of another world, as it were, from that in which we live; and when we attempt to regulate the impressions of our own thoughts and feelings upon forms which belong not to us, and are wholly inapplicable to our state of existence, our copies must ever be forced and unnatural. But that which is stigmatised as the imitation of barbarism, is on the contrary, only the cultivation into elegance of ruder materials, which have descended to us as the natural possessions of our birthright. Here we do not imitate, we only mould the unfinished work that has been bequeathed to us into all the perfection and beauty of which it may be capable. But if, like the French writers of the seventeenth century, we would labour only after the models of classical antiquity, we should be at once constrained range of to abandon all efforts of originality, and to limit the intellectual taste to an eternal circle of repetitions.

M. Villemain's Essay on Shakspeare is far less narrowed by the critical dogmas of the whole school of French literature, than his opening discourse.' Here, in his critical examination of the works of our immortal bard, he has evinced a warm respect for his excellences, a high and liberal estimate of his genius, a candid allowance for his faults, and a thorough capacity for appreciating and enjoying his beauties, which, in a Frenchman, and an academician above all, must be pronounced to be alike novel and quite surprising. We should judge from this essay alone, that a great and most remarkable change is already in progress in the national literary tastes of our neighbours. Doubtless M. Villemain does not share in all the enthusiasm, with which we worship the genius of Shakspeare; nor is it natural that he should. But the judgment of a foreigner, who, while he really understands his author, is without the affectionate prepossession of a native, may not, after all, be the farthest from the truth, nor most widely removed from the only fair and impartial standard of decision. The fidelity with which M. Villemain has repeated all the little which we know, of the life of Shakspeare, is not less worthy of remark: because this accuracy, so easily as it is attainable, is very unusual with French commentators on either our manners, language, or literature. Even M. Villemain's English orthography of proper names is rarely erroneous: though we could desire that he had not afflicted us by insisting upon throwing Ben Jonson's two names into one, and rendering Ben-Jonson, rabbinically or arabically, as though it had been Ben-David, or Ben-Hamet. Nor can we conceive either the source from whence M. Villemain derived, or the measure of credulity with which he admitted into his essay, the following notable story:

< According to some other traditions, his father with his trade in wool united the occupation of a butcher; and young Shakspeare being suddenly withdrawn from a public school, where his parents could no longer support him, was early employed in the severest drudgery of that calling. If a writer, who was almost contemporary with him, may be believed, when Shakspeare was directed to kill a calf, he performed the execution with a sort of pomp, and did not fail to pronounce an oration before the assembled neighbours. Literary curiosity may perhaps please itself in tracing some connection between these harangues of the young apprentice and the tragic vocation of the poet,' &c.-p. 143.

Where M. Villemain discovered this precious piece of absurdity we know not, but the whole tale looks very French, and still more so is the crowning gravity and grandeur of M. Villemain's reflection upon it, that- de semblables premices nous jettent bien loin des brillantes inspirations et de la poétique origin du theatre grec. C'etait aux champs de Marathon et dans les fêtes d'Athènes victorieuse qu' Eschyle avoit entendu la voix des Muses!'

The ridiculous puerility of such a passage as this, however, is not to detract from the tribute of general applause due to the

critical judgment and good sense of our academician. It is one of the signs of a new literary era in France, when the name of our Spencer, is there heard and known, and when the structure of the Fairy Queen is praised for ingenuity and elegance, by a countryman and academic successor of Boileau. The style of Spencer,' says M. Villemain, is prodigiously superior to the grotesque diction of our Ronsard. And even old Chaucer, the imitator of Boccaccio and Petrarca, had already, in his English of the fourteenth century, offered examples of liveliness and a great abundance of felicitous fiction.' And then M. Villemain proceeds, not unskilfully or inaccurately, to develope some of the intellectual features of English society in the age immediately antecedent to Shakspeare:

Other sources of imagination were opened, other materials of poesy had been prepared in the remains of popular traditions and local superstitions, which were preserved all over England. At the court, astrology; in the villages, sorcerers, fairies, and sprites, were articles of belief still alive and all-powerful. The imagination of the English, habitually melancholy, preserved these fables of the North like a national remembrance. At the same time there came to be mingled with these, in minds more cultivated, the chivalrous fiction of the South, and all the wondrous relations of the Italian muse, which a cloud of translations had infused into the English language. Thus from all parts, and in all senses, by the mixture of old with foreign ideas-by the obstinate credulity of indigenous associations-by erudition and by ignorance-by religious reforms and popular superstitions-were offered a thousand perspectives for the imagination; and without investigating further the opinion of writers who have called this epoch the golden age of English poetry, it may be said that England, rising out of barbarism, agitated by the conflicts of opinion, without being disturbed by war, pregnant with imagination and with tradition, was of all fields the best prepared for the appearance of a great poet.'-pp. 148, 149.

In considering the dramatic system' of Shakspeare, M. Villemain naturally follows, in some measure, the style of French theatrical criticism, and dwells much upon his irregularities and extravagances. That Shakspeare was acquainted with the existence of regular dramatic rules, our critic does not fail to observe; that the bard knowing, should still neglect them, he does not consider so extraordinary and so unpardonable as other French critics have done. But, in opposition to the German worshippers of Shakspeare, he strenuously denies to him the forethought of any formal system, and maintains that, in the irregular structure of his dramas, he followed only the easily satisfied taste of his times, and gave the reins to his splendid and original imagination. We confess that we here wholly agree with him; nor have we ever, in our most enthusiastic veneration of Shakspeare's genius, been able to recognise that uniform philosophical "realization of the ideal in poetry," that profundity of original design, which Schlegel and his