Napoleon as a whole. He aims to rekindle, or rather to furnish, a text-book for that martial frenzy which is rife just at present in France, which talks about the natural boundary of the Rhine, and has induced the Chambers to consent to sink some millions in the fortifications. Silly as this schoolboy heroism is, its prevalence cannot be doubted, and it is in a great degree to that that the success of this book is to be attributed. It is in vain to remind such têtes échauffées of the necessary accompaniments of all that glory that dazzles them-of the dreadful conscription, of the grinding and arbitrarily levied taxes, the press and opinion stifled, and the selfish neglect, the vindictive persecutions, or the outrageous violence of the tyrant. But all this is known well enough to M. Thiers. So that in aiming, notwithstanding, at feeding and flattering this enthusiasm of the Polytechnic School, we cannot acquit M. Thiers of sacrificing at the shrine of a paltry vanity. As in 1825 he made a hit by writing up the Revolution to the taste of young France, which was then republican, so he would now write up the empire to meet the prevailing military fever. We have endeavoured, and we would endeavour, to speak of this writer with respect, mindful of the responsibility that attaches to all judgments of others, a responsibility that is not diminished, because the subject of the judgment happens to be a public character. We have endeavoured to treat his convictions as true, and his expressions of them as sincere, as that of, at least, others in general. But we

must beware that we do not carry our courtesy too far. The public character and career of M. Thiers must be taken into account in estimating the value of his views and opinions. And this is such as to deprive those opinions of every grain of weight or authority.

M. Thiers is a successful adventurer. The son of a poor schoolmaster in Provence, without station, interest, friends, or money, he has made his way to become Prime Minister of France, by the unaided exertion of his talent. We cannot even say that any peculiarly fortunate concurrence of circumstances helped him there. For he was great before July 1830, an event to the bringing about of which he contributed as much as any one man could contribute. The field of political life in France is, without exception, the finest and fairest arena in the world open to simple talent. In this country, birth and connexion do so much; in America, money, and that modified species of physical force, only one degree removed from the bowie-knife of the back woods, which society allows of there, and which consists in a swaggering, bullying, impudence of fraud, interfere with the free play of the higher gifts of mind. In France, notwithstanding the inroads of the demon of gain,

pure talent, intellectual energy, is still supreme. Compare the political articles in their journals with ours. Those of our most widely-read, and most influential papers, are made up of coarse personalities, petty slanders repeated over and over 'ad nauseam,' tedious comparisons of present, with past speeches, but all personal, individual, party arguments. But in all the Parisian

journals of the first class, and this is a very much more numerous class than with us, every measure that comes forward may be found discussed in the most highly scientific way, referred to first principles, and with all the lights and illustrations which a competent, if not often profound, political science, and historical information, can supply; and all this in a style of that neat, clear, luminous logic, which seems almost a property of the French language, by whomsoever handled. Hence their journals lead, while ours follow, public opinion. And it may be also added, that, notwithstanding the higher price of our papers, the remuneration of editors and contributors is at a much higher rate in France.

Upon this clear stage, and with this formidable engine of journalism, the young Provencal came to Paris to try his fortune, as he describes Mirabeau doing, in his History of the Revolution. We do not propose to follow his career; how from the friendless student of the Ecole de Droit, he had worked his way, in less than twenty years, to the Premiership. He did not hold office long. Amusingly enough the ex-minister returned to the point at which he had started. He had begun by thundering away in the Constitutionnel against religion, and the clergy, or, in his own phrase, Jesuitism and the Jesuits-a paid writer, at so much a line. Having, during his under-secretaryship in the treasury, contrived (so it is said) to make a snug fortune for himself, and all the Thiers family, he bought the Constitutionnel

and now, as proprietor, pays other aspirants for continuing the same strain which he had found so profitable. So that, after all, there is some ground for those assertions of the omnipotence of the Jesuits, which some writers, from childish alarm, others, who know better, from malevolence, are continually repeating. As Gibbon used to hint that he had made Watson a Bishop, and collated Dr. Apthorpe to an archiepiscopal living, so the few, poor, helpless, and persecuted priests of the Society of Jesus in France, may lay claim to the honour of having made M. Thiers President of the Council of Ministers.

Yet this is the man from whom we are content to receive lessons of history, to whose judgments of men and events we are

ready to bow with implicit submission. We listen, or we read, we assent or dissent, we argue for or against, as though they were real genuine sentiments, truths which his mind had conceived, and had been forced to utter. Do we not very well know all the while that the article was got up for the market, that this tone was affected because it would take, and that sentiment thrown in to make a sensation, and that the author himself is laughing at us in his sleeve all this time for taking him to task so gravely, and for being at the pains of a formal refutation of his theory?

But this is the picture of the shallowest species of sophist, the mere juggling rhetorician; and M. Thiers is something more than this. It is true that men of his fortunes cannot be sincere; they cannot mean anything by their words, even when they wish to. But they do often wish to have a meaning. So natural is the appetite for truth in the human mind, that there are moments when they would fain think one of their own gaudy theories true. When ambition is stilled for a moment, and success cloys, they would gladly have something to repose a faith in, and for some short time they may even become their own dupes. They began to sport with general principles as though they were mere formulæ of the reason, counters of which they were masters, to take up and drop at pleasure, and every now and then they are startled to find them mastering their minds in spite of themselves. They They are like children in the necromancer's room, who have meddled in play with spells they did not understand, and called up genii they cannot lay. The shallower and more material intellects will be the more free from visitations of this kind. But where the purely intellectual power has developed in an extent at all proportioned to that of the selfish and prudential organs, thought, with which he has so often trifled as the means of his worldly advancement, will now and then revenge itself by flashing across his mind, that he has never known truth; that he has chosen, and is, therefore, for ever confined to, shadows; that there is a real and substantial knowledge, of which his is but a glittering copy; and, therefore, that if there are any truly sincere searchers of truth in the world, they have got beyond him, they possess a secret which he can never have. As he who honestly seeks knowledge for its own sake, for the practical guidance of his conscience, has moments when all truth seems hollow and a mockery, and when everything he had deemed most sure seems to have slipped away from him; so the clever trader in theories, who has employed ideas as the stepping-stones of his ambition, must occasionally suspect, in despair, that there may be such a thing as abstract verities, and if so, that his whole existence has been a cheat and a lie.

And as where the desire or necessity of making good their case is not urgent, such writers may by chance be honest; so there is another cause which sometimes leads active intellects, even when quite unprincipled, to truth, that is, curiosity: while things are new to them, they do not think about distorting them. This motive has been assigned to M. Thiers in a criticism of his former History, which, written many years ago, contains so remarkable a prophecy of the line which he would take in his present subject, that we think it worth recalling to memory:

:

En effet, M. Thiers n'est pas un philosophe, il n'est ni systematique, ni enthousiaste dans son histoire. Mais avant tout, il est un curieux; un homme avide de spectacles nouveaux, qui se plait à tout, qui s'enquiert de tout qui bat des mains, aux Etats Généraux, à l'Assemblée Nationale, à la Constituante, à la Convention, oui même à la Convention! Et pourtant il aime le Directoire, quand vient le Directoire, parce que c'est un monde qui lui reste à connaître, des hommes qu'il n'a parvus, des connaissances à faire. On sent qu'il eût été l'ami du Consulat et de l'Empire, s'il eût fait leur histoire. Tous ceux qui vivent ont raison auprès de lui, on n'a jamais qu'un tort à ses yeux, c'est d'être mort.'

This seems to be the temper in which he has applied himself, in one of the most elaborate chapters of the book, to that important portion of the history of the Church which is connected with Napoleon. There is novelty about the subject, and the negotiations connected with the Concordat are curious in themselves. But they occupy a very brief space in most of the histories of Napoleon, and generally, from want of interest and attention to the subject, have been very imperfectly told. But whatever may have been the case hitherto, it is so no longer; the Church and the Church's affairs, from filling the last and most obscure corner in our books of history, have come to occupy the most prominent page in them. And this not only when the middle ages are the subject, in which case it would not be possible to shut the eyes upon the existence of the Papacy, but the present actual workings of the Church beneath the surface attract the attention and excite the fears of all. One cannot write a novel without supplying this appetite with some appropriate food in the shape of intriguing Jesuits, and dangerous Abbés. And these not the shadowy, unmeaning personages we used to be familiar with in the Mrs. Radcliffe school, but real living men of the present day, whom it is suggested that you should expect to meet at every dinner-table, or see prowling suspiciously about your door in an evening. Writers, again, of the high visionary class, who speak as though they floated perpetually aloft on the wings of speculation, and never touched

this polluting earth even with the soles of their feet, yet, when they do cast a glance earthwards, see nothing so worthy of their attention as Christianity. One of this school said lately from the Professorial chair

'When I have had to speak of Homer and of Plato, I have found it indispensable to go back to mythology. How could I speak of Christian poets, historians, legislators, without speaking of Christianity? Deny me the Church, in the largest acceptation of the term, and the soul of my subject is vanished. What would you have me say of Italy if I am not to mention the Papacy, how treat of Calderon without Catholicism, of Spanish philosophy without Louis of Grenada and St. Theresa, of America without the Dominicans, of the Alhambra without Islamism, of Byzantium without the Greek Church, of the institutions of Alphonso without the councils, of the East without Mahomet, of the world without the Gospel? It would be to take the body and leave the spirit.-E. Quinet. Cours au Collège de France.

And this, it should be observed, is of a very different nature from mere antiquarian curiosity of research. It is a living, present interest, founded on the experience of a living, present power, active in the Church at this moment, and nourished by an entire antipathy to that power and tendency. Thus, in the case of M. Thiers, the bitterness of this ancient feud, which has subsisted from the beginning, and will subsist to the end, of the world, is ill-concealed under the condescending language of compliment, which the statesman studiedly uses towards the Church in his detail of the negotiation of the Concordat. He assumes towards it the attitude not of the arrogant philosopher, but of the practical statesman, to whom the attachment of a certain number of persons to a certain institution is a fact not more, but not less, important than any other fact, and which must be met and dealt with in its turn with the same consideration. To declaim against it, to insult it, or to argue with it, would be to attribute to it more than its worth-would be to seem to fear it. The politician conducts himself towards the Church like the nobleman's servant towards the visitor of humble exterior, with a stately composure which disdained to be supercilious.' Nay, so far from reasoning against it, he will even take it by the hand, and vindicate its claim, at least to existence. The establishment of the Church, he says, was not only necessary, as being clung to by so large a proportion of the population, but on reasons

' of a more exalted character, if any there can be more exalted than public order and the repose of families. There must be a religious faith and form of worship in every human society. Man, thrown into the midst of this universe, without knowing whence he comes, whither he goes, why he suffers, or even why he exists, what rewards or what