You knew nothing personally about him; and your whole work, as we abundantly and unanswerably showed, was made up of tittle-tattle already in print, and to which the only novelty you gave was that of the immense and ridiculous blunders you made in the confection of your patch-work.

It really exceeds all power of face' that we ever met, that the author of so long and, to the public, so expensive a fraud-assuming not only the person of the King as the author, but even that of the Duke de D——, as the editor-should now tell us that HE-M. Lamothe, alias the Baron de la Mothe Lanjon, was both the author and editor of those Memoirs! He adds

'I have here in my favor the suffrage of the sharpest intellect and most subtle heart of the kingdom, who however was partly in errorfor he thought that I had admission to the ante-chamber of the king's cabinet-as he said publicly in London-whereas in fact I was in the cabinet itself.'-Preface, p. xv.

It is very true that Prince Talleyrand, for some reason best known to himself, did in London, after the Three Days,' profess to believe that this work had some degree of authenticity; but as he was also known to have said, that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts'—all the world immediately concluded that the book was-as it turned out to be-an egregious forgery. That a line-a word-a letter of this voluminous fiction ever came out of the king's cabinet or even ante-chamber, neither Prince Talleyrand, or any one else who knew anything of the matter, could for a moment have believed.

As everything has its acmé, so the jocular impudence of M. Lamothe has a pinnacle beyond those that we have hitherto reached. He calls these two works-disgraceful in every way, 'his two honourable successes.'-There we leave him.

The Après-Diners of his Serene Highness Cambacères are below contempt for obvious falsehood and unreadable dullnessthere is not, we believe, one single word of truth in the four volumes-nor have we found one single sentence which could interest or amuse any reader; these are the dregs of M. Lamothe, whose best productions are the dregs of all other writers, and we believe that there is not one single library table in England which will load itself with such absurd, incongruous, wearisome, offensive, and altogether execrable stuff. The four volumes cost us forty shillings-they are not worth one penny!

ART.

ART. V.-Original Letters, Manuscripts, and State Papers. Collected by W. Upcott. London, 1836.

Τ

'IT may be doubted,' as Mr. M'Leod would observe, whether we profit materially by any person's experience but our own, as to the line of conduct to be pursued under particular circumstances. But in the formation of that tone of temper and character which will direct or modify our conduct on all occasions, no one can doubt the efficacy of those lessons which the experience of others conveys. The longer the experience, the more in number and the greater in weight are the instructions which we derive from it, which is the simple reason why history, properly written, is one of the most effective of moral teachers. It was in this higher character that a great writer considered it, when he said that history was philosophy teaching by examples.' But in morals all depends on circumstances. An example, whether real or fictitious, can teach us nothing, if it contains only dry facts. The fact that a wolf eat a lamb, without the ingenious conversation which precedes that operation in the fable, would hardly teach us that the strong never want a pretence when they are inclined to oppress the weak. The mischief of a great many histories, and those of no mean account, is, that they are quite contented with giving an agreeable narrative of naked facts, from which we can gather nothing beyond the facts themselves. The evil is not by any means corrected by the exercise of the imagination in forming a theory to account for the facts, for hypothesis is a very sandy sort of a foundation for moral teaching. The pictures with which the geologists present us of palæotheria, megalotheria, iguanodons-beasts with fishes' tails and beasts with birds' tails-may perhaps gratify the lively imaginations of these brilliant philosophers and indefatigable gourmands. Content with finding two or three bones, they make none of clothing them with flesh and skin, and then assuring us that we possess a portrait, to the life, of the monsters of some millions of centuries ago. But we are not all men of genius, like the gastro-patetics, and the question, after all, is,-Is the picture like? Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, when he held poor Yorick's skull in his hand, could have easily, in his mind's eye, reinvested it with its proper lineaments and complexion. He knew well enough whether the jester had cherry cheeks, a turn-up nose, flaxen hair, and blue eyes, as became a Danish jester; while, if some one who never saw Yorick had drawn a picture of him as a gentleman of melancholic complexion, hazel eyes, black hair, and aquiline nose, the accuracy of the likeness would have been rather damaged by the nose being

of

of the wrong shape, and the eyes, hair, and complexion of the wrong colour. Even so is it with history. The facts are Yorick's skull, or the two or three bones of the ichthyosaurus, which some historians leave as dry bones still, while others create pictures from them just as veracious, doubtless, and as correct as those of the geologists.

All this is in the natural course of things. The chronicler of the day cannot be expected to stop and explain his own and his contemporaries' feelings on all subjects of morality, taste, and feeling, for to him they cannot appear worth recording, although the light in which the facts of his chronicle are to be viewed wholly depends on them. Still less would it be reasonable to expect, from the good monk of the tenth or eleventh century, that he should accompany his tale of murder or of war by an exposition of the motives which led to them, when those motives were perhaps not very fully understood by the principal agents in these bloody scenes. Whether St. Thos. A'Becket's murder was the natural consequence of his seeking the aggrandisement of his order by right or by wrong; whether he was the victim of his righteous resolution to maintain those privileges, without which he knew that in those ages neither the light of the gospel nor civilization could be extended; or whether, finally, as a modern French historian suggests, it arose from his patriotic resolution to uphold his Saxon countrymen in their wish to save some of the honours and benefits of the English professions from the grasp of the greedy Normans, are questions which the Quadrilogus cannot be expected to answer. To the chronicler, the murder of Becket is the murder of Becket, and it is nothing more. To what quarter,

then, are we to look for the magic by which we may make the dry bones live again? We answer, unhesitatingly, to the letters of the day, if there are any. We say so, not because they will contain any elaborate description of the feelings, or exposé of the views of the age to which they belong, but because they must be written, to a great extent, in the spirit of the age when their writers lived. Most men try to live in that spirit, and the few who, from wisdom or caprice, seek to escape it, can succeed only partially. They are brought up in it, formed in it and by it, and it impresses its stamp deep upon them in the passive years of childhood and youth. Their mind can no more avoid drinking in this spirit than their lungs can refuse to breathe the atmosphere which surrounds them. They who feel most deeply the many evils which flow from the utilitarian views of this luxurious age, would find, on a calm review, that they are themselves infected with its utilitarian and luxurious principles, in a measure which, without such examination, they would scarcely credit. The letters, there

fore,

fore, of a particular age must of necessity represent its judgment of moral and political questions, its feelings, and its social condition, and must faithfully convey to us the hopes and fears which animated and checked mankind, and by which their conduct was materially directed. The events of the day-the writers' feelings towards their neighbours and their neighbours' feelings towards them their comments on the ordinary course of things around them-these are precious records for all who wish to study mankind and morals in history; for these things, and these alone, can enable us fully to appreciate the temper and spirit in which the acts commemorated by history were done. We denounce acts done in an age when law was laughed at, and the only human protection to which a man could look was in his own right arm and his own courage, as if they were as criminal as they would be in the days of Chief Justice Denman and Mr. Attorney General Campbell; and till we come to place ourselves in the condition of those who did such acts, or, as the phrase in the religious world is, realise their condition, our judgments will always be thus wrong and absurd. It is very true that some historians profess to use letters, and that some have actually used them in a small degree. But, considering their great value, they have never been used as they deserve; and, in very many cases, their existence seems to be hardly known to historians themselves. It is, perhaps, more to their credit to put the matter on this footing, than to suppose that they did know of the existence and the contents of letters, and yet neglected to use them. Yet there is, perhaps, no department of literature so rich in materials, and that from a very early period. Of Cicero and Pliny it must be unnecessary to say anything here. Nor is this the place to enter further into the merits of Seneca's letters than to say, that they who expect to find in them only philosophical essays will be very agreeably disappointed. We remember, at the moment, a description of the old and modern style of baths in Seneca's letters, which is truly graphic; and a picture of domestic slavery, which lets one more into the condition of society than almost any record of that age.

The letters of churchmen begin at an early period, and are of the highest value. Cyprian's letters are, perhaps, the most valuable part of his works, and throw great light on history, on manners, and on opinions. The collections of the letters of Basil, Augustin, and Jerome, will occur to every reader. But we mean to descend at once to a much later period, and one where, from the supposed darkness' of the age, such light must be esteemed peculiarly precious. There are collections extant of letters which throw full light on the state of manners in France, Italy, and

England

England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. For example, we have the letters of two bishops of Chartres in the eleventh century, Bishop Fulbert, near the beginning, and Bishop Ivo, near the close of it; and subsequently those of Stephen, Bishop of Tournay. For Italy we have Gerbert's Letters (Pope Silvester II.) at the very beginning of the eleventh (or rather, the close of the tenth) century, and then Cardinal Damiani's. The history of England and France is so mixed up that what relates to one relates to the other. We have Anselm's three books of Letters, which give us Normandy and England perfectly in the time of William the Conqueror and William Rufus; John of Salisbury, who continues it at a later period, the reign of Henry II., which is most fully and perfectly illustrated by the most entertaining of all these letter writers, Peter of Blois, Archdeacon of London. The enormous collection of St. Bernard's letters may be said to illustrate the condition of France most especially, although it throws no small light on other parts of Europe; while the small collection of Peter Abelard's letters are of inestimable value in showing us the state of learning and of education at the same period.

We esteem these letters (and there are many others which it is not our purpose to enumerate *) to be at once so valuable, and so extremely amusing, that we should be exceedingly glad to turn attention to them. For this purpose we shall give a few extracts from several of them, but more especially from those of Peter of Blois, whose life might be written from his letters, who probably saw as much, or more, than any person of his time, of life and manners in Italy, Sicily, France, and England, and who had a most fortunate habit of commenting on great part of what he did see. It would appear that the writers kept copies of their correspondence, for Peter of Blois collected and published his own letters by desire of Henry II.; and from various expressions of Cardinal Damiani appears that he was sensible of the use which would be made of his letters at the time when they were written, i. e. that they would be shown and canvassed. This, however, will not diminish the value of the letters to any one who knows them. For it is impossible, after reading even a small number of them, to mistake their nature, or to doubt that they were actually letters of business, written expressly rebus agendis.

it

It seems to us to be no small boon to those who wish to have some notion of the common, every-day life, of Italy or England, about the time of William the Conqueror, and rather before his

* Petrarch's letters, to come down later, are of the highest value. They are often poems in prose; and, where they are not so, they are precious as throwing light on manners. Later again we have Scaliger, Vossius, Baudius, Casaubon; and in a different style, Erasmus, Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin.

day,