briand were wasted in the attempt to seduce the Duke of Wellington from the policy of his Government can be taken for an indication of the mental inferiority which he ascribes to our illustrious countryman. We have printed the concluding lines in French, because they are not more obscure in the original than in the translation; but in this instance the obscurity is not the fault of the translator; the anecdote alluded to is not very generally known in England.

The Princess Orsini, the favourite of the queen of Philip the Fifth of Spain, was placed about the person of her Majesty by Louis XIV., that she might watch over the interests of France at the Spanish court. After some time her enemies, anxious to destroy her influence, represented her conduct, both private and political, in an unfavourable light to the French king. It is said that on one occasion, having caused the courier of the French ambassador to be stopped, she found that in some of the despatches directed to the King her character was virulently assailed. Among other things it was alleged, that her over-intimate connexion with a certain D'Aubigny, her homme d'affaires, gave rise to a general belief that they were married. The Princess, stung to the quick by this accusation, lost all command of herself, and wrote upon a corner of the despatch the words pour mariée, non, and was rash enough to forward it, with this marginal commentary, to the King. So strange a justification of her conduct in one particular was naturally taken as an admission of all the rest. But how does this apply to the Duke of Wellington? Does M. de Chateaubriand mean to insinuate that His Grace was attempting to bribe some wretch to stop the messengers of the French embassy on the highway, and rob them of their despatches? We do not believe one word of it; and the mere supposition, resting on no better foundation than the poetical fancy of M. de Chateaubriand, is rather apt to give an idea of what the Frenchman was capable of, than likely to induce any one to suspect the English statesman of such nefarious practices. But the conceited Viscount, thinking himself the greatest minister at the congress, fancied that every cabinet must be anxious to be informed of his dreams, no matter by what means, or at what sacrifice of honour, the knowledge was obtained.

We have thus endeavoured to lay before our readers a correct account of a work, to which the author attaches much importance, as describing his conduct, and the motives by which he was actuated, in the most eventful period of his versatile existence, a period during which it was permitted to him to exercise considerable sway over the destinies of his own country, and to overthrow the liberties of an adjacent state. Our task would have been less irksome had we found in these volumes more which we could conscientiously have praised. We have not forgotten that there is at least one act of the life of M. de Chateaubriand, which justly earned for him the respect and admiration of Europe-his conduct upon receiving the intelligence of the Duc d'Enghien's murder. The moment he heard of that horrible crime, he hastened to resign the embassy to which he had recently been appointed by Napoleon; thus braving the fury of the despot at a moment when his power was near its zenith, and his passions in their most terrible excitement. The manner too in which he was dismissed from office in 1824 by that bad race whom it was then his fate to serve, and his subsequent fidelity to their desperate cause, cannot fail to enlist sympathy in his behalf. But in reviewing the Congress of Verona we could not hesitate as to the tone which it behoved us to adopt: when a work from the pen of so distinguished a writer professes, as this work does, to furnish materials for history, it imposes upon his reviewer the obligation of exposing, as best he may, the vanity of its pretensions, the hollowness of its principles, and the inaccuracy of its assertions.

ARTICLE VIII.

Poems of Many Years. By R. M. MILNES. Memorials of a Residence on the Continent. By R. M. MILNES. THESE Volumes have as yet been printed for private circulation only; we understand, however, that it is the intention of their author to give them to the public at some future period; and we may, therefore, venture to direct towards them the attention of the readers of poetry, in the hope that they may not long be debarred from the pleasure which we have derived from their perusal. The specimens which we shall lay before them, in vindication of our favourable judgment, will, we trust, speak for themselves; and every opinion is now required to give some account of itself, if it hopes to be considered respectable. Moreover, poetry is less plentifully supplied to us at present than it was a few years since, or, which comes to the same thing, everybody has agreed to say that such is the case, and every notice of a new writer is expected to begin with "In the existing dearth of poetry," or some equivalent expression. Much, too, has been said and written, not merely to prove the fact of such scarcity, but to demonstrate its necessity, and thereby to prepare us to expect its continuance; with all which, however, we are not otherwise concerned, than to point at it as a justification of the general nature of the remarks suggested, under such circumstances, by the appearance of these volumes. If a phenomenon be rare, there is the more need for observing it accurately. If, indeed, there were a natural law ordaining that periods of literary plenty should alternate with periods of famine, it would be difficult to look back upon the last thirty or forty years without anticipating the latter for the coming generation. Few will deny that such a view presents us with a body of poetry, to which, for extent, originality, and beauty, any age and any nation might refer with pride; inventive, not imitative, one of those outbreaks which mark an æra, and distinguished not more by genuine vigour than by the unparalleled width and variety of its range. From Crabbe, the poet of daily realities, sometimes humorous, sometimes fearful, and in the spirit of accurate truthfulness verging as nearly

upon prose as is permitted to a poet, to Shelley, the most ideal of idealists, whose works contain a larger proportion of unmixed, unalloyed poetry than those, perhaps, of any other writer, a kind of essence of poetry abstracted, as it were, from the body with which it is usually conjoined-how wide is the distance! Yet there is no lack of occupants to fill up the space between. These two being the nadir and the zenith, we may well say that the collective poetry of the age, "Though its head be hidden in the skies,

Plants its firm foot upon the common earth,

Dealing with thoughts that everywhere have birth ❞—

even were we to doubt whether any individual representative thereof had altogether filled up the measure of this noble eulogium.

It is a privilege to live under the immediate influence of a time from which posterity will date the revival of English Poetry. It is almost necessarily incidental to such a revival, that it should present itself to its contemporaries under a somewhat anarchic appearance-the ephemeral, more even than at any other time, struggling with the permanent, often successful in imposing itself as such upon the many, and vexing with doubts even the judgment of the few. This struggle is not yet over; but its ultimate results may be conjectured from the general tendency of that singular literary revolution which the last few years have seen in progress, which is still far from complete, and of which these volumes present us with additional and striking evidence. One prominent and admitted feature of this change is the very general introduction of a thoughtful and meditative tone into our more recent poetry, a fact inclusive of the following, which, though sufficiently obvious, we do not recollect to have seen directly noticed, and which is not without its bearing on the question of merit and popularity. It is this: that the taste of the public of twenty years since, and possibly of the present day, stands in apparent opposition to the taste of the writers of the present day; that the poets whose works were most popular at the former era, and probably continue to be so with the mass of readers, have by no means created a corresponding degree of influence upon their successors in art,— the writers of this generation. Examine any well-known

volume of generally admitted merit by a writer of recent pretensions,--Philip van Artevelde, let us say, or Ion, by way of selecting works widely known, and, on the whole, popular, with a view to ascertaining the degree in which the minds of the authors of those works have been influenced by this or that writer of the generation which is passing awayand what will be the result? We may confidently assert that it will be an entire conviction, founded upon evidence so strong as to surprise those even whose prepossessions had prepared them to expect such a phenomenon, that of any effect produced by those who sold ten thousand copies a day, to the great excitement of the public, and the great rejoicing of booksellers, and were pointed out by applauding hands as the living representatives of English poetry, the traces are slight, indeed so slight as to be hardly discernible. Neither in the nature of the subject, nor in the manner of regarding it; neither in particular images, nor in pervading tendency, do we recognise anything borrowed from or inspired by that extraordinary man whose name resounded wherever English literature was heard of, and whose fame darkened that of Wordsworth as a rocket darkens a star. For aught that appears from the works of some of the most gifted of the succeeding generations, the Corsairs and Childe Harolds, and other highly-seasoned celebrities, might never have been written. Those who delight in Byronism must seek it at the fountainhead; but the gentler influence of his great contemporary is everywhere.

The inquiry to which these observations naturally give rise, is not entirely set at rest by the answer, that popularity is a bad test of merit; that the higher power, retarded at first by the originality which made its conceptions unfamiliar to common apprehensions, and acting first upon the few most competent to appreciate it, nevertheless is certain of ultimate and universal triumph. Still less is it explained by the convenient supposition of a reaction, which has driven the public, satiated with one style, to require from authors its direct counterpart as an antidote. The first explanation is insufficient to meet the extent of the difference to which we have alluded; the second is not borne out by fact, for we fear that the mass of readers have not yet learnt to prefer the calm and