tination of the sword they had voted to captain Blakeley, 'Resolved unanimously, That captain Blakeley's child be educated at the expense of this state; and that Mrs. Blakeley be requested to draw on the treasurer of this state, from time to time, for such sums of money as shall be required for the education of the said child.'

This, we repeat it, is substantial gratitude. It is classical, too, and reminds us of those noble eras in the history of some of the illustrious states of Greece, when the offspring of those who had fallen for their country, became the children of that country whose cause had made them fatherless. It is in this way that our states may acquire a sort of parental character, that will endear them still more to the hearts of the citizens; that will inspire fathers to die in defence of their country, and mothers to educate their children to follow the example. It is in this way, too, that the different members of the union may nobly indulge their local feelings, and display their honest home-bred affections. Let them exemplify their desire to appropriate to themselves the fame of their distinguished citizens, by their peculiar care in honouring their memory, and cherishing their helpless orphans. It is thus that our sister states ought ever to display their rivalry;-by being as zealous to reward, as they are to appropriate the achievements of their sons. ART. III.-Histoire de l'Origine, &c. History of the Rise, Progress, and Extinction, of the different Factions which agitated France from the 14th of July, 1789, till the Abdication of Napoleon. In three Volumes. By Joseph Lavallee. Price 17. 7s. Murray. 1816.-From the Eclectic Review. F the French are not first rate historians, they are at least excellent narrators. They seize with admirable dexterity, and touch with inimitable skill, those marking points which comprise the main interest of the story; but they neglect those minor and connecting details which give it its colour and character. They write as they declaim, with spirit and rapidity; but their vehemence and superfluous energy are injurious to that calmness and steadiness of mind, that keenness of penetration, and that power of combination, which distinguish the historian from the narrator. The Frenchman, in all that he writes, as in all that he does, aims at effect; and this cannot, in narration at least, be always obtained, without the sacrifice of truth; not that he designedly falsifies, but the vivacity of his imagination, the rapid and fluctuating movements of his mind, and the readiness and felicity of his expression, seduce him, and he wanders. There is a great deal of all this in the work before us. It is ex

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ceedingly superficial, but uncommonly interesting. It has much brilliant colouring, and much spirited grouping, together with, here and there, facts both novel and important; but it is utterly deficient in that soundness of intellectual and moral principle, in those just, comprehensive, and penetrating views, which, in their combination, men have for want of a better epithet, agreed to call the Philosophy of History. In most of the publications we have seen, relating to the revolution, the writers continually betray the partisan; and in compliance with the rules established in such cases, on one side they lavish a redundant portion of laudatory adjectives, while on the other they heap an average quantity of vituperative substantives. Their own friends are vertueux, incorruptible, intrepide, sublime; while their opponents are traitres, poltrons, energumenes, or scelerats. M. Lavallee is not quite exempt from this; on the whole, however, he is as free from partiality as can reasonably be expected from one who was an interested spectator, and occasionally an interlocutor in the scenes which he describes. We by no means acquiesce in all M. L's discriminations of character; we think some of them defective, and others directly at variance with undeniable facts; but there is an air of conviction and sincerity in his very errors, which, while we differ from his sentiments, leaves our confidence in his honesty unabated.

In his preface M. Lavallee justly complains of the erroneous notions entertained in England, respecting the revolution; and he very fairly assigns the reasons. After adverting to the enthusiasm with which the first circumstances of that great event were hailed in this country, he attributes the aversion which subsequently arose, to the war, to the misconceptions and misrepresentations of the emigrants, and to the venal and factious character of the French journals. In truth, for want of authentic materials, it has been impossible hitherto to form a fair and impartial estimate of the general character of the French revolution. Respecting the more overt acts of the various transactions, we have evidence more than is requisite; but of their secret-that is, of their real history, we know little or nothing. As in all great events and sudden changes, much no doubt was the result of what is called accident, but much more was the effect of intrigue; and of this, who, excepting the parties immediately concerned, shall give us the history; and even when given, who shall insure its correctness? Be this however as it may, every new summary of these events, furnishes us with additional facts, and brings out something at least of those deeper machinations; and if the world should be permitted to enjoy a few years of peace and quietness, we may hope that in that respite from revolutionary madness, and from the far less

curable frenzy of imperial ambition, the means and opportunity may be obtained, of forming a more accurate and impartial judgment of the troubled period through which we have passed. After having vindicated his countrymen from the charge of jacobinism, M. Lavallee describes the vast majority of Frenchmen as desirous only of a government which shall be the guarantee and conservator of public liberty; careless about the name, provided the reality be secured.

Why, (he asks,) has France suffered and fought through the course of five-and-twenty years? It was to attain such a state of things as I have just described. What does she, at the present moment, require? That her strife shall not have been in vain.... But I fear that there are still some, whose interests and prejudices are in opposition to this anxious hope of the great majority of the French people, and who endeavour by an odious epithet to discredit the wisdom and the purity of this desire. These tactics are not new. Thus the jacobins stigmatized as royalists all the partisans of an equal liberty, and thus the ultra-royalists reproach as jacobins, those Frenchmen who stand up for a constitutional govern. ment.'

In a brief sketch of his own qualifications for the task he has undertaken, M. L. describes himself as having enjoyed the confidence of the count de Clermont-Tonnerre, and as having assisted him in his efforts to save Louis XVI. He then passed into the service of Roland, and until the close of the session of the national assembly, was at the head of the office des comptes decadaires. During the ministry of Benezech, he was principal commissary of the executive power; afterwards he became confidential secretary to a member of the directory, and finally, for ten years, chief of division in the grand chancery of the legion of honour. M. L.'s introduction, without any particular claim to novelty or interest, leads us through the usual routine of preparatory causes, which gradually but surely brought on the revolution; the low and selfish debauchery of Louis XV., the intriguing sycophancy of Maupeou, the indecisive character of Louis XVI., the unguarded and expensive dissipation of Marie Antoinette: and in addition to these defects of character, the practical errors of Louis in the recall of the refractory parliaments, and the alliance with the United States of America; these, with innumerable other blunders, and repeated failures, both theoretical and practical, were eagerly made use of by desperate and ambitious intriguers, to exasperate the public mind. Independently of the weakness of character, (very different from intellectual weakness,) of Louis, his manners and habits were not calculated to command respect. He was an excellent and sensible man, but without any thing dignified or kingly in his composition. His tastes were simple, but somewhat low;

his ordinary recreation was, we believe, working in a smithy; and in his visits to the theatre, he displayed no relish for the works of Corneille and Racine, while he exhibited the most extravagant delight at farcical and grotesque performances. The very excellencies of his character were injurious to him; and those qualities which would have made him amiable and respectable as a private individual, were destructive of his authority as a monarch. Nor was he happy in his choice of ministers. The selfish levity of Maurepas, the systematic restlessness of Brienne, the splendid charlatanism of Calonne, the vanity and ministerial insignificance of Necker, all, and each, contributed to the sure and terrible progress of the gathering storm. M. Lavallee describes the present king of France, as leading a retired and literary life; the count D'Artois as merely a man of pleasure; the house of Conde enjoying the otium cum dignitate at Chantilli; the prince of Conti distinguishing himself by an honourable frankness, censuring without reserve both men and things,' and reproving even his own son, whose 'pliant disposition rendered him more subservient to the royal will.'

But the most popular member of the royal family, was the miserable Orleans; tall and well made, but betraying in his carbuncled countenance the irregularities of his life; seeking popularity by the basest and most detestable means; and collecting around him debauchees and intriguers of the lowest and most desperate class, until men of higher talents and wider aims, found it convenient to make him their tool and their victim. The fortune which he inherited from his father, was immense; and yet so despicable was his rapacity, as to lead him into the grossest acts of meanness throughout the whole of his career. He began by seizing the plate and jewels of his father's widow, and carried his baseness to the incredible extent of stealing the very brilliants in which his father's portrait was set when presented to her. The whole of his life was worthy of its outset; and the only redeeming virtue which for a moment mingled itself with the mass of infamy, was manifested in the calmness and dignity with which he met his merited fate. The first of the factions which, in long and appalling succession, afflicted France, put this wretched man forward, as its ostensible hero, and would probably have placed him, for a time at least, upon the throne; but so excessive was his cowardice, that it compelled them to abandon him, at the very moment when his interest and their own seemed inseparably blended.

In the early scenes of the revolution, while there was much of turbulence, much enthusiasm, and much practical ignorance, displayed on the part of the new legislators, it seems to us impossible to deny that there was also, especially in the na

tional assembly, much genuine patriotism and political integrity, and in not a few individuals commanding superiority of talent. Of the two principal leaders of the opposite parties, Mirabeau, the Brutus of patriotism,' and Maury, 'the Joad of royalty,' M. Lavallee sketches the characters at length; but the first is so well known, that we shall confine ourselves to the portrait of the second.

'In these stormy discussions appeared a man whose name, during four-and-twenty years, has never ceased to be famous; a priest whose portrait has never yet been drawn, except by passion; long boasted as their Demosthenes by the friends of royalty; long insulted as a Zoilus by the pretended friends of the people; invested with the purple, and the saintly halo, (l'aureole des saints,) by Pius VI.; now made to sit in sackcloth by Pius VII. by that pope who was in turn the creature, courtier, friend, chief-priest, and evil genius of Napoleon, but always infallible, because always pope. It is already perceived that I speak of the abbé Maury......Born in the Comtat Venaissin, at Vaureas. .he came while still a young man, to Paris. He there attempted to tread in the steps of Bourdaloue, but he followed with a halting pace. He preached, and preached badly......he introduced himself to Diderot, and told him his failure; his provincial forwardness, his levitical airs, his antipathy to prejudice, pleased the philosopher, and he thought it a marvellous good joke to correct, adorn, and even to compose discourses to be delivered by a priest from the pulpit of truth. Diderot thus metamorphosed into a divine, puffed his pupil. Maury was intimate with d'Alembert, Marmontel, Helvetius, the baron d'Holbach, and others of the same stamp; the women especially assisted to bring him forward-such was the school in which he was educated. The panegyric of St. Vincent de Paule, a master-piece in its kind, was the result of this training. But he was poor, and it is a very necessary thing to be rich. His friends laid siege to the simplicity of the abbé Boismont, and persuaded him that a handsome pension would give him less trouble than the management of his official possessions; he was old, he loved ease and quiet, and he resigned his numerous benefices in favour of the abbé Maury; the abbey of Lyons was one of these. This abbey is near Peronne, and Maury was resident there, while the election to the States General were going forward. The curé of Danevoisin was elected, but after having excused himself as long as he could, he consented, only provided they would give him Maury for his colleague.'

We are told that sir Walter Raleigh burned part of his History of the World, on discovering his inability to ascertain the particulars of a transaction which took place before his eyes; and Henry IV. listening to the varying and contradictory accounts given by his officers, of a battle in which they had just

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