The Press. — London, England, 1858-04-10 00:00:00

not depend on the strength and success of the moment ; that there are certain inviolable duties ; that we cannot safely sport with the fate of governments and the peace of nations ; and that, in this momentous game, the most powerful and the moat eminent risk their honour and their lives. In a political and moral sense these considera tions were of the greatest importance. The reasons for the execution could not be put with more singular conciseness and clear strength of logic. On the other side, Guizot says But another prominent truth, equally moral and political, ought to have weighed heavily in the balance against an ettreme decision. The Emperor Napoleon hail reigned long and brilliantly, acknowledged and admired by France and Europe, and supported by the devotion of millions of men—by the people as well as by the army. Ideas of right and duty, sentiments of respect and fidelity, were confused and antagonistic in many minds. There were two actual and natural governments in presence of each other; and many, without perversity, might have hesitated which to choose. The King, Louis XVI 11., and his advisers might in their turn, without weakness, have taken into considera tion this moral confusion of which Marshal Ney pre sented the most ilinstrious example. The greater his offence against the King, with the more safety could they place clemency by the side of justice, and display, over his condemned head, that greatness of mind tied heart which has also its fall influence in establishing power and com manding fidelity. The very iolence of the reaction in favour of royalty, the bitterness of party passions, their thirst for punishment and vengeance, would have imparted to this act a still greater brilliancy of credit and effect ; for boldness and liberty would have sprung from it as natural consequences. I heard at that time a lady of fashion, usually rational and amiable, call Mademoiselle de Lan:late " a little wretch," for aiding her mother in the escape of her father. When such extravagancies of feeling and language are indulged in the hearing of kings and their advisers, they should be received as warnings to resist, and not to submit. Marshal Ney, pardoned and banished after condemnation, by royal lettera deliberately promulgated, would have given to kingly power the aspect of a rampart raising itself above all, whether friends or ene mies, to stay the tide of blood ; it would have been, in fact, the reaction of 1815 subdued and extinguished, as well as that of the Hundred Days. Admirable writing, vigorous thinking, excel lent sentiments! But what did Guizot—" the " man who went to Ghent "—do or say then ? That is a question which sarcastic lips will urge at Paris, as passage after passage of a similar kind may 131 seen in this volume. The able author anticipates the cavils and the cri ticism of his censors, and thus tries to silence them : Ido not pretend to have thought and said then, all that I say and think at present. I was sorrowful and perplexed. The King's ministers were in a similar predicament. They believed that they neither could nor ought to recom• mend clemency. In this momentous contingency, power knew not bow to be great, sometimes the only method of becoming strong. The " candour of Guizot " was a double-edged weapon of a formidable kind. This apologetic air, white affecting the severe tone of history in judging others, has something of the savour of an austere Tartq(fe We shall not, however, discuss here the character of M. Guizot,as there will be other opportunities of doing so. Sonic of the weaker traits of his nature are uncon sciously revealed in these pages. The air of opinionative obstinacy with which he contends for his views,'and the singular pliability before power of this stern censor, have alwa) a con trasted strangely in this eminent man's career. As a philosophical lecturer on history, not only on the laws which regulate it, but on the course of events in modern ages, Guizot could not be surpassed. His masterly grasp in generalization is rendered doubly strong by his prodigious command over literary details, and by his penetration in discovering the real sources of historical knowledge. As a man of action--hut in that capacity we shall have to notice him in the future volumes of this work. In the meantime, we shall present some of the lighter passages in this able volume. Fouchti is thus described : I only met the Duke of Otranto twice, and had but two shortconversations with him. No man ever so thoroughly gave me the idea of fearless, ironical, cynical indifference, of imperturbable self possession combined with an inordi- nate love of action and prominence, and of a Sued resolu tion to stop at nothing that might promote success, not from any settled design, but according to the plan or chance of the moment. He bad acquired from his long associations as a Jacobin pro-consul, a kind of audacious independence; and remained a hardened pupil of the Revolution, while, at the same time, he became an unscrnpuloua implement of the Government and the Court. The following description of Bellinger is admirably penned. No one but Guizot could condense all the critical points with such sin gular closeness:— At the same moment a man of the people, born a poet and rendered still more poetical by art, celebrated, excited, 1hi'',...,.. ' -., iiiih THE PRESS, APRIL 10, 1858, and expanded, through his songs, popular instincts and passions in opposition to everything that recalled the old system, and, above all, against the pretensions and supre• macy of the Church. M. Beranger, in his heart, was neither a revolutionist nor an unbeliever ; he was morally more honest, and politically more rational, than his songs ; but, a democrat by conviction as well as inclination, and carried away into licence and want of forethought by the spirit of democracy, he attacked indiscriminately every thing that was ungracious to the people, troubling himself little as to the range of his blows, looking upon the success of his songs as a victory achieved by liberty, and forgetting that religious faith and respect for things holy are nowhere more necessary than in the bosom of democratic and liberal associations. i belir.•ve he discovered this a little too late, when he found himself individually confronted by the p salons which his ballads had fomented, and the dreams he had transformed to realities. He then hastened, with sound sense and dignity, to escape from the political arena, and almost from the world, unchanged in his sentiments, but somewhat regretful and uneasy for the consequences of the war in which he bad taken such a prominent pert. Under the Restoration he was full of confidence and z-al, enjoying his popularity with modesty, and more seriously hostile anti influential than any sonnetteer had ever been before him. Our French copy of this work has not come to hand, but Guizot could scarcely have called Beranger a " sonnetteer," for which the French word would be ‘ 1 sonnettier "or poetereau." it is more probable that Guizot used Beran gees own modest word for his vocation, " ehan sonnier," which exactly means a " ballad maker." Elsewhere, also, we find the word " sonnetteer" absurdly misemployed in this volume. The further portions of this work will in crease in personal interest, and we hope that we may have the pleasure of receiving another volume during the present season. It was after 1830 that M Guizot became a man of action ; and in describing that part of his career he will, probably, give the world some extraordinary revelations. Essays and Re►nains of the Rev. Robert Alfred Vaughan. Edited, with a Memoir, by the Rev. Robert Vaughan, D.D. London: J. W. Parker and Son. THE practice of reprinting articles contributed to Reviews " has increased, is increasing, and " ought to be diminished." There is an incon gruity in elevating that which is by its nature ephemeral into the ranks of permanent litera ture. Hence no doubt the rule for many years adhe red to by the managers of the Literary Fund, that periodiciti writers should not be classed among regular professional authors. The practical requirements of literature at the present day have compelled the relaxation of this provision, and it is of course undeniable that the expansion of the old-fashioned cri tique into the elal-orate modern essay has done much to break down the distinction be tween the critic and the original writer. As the line of demarcation grows fainter, the ob jection to this system of republication of course grows less. But it still exists ; and even now a composition may be highly ser viceable to the reading world in the columns of a magazine which is altogether deficient in the qualities requisite to constitute it a x74"/Acs t:r In the second place, the system of which we speak is as it were a short road to fame, and eagerly pursued by many writers who have neither the abilities nor the industry to complete an independent work. Ushered into public notice under the wing of some first•class periodical, the young litterateur at once secures a favourable audience. Nothing that is not good, people think, can have been admitted into the columns of this or that celebrated review or journal ; forgetting that what was very good there is not necessarily of equal merit in another sphere. It is a fact, also, that the uninitiated public are apt to look with reverence on any man who has penetrated through the triple brass with which the approaches to all first-class periodicals are fenced off, and has succeeded in becoming one of that mysterious plurality whose utterances possess corporate weight. This is shown by their readiness to attribute articles to cele brated people who have perhaps never called themselves "we " in all their lives ; and men who come before the world as regular contri butors to a work of this character shine with a degree of reflected light which gives them an undue advantage over other members of , tho craft. MI .b••• But we are wandering from Mr. Vaughan Many of the above remarks d o not apply to hi; particular case. He has written a book —and a book of mark and merit. This is sufficient to exonerate him from the charge of stealing into a position to which his literary calibre did not entitle him. But it by no meialnaspsfo,lalto:setshuast the same fact affords any go o d ground for the present reprint. Nothing, perhaps, more in reading the serious portions of these essays than the youthfulness which pervades them—youthfulness both of idea and of style. The effect is, that although we are convinced all the time that the writer was a very clever man, we cannot get on with his productions. A young man of extensive reading and most accomplished mind he evidently must have been. But it may fairly be doubted whether at the age of two and twenty the greatest genius on record could have written much de serving the attention of men on such subjects as Mr. Vaughan selected for his maiden effort. Accordingly, the essay on ()tiger', though full of reading, written throughout with smoothness and ease, and adorned at inter vals by a happy illustration or a well-chosen epithet, totally fails to arrest the attention or to leave any definite impression on the mind. The same may be said of the essays on S3hleiermacher and Savonarola. Page after page presents itself with the most inviting heading at the top of it, and the most dis appointing vacuity below. We search in vain for thought. We find instead of it a reproduc tion of the thoughts of others, arranged to look original. This is the art of the Prize Es s ay. He who is a master of it proves no doubt that he has a good intellectual diges tion ; gives good promise of a powerful mind that may hereafter bring forth fruit, but nothing more. We do not at all intend to depreciate Mr. Vaughan. We only mean that he has not risen superior to the conditions under which a youth of one and twenty com monly exerts his reflective faculties, and that, however valuable may be his prolusions as evidence of future vigour, they have little or no value as deliberate judgments on the sub jects he has taken in hand. Even in the essays which were composed at a more advanced period we fail to catch any thing very striking or original. In an essay on " Hypatia" we find a page headed " Charac teristics of Mr. Kingsley's style," and wo read below : The strength so conspicuous in Mr. Kingsley 's writings is power of that kiud which results from the consecra• tion of great gifts to a great purpose. We might as well say the violence so conspi cuous in a cannon-ball is power of that kind which results from the application of a great discovery to a great gun. We assure our readers that there is no unfairness in the choice of the above instance. The essays abound in similar platitudes ; and we cannot resist the suspicion that Mr. Vaughan was unlucky enough to have been clothed in early life with the character of an infant phenome non—that a fond family puffed him into a spurious precocity, and made him what Nature never intended him to be—a juvenile pedant. It appears to us that Mr. Vaughan himself had a truer presentiment of his real vocation than his friends had. He possessed many of the qualities which are characteristic of poetic genius. Sometimes his fancies are truly graceful and beautiful. The simile of the willow and violet ia the Origen essay is an example : The men who have embraced such voluntary humilia tion have too commonly accounted it quite proper to in demnify themselves by deriving from the meagreness of their diet supplies whereon their self•righteousuess may fare sumptuously every day, and from the spareness of their apparel abundant reason fur compassing themselves with pride as witii a garment. Their humility has been less that of the violet than that of the willow, which, while it bends its head with a graceful submissiveness, seems to be constantly employed in contemplating its image in the stream. This illustration was greatly admired by Sir James Stephen. as we arq informed in the memoir prefixed to these volumes, in winch a long letter of Sir James is inserted. We may here take the opportunity of observing that wo should have liked the preface a great deal better without this and similar quotations, which remind one rather painfully of the puffing advertisements of publishers. Sir