The Press. — London, England, 1858-05-01 00:00:00

416 might have been expected ; and it is to be re gretted that, by the use of a wrong title, Lord Normanby led to false expectations as to the exact nature of his work. It is not the his tory of the year 1848, but merely a journal kept at Paris by the lighthearted Marquis So also M Louis Blanc's work, as already stated, has a singularly inexact title. Of its so called " revelations," the most in teresting are those of his Majesty the Emperor of the French, but these only run to a few pages. We shall condense the most readable of them They are prefaced in the following fashion : Louis Bonaparte is on a throne ; and I am in exile. To me he was, to a great extent, indebted, when banished, for his return to France ; and to him is ascribable that state of things which keeps me from my country. After his attempt on Boulogne, in August ISM, I was the only =ea who dared raise a ptotest against his being tried by an unlawful jurisdiction ; and he, once become the President of the Republic, suffered • most iniquitous accusation to be brought against me, not before a jury, but before a sham tribunal. Whilst lingering at Ham, a poor forlorn prisoner, he entreated me, in a pressing letter, to come and spend a few days with him in his prison, which I did ; and when afterwards the vicissitudes of fortune, coupled with the baseness of men, made him an emperor and myself an exile, my utter spoliation was consummated by his own official servants, who were not ashamed to deprive me of a slender sum of about six hundred pounds, which I had earned by many years of literary labour, anti which, in vested in the public funds, was all my substance. Louis Blanc had reviewed " Les [(lees Nano leonniennes," and, although far from adopting its author's opinions, the reviewer did nut insult the prisoner at Ham : From the Chateau de Han, wherein he was imprisoned, by seam:toe of the Chamber of Peers, he wrote to me the letter above mentioned, in which he thanked me for not having wantonly insulted a fallen adversary, and esoressed, in very affecting terms, a strong desire that I might niske it convenient to come to him and stay at Ham for a few da ge was surrounded, at that time, with the only prestige which a true Republican may be willing to salute : he was unfortunate. His imperial pretensions had, as it were, vanished in the smoke of a wretched adventure. People were looking round for his party ; and he, bowed down, tried, condemned, denied by his partisans of that period, railed at by his servan 6 s of this day, was doomed to a lonely life in a gloomy fortress, with no other friend to whom he could unburden his heart that his physician, Dr. Connect, and a chemist, named Aoar. Res seers miser. With the request of tae prisoner, not of the prince, I complied ; he procured from the Home Minister a permission for me to enter his prison, and I set off to Ham. Of the entourage of the prisoner we are treated to some glimpses, but we shall not copy all that the author says. He arrived at the Chateau, and whit he saw there is thus told : I was ushered into a large, neatly furnished room, where little seemed to be wanting of what is required for do mestic comfort. lat once perceived —let this be said to the credit of Louis Philippe—that the prisoner was very kindly treated. He sat in a bigh•b+eked armchair, between the chimney and a table spread with books and papers. As I entered, he rose, came forward to meet the expected visitor, and shook han•is with me with a mingled expression of cordiality and reserve. My impression was that for a moment he thought of assuming a sort of stately countenance; but he was almost icatantly sensible of the mistake, did his best to appear easy and free, and we g.it into conversation. I had never seen him before. Nor was I enabled, at that time, to remark how different he was in his features, his manners, his deportment, from all the other members of Napoleon's family, whom I did not know. Bat it struck me that there was nothing in him 'of the Napoleonic type, di t be spoke with a rather foreign accent, and that he had less command of language than any man I hail ever conversed with. As long as the conversation tnroel on Louis Philippe's policy, we could not but agree. We concurred in thinking that a system would nut last long, which was based upon corrupt practices at home and a permanent humiliation abroad. Rat when the question arose what the future should be, we began to dissent. As he professed to be a true democrat and to acknow• ledge in full the principle of the sovereignty of the people : " How is this principle to be carried out, in your opinion ?" I asked. He answered unhesitatingly: ' Through universal suffrage." They then entered on a political dialogue. for which we cannot find room, but we cannot help observing that the general purport of it shows that from first to last the present Em peror of the French has been perfectly con sistent in his views. For example, in one place Louis Blanc thus interrogated the imprisoned Prince : " Well then, it is not enough for von to acknowledge the sovereignty of the people, and to bow passively to universal sultrige. You must have, as a %timber of the whole, a doer notion of your intended initiative ; you Oast hens ba4 you worobip of uotrtfloi 111frep, Patlol4 THE PRESS, MAY 1, 1858. Louis Bonaparte looked a little embarrassed ; but after a moment's silence : " My creed," said he, " is the Em pire. Was it not the Empire that raised the French nation to the summit of greatness and glory ? I am con • vinced that the destiny of the Empire rests on the national will." " But the Empire involves, I suppose, the hereditary principle?" We are surprised that Louis Blanc does not perceive that these " reveiations " attest the fact that the Emperor made then no conceal• ment of his ulterior aims. He further says:— One afternoon, he was telling me the particulars of his failure at Boulogne, when on a sudden his voice seemed to falter ; he stopped, struggled a moment to repress a sob, and burst into tears. The next day, we went out to take a walk over the narrow rampart assigned to his melancholy promenade, which was watched, of course, on all sides by sentinels. Methinks I see him still, his head reclining, walking with slow steps, and speaking in a low voice, as if fearful lest the wind should bear every word he uttered to the gaoler. The conversation now was about the " History of the Roman Emperors," as written in a book which Louis Bonaparte admired very much, on account of the partiality shown by the author for those tyrants whom Tacitus branded with everlasting infamy. In Louis Bonaparte's opinion, Tacitus was in the wrong and the modern author in the right. I had not read the book so warmly praised, but I was not at a loss to guess the secret reason why Louis Bonaparte praised it. So I took the opposite aide of the question, in a somewhat excited manner, which called forth on his part a recommendation I little anticipated. " Pray, speak low," he whispered, and turning round, he pointed to a man, who, wrapt up in a cloak, followed at a short distance, without losing sight of us. Louis Bonaparte does not remember now certainly, but I do, that he availed himself of the opportunity to expatiate on the wretchedness of that policy which needs a dark army of spies, takes root in the filthiest recesses of human nature, and glories in the very degradation of its agents. The political conversers met again in the following way However, he hail not yet availed himself of the decree which entitled him to g 3 and take his seat in the National Assembly, when, ostracised myself after having done my best to save from ostracism both the Bonaparte and the Orleans families, I came over to London, where I arrived in the beginning of September. Louis Bonaparte was still living in England. Scarcely had I put up at the Brunswick Hotel, Jerrnyn street, when a visitor was announced. It was Louis Bonaparte. He came to me in the most friendly manner, expressing how indignant he felt at the iniquitous treat ment I had experienced from men, whom I remember he spoke of with anything but kindness. This considerably embarrassed me. I could not repel the civilities he loaded me with, unless determined to set all propriety at defiance; and on the other hand, there were public grounds which pr3mpted me to avoid having any connection with him. That he detected this feeling, which I took no greater pains to conceal than was strictly requisite to keep within the hounds of good breeding, I have every reason to suppose, for he showed himself very anxious to impress me with the idea that he had no other ambition than to serve the Republic ; that he was heartily devoted to the cause of the people ; and that, on social questions especially, his opinions were, to a great extent, in accordance with my own . These are the most interesting bits in the volume, which is by no means equal in read ability to the " History• of Ten years" The dissertations on Socialism, and on the author's peculiar views of the construction of society, we decline to criticize; and we cannot give the circulation of our columns to passages in this work in which the harshest imputations are made on the Emperor of the French. We have dealt with the volume from its literary aspect. We have seen it stated that its author has learned English since his arrival in Eng land, and that it is exclusively composed by himself. His mastery of our tongue does him great credit, but however objectionable and revolutionary may be M. Louis Blanc's opinions, there never was any doubt about his high literary powers. Cathedri Petri. A Political History of the Great Latin Patriarchate. By Thomas Greenwood, M.A., Barrister-at-Law. Books I. and 11. London : Stewart, 1836. The Same. Books 111., IV., and V. London : Stewart, 1838 THIR is a remarkable hook. It is learned, laborious. impartial, and well written. In patient industry the author reminds us of the divines of the middle ages, and of the seven teenth century. Here are two goodly volumes, of nearly 1,200 pages taken together, and the author states that he has the material for three more already prepared ! We Can hardly call to mind a similar instance of literary labour in our own day. And it is the more eurprislog, wbe4 we reoolleet Shit the author could not have indulged any very confident hope of gaining many readers. The predominant thought, however, whi c h pervades our mind is that of wonder that atty student should have been able to devote him. self to such a work, knowing, as he must have known, that the whole is but a learned Inves tigation of a fiction and a fraud. If the facts of the case were really as people half a cen tury ago supposed them to be—if the Pope were really the successor of St. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome—then there might be some show of reason in investigating the history of that ecclesiastical sovereignty. But when people have been gradually awakening to the fact that the whole idea of " the Chair of St. Peter" is one which never passed through any one's brain until the days of Buse bins—i.e., until three hundred years after the supposed circumstances had taken place—it does seem strange to find a man, at this time of day, calmly discussing the question as it was supposed to stand some thirty or forty years ago. Mr. Greenwood correctly states that " no visit " of the Apostle Peter to the West is asserted " in direct and positive terms by any extant " Christian writer of the first three centuries." There is no doubt whatever that the whole story of the Apostle's visit to Rome, his bishopric of Rome, and his martyrdom at Rome, was concocted in the third and fourth centuries, when the Roman See began to exalt itself, and when it found that to derive rank and power from " the first of the Apostles" would greatly aid its pretensions. The Apostle himself, in his own epistles, plainly tells us that, when forced to leave Jerusalem, it was to the East, and not to the West, that he turned. His first epistle is addressed "to the " strangers scattered throughout Pontus, " Galatia, Cappadocia, • Asia, aild Bithynia,', and it is dated from Babylon. His second is addressed to the same parties, and he wrote it, he tells us, not long before his death. The earliest writer that we possess, alter the apos tolic age, is Clement, the third Bishop of Rome. He speaks of both Paul and Peter, but he makes one very important distinction between them. Paul, he says, was " the " herald of the Gospel both in the East and "in the West . . . lie taught righteousness " throughout the world, and having reached " to the utmost verge of the West, he passed " out of the world and entered the abodes of " the blessed." Thus, speaking of . both the Apostles, he distinguishes one of them as having travelled to the West as well as to the East. Clearly it is here implied that of Peter he had no such facts to record. But, in truth, any earnest student of early Church history will easily satisfy himself cf this—that of Petet's visit to Rome, or bishopric of Rome, there is no evidence in any early writer. The whole story was fabricated about the time of Eusebius, when the Roman See began to feel the want of some such basis to support its lofty pretensions ; and, once con coated, there was no difficulty in finding fresh maintainers of the fiction, age after age—its suitability to the wants of the case being so evident and so complete. And this is, in fact, the turning-point of the whole controversy. All else depends upon it. Peter, say the Romanists, was made by our Lord the rock on which His church was built, and the Prince of the Apostles. Now Pro testants and Papists may wrangle for days and weeks upon the text, " Thou art Peter, and " upon this rook will I build my church," — and may fail in convincing each other. But it is as well that both Protestants and P a p ists should be reminded, that the real que stion does not turn upon the interpretation of these words. The Papist may ho wholly right, and the Protestant utterly wrong, in their respez• tive views of this passage, without the Papal Supremacy being either established or over thrown by that controversy. Let the advocate of the Papacy remark, and lay it well to heart, that however triumphant he may be, in es tablishing his view of the words in Matt. xvi• 18, he will only, by that victory, have advanced one step in the argument ; and it is quite clear, that, unless he oau prove something more thsti this, the Papal Supremacy will be 1O( witiou t a ba4iii.