The Press. — London, England, 1855-03-31 00:00:00

310 married I got into the habit of accompanying my husband to his church, and I continued to go there from the force of habit and for convenience, but never from conviction of its doctrines being better than those of the Catholic Church." Count d'Orsay informed Mr. Madden that Lady Blessington never ceased to be a Catholic " in her heart ;" and it appears from the fol lowing anecdote that he was himself a Catholic of the same esoteric school. Mr. Madden, visiting him a few weeks before his death, turned his attention charitably to the subject : I said, among the many objects which caught my attention in the room, I was very glad to see a crucifix placed over the head of his bed ; men living in the world as he had done were so much in the habit of forgetting all early religious feelings. D'Orsay seemed hurt at the observation. I then plainly said to him, " The fact is, I imagined, or rather I sup posed, you had followed Lady Blessington's example, if not in giving up your min religion, in seeming to conform to another more in vogue in England." l)'Orsay rose up with considerable energy, and stood erect and firm, with obvious exertion, for a few seconds, looking like himself again, and, pointing to the head of the bed, he said, " Do you see those two swords ?" pointing to two small swords which were hung over the crucifix crosswise : " do you see that sword to the right ? With that sword I fought in de fence of my religion. I had only joined my regiment a few days, when an officer at the mess•table used disgusting and impious language in speaking of the Blessed Virgin. I called on him to desist ; he repeated the foul language he had used ; I threw a plate of spinach across the table in his face; a challenge ensued; we fought that evening on the rampert of the town; and I have kept that sword ever since." This story will produce different effects upon different persons, according to their notions of the qualities that enter into the religious character, and the manifestations which they are disposed to accept as evidences of religious conviction. To us it is the most melancholy and pitiable passage in the whole book. Of the literary pretensions of this work it is scarcely necessary to speak. It possesses the merit of carrying the art of book making to the last practicable extremity. The particulars it contains concerning the life of Lady Blessington might be presented in twenty pages ; but we have here something like 1,500, swelled out by extracts from news papers, magazines, diaries, and travels, and extraneous accounts of gods, men, and co lumns, introduced apparently for no other purpose than to increase the bulk of the pub lication. The narrative is involved and inco herent. The story goes up and down, and there is neither sequence in the relation nor accuracy iu the facts. The same things are not only often repeated, and repeated out of place, but repeated differently. The writer does not always seem to be quite sure of his own statements, and sometimes contradicts them without setting them right. The work abounds in blunders. Some of them may pro bably be referred to the printer, such as a reference in the text to a note that has no existence; but the bulk of them must be laid to the account of the author himself. In one place we are told that the " bridegroom of " Captain Farmer was a Captain Hardinge ;" in another, that Captain Jenkins was married to the Baroness Calabrella, which he could not have been, unless he had undergone the pro cess of disinterment ; and in a third we are informed that Sir Robert Peel pronounced a noble eulogy on his illustrious friend the Duke of Wellington, the deceased being mistaken for the survivor, and the panegyric delivered by the Duko being transferred to the states man. Slipshod writing and inaccuracies of detail, however, are venial faults in compa rison with those graver demerits which we have felt it our duty to point nut as a warning and example to future writers of contemporary memoirs—a class of works always dangerous, and sometimes pernicious. Metnoires (le M. Dupin. Paris : H. Plon. WE never admired M. Dupin in any of the characters in which it has been his lot to ftgure on the public stage. People say, to be sure, that as an advocate none of his time possessed such vast and varied stores of legal lore ; but it has always seemed to us, from all that we have heard and read, that his reputation at the bar was based, not ou learn ing, but on the vehement claptrap advocacy of political offenders at a timo when political passions raged fiercely. Certain it is, that it is not in the defence of Marshal Ney ; of the Wee Englishman, Wilson, liutchinvon, and THE PRESS. Bruce, accused of having caused the escape of Lavalette; of Camillo'', who attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington; of the generals of Napoleon, who conspired . against the Government; and of the journalists who wrote sedition, that we must look for any wonderful display of legal knowledge ; yet it was such cases that made him famous. As a politician we hold that nothing can be said in his favour; for in our eyes a d an who plays a part in poli should possess principle, and he notoriously never had any — witness the scandalous manner in which under Louis Philippe he was by turns in almost every political party, from extreme democracy to extreme Conservatism—witness the infamy with which, after the Revolution of 1848, he hurried to the Hotel de Ville to proclaim himself a republican—witness his cringing to the Republic in the heyday of its strength, and his insolent abandonment of it when it fell into distress—witness his disgust ing crouching at the feet of Louis Napoleon, after the coup ditat of December. We hold, too, that in politics a man should think much of the general weal, and but little of his own; but everybody who knows anything of the public men of France knows that M. Dupin, throughout his career, has never had any other object in view than to fill his pockets from those of the pablic. It was to put money in his purse that he was the Attorney-Gcneral to the revolutionists under the elder Bourbons ; it was to get the place of Procureur-General of the Court of Cessation, with its 30,000 francs a year, that he declared for the Govern ment of Louis Philippe ; it was to keep that place that he always contrived to stand well with his barricade Majesty, though he was often on very bad terms indeed with his Ministers ; it was to be permitted to retain it that he bent low to the republican gentry in 1848 ; and it was with a howl of despair that he found himself forced to resign it after the coup d gat. As President of the Chamber of Deputies his partiality was gross, and his bearing undignified; and, as President of the Republican Assemblies, it may safely be said that by his rudeness, insolence, and violence,he did more than any other individual to bring the parliamentary form of government into contempt. He has always flattered himself that he possessed great oratorical powers; but his style of speaking at the bar was coarse as that of the Old Bayley, and in the tribune he ap peared more an advocate than an orator. He has long enjoyed the reputation of a wit; but his wit, which is unquestionable, is of the malignant kind, and has deeply wounded many a worthy man. In manner he affects rusticity, but he is as vain as a peacock, and as supple as a reed. Such is the worthy M. Dupin, who, in com pliance with the prevailing fashion of the day in France, has just given to the public the first volume of the memoirs of his eventful life. There are certainly few persons in ,France who have seen so much of public affairs :as he has done during the last forty years, from, and including, the downfal of Napoleon to .the re-establishment of the Empire by another Napoleon. He has been, in fact, a close spectator of, or an actor in, all the great and mighty events that have agitated or con vulsed his country. It might have been ex pected, therefore, that his memoirs would have been a valuable contribution to modern history. But the first volume of them, which is all that has yet appeared, is nothing of the kind. It consists of what he calls " souvenirs " of the bar," and professes to give an account of the more important cases in which he was engaged as an advocate ; but the details of each case are for the most part very bald and scanty, and are of such a dry, technical cha racter that they can only be interesting to, or, in fact, understood by, professional lawyers. But, as this way of treating his subjects would not have been sufficient to swell out his volume to the 560 pages and more on which his publisher insisted, the good gentleman has made copious quotations from his speeches, from newspaper articles about him, from par liamentary and official papers, from books and pamphlets, from private letters and accounts, and from all sorts of documents imaginable, printed and written. A book thus concocted has no right to expeet S4TURDAY, the honour of a detailed notice from the hands of a critic, and it shall not receive one. But we will notice one matter. It is that M. Dupin seems very anxious to relieve himself of the responsibility which has long weighed on him of having advised poor Marshal Ney badly in his famous trial, and equally anxious to fix upon the Duke of Wellington the charge of a want of magnanimity and generosity in not preserving the life of Ney. On the first point M. Dupin appears to us to fail com pletely. It is certain that he made Ney refuse to be tried by a court-martial composed of his brother generals, by which he was almost cer tain to be acquitted, and accept a trial before the Chamber of Peers, by which he was quite certain to be condemned. On the second point we altogether differ from M. Dupin. In a military point of view Ney most un doubtedly deserved his fate, for he was guilty of desertion to the enemy and of treason ; and Wellington, as a good soldier, could not con scientiously protect so great a military crimi nal. He, besides, had no right whatsoever to interfere between the French Government and one of its own subjects. Apropos of Wel lington, M. Dupin, in noticing the trial of his precious client, the assassin Cantillon, has the . bad taste not only to sneer at the duke, but to turn the attempt to murder him into ridicule! Vain as we knew M. Dupin to be, we could hardly have believed him capable of making such a grotesque exhibition of vanity as he has done in this book. He actually thinks it worth while to inform the world that when he was a law student at Paris he lived in three different places—the Place St. Andre des Arts, Rue Hautefeuille, and Rue Payee St. Andre! He gravely quotes eulogiums on himself, some of them very extravagant, from newspapers, and biographical sketches written by his friends and flatterers. He records dinners given to him, and presents made to him ; and he cites with complacency these sublime lines from a poem in his honour A cote de cypres funebres, II cusillit d'immortels lauriers En vengeant ceux non morns celebres De grands et malheureux guerriers; but, unfortunately, he neglects to explain what on earth they mean. We have looked twice through the book in the hope of finding something worthy of trans lating ; but the only passage we have hit upon likely to interest our readers is the fol lowing ; and that it will be seen is apropos des boats, having about as much to do with the subject matter of the book as with a treatiso on astronomy : In the year MO, when I was President of the Assembly, I paid a visit to the porcelain manufactory at Sevres. My attention was particularly drawn to a magnificent portrait of Prince Albert, which was executed by order of King Louis Philippe, together with one of Queen Victoria, and they were both to be presented to her Majesty. The portrait of the Queen was sent. I asked why that of Prince Albert was still there? I was told that as it was being baked it became slightly cracked, and that it had been determined on recommencing it ; but that the Revolution of 1848 had stopped the operation. 1 asked where the crack was, for it did not appear either in the face or the bands, which were of perfect beauty. I had to look very close in order to perceive it in the black coat in which the Prince was represented in truth, it was carry ing love of art very far indeed, when such a slight accident, scarcely visible even quite close, was considered sufficient to prevent the delivery of an admimblrexecuted work. This susceptibility, however, oould not be blamed on the part of the manufactory. But as it was not possible to hope that the portrait could be recommenced, I wrote to the King and asked him if, supposing I were able to ob tain the delivery of it, he would not wish to receive it in order to oomplete his present. The reply soon came; it expressed the pleasure the King would feel on receiving the portrait. " I always thought as you think," he wrote, " that the little defect in the baking of the portrait of Prince Albert was not worth noticing. But poor Brogniart was so anxious to have it recommenced, in order not to send to England a defective piece, that I gave way, and contented to its being recom menced. I have since greatly regretted having done so. If, however, it be possible to cause it to be restored to me — which would be just, for it is my property—it would cause me much satisfaction, and I should have great pleasure in presenting it to the Queen of England, who I believe de sires it greatly." I thereupon asked the President of the Republic (Louis Napoleon) for it, and he gave it up to me in the must gracious manner. The King, by a letter of the 27th of March, expressed the pleasure which he felt st receiving it, and " anthmised me to thank the President in his name." This I did. The portrait arrived safely, and figured at the Exhibition of London. In the month of June, 1851, I had the honour to be presented to the Queen and Priam Alberti and I gave them the history et the pestrett,