The Sun.
London, England, 1864-06-08 00:00:00

]LITERATURE.

Le Correspondant d'Avril et de Mai. Chaff ley

Douniol.

Several articles of unusual interest are comprised
in these two numbers of Le Correspondent. Upon
the article leading off the later of the two, the one
but just now published, we have already commented
in our leading columns. The argument therein put
forth, it may be remembered, hail relation to the
affairs of Poland, and emanated from the hand of
❑o less illustrious a writer, publicist, statesman
than the Count de Montalembert. We spoke of it,
at the time as one of the moat impressive and re-
markable appeals to the nobler sympathies of Europe
that has ever been addressed to his contem-
poraries even by M. de Montalerribcrt. Turning
back to it again, hearkening once more to these
eloquent and impassioned utteraneea, we are more
than ever of that opinion. It is a cry of love, of
pity, of homage, of sympathy for that most cruelly
oppressed among all the European nationalities—a
cry so piercing and persuasive that, but for the
miserable record of these last seventy years of Rus-
sian cruelty and European apathy, we might
almost hope for its penetrating to the conscience of
the Czar and to the conscience also, we might
say, of the rest of Christendom ! For, while
the Czar himself is of course the chief
offender in the perpetration of this hideous
crime of oppression, the other Powers are guilty
also with the blood-guiltiness of complicity or con-
nivance. The accents of the Count de Montalembert
as now heard through this noble effasion of his
genius, at once as an orator, es a writer, as a states-
man, and as a great Christian philanthropist, must
to gratoful, we may be certain, to all such earnest

sympathisers with the Polish population, no w living,
as the hon. member for King's County—might be
grateful, one is almost tempted to say in pagan
phrase, to the manes of Mich departed champions of
the cause of Poland as the late gentle hearted,
noble minded Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart. At the
least if inoperative of good, by reason of the obdu-
racy of those whom the Count de Montalemlsert is
addressing, namely, all the right thinking men of
Christendom of all tonguo3 and of all countries—the
Count may once more, at least, exclaim (and with

how much reason !) as he has so often done before
now upon no less momentous occasions, " Liberavi
animanz meant!" He has unburthened his sow

by giving utterance t6tho thoughts, emotions, hopes,

aspirations, imparting so fervid an eloquence to his
argument throughout this remarkable paper,eutitled,
"Le Pape et la Pologne"—and, while unburthen
ing his own soul in so writing, ho has articulated

the thoughts, emotions, hopes, aspirations, lying
until now dumb and unuttered in the breasts, w:
believe, of many millions of his contemporaries. It
is with a sense of personal obligation, therefore,

that we read an argument such as this of
the Count [de Montalemberes. He says

for us what we cannot express—what at least
we could not thus have expressed—for ourselves.
Re is again, as he has been before now so often
and so well, the mouthpiece of the Conscience of
Christendom ! It is like a light suddenly beheld
in the darkness—a voice abruptly audible in
the siience—a light whose radiance, a voice whose
eloquence is known full well to us all ! Glancing
through the rest of the contents of this latest
number of Le Correspondant and its immediate
predecessor, we observe that Louis Joubert
nas just now brought to a close his nouvelle of " La
Jeunesse du Doyen"—that Victor Fournel has a
graphic little disquisition upon " Les Alonumens
du Nouveau Paris"—that the ex-Deputy Keller
analyses rather searchingly the three last Budgets
of the Imperial Government —that Leon Lagrange
has a tribute to the memory of Ilippolyte Flandrin
(of whom, by the way, the Count de Montalembert
speaks incidentally and very touchingly towards the
close of his, the Count's, paper about Poland as " the
most Christian and the most deeply to be deplored
among all contemporary artists")—and, finally, be it
nere remarked in regard to the contents of the April
number of this able periodical, that P. Douhaire
contributes to the last published instalment but one
of Le Correspondant a criticism very interesting,
indeed, as coming from the hand of a Frenchman,
upon the writing and genius of the late Mr. Thacke•
ray. Perhaps the most attractive paper in the new
livraison of Le Correspondant, after the inaugu-•
rative paper of the number from the hand of the
Count de Montalembert, is H. Biazs de Bury's
memorial chapter upon the great composer of the

"Huguenots" and "Le Prophete," recently de-
ceased.

People's Edition of Macaulay's _History of England.
Part VIII. Longman and Company.

The third volume of this wonderfully cheap and
admirably got-up popular edition of Macaulay's
colossal fragment of our National History, regarded
from a purely Whig point of view, is here, in this
eighth shilling instalment, duly commenced. As
a piece of magnificent writing it is beyond the
reach of any exaggeration in the way of praise.
As an example of herculean labour, in the way of
research, it becomes more and more remarkable at
every fresh examination of it. But as for its free-
dom from bias, from prejudice, from predilection—
well, the less said about all that the better. It
was little else than the statement of a fact, when
somebody dubbed it, years ago, on its first publi-
cation, A Great Whig Pamphlet. The genius of
Lord Macaulay, as Sir Archibald Alison well said
of it, was more forensic than judicial.