ception of the ludicrous, the inappropriate, or the exaggerated, would have always rendered his remarks of valuable application, if, unfortunately, the insincerity of his mind had not often led him to compliment persons whom in his secret heart he laughed at and despised. Thus, while the once celebrated Thomas was in reality a frequent subject of ridicule with him, so much so that in speaking of any piece of bombastic nonsense, he used to call it, not galimatias, but gali-Thomas; he gravely addressed him after reading his Eloge on Descartes.

-

"Descartes is no longer read; but his eulogy will be read, which is at the same time your own. Ah! what a noble and enlightened spirit do you display," &c. &c.

"I am told you are writing an epic poem on the Czar Peter. You were created to celebrate great men; it is for you to paint your brethren.

Thomas, to whom these ironical praises were addressed, though a great man in his day and generation, has sunk, and we think not without reason, into oblivion. We are surprised to find Gibbon in his journal speaking of him in language like this," I have finished the Eloge of the Duc de Sully. M. Thomas is a great orator. What strength of thought; what rapidity of style! He has the soul of a citizen, the spirit of a philosopher, and the pencil of a great painter. It is Demosthenes, but Demosthenes who has sacrificed to the graces." Were any thing wanting to show that Gibbon's taste was nearly in the inverse ratio of his learning, this notable estimate of Thomas would be sufficient to settle the question.

39

In one respect certainly, Thomas had greatly the advantage of Voltaire and of most of the literary men by whom he was surrounded. He was a man of conscience and probity, of simple manners, well acquainted with antiquity, with a sincere enthusiasm in favour of reason and truth, of which he seemed to consider himself a sort of missionary. "By temperament and principles," says Marmontel, "he was a stoic, whose virtues should have been exposed to the severest trials." These, however, were not to be found in Parisian society, and amidst the even current of the eighteenth century; and Thomas, who might really have been an orator, if fit occasions and great

interests had presented themselves in France for the developement of a manly and effective eloquence, remained to the last, notwithstanding the most anxious efforts on his part, a mere rhetorician, laboriously composing critical eloges of personages long before quietly inurned, which, though they might excite the applause of academies, fell coldly on the public ear of his own time, and have been forgotten by posterity.

How different from those funeral discourses which the great orators of antiquity or of France had occasionally pronounced in circumstances really calculated to call forth a genuine and impassioned eloquence in the speaker, and to leave on the minds of his audience impressions that might be at once of immediate power and of abiding utility! When Pericles pronounced the funeral oration of those who had fallen in the Peloponnesian war, he was surrounded by the survivors of the contest, and by the fathers, orphans, and widows of those who had died for their country; the youth of Athens stood intent to hear the praises of their bravest heroes spoken by their greatest statesman, and to gather from his lips incentives to imitate or surpass the fallen. When Massillon pronounced his solemn address above the dead body of Louis XIV., or Bossuet over that of Turenne, the pall which covered the narrow mansion into which royalty had shrunk, lay before the eyes of the audience; they saw before them the very coffin in which the victor of a hundred battles now rested from his labours. All around them was the contrast of the trappings of royalty and the trophies of military renown with the solemn emblems of mortality; and from above them looked down the fretted roof of that ancient pile which had already opened its vaults to so many of the princes and heroes of France, and was yet destined to receive so many more into its bosom. The very numbers of the multitude thus congregated together, where each could read the re flection of his own feelings in another's eyes, incalculably increased the power and the magic of speech, because each borrowed excitement from the enthusiasm of his neighbour. Before the

orator had uttered a word, the prevailing tone of feeling, which it was his province to excite, had already

penetrated all hearts; he had but the simple task assigned to him of developing and heightening it, and directing it to the contemplations of the vanity of earthly grandeur, and the disappointment of all hopes which were not" anchored in heaven."

ing over chairs; and the success of the French Rhetorician and the German Baron, in attaining the respective objects of their exertions, has been very much upon a par. There is more simple beauty in the following passage from one of Thomas' letters written to Ducis the dramatist, in which, avoiding en

dies

All that this world is proud of. From

their spheres

The stars of human glory are cast down, Perish the roses and the flowers of kings, Princes and emperors; and the crowns and palms

Of all the mighty, wither'd and consumed!"

No wonder if "in such a place as this, at such an hour," surrounded with such accompaniments, the hearts of the vast audience vibrated responsive to every varied movement of the orator, as he traced the carcer of the monarch or the warrior, from its helpless commencement in infancy to that inevitable termination which awaits the rich and poor alike, and were alternately roused to deep reflection, melted to sympathetic tears, or impressed with the ardent wish to become humbler, wiser, and better.

the

But those eloges in which Thomas dealt, in which that warmth and vehemence of sentiment which can only be appropriately employed in reference to the feelings of the present was applied to the past, and our enthusiasm or our tears invoked for those who had closed their account centuries before, nay, to use the language of Sir Thomas Brown, had "quietly rested beneath drums and tramplings of three conquests," are at once felt to be unreal, and therefore inefficient; eloquence uttered to the wind-the voice of one crying in the desert-without a motive and without an audience; with no other practical object, in fact, except to display his own talent in such academical exercitations. We cannot be lieve that the orator is himself influenced by the feelings which he seeks to excite.

"What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?"

Our sympathies are on their guard against him, and the more he labours by an assumed warmth to excite them, the less he is likely to succeed in his aim. For eloquence is not attained by straining any more than liveliness by jump.

complained, he expresses the natural emotions created by a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, than in the pompous paragraphs of the Eloge on Descartes, or Sully, or Marcus Aurelius.

"I wish I could accompany you on your visit to the Grande Chartreuse. The place is made for you. How many tender and melancholy ideas will it awaken in your imagination! I know you will be more than once tempted to remain; you will leave it at least with the deepest regret. These pious solitaries have abridged and simplified the drama of life; they think of nothing but its denouement, to which they are incessantly hurrying. There life is but the apprenticeship of death; but a death that borders upon heaven; it is a gate that opens upon eter. nity. The very gloom of the desert they inhabit, resembles a tomb. They seem to have retired to the farthest distance from life.

"Ah! how different will the sight of Ferney be to you! What a contrast! There every thing tended towards agitation and restlessness. It, too, was a retreat; but the retreat of one who, from his solitude, wished to shake the world, and mingled in all those events, the most distant rumour of which never reaches the other asylum. Even now we can scarcely believe that his dust enjoys repose.

"I have learned with grief the death of the poor Abbe Millot. My dear friend, the cannon is piercing our lines, the ranks are closing up every moment. This is fearful. Let us

love each other to our latest hour; and let him that survives the other, continue to love and cherish his memory. What asylum more sweet or more honourable can it have than in the heart of a friend?"

The writings of Thomas may be considered as entirely belonging to the class of criticism; for his Eulogies are critical biographies of those great men to whom he thought fit to assign a place in his Pantheon; and his Essai sur les Eloges (as if he thought he

never could have enough of eulogy), is a critical history of the panegyrical effusions of antiquity, in which he has omitted precisely that branch of the subject in which novelty and originality might be found, namely, the productions of this class which may be found among the writings of the fathers of the Christian Church. "If any thing," says Villemain, "could make us feel anew the impression of that eloquence which animated the brightest days of Greece-if any thing could present to us the public square of Athens under another form-it was a catacomb of a Christian church. There the orators were free and enthusiastic spirits, celebrating the great example of some one of their body who had died for the common cause. What interest can I experience in the perusal of the compliments which Libanius addressed to the Emperor Valens, and afterwards to Theodosius, or any other emperor? At a period more favourable for letters, what lively curiosity can I feel for the analysis of the long eulogies which Pliny addressed, face to face, to the Emperor Trajan? But when, following the steps of some of those obscure and vehement orators who were formed in the school of Christianity, we descend into some meeting of that persecuted sect; and there some one rises, commences by prayer, and afterwards, in terms energetic and familiar, with enthusiasm, and with the presentiment of martyrdom before him, describes the sorrows and the constancy of him whose death the Christian body is lamenting, can we not conceive with what a vivid life these panegyrics were animated, which might be interrupted every instant by the satellites of the Emperor, and the renewal of persecution? There is, for instance, in the works of St Cyprian, a composition entitled In Laudes Martyrum:' it boasts not the pure and correct eloquence of Greece; it is an eloquence which approaches more nearly to the vehement energy of some of the orators of the sixteenth century. There there are no pompous praises, no elegantly rounded phrases: the orator tells you, When the executioners were torturing the victims of our faith, I have perceived by the words of the spectators how deeply they were struck by that greatness of mind which enabled them to triumph over suffering. I have heard them say, 'This

NO. CCLXXXVII. VOL. XLVI.

man has children-he has a wife at home; and neither weakness of heart, nor pity for these dear pledges, could withdraw him from the sacrifice: we must learn to know this religion, and to penetrate into its virtue. That is no light confession to make, for which a man must be ready to die.' These simple words, which I translate imperfectly and from memory, have a native strength of eloquence which you will not find in all the panegyrics of the empire.''

A much more just estimate of the requisites of oratory had been formed by Marmontel, whose testimony to the stoical virtue of Thomas' character we have already noticed. Indeed, as a critic generally, we should be inclined to rank him next to Voltaire. His Elemens de la Littérature, are full of just and ingenious observations; and he has a peculiar talent of illustrating his precepts by well-selected examples. Tomost of his observations on oratory we cordially subscribe; they are cal'culated to form a sound, masculine, business-like style of speaking ;—the very style in which French oratory was at this time, and up to the appearance of Mirabeau, lamentably deficient. The general popularity which his Moral Tales retain, even at the present day, sufficiently proves his talent as an agreeable narrator; a requisite in which, indeed, few of the eminent French writers of the time were deficient. In fact, they transferred to their written compositions the style which was found effective in conversation, avoiding longueurs, and mingling a dash of irony even with the sentimental. Whatever we may think of their morality, the grace and naiveté of such tales as Annette and Lubin, and Heureusement, will always find them readers, when more ambitious productions are forgotten.

On the other hand, we cannot help thinking that his Belisarius has been egregiously overpraised. No doubt, at the time of its appearance, its dissertations on philanthropy and toleration were somewhat newer than they now-a-days appear. But granting this, it is still difficult to account for the exaggeration of praise upon the one hand, and the alarm and opposition on the other, with which the work was received. "Taste was lost," says Voltaire,-"we were falling into barbarism; the eighteenth century would

Y

have been irrecoverably sunk in the mire, if it had not been for,"-what think ye, gentle readers?. "for the fifteenth chapter of Belisarius!" Read this wonder-working chapter at your leisure, and see if you recognise in it the instrument of national regeneration,

But if we are at a loss to perceive the stupendous importance of the fifthteenth chapter of Belisarius, we are scarcely less tempted to smile at the alarm of the Sorbonne, who probably applying the maxim noscitur a socis, and not liking the school in which Marmontel had formed his views, took it for granted that the whole work was of a very pestilent and dangerous complexion, and accordingly pronounced a severe censure against Belisarius; and having selected from it thirty-two propositions, which they declared heretical, printed their anathema for the benefit of the author and the public. general drift of the censure may be gathered from one of the propositions thus denounced. Marmontel had said, "It is not by the light of the stake that we must enlighten the mind." The celebrated Turgot, who appeared as the defender of Marmontel, concluded logically enough, that, as the Sorbonne had selected this proposition for censure, they meant to advocate its opposite;-that it was by the light of the stake that the mind must be enlightened.

The

Two other critical writers of this period deserve notice, La Harpe, the author of the Cours de Littérature, and the learned author of the Travels of Anacharsis, Barthelemy.

It would be very unjust to deny to the former the conscientious study of the literatures to which he has chiefly devoted his attention-we mean the classic literatures and that of his own nation-for of English and Spanish he appears to have known nothing. But, though more pains-taking and conscientious than Voltaire, he was, after all, but very indifferently acquainted with Greek; and the strange errors into which he has fallen in his translations of Sophocles have been severely exposed by Brunck. "The Latin writers," says Villemain, "Cicero and Livy, were more familiar to him. He analyzes them with talent and vivacity; frequently nothing is wanting to his eulogiums except having failed to catch the true meaning of the

author." The exception, however, it must be admitted, is rather an import

ant one.

"Shall I add," continues Villemain, 66 a thousand errors of detail which have been pointed out by learned foreigners or Frenchmen ? Shall I mention that, in speaking of Aristotle, La Harpe forgets to mention that he has composed a sublime hymn ?-that he has said nothing of a crowd of precious fragments of Greek poetry?—that he judges of Aristophanes, Pindar, Thucydides, Xenophon, Terence, Livy, with a levity and brevity which are remarkable? Shall I say, in short, that the author of the Cours de Littérature, who, in the analyses of the principal productions of the seventeenth century, and particularly in his estimate of our tragic theatre, is full of sympathy for genius, and happily animated by a sincere and persuasive admiration, seems a faithless and deceitful guide the moment he has to do with ancient literature?"

Notwithstanding this partial acquaintance with the language and the spirit of Greece, La Harpe attempted the revival of one of the pieces of Sophocles— the Philoctetes, upon the French stage. Racine had avoided the dramas of Sophocles, because, while he felt their perfection in the original, he conceived it impossible to present them in a faithful translation on the French theatre. La Harpe, however, tried the experiment in Philoctetes, so far as the preservation of all the situations and the whole substance of the dialogue was concerned; but he could not resist the temptation of pointing occa sionally the feeble lines of Sophocles, by those antitheses for which the Parisian public invariably looked in dramatic verse, till, in truth, he changed the character of the original nearly as much as if, upon Racine's principle, he had recast the whole in a French mould.

Barthelemy appears to be a favourite with M. Villemain, for he has devoted more than a whole lecture to the subject of his Anacharsis, a space which is surely somewhat disproportioned to its importance. His learning is undeniable; the modesty and simplicity of his character are worthy of all respect; but except as a piece of learned, and in the main just, criticism on the literature and manners of antiquity, the work has no high merit; the imaginative framework in which Bar

thelemy has inclosed his museum of fragments from antiquity, is commonplace enough; the characters scarcely supported at all; and the whole attempt to revive in a fictitious form the character of ancient society, appears to great disadvantage beside those lifelike pictures of Greece which Wieland has exhibited in his Agathon, Aristippus, and Agathodämon. Villemain admits that his fictitious personages are the mere spectators of events. "Philotas, Timagenes, Apollodorus, Lysis, are pallid figures, which attract no attention: Philotas is killed at the battle of Chæronea; and the author bestows on him regrets in which the reader does not participate.'

Another writer of this period who occupies a large portion of M. Villemain's attention is the dramatist Ducis. He may, like most of his brethren, be considered as more a critic than an inventor, since his efforts were directed rather to infuse into the French dramatic literature the spirit of foreign productions than to attempt original creation. Indeed, with one exception, viz. his tragedy of Abufar, his whole dramatic works are taken either from the Greek or from Shakspeare, whose Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King John, and King Lear, he has introduced-certainly in a sufficiently strange disguise upon the French stage. The portrait which Villemain presents of Ducis, whom he had seen in old age, is quite flattering: "Amidst that species of uniformity which brings together and confounds the secondary talents of an age, Ducis had preserved something striking and original. His appearance, singularly grave and majestic, had an air of naiveté and inspiration: you would have thought you saw-I will not say a descendant of Ossian — (that genealogy is rather doubtful), but of Homer himself. You saw at a glance that he was not a man of his time-a man such as is common enough even among poets. He possessed nothing in the world he troubled himself not about its little affairs and petty ambitions; wild, and yet gentle-a poet in the highest degree-requiring nothing but to be a poet; he sang the pleasures of the country while shut up in his modest retreat at Versailles: it was there that in his unpolished verses he brooded over that picturesque and neglected

nature which he loved, and which he resembled.

"Another distinctive trait in the character of the man, was something proud, free, and indomitable in the nature of his mind. He would submit to no yoke, not even that of his age; for even in that age he was constantly religious. He lived in the society of several persons of philosophic opinions, particularly with Thomas, who was his most intimate friend. His tragedies bear the impression of those liberal maxims and abstract expressions which formed the currency of the literature of his time; but his taste, his study, his solitary preference, was for the reading of the Bible and of Homer."

So far well: an originally minded man like this, formed in the school of Homer and the Bible, preserving his religious impressions amidst an age of scepticism, alive to the language of nature and simple feeling, and more occupied with the solid value of thought than the graces of expression, was exactly the person we should have held to comprehend the spirit of the romantic drama, and to be qualified to make his country men really acquainted with the genius of Shakspeare, of which the translation of Letourneur had conveyed so inadequate an idea. Alas! the Shakspearian tragedies of Ducis are among the most cruel mutilations to which the prince of dramatic poets has ever been subjected.

M. Villemain conceives Macbeth to be the chef-d'œuvre of his friend; but, on the whole, we think English readers will form a better notion of Shakspeare à la Ducis, by a few specimens from our old favourite Hamlet.

It must be admitted, in the first place, that Ducis takes some liberties with his original, as regards the arrangement of the plot and position of the characters. The Claudius of Ducis is not the brother of the deceased monarch, but simply a nobleman of the court to whom the Queen had formed a guilty attachment; he is not married to the Queen, who, on the contrary, tormented by remorse for the crime of which she has been guilty, loathes the idea of a union with him; he is not King of Denmark, or an usurper standing between Hamlet and the throne; for Hamlet is the admitted heir to the throne, and nothing