M. Thiers and the return of the Emperor's coffin from St. Helena. Yet at this very moment Heine (in January, 1842)

writes:

"What is to become of this country? What is to be done against this ever-increasing individualism, this particularism, this extinction of all esprit de corps, that brings on the moral death of nations? The money-worship has brought this state of things about. But will it or can it last? or will an event of all-superseding force, a stroke of chance, or a great public disaster, reunite together men's minds and hearts in France? No nation is abandoned of Heaven; and when a nation slumbers from fatigue or indolence, Heaven prepares its future awakeners, who, hidden in some remote, dark corner are biding their time, and awaiting the hour of the general uprising. Where now are the awakeners watching? I have often asked this in a whisper, and the answer, mysteriously given, is, The army!' And I hear it said around me, 'Here in the army is still a strong feeling of patriotism and nationality; here under the tricolored flag have taken refuge those generous instincts that the reigning industrialism repulses and turns into ridicule; here is still to be found civic virtue, the valorous love of honor and high deeds, and the faculty of ardent enthusiasm; and whilst everywhere else predominate discord and social decomposition, the healthiest life breathes here still, and the sternest authority meets with obedience; here is discipline, here is at least a unity, — an armed one.' I have even heard it hinted, that a by no means impossible event would be the overthrow of the present reigning Bourgeoisie by the army, which would thus enact once more a second 18th Brumaire in presence of a second Directoire." (This is written, do not let us forget, in 1842!) "So after all, then, the burden of the song would be, Sabre-Government; and humanity and society would be once again treated to all the bustle made by glory, with its eternal Te Deums, with the foul-smelling tallow of its illuminations, with its big gold-epauletted heroes, and its permanent cannon-fire." pp. 228, 229.

Were we not justified in saying that Heine's Lutèce was a "prophecy of the past"?

But Heine only foresaw here the ridiculous part of "SabreGovernment," as he terms it. He supposed that the sword, if appealed to against the corruption of the Bourgeoisie and the industrial spirit, would exercise a purifying influence. He did not advert to the possible fact of identity of corrup

tion in both army and Bourgeoisie; he did not see, in the dim advance of years, the "gold-epauletted heroes" as greedy for gain as the traders in gold themselves. He did not image forth to himself a state of society in which the sword should be the mere instrument of oppression, in which brute force should supersede intelligence, but in which the worship of probity and honor should not be offered up more ardently by the Maréchal de France than by the stock-jobbers. Heine thought of the army as the refuge of honesty, and did not dream of a period when dishonesty should be everywhere. This, however, is a detail. The curious part of the whole matter is, that, in the lazy flood of fat security that was little by little mollifying France at the time our German poet made his observations on the country, he should have been able to admit the possibility of a time coming when the then apparently most obsolete of all forms of government — military rule would be required as a counterpoise and cure for the gangrene that was gradually setting in.

"Every twenty years (or even less)," says a great intellectual authority in France, "you have fresh representatives of momentary power; they do not attain to the dignity of an aristocracy, but for the time being they constitute Public Importance." This is so true, that any foreigner coming to Paris after an absence of some years and a change of government, would fancy himself in a country quite different from the one he knew before. Instead of dukes, he would find bankers; instead of generals, declaimers; instead of poets, political economists. There, where he might have left M. de Richelieu, M. de Serre, or M. de Montmorency, high in their fellow-countrymen's esteem, he would return to find that they were "inadmissible," "rococo in the extreme," "wholly unbusiness-like," and "foolish," - types only whereby to appreciate the utter stupidity of those whom they had governed. He would in all safety allow himself to admire the "practical capacities" that had succeeded in the task of directing what Heine calls "that vulgar shop, the state"; for these had been borne upon the current of popular favor to their position, by the main force of their superiority. But lo! some years later, Public Importance, after being personified in

Thiers, Guizot, Villemain, Cousin, De Broglie, De Remusat, or Molé, allows itself to be again vested in men without consideration or fame, in men to whose names no distinction attaches, and whose title to power seems to be that they are socially and intellectually nothing. An American who should at this moment, for instance, visit Paris, would, if he did not dive down somewhat beneath the surface, wonder where had disappeared what he heard of once as the notabilities of France. Or if he were just starting into life, and were too young to have heard much of the political history of the last quarter of a century, he would take for the notabilities of France men like Messrs. Fould, Baroche, Morny, Troplong, etc., would be liable to form but a mediocre notion of the integrity or intelligence of a leading nation of Europe, and would inevitably ask himself what could be men's ideas of "master-minds," if they found any such to admire and extol in France. Those that are belong to a kind that affords small hold to the esteem of the upright or intellectual, and of those that were there is literally no trace. Of the mere talents of the latter as writers, historians, philosophers, and critics, commentators, in short, upon others' deeds, there never was greater proof than at this hour; for they all have written, or are writing, books that will last while the literary monuments of France endure. But of these men themselves, not as commentators, but actors, - doers of deeds, we repeat it, there is absolutely no trace. From this point of view, therefore, Heine's Lutèce is not merely a curious or interesting, it is an invaluable work; a faithful record of the lives of those men who during eighteen years personified Public Importance in France, a true picture of the society that was the reigning society of that time, and is now no more, but is broken up, dispersed, its component elements scattered here and there.

For those who had known and observed the France described by Henri Heine, Lutèce is a charming, and, in many respects, a touching remembrancer of what is by-gone; for those who were strangers to the whole, it is an abundant source of information, to be relied on like ocular testimony. Heine's book gives you (unlike most pictures) the reality of

detail and the truth of general effect. After reading it attentively, you not only possess with precision certain facts, but you see them framed, as it were, in the smaller incidents of every-day life that surrounded them, and made, so to say, the decoration of the scene. You follow society in its goings and comings, watching who moves it, and also how it is moved. You pass your mornings at the Chambre des Députés, and your evenings in the coulisses of the Grand Opera, amongst the full-blown, bloomless, long-established, famous, fashionable chieftainesses of the corps de ballet, whom our author so wittily and truly styles "La Pairie de la Danse"; and you learn here indirectly, and by an apparently frivolous application, to recognize one of the principles that governed and helped to ruin France,-the distrust and dislike of youth; one of the immense mistakes of the régime of July, which contributed to banish from it all lofty and generous impulse, and to mark it in the eyes of the world more with the seal of cunning and sordidness than even with that of corruption. Guided by the poet of the Reisebilder, you pass from the statesman's study to the artist's studio; from the concert-room, where Franz Liszt exhibits his hair and his talent on the piano-forte to an audience in contortions of enthusiasm, and utterly incapable in fact of distinguishing whether he plays well or ill, to the race-course of Chantilly, where men risk their fortunes upon a thing they neither do well nor are amused by. You live in Paris, with the men and women of the day, who, living, surround you and initiate you into the secrets of their existence. You have clearly impressed upon your sense all the truth, and all the falseness, of the period, copied exactly by the chronicler.

We have perhaps far too lengthily tried to give our readers on this side the Atlantic a notion of what Lutèce really is; but we would seriously advise such of them as are curious of what has been arrogantly styled "le plus beau royaume après celui du ciel," to read the book. They will find that we have not said too much of it, and that it perpetuates an historical epoch, the traces of which are being more and more every day effaced from the political and social surface of France.

-

ART. II. Appletons' Cyclopædia of Biography: embracing a Series of Original Memoirs of the most distinguished Persons of all Times, written for this Work by Sir Archibald Alison, D. C. L., William Baird, M. D., F. L. S., Sir David Brewster, F. R. S., James Bryce, A. M., F. G. S., John Hill Burton, Professor Creasy, A. M., Professor Eadie, D. D., LL. D., Professor Ferguson, A. M., Professor Gordon, F. R. S. E., James Hedderwick, John A. Heraud, Robert Jameson, D. D., Charles Knight, James Manson, James M'Connechy, Professor Nichol, LL. D., Elihu Rich, Professor Spalding, M. A., Professor Thomson, M. D., F. R. S., Ralph N. Worпит. American Edition, edited by FRANCIS HAWKS, D. D., LL. D. With numerous Illustrations. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1856. pp. 1058.

THIS book an enlarged reprint from the English work— draws in the train of its announcement, we perceive, numerous testimonies of the newspaper press, presupposing for the sentence given all the time, pains, and careful comparison usual in such cases. It were not delicate, possibly, in some things to make light of the judges who have preceded us in the same cause, and whose decisions we had a presentiment on the very threshold must be reversed; but a bulky reference-book of any kind, involving an endless multiplicity of particulars, is an exception surely, if any there be, to that rule. It will not do to issue grave and confident decrees from a bird's-eye glance over a field of survey like this.

But though our present criticism will take a somewhat wider range than the book chosen for our text, we confess to a penchant, strong and of some date, for the very class of books in question,-a humor which has found vent in various classifications, and in tabular lists, intended to set forth the merits, in this point or that, of the several biographical collections, recent or remote, relatively to one another and to positive perfection. We do not readily think of any one else so inoculated with the same taste, or willing to yield so much time to its indulgence. But be sure, reader, to construe this frankness aright. If so much manuscript be taken for granted