A Suggestion to the Journalists of Paris. 497 Already we seem to hear the voice of Louis Philippe in Paris, as that of Napoleon was heard in the Desert:* Citizens! From these Detached Forts forty thousand soldiers look down upon you! I We are not unfriendly to the Press of France. Freely we admit its extraordinary talent: with bitterness, when we look to its present condition, reflect upon the enormous capability for good it has of late so utterly abused. Fallen, and with but a shadow of its former influence, we now believe that Press to be. We have shown, also, that it has merited its fall. But it may even yet be worth its while to consider, that if it be not determined upon sinking itself deeper in its present forlorn and pitiable condition, it will cease that monotonous din of which the ear of this country is weary, and apply itself to some useful work. Difficult it may be to retrace its steps, but it is not impossible. The field is ample and almost untrodden. As friends we would suggest to them, as a study, the Institutions of that people, against whom it is their pleasure to rail. Are you not ashamed, Newspaper Writers of France, that after two revolutions in the name of Liberty, there is no security for personal freedom in your country. You know that the police may enter the house of any man; and if he be from home, may frighten his wife and children, break open his drawers, and seize his papers. The letter found in M. Dupoty's box has shown you what use may be made of papers in the hands of an attorneygeneral, who deciphers their meaning through MORAL CONVICTIONS. Nay more, it has again and again most bitterly occurred to you, that a man may upon mere surmise be thrown into gaol, and there, upon no better grounds than Moral Conviction, be detained until the pleasure or convenience of the authorities allow him a trial; or he may at the end of a month, or a year, or two years, be dismissed from confinement, with the stain of the prison upon him, broken in fortune and in health, and yet no satisfaction, no redress! Would you not, O Journalists, be better employed in agitating for the adoption of a measure for the security of personal freedom (M. Guizot will tell you about our English habeas-corpus), than in rendering yourselves worse than useless by your folly, and so depriving the public of the only public defender left to it. We propose but one glorious feature of liberty to you, lest we might confound you with too much light. Here is a noble, useful, necessary object, for the advocacy of which the country would thank you, in the efforts for which the country would sustain you, and in the pursuit of *Before the battle of the Pyramids. "Soldiers, from these Pyramids forty centuries look down upon you!" The parody is the pleasant suggestion of the Charivari, a paper that it has not come within our design to mention, but always full of wit, and rarely deficient in wisdom. which you would once more take your legitimate place as the guides and guardians of a virtuous public necessity. If the Journalists of France adopted this counsel, the glory would be all their own. The popular leaders in the Chamber show not the least inclination to make a stand for public liberty. Thiers helped to pass the September laws against the Press, which made him what he is; and without Odillon Barrot, the Bastilles could not have been carried. We hear enough of soldiers and sailors, but not one word about civil institutions. M. Dufaure and M. Passy are separated from M. Guizot only by so many sail of the line: they have not a word to offer for the electoral franchise. Here, we repeat, is a wide, and to the shame of the statesmen and legislators of France, an untrodden path. Press we again say, take it, occupy it, plant it with fresh and vigorous Institutions for the shelter and security of the People, and do cease to play those tricks which make you objects of pity to your neighbours. To the We are the more earnest in offering this advice, because we think the present time most favourable for an experiment in favour of Liberal Institutions. The country enjoys profound internal tranquillity; but the country is standing still and an ardent, intelligent, and accomplished people will not consent to stagnate, while every other nation is, if not in progress, at least in a state of activity. It is because the attention of France has not been fixed upon practical reforms, that in particular fever fits she turns to foreign war as the sole path to glory. It was the hope of war, deprived of the fear of invasion by the Fortification of the Capital, which allowed that feudal measure, so full of danger to liberty, to be passed in a moment of artificial excitement. Let Louis Philippe boldly widen the popular basis of his throne, and he will secure the dynasty of whose continuance he is so apprehensive, and obtain guarantees for that peace which it is still asserted that he loves, and which it will then be his honour to have maintained. But let him mark well, that upon no other condition than this, is either the one or the other permanently fixed. And notwithstanding the grave censure which we have been obliged to pass upon the Paris Journals, we think sufficiently well of them to believe, that they would yet support the monarch in the wise, just, liberal, and yet most prudent course, which we humbly suggest to him. A more grateful task could not occur to us than that of welcoming back the NEWSPAPER PRESS OF FRANCE, in circumstances such as these, to a position they never would have forfeited, if the possession of most remarkable talents, and the recollection of services for which in times past they made the whole civilized world their debtor, could of themselves have retained them there. SHORT REVIEWS OF RECENT PUBLICATION S. Gedichte. (Poems.) Von HEINRICH RITTER VON LEVITSCHNIGG. Vienna: Pfautsch and Co. 1842. WE must say that on opening this book our impression was a favourable one. A portrait of the author greeted us, and certainly, if the limner be faithful, he is an uncommonly fine-looking fellow. There is an agreeable ferocity in his thick moustache, a proud animation in his large eyes. Here, we thought, we shall have something crude perhaps, but energetic and spirit-stirring. Alas for our hopes! Patiently did we turn over poems in all sorts of metres, including ghazels and sonnets, but our feelings were untouched, our imagination was unelevated, our fancy was guided to no pleasing sport. The author, we suspect, has taken Nicolaus Lenau for his model : a noble poet, but one very likely to lead his imitators into straits. Those excessively bold personations which delight us in Lenau, that perpetual recurrence of the most startling imagery, can only succeed when a powerful mind displays in such combinations the vigour of its grasp. Ritter von Levitschnigg is on a perpetual quest to find out something, which shall be like something else; the chase after the image is a most painful one; and the worst of the matter is, that when it is caught, it is generally singularly infelicitous. If he starts from something beautiful, it is a hundred to one that he illustrates it by something remarkably ugly. you. A Our mind misgave us at p. 57, when we were told in a serious poem, that hope kept a mint in the heart, where he struck bright coins out of promises, and that when his false gold would not pass, he wrote bills of exchange payable at the bier, with the good firm Heaven' written thereon. We are not hoaxing you, gentle reader: turn to page 57, and then, if you can read German, you will find we have not misled little further on we found the sun compared to a golden swan floating through a blue flood. A golden swan ! It is this sort of poetical genius to which we are indebted for those figures that adorn our public-houses, and regale our eyes from the broad surface of our twelfth-cakes. Night (p. 82) is a black beauty, and-what are the stars? Why they are eunuchs that guard the harem with bright Damascene swords. A strange taste this of Ritter von Levitschnigg! He finds himself in a beautiful real world, enlivened by hope, and adorned with celestial luminaries, and out of this he hammers an ideal world peopled by masters of the mint, eunuchs, and golden swans! If this be poetry who would not prefer plain prose! But the stunning poem was one on Schiller (175). The poet Levitschnigg is indignant at the depreciation of Schiller which is prevalent among certain German literati. He predicts that the time will arrive when Europe will be a desert, and when tourists will come from Botany Bay to Germany, and that when they reach Weimar they will look into their geographical dictionaries (!) and find that it was the spot where the last German nightingale sung. We must give two of the verses from which this is condensed: An ihren Tagen werden sich Touristen Und schwer bepackt mit Karten, Reiselisten, ↑ Sie werden sich zu uns zu Deutschland wagen 'Botany-Bai,' and the geographisch Wörterbuch,' were too much; and exclaiming, This bay will be the death of us,' we took leave of Ritter von Levitschnigg. Cours d'Etudes Historiques. (Lectures on the Study of History.) By P. C. F. DAUNOU. Vols. I. and II. Paris. 1842. DAUNOU, after playing a distinguished part during the troublous times of the French Revolution, devoted the latter period of his life chiefly to literature. He was born at Boulogne in 1761. In 1792 he was elected a member of the National Convention, where he voted against the death of Louis XVI., demanding that the sentence should be commuted into imprisonment during the continuance of the war, and into banishment on the restoration of peace. This brought him into connexion with the Girondists, and involved him in the persecution to which that party was shortly afterwards exposed. Daunou was the first President of the Council of the Five Hundred. After the 18th Brumaire he was elected a tribune, but as he sought to defend the constitution against the encroachments of the first consul, in 1802, the latter found means to remove so inconvenient a functionary from office. Daunou thereupon occupied himself for some time chiefly with the duties of his place as librarian to the Pantheon. Napoleon, when Emperor, found an opportunity, to promote him to a more important office, of which, however, he was deprived on the restoration of the Bourbons. He then accepted an engagement as principal editor of the Journal des Savans,' and in 1819 was attached to the Collège de France as professor of history. It was not long afterwards that heowas elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies, where he spoke on several occasions, and always voted with the liberal party. After the revolution of 1830, Daunou had several marks of favour from the men in power. In August of the same year he received the superintendence of the archives of the kingdom, and several honour Daunou's Lectures on History. 501 able distinctions, including that of the peerage, were conferred upon him. Daunou enjoyed a high reputation among French men of letters, yet the works that he has left behind him are neither numerous nor very generally known. Among the most successful of his writings may be named, Analyse des Opinions Diverses sur l'Origine de l'Imprimerie published in 1802; Essai sur les Garanties Individuelles, of which a third edition appeared in 1821; and Essai Historique sur la Puissance Temporelle des Papes, et sur l'Abus qu'ils ont fait de leur Ministère Spirituelle, a work in two volumes, of which a fourth edition was printed in 1828. The work now before us consists of a condensation of the lectures delivered by Daunou, as Professor of History, at the Collège de France, from 1819 till 1830. A large portion of the work had been carefully revised by the author, and the first volume was already in type, when death surprised him about a year ago. The remainder was left by him in the form of detached lectures and as he had in his last illness expressed a decided wish, that whatever of his writings might be printed after his death, should be given to the public in the exact form in which he left them, his literary executors have felt it their duty to comply with so solemn an injunction. The first part appears, therefore, with the corrections of the author, and is divided into books and chapters; the second is divided into lectures, and would, no doubt, have undergone a severe revision had the author's life been prolongued for a year or two. The corrected portion comprises the whole of the first, and about one-half of the second volume; the rest fills the latter half of the second volume, and will, we presume, occupy the whole of the succeeding volumes which have yet to appear The subject of historical study is divided by our author into three parts: the examination of facts, the classification of facts, and the exposition of facts. The first of these he again subdivides into two books, of which the first lays down the rules of historical criticism, while the second enlarges on the utility of history. Under historical criticism we are particularly to understand the art of examining the historical value of ancient traditions and monuments; and the comparative trustworthiness of different writers, in proportion as they were themselves spectators of the events they relate, or were likely to have received their information from pure or questionable sources. Every history not written till a century and a half after the events to be related had occurred, is at once classed by Daunou among traditions. Thus the whole of the Roman history down to the war against Pyrrhus, is mere tradition; and in reading it, the student is warned to make allowance for the credulity, ignorance, and imagination of the people among whom those traditions were current. In Greek history, according to our author's view, all is tradition that precedes the time of Herodotus; and the annals of the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Medes, and the Persians, are all similarly classed. The traditional period again is preceded by what Daunou calls the mythological period, |