This great poet of modern France, a just admirer of the talents of the author of Attala, trusted that he would avail himself of his return to defend the cause of the newly-risen monarchy, or at least would seek to calm the agitation of a country torn by greedy and entirely selfish factions. Judge of Béranger's astonishment and regret at having so unsuccessfully penned his splendid invitation, when Chateaubriand, immediately on his return to Paris towards the end of 1831, set about depreciating the administration of one so capable as M. de Perrier, and in terms so violent that we should blush to repeat them; for on reading this rabid effusion we sincerely believe that vanity had entirely turned M. de Chateaubriand's brain. Since this period he has lived in retirement, and no mention has been made of him, excepting in consequence of an article penned by him on Shakspeare, and published in the Revue de Paris-a kind of pseudocriticism, so entirely anti-Shakspearian that it would seem to have been dictated by Voltaire. In the present day to write against Shakspeare in France is more than a fault-nay, amounts almost to a crime; for he justly inspires there the liveliest enthusiasm and admiration. After having thus given a brief memoir of Chateaubriand, more particularly as connected with the politics of his country, we address ourselves to the more pleasing task, and one more strictly within our province, of criticising his literary merits as the author of the " Essay on English Literature." This work, to which are appended considerations on the genius, men, and revolutions of his times, proves to us, unfortunately, that M. de Chateaubriand writes at the present day under the influence of necessity; and we need go no further in proof of this than to refer our readers to the last chapter of the work before us for a literal confession, 'totidum verbis, of the fact. Oh! malesuada fames! After reading the work through with attention, we cannot allow that it has been rightly entitled (and it is unconnected, incomplete, and quite unsatisfactory); but still we cannot agree with the sweeping censure and unlimited abuse passed on the author and the book by the reviewer in the Atheneum of July last. Our own way of thinking does not fall in with that of M. de Chateaubriand any more than that respectable reviewer's; but in deciding the merits of a literary work we would carefully distinguish the writer from the politician, and not condemn the productions of his imagination because we disapprove of his parliamentary speeches. The reviewer in the Athenæum was, apparently, unaware of the fact, which may be fully relied on, and which accounts also for the want of connection between the chapters of the Essay-namely, that the whole is a mass of loose and unconnected fragments, written at different times and thrown aside, which the publisher, partly out of a delicate regard to the author's necessities, partly as a trading speculation, abstracted from him by gentle force, and published in spite of his scrupulous objections. Chateaubriand has been condemned by the English with somewhat of illiberality, not because he has severely criticised the great writers of our country (for he has generally spoken of them with more praise than Johnson, Warton, and other native biographers), but because he, a foreigner, has dared to open his lips on the subject at all. Of this attack it seems reasonable to suppose that he had some presentiment; for he says somewhere in the course of his work that the people themselves are the only competent judges of works produced in their own country. This admission undoubtedly entitled him to the indulgence of his English critics. Whatever faults Chateaubriand has been charged with, whatever wrong views of particular writers he may have taken, whatever political prejudices he may have allowed to disfigure a purely literary work, he cannot be charged with ignorance of his subject. Every body knows that he passed the greater part of his life in attempting to translate Milton. Whether he succeeded or not we do not stop to enquire here, for that would of itself require an extended article. Every one knows also that such a work could not be done respectably without much preparation, without reading and profoundly studying the English writers who lived before and after the singer of Paradise Lost. These volumes, loose, vague, and unconnected as they are, furnish nothing else but the very proof that the translator of Milton did not venture on his task without a very considerable stock of materials. Whether he should have risked ruining a justly high reputation by undertaking so difficult a task at all it is not for us to consider. We are not ignorant of the fact that Chateaubriand has inserted portions of his outre-tombe mémoires, as, alas! he himself terms them with ghastly merriment, and thus presents himself to our notice like one in full health attending his own obsequies. The publication of the "Lectures des Mémoires de Chateaubriand has brought on him the snears of the malevolent and moved the pity of his literary advocates in France. That Chateabriand is a weak man the acts of his life testify. His vanity is clearly discoverable in all his works, and perhaps more in the Essay before us than in any other. But it is not fair in educated English writers to charge on Chateaubriand a failure, if it be so, in an attempt that might have daunted the genius of greater minds than are at present to be found on the continent of Europe. "THE HOUR WHEN KINDRED SPIRITS MEET." THE hour when kindred spirits meet, ; R. S. MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE. Excursions in Switzerland, By J. F. COOPER, author of The Spy, Pilot, &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Bentley. No people of Europe are more restless or more dearly love the sight of other countries than the English. Soon as the summer fairly sets in flocks of these sight-hunters rush to the out-ports and pour their living flood on the continent with a regularity not less remarkable than the periodical visits of the migratory birds. Not even the most retired nook of middle and southern Europe is free from the curious eyes of our countrymen. A few paltry pounds suffice to waft the tourist up the Rhine, and the facilities of steam communication convey him, by way of Mayence, into Switzerland in so short a time that a visit to the land of lakes and glaciers becomes as easy and inexpensive as a trip to the northern lakes. That this extension of national intercourse has been, in some sense, a benefit to all parties we are willing to believe; but the attendant disadvantages have been in some instances so great as to make it extremely doubtful whether or not the evil is balanced by the good. We are not disposed to quarrel with the increase of wealth resulting from an intercourse with wealthy foreigners, because it is necessarily accompanied by the adoption of less simple manners; but we cannot congratulate our continental brethren, and the rural population more particularly, on a very sad moral change which every intelligent observer acquainted with the continent for the last twenty years will agree with us in saying has taken place wherever the English have sojourned, and that too so regularly as to mark with a painful accuracy the track of their journeyings. With our countrymen rests the fault, and a heavy one it is, of tainting the morals of the simple and happy peasantry of France and Switzerland, by the example of conduct which they would blush to exhibit to their countrymen. We speak not of the literary or scientific men who travel with a definite object in view, to ascertain the state of foreign science, or to investigate the natural phenomena of countries,-we speak not of fathers of families who usefully and economically pass the summer months with their beloved circle in the retirement of a Swiss valley,-we speak not of the ardent lover of nature and the true observer of life and manners, who assumes the incognito, travels alone and on foot, mingles with the people, and rejoices in the privilege of seeing their rude but single-hearted and characteristic manners; we allude to that large class of English tourists to whom the leisure from a laborious occupation-legislative, legal, or commercial, matters not-to whom, we say, such leisure brings no repose, but rather a bustling eagerness for an expensive and dissolute holiday-keeping. Travelling with such impatient speed as the quality of the cattle and the obstinate disposition of a native postillion will allow, making a permanent stay only in those populous town where an assemblage of curiosities marked in Mr. Leigh's rubbishing "Itineraries" collects a crowd of gapers of the same stamp as themselves, having the same associations, loving the same pleasures, and therefore successfully claiming their society and fellowship, they carry all the vices and prejudices peculiar to our country, rife and rank, into the provincial towns of the continent; first shock the simple natives by their coarseness and moroseness, next seduce them with their purses, and lastly, by their example, work on the imitative propensities of human nature, and permanently lower their standard of morality. Thus baneful, we regret to say, is the moral influence of a large class of English tourists, who, with a disgraceful ignorance of the resources which the father-land supplies to a legitimate love of enquiry, yearly rush to the continent, and show a want of acquaintance with men and things that makes them the laughing-stock of intelligent foreigners (who, by the way, are too well-bred to show it openly, as we too often do) and a disgrace to their own-the greatest manufacturing and trading nation of Europe, the medium of peaceful communication between all the members of the European confederacy. Some of our readers may think that the matter is overstated, that English travellers are not the selfish, prejudiced, merely sightseeing race that they are here represented. Our own opinion is before the public-put forth not without a keen and laborious investigation of facts. We ask of those who have gone and staid abroad, and in the heart of the continent-not at Paris or Brussels, or those towns were the more artificial manners of society prevail already, but in the south of France, in Switzerland, in southern Germany-are these statements true or false? Has not the increase of foreign intercourse demoralized the rural population of the more accessible and attractive parts of the continent; and, what is more important to us as a professingly moral nation, has not our influence, as recognized through our representatives, contributed very largely to produce this baneful effect? judice lis est. Sub After so long and severe a stricture on foreign travel, it becomes us now to perform the duty, which perhaps lies more within our province, of considering the merits of the work in question. The reputation of the "American Magician"-the man so invidiously put forward by his countryman as the rival of the author of Waverly-was so great as to raise a degree of expectation in us which has not only been not realized but has been miserably disappointed. We are aware that the situation of a person who draws on the imagination of himself and his readers, and paints the scenes which his country and his early habits have fixed indelibly on his memory, is widely different from that of the person who faithfully records to a private friend; but when a person whose love of the picturesque enables him to invest the terrors of the ordinary storm at sea with the terrors of a tornado, and to paint so beautifully, so seductively, but yet so falsely, the charms of an American forest, goes abroad, and, with the candid confidence that a friendly communication inspires, talks to us, as an English public, of the Alps, its glaciers, and its passes, of Switzerland, its towns, villages, farmhouses, and chalets, of the people with whom he meets and the travellers whom he passes, we naturally expect something that shall repay the trouble of perusal. We have not been repaid; and we do not think that, if Mr. Cooper had, with the feelings of a poet-and as such we had ever considered him-applied himself to the strict investigation of the Alps, their rivers, valleys, and their passes, we should not have read the crude and unsatisfactory notices which are given in these volumes respecting some of the most celebrated, though, nevertheless, not the finest and most picturesque passes of the Alpine barriers. Mr. Cooper with his party entered Switzerland by Dijon, Pontarlier, and across the Jura range, made way to Neuchatel, and thence to Berne, one of the three great entrées to Switzerland known to our travelled countrmen. His first trip to the mountains was to the Oberland Alps along the valley of the romantic Aar, by the lake of Thun, the valleys of Lauterbrunnen, and Grindewald, as far as the neighbourhood of the Jungfrau, whose highest summit was surmounted the same year that our traveller was in the Alps. He returned by nearly the same route to Berne, whence, in his second excursion, he proceeded nothward to the Rhine, Schaffhausen, Lake of Constance, Freyberg, &c. He subsequently visited the Lake of the Four Cantons, Altorf, and other parts of Switzerland. In leaving Switzerland he chose the route over the Simplon. The journal closes on the author's arrival at Milan. It is perhaps rather unamiable to be severe in noticing the books of a deserved favourite; but from such a man we expected something of the first character, and we have been disappointed. More sober matter-of-fact readers than ourselves may still find much that is worthy of attention in these volumes. Hase's Ancient Greeks. Translated from the German. Post 8vo., pp. 358. Murray. THE accomplished Mrs. Austin has placed the literary world under a fresh obligation, in addition to the many favours received by her previous productions; and it is to be hoped that her industry has reaped a more solid reward than the commendations of her reviewers. The idea that occurred to us on turning over the leaves of this elegant little manual was that the school-boys of the present day are much to be envied by their elders for having their path smoothed by light and easy books like this before us. Without doubt it supplies what had before been a lamentable deficiency, ill supplied by Potter's Archæologia and Paul's abridgment of the same work. We ourselves recollect Potter; and certainly never was there book so miserably inefficient, so very unsatisfactory, for the purpose of illustrating the historians or the orators, which last, indeed, cannot be read by the tyro without some assistance in the way of technological explanation. Dr. Hase (Ph. D. of Dresden) has divided his work into two parts: one illustrating the heroic age, and the manners, government, laws, religion, and military establishments of Greece before the decline of the monarchies; the second explaining the social, political, and religious institutions of the historic age, in which oligarchy and democracy took the place of absolute rule, and ranged the different states into two parties, the advocates either of oligarchal or democratic sway, the adherents of Athens or Sparta. The manners of the two parties were essentially different one from the other; and they require and receive in Dr. Hase's book a separate description. We wish this manual all the success which it undoubtedly deserves, and hope to see it very widely diffused through our universities and classical seminaries. A similar book is much wanted to supply the defects of Adam's Roman Antiquities. Germany, we believe, can furnish the materials ready to the translator's hand. Jerningham; or The Inconsistent Man. 3 vols. Smith, Elder, & Co. THERE are two heroes to this work. The one is a decided advocate for religious establishments, and the "ancient order of things;" the other is the inveterate foe of all religion, and a thorough leveller in politics. He is a disciple of the Shelley school. The author makes the latter state his infidel opinions, and then calls in the other to answer them. What the author's own opinions are on politics or religion is not very clear; but the moral tendency of his work is very doubtful. If Christianity had not more sincere or able defenders than our author, it would fare but indifferently with it. Considered as an intellectual production "Jerningham" is respectable. It is in description the author excels. Suggestions for obtaining the best Medical Advice at the least possible Expense. Whittaker and Co. THIS is a small pamphlet consisting of only eight pages; but the subject is one of the deepest importance to the class to whom it is addressed, namely, to those "of a limited income, but respectable station in society." Doctor's bills in all families have, from time immemorial, been the subject of complaint. Any plan, therefore, which would materially reduce their amount without trenching on the quality of the medical advice given is a desideratum of the most important kind. Our author thus introduces the subject: "Sickness, at all times the greatest of personal misfortunes, afflicts in a tenfold degree those of narrow income and slender means. The desire of maintaining a decent appearance, and possessing what may be termed the respectabilities of life, is the great national trait of an Englishman's character; and to it may |