bethan age, the golden period of our imagination, was prodigal of the most exquisite picturesque poets. No modern poetry can produce such pictures of nature as our own, from that of Thomson to that of Cowper. The Seasons of the former, observes the author, greatly excited the enthusiasm of the French : it became the model of Les quatre Saisons of St. Lambert, who extended the plan but contracted the genius of his original; of Les Mois of Roucher; and of " L'Agriculture" of Rosset: but he whose descriptions are the most beautiful, whose versification is the most melodious, the greatest poet since the days of Racine and Voltaire, and who enjoys an undisputed claim to become the founder of a new school, is De Lille,' the brilliant copyist of Goldsmith and of Gray, of Milton and of Thomson!

In their Didactic poetry, the French have produced no rival of the art poetique of Boileau. Dorat, a monotonous poet, had great experience of the stage, and his Declamation theatrale may convey to an English critic some notion of their recitation. Watelet's Art de peindre, with clear principles of the art, fails to interest: but Lemiere in his poem on La Peinture has splendid fragments. M. SALVERTE conceives that the French idiom has une disposition raisonneuse, adapted for philosophical discussion by its clearness, but for that very reason unfavourable to relieve the austerity of didactic verse: yet he asserts that the Lyric poetry of his nation is not inferior to that of any other people! We suspect that French enthusiasm consists more of attitude than emotion: their vivacity seems incapable of the deeper impressions of dignified imagination. The present critic himself grows lyrical in the description of his favourite lyrist, Le Brun. This poet creates not only thoughts but a new poetical idiom; in the rapid march of his odes, his audacious genius carries him almost into confusion, and almost verges on barbarism: but all lives! all breathes! all burns! and all this too, in French verse, with une disposition raisonneuse! We long to unite our acclamations to such majestic perfection:

but how mortifying is it to us, if not to the poet, to perceive that a foreign country is like a distant posterity to most bards,their names never reach it; and to how many melodious souls are the banks of the Seine as fatal as the banks of the Styx !

Poetical prose is considered as a monstrous production in our country; where, however, the wild and shapeless grandeur of the northern Ossian long frowned on the fine proportions of classical beauty. Without losing our admiration (which indeed is impossible,) for the Grecian architecture, let us be indulged in the enjoyment of the more solemn and. wonderful edifice of: Gothic invention. The "Prosateurs Ossianiques" at Paris (as this author terms them,) abound with every meretricious

ornament; and though Bitaube's Homer is here highly commended, we should be inclined to rank it with his own prose epics, which M. SALVERTE is inclined to condemn. He, how ever, thinks that those poets (for such they are) who have composed in prose, could they have written verse worthy of their thoughts, would not have adopted this practice. Yet poetical prose (a barbarous contradiction to a classical taste,) has some times been happily adopted; and even our Hume, in his essay on the Epicurean, can delight. Fenélon just tinted his harmonious prose with the most delicate colouring of poesy: Montesquieu, in his Temple de Gnide, passed off his work as a version of an antient Greek poem; and Buffon, in his contemplations on Nature, with the most happy transition, glides from the most elevated heights to the minutest details of description, his genius being always level with his subject. With less majesty and art, but with more sensibility and interest, St. Pierre, the author of Paul et Virginie, and of the Etudes de la Nature, seems to new-mould the French language; a simple story becomes a romance that affects like the inspiration of Nature!'

Of the philosophical writings of the 18th century, M. SalVERTE is a temperate advocate against their violent detractors. The philosophy of antiquity (says he) had been embellished by the fancy of Plato and the eloquence of Cicero: but the art of adorning truth was lost in modern Europe, till the 18th century beheld it restored in France; if we except Malebranche, who had before displayed the most lively imagination on metaphysical researches. While, however, he claims for the pecu liar honour of his country this art of adorning truth,' he is not so unfaithful an historian as to conceal the spot where Truth herself was first discovered. He says, the English philosophers, who were our predecessors, did not however precede us on this head. The English have no work in prose that can establish the reputation of a great writer. More fortunate in verse, England is justly proud of her Pope, whose poem will always be admired, although the subject is only a metaphysical question, as little intelligible as useful.' He adds:

• Condillac, among others, discovered that the French idiom, as well as the French public, requires, on the most abstract subjects, the art of putting things in their places; omitting nothing essential, leaving nothing superfluous; and while it orders its general march and the disposition of its details, a luminous clearness opens in proportion to the extent which it traverses. Voltaire said that Condillac could have composed Locke's Essay, but would have done it more concisely; and Voltaire uttered truth. This art, which in fact is that of making a book, has been rarely known to the English; this excellence their philosophers must yield to ours; however admirable their depth of thought, their fertility of ideas, and their pages of concatenated reaAPP. RET. VOL. LXIII.

Mm

soning

sonings, still their works on the whole appear at once incomplete and redundant, to a reader who is formed by the excellence of the French melbod!'

--

Master Vellum, the honest butler in Addison's Drummer, would certainly have agreed with the critic on the excellence of the French method; for to use his words, "Method, John, makes business easy; it banishes all perplexity and confusion out of (metaphysical) families !"-"How he talks! I could hear him all day!" but in sober sadness we must assert that the art of adorning truth' is as dexterously performed in London as in Paris. Our writers at the commencement of the century were indeed but clumsy artists, and too much occupied to be very nice in their work:- they were delvers in the nine; the gilders and the varnishers came from Paris; and we suspect that the Guild have made more progress in their establishment here, than suits the gravity of our labours. We can assure the present author that we have writers here as obscure as Diderot, as entertaining sophists as Helvetius, as geometrical in their tastes as D'Alembert, and as extravagant as Court de Gebelin, in his Monde primitif, who would re-create the world again, or as Dupuis, in his immense repertory of antient mythologies, who discovers the origin of all on the face of the heavens!

In translations of the Classics, the French may be said now to excel. All the feeble and unfaithful versions, with which they abounded in the preceding century, have been replaced by others that are very elegant, and by a few that are eminently successful. Their critics pretend that they have made great progress in the difficult art of translation, and its principles have been unfolded with considerable anxiety; indeed, a diffused taste for reading, and a general neglect of the dead languages, have increased the demand for translations which attempt to copy the style as well as the thoughts of the origi nal. Scarcely any writer in antiquity, however voluminous or however obscure, has failed to be incorporated with French literature.

The assumption of this critic, respecting the universality of the French language, would be a point scarcely worth discussion, did it not form a feature of that lasting egotism in the national character, which is connected with still more important interests than those of literature. This pretended universality he attributes to the influence which he says the French Encyclopædia created throughout Europe, and to the excellence of the French authors: but we should rather trace it to the barbarous revocation of the edict of Nantes, which, by expatriating so many thousands of Frenchmen, diffused their language over

Europe;

Europe; and some of the most valuable works in that tongue have been composed by these exiles. Recently, when the Berlin Academy instituted an inquiry into the causes of this universality, Rivarol, a French writer, in his reply, carefully abstained from adopting the affirmative; and M. SALVERTE loses his temper when he unjustly declares that Rivarol was a satirist, whose superficial genius could not comprehend the subject, nor furnish him with the proofs. The superiority and the number of models resolve the problem.'-Can we assent to "the superiority and the number of models,' who during this century possess such an unbroken line of genius, in productions which excite the admiration and constitute the studies of Europe? What claim has the French language to this pretended universality, beyond the continent?

We must however check our course, and refrain from extending our remarks to the author's curious observations on the political eloquence of the two rival nations: but, as he seems to be well acquainted with the distinctive characters of the great leaders in the British senate, we must briefly state a few of his positions. He compares Pitt with Barnave, whose merit lay chiefly in the art of summing up, which M. SALVERTE considers as a great means of influence in popular assemblies, whom long and fatiguing discussions are apt to render inattentive. Fox he compares with Cazales, for a flow of natural eloquence, adorned by literary acquirement. The powerful irony of Sheridan, he says, was sometimes adopted with inferior felicity by Mirabeau, who more successfully caught Burke's energetic movements,' glowing imagery, and grandeur of thought. Vergniaud, he asserts, could find no rival in the British senate, where the appeals of excessive sensibility would have acquired less influence than the captious weapons of political argument. On the whole, could we have transcribed all the names exhibited in this work, we should have inscribed a roll sacred to genius and to posterity. The last was at once the most glorious and the most shameful century for France: but it was not one, as it has been unjustly reproached, of "sterile abundance." Such names as Massillon, and Voltaire, and Buffon, and Montesquieu, and Crebillon, and Rousseau, and even Diderot, D'Alembert, and Helvetius, with many a successive rival, demand the tribute which we willingly pay to talents: yet let it not be forgotten that France has produced original authors only in the more elegant and miscellaneous departments of literature; and that in the great provinces, which submit only to the first order of genius, she takes a secondary rank: she stands without the dignity of an inventor, sometimes as an improver, but often as an imitator. The master-founders dwell here: M m 2 but

but the finer workmen she has occasionally possessed. This has ceased to be a matter of opinion, since it has become a matter of fact; for at the moment when she has rested her cause not on her assumptions but her documents, (as in this work,) she confirms that unalienable title, which, though disputed during the century, its last days have irrevocably established-so long it has taken to dissolve the illusion of her egotism, and so slowly does TIME withdraw the veil from TRUTH!

ART. IX Mémoires du Prince Eugene, &c.; i. e. Memoirs of Prince EUGENE of Savoy, written by himself. 8vo. pp. 189. . Paris. 1810; reprinted in London by Deconchy. sewed.

Price 6s.

THE Memoirs of Prince EUGENE, written by himself,' form a title of such great promise, that the first and most anxious question which we are induced to ask is in regard to their authenticity. After the various impositions in this species of writing which the French press has pawned on public credulity, we may be pardoned for receiving with some degree of suspicion a narrative which is given to the public seventy years after the death of its author. We find in the preface to the edition printed at Weimar in 1809, from which the French copy is a reprint, a detail of circumstances accounting for the transmission of the MS. from one hand to another, till it came into the possession of the editor; who conceals his name, but describes himself as a French emigrant officer, and gives the address of a bookseller at Clagenfurth (George Conrad Waldburg,) with whom he has deposited the original copy in the hand-writing of the Prince and of his secretary. Of the accuracy of this statement, it is wholly out of our power to determine: but we have great satisfaction in declaring that, after a careful perusal of the work, the inherent evidence is such as to convey to us a conviction of its authenticity. It discovers

The French bookseller states that his impression is freed from numerous faults which disfigured the Weimar edition;' that he has restored the names of persons, cities, rivers, &c. according to the best historical and geographical dictionaries;' that he has corrected a crowd of marks of punctuation which totally altered the sense ;' and that without endeavouring to amend the style, the necessity has sometimes though rarely occurred for changing words of which the too close repetition would fatigue the reader :'-but no mention is made of the omission of any passages, nor of any alteration which could affect the sense. We have not the Weimar edition to examine

this matter.

none