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observations in a work, which was forwarded in manuscript from Naples to the writer of these pages, upon an understanding that he was to engage a translator and a publisher. Through some unaccountable oversight of the Foreign Office, the MS. never reached him till two years afterwards, by which time Madame HahnHahn had lost all interest in it, and it was consequently returned to her. During the intervening period, a domestic affliction had induced her to join the Roman Catholic (the Alleinseligmachende) Church, and she has ever since devoted herself to religious and philanthropic objects, combining practical utility with earnestness in the promulgation of her faith. All her subsequent works, which are too numerous for even a brief analysis or description, are marked by strong Ultramontane tendencies. They betray no decline of intellectual power.

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M. DE STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE).

(FROM THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, JANUARY, 1856).

1. Bibliothèque Contemporaine. 2e Série. DE STENDHAL. Euvres complètes. Paris: 1854-55.

2. Romans et Nouvelles. Précédés d'une Notice sur De M. B. COLOMB. 1 vol.

Stendhal, par 3. Correspondance Inédite. Précédée d'une Introduction, par PROSPER MÉRIMÉE, de l'Académie Française; ornée d'un beau Portrait de Stendhal. 2 vols.

THE literary career of Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonyme of De Stendhal, deserves to be commemorated, if only as a curious illustration of the caprice of criticism; or it may be cited in proof of the occasional readiness of contemporaries to forestall the judgment of posterity, when there is no longer a living and sentient object for their jealousy. His habits were simple, his tastes were of a nature to be easily and cheaply gratified, and his pecuniary wants were consequently of the most modest description. He would have been content, he tells us, to rub on with 4,000 francs a year at Paris: he would have thought himself rich with 6,000; and in an autobiographical sketch he says, 'The only thing I see clearly is, that for twenty years my idéal has been to live at Paris in a fourth

story, writing a drama or a novel.' This ideal was never realised, because the booksellers and theatrical managers would not, or could not, bid high enough for dramas or novels from his pen; and he was eventually compelled to accept the consulship of Civita Vecchia, where the closing period of his life was shortened by the diseases of the climate, as well as embittered by disappointment and ennui.

There occurred, indeed, one striking exception to this general indifference. In the Revue Parisienne' of September 23rd, 1840, appeared a long and carefully written article, entitled an Étude sur H. Beyle,' by Balzac, in which 'La Chartreuse de Parme' was declared to be a masterpiece, and its author was described as one of the finest observers and most original writers of the age. But although elaborately reasoned out, and largely supported by analysis and quotation, this honourable outburst of enthusiasm was commonly regarded as an extravagance into which Balzac had been hurried by an exaggeration of generosity towards a fancied rival; and Beyle's courteous letter of acknowledgment contains the following sentence, showing how little disposed he was to overestimate his position or his hopes:

This astounding article, such as no writer ever before received from another, I have read, I now venture to own to you, with bursts of laughter. Every time I came to a eulogium a little exalted, and I encountered such at every step, I saw the expression of my friends' faces at reading it.'

Could he awake from the dead and see his friends' faces now, his characteristic smile of irony, rather than

loud laughter, would be the form in which his feelings might be most appropriately expressed; for those friends have not waited till 1880, the earliest era at which he expected to be read; they have barely exceeded the time prescribed by Horace-nonumque prematur in annum for testing the soundness of a work. Beyle died in 1842, and few beyond the very limited circle of his intimates then seemed aware that a chosen spirit had departed, or that a well of valuable thought and a fountain of exquisite sensibility had been dried up. One solitary garland of immortelles was flung upon his grave. An essay on his life and character, by M. Auguste Bussière, appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes' for January, 1843; but the first paragraph was an avowal of the hazardous character of the attempt:

'We approach a task which is at the same time both embarrassing and seducing, that of appreciating a man of talent whose upright character and original qualities seemed to promise a greater extent of influence than he has exercised on his contemporaries. We shall encounter in this mind and in this character odd specialities, strange anomalies, contradictions which will explain how, after having been more vaunted than read, more read than relished, more decried than judged, more cited than known, he has lived, if the expression may be used, in a sort of clandestine celebrity, to die an obscure and unmarked death. Contemporary literature, it must be owned, has found before the tomb of one of its most distinguished cultivators, only silence, or words worse than silence. M. Beyle dead, all has been said for him. His remains have not seen their funeral attendance swelled by those regrets which delight in display, and which come to seek under the folds of the pall a reflexion of the lustre shed by the living.'

Unlike the noble English poet, who, after an ordinary night's sleep, awoke and found himself famous, Beyle must have slumbered thirteen years, dating from the commencement of his last, long sleep, before he could have calculated on a similar surprise on waking. But his hour has come at last, and come sooner than he anticipated. We have now before us popular and cheap editions of almost all his books (thirteen volumes), in addition to two closely printed volumes of correspondence, and three volumes of novels from his unpublished MSS., bearing striking evidence to the assiduity with which every scrap of his composition has been hunted up. We have, moreover, a somewhat embarrassing superfluity of biographical notices from surviving friends, who, whatever their amount of agreement with Balzac in 1840, have no objection to respond to the popular demand for Beyle testimonials in 1855. Prefixed to the Correspondance' is a condensed and pithy series of clever, polished, highly illustrative, and by no means enthusiastic, notes and reminiscences by M. Mérimée. M. Sainte-Beuve has devoted two papers, distinguished by his wonted refinement and penetration, to Stendhal, in the 'Causeries de Lundi.' An extremely interesting biographical notice, drawn up by M. Colomb, Beyle's most attached friend and executor, from private papers and other authentic sources of information, is prefixed to the Romans et Nouvelles:' and by way of preface or introduction to the Chartreuse de Parme,' the publishers have judiciously reprinted the long-neglected éloge of Balzac.

As if to complicate the problem, Beyle's critics and

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