changes of opinion have all been in opposition to his interest; and he has suffered at different periods of his life from his resistance to the mandates of authority, and his rejection of the calls of ambition. In early life he was exiled from France, and shared in all the hardships of the emigrants, from his attachment to Royalist principles. At the earnest request of Napoleon, he accepted office under the Imperial Government, but he relinquished it, and again became an exile upon the murder of the Duke d'Enghien. The influence of his writings was so powerful in favour of the Bourbons, at the period of the Restoration, that Louis XVIII. truly said, they were worth more than an army. He followed the dethroned monarch to Ghent, and contributed much, by his powerful genius, to consolidate the feeble elements of his power, after the fall of Napoleon. Called to the helm of affairs in 1824, he laboured to accommodate the temper of the monarchy to the increasing spirit of freedom in the country, and fell into disgrace with the Court, and was distrusted by the Royal Family, because he strove to introduce those popular modifications into the administration of affairs, which might have prevented the Revolution of July; and finally, he has resisted all the efforts of the Citizen King to engage his great talents in defence of the throne of the Barricades. True to his principles, he has exiled himself from France, to preserve his independence; and consecrated in a foreign land his illustrious name to the defence of the child of misfortune.

Chateaubriand is not only an eloquent and beautiful writer, he is also a profound scholar, and an enlightened thinker. His knowledge of history and classical literature is equalled only by his intimate acquaintance with the early annals of the church, and the fathers of the Catholic faith; while in his speeches delivered in the Chamber of Peers since the Restoration, will be found not only the most eloquent, but the most complete and satisfactory dissertations on the political state of France during that period, which are anywhere to be met with. It is a singular circumstance, that an author of such great and varied acquirements, who is universally allowed by all parties in France to be their greatest living writer, should hardly be known except by name to the great body of readers in this country.

His greatest work, that on which his fame will rest with posterity, is the Genius of Christianity, from which such ample quotations have already been given. The next is the Martyrs, a romance, in which he has introduced an exemplification of the principles of Christianity, in the early sufferings of the primitive church, and enriched the narrative by the splendid description of the scenery in Egypt, Greece, and Palestine, which he had visited during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and all the stores of learning which a life spent in classical and ecclesiastical lore could accumulate. The last of his considerable publications is the Etudes Historiques, a work eminently characteristic of that superiority in historical composition, which we have allowed to the French modern writers over their contemporaries in this country; and which, we fear, another generation, instructed when too late by the blood and the tears of a Revolution, will alone be able fully to appreciate. Its object is to trace the influence of Christianity from its first spread in the Roman empire to the rise of civilisation in the Western world; a field in which he goes over the ground trod by Gibbon, and demonstrates the unbounded benefits derived from religion in all the institutions of modern times. In this noble undertaking he has been aided, with a still more philosophical mind, though inferior fire and eloquence, by Guizot a writer who, equally with his illustrious rival, is as yet unknown, save by report, in this country, but from whose joint labours is to be dated the spring of a pure and philosophical system of religious inquiry in France, and the commencement of that revival of manly devotion in which the antidote, and the only antidote, to the fanaticism of infidelity is to be found.

VIRGIL, TASSO, AND RAPHAEL

[BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE, APRIL 1845]

ORIGINALITY of conception and fidelity of observation in general mark the efforts of genius in the earlier ages of society; and it is then, accordingly, that those creative minds appear which stamp their own impress upon the character of a whole people, and communicate to their literature, in the most distant periods, a certain train of thought, a certain class of images, a certain family resemblance. Homer, Phidias, and Eschylus in ancient times; Dante, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, and Shakspeare in modern, belong to this exalted class. Each, in his own department, has struck out a new range of thought, and created a fresh brood of ideas, which on "winged words" have taken their flight to distant regions, and to the end of the world will never cease to delight and influence mankind. Subsequent ages may refine their images, expand their sentiments, perhaps improve their expression; but they add little to the stock of their conceptions. The very greatness of their predecessors precludes fresh creations: the furrows of the ancient wheels are so deep that the modern chariot cannot avoid falling into them. So completely, in all persons of education, are the great works of antiquity incorporated with thought, that they arise involuntarily with every exercise of the faculty of taste, and insensibly recur to the cultivated mind, with all that it admires, and loves, and venerates in the world.

But though originality of conception, the creation of imagery, and the invention of events belong to early ages, delicacy of taste, refinement of sentiment, perfection of expression, are the growth of a more advanced period of

society. The characters which are delineated by the hand of Genius in early times, are those bold and original ones in which the features are distinctly marked, the lines clearly drawn, the peculiarities strongly brought out. The images which are adopted are those which have first occurred to the creative mind in forming a world of fancy; the similes employed, those which convey to the simple and unlettered mind the clearest or most vivid conception of the idea or event intended to be illustrated. Valour, pride, resolution, tenderness, patriotism, are the mental qualities which are there portrayed in imaginary characters, and called forth by fictitious events and it is this first and noblest delineation of mental qualities in a historical gallery which has rendered the Iliad immortal. The images and similes of Homer are drawn from a close observation of nature, but they are not very varied in their range: he paints every incident, every occurrence, every feature, but he is not much diversified in conception, and surprisingly identical in expression. His similes of a boar beset by hunters, of a lion prowling round a fold and repelled by the spear of the shepherd, of a panther leaping into a herd of cattle, of a mountain torrent bearing all before it in its furious descent, are represented in the same words wherever he has a close fight of one of his heroes with a multitude of enemies to recount, or the fell swoop of victorious onset to portray. So forcibly is the creative mind, in the first instance, fascinated by the variety and brilliancy of its conceptions, that it neglects and despises their subordinate details. It is careless of expression, because it is intent on ideas: it is niggardly in language, because it is prodigal of thought. Homer's expressions or epithets are, in general, admirably chosen, and speak at once a graphic eye and an imaginative mind; but it is extraordinary how often they recur without any variation. It is the same with Ariosto: he is somewhat more varied in his expression, but even more identical in his details. Prodigal of invention, varied in imagination, unbounded in conception, in the incidents and great features of his story, he has very little diversity in its subordinate parts. He carries us over the whole earth, through the air, and to the moon: but giants, castles, knights, and errant damsels, occur at every step, with hardly any alteration. The perpetual jousts of

the knights, charging with the lance and then drawing the sword, are exactly parallel to the endless throwing of the spear and leaping from the chariot in the Iliad.

No man can read the Eneid without seeing that it has been constructed, both in its general conception and chief incidents, on the poems of Homer; and yet so exquisite was the taste, so refined the sentiment, so tender the heart of VIRGIL, that he has produced upon the world the impression of a great original author, and his fame is second only to the immortal author of the Iliad. Dante worshipped him as a species of divinity; he made him his guide through the infernal regions, to unfold the crimes of the wicked, and the intentions of the Deity in the distribution of future rewards and punishments. Throughout the Middle Ages he was regarded as a sort of necromancer, a mighty magician, to whom the past and the future were alike known, and whose power even the elements of nature were constrained to obey. The "Sortes Virgillianæ," so well known and so long practised in every country of Europe, arose from this belief. The imagery, mythology, and characters of his epic poem are drawn from the Iliad; but in two particulars he is entirely original, and his genius has opened the two fountains from which the most prolific streams of beauty in modern poetry have flowed. He is the father of descriptive and amatory poetry. The passion of love, as we understand it, was unknown to Homer, as much as was the description of nature as a separate and substantive object. He has made the whole Iliad, indeed, turn upon the wrath of Achilles for the loss of Briseïs; and he has painted, with inimitable tenderness and pathos, the conjugal attachment of Hector and Andromache; but he had no conception of love as a passion, mingled with sentiment and independent of possession. The wrath of Achilles is the fury of an Eastern sultan whose harem has been violated: the parting of Hector and Andromache is the rending asunder of the domestic affections, the farewell from the family hearth, the breaking up of the home circle. But the love of Dido for Æneas is the refined passion which is the soul of the romances and of half the poetry of modern times. It was the creature of the imagination, the offspring of the soul from its own conceptions, kindled only into life by an external object. It arose