atives and the civil and military leaders "Effort without one's self, and still more speak in such language, in such a crisis, is within, is more necessary in proportion as a great country, and, I add, a great Chris- we grow old than in youth. I compare tian country. I know not if the eye of man in this world to a traveller, who walks God, in looking down upon this earth, on without ceasing, to a region more and could find there, in the times in which we more cold, and who is obliged to move quicklive, a spectacle more worthy of him. er as he advances farther. The great malady All this, some will say, does not rise above of the soul is coldness, and in order to coma vague and incomplete Christianity; a bat this fearful evil, it is necessary, not only Christianity too nearly allied to deism, like to keep up a lively movement of the mind that of Washington. That may be true, by labor, but still more, by contact with his bu, as the Bishop of Orleans said, we are fellow-creatures and with the affairs of this still very far from it in Europe. All vague and incomplete as it may be, it seems that the most scrupulous and exacting Catholics can still admire and envy it, since Pope Pius IX. has not disdained to contribute to the monument of Washington. world. It is especially in old age, that we are no longer permitted to live upon what we have already acquired; but it is necessary that we should exert ourselves to acquire more, and, instead of resting in ideas in which we should find ourselves, become If it is just to apply to politics the rule laid buried in sleep, place ourselves in constant down by our Lord for the spiritual life: " By contact, and in struggle with the ideas that their fruits ye shall know them," I think we adopt, and with those that are suggested we can look, without too much anxiety, at by the state of society and the opinions of the future of the United States; and of all the time."* All this is true, not only nations, who, placed in the same conditions, of old people, but of old parties, of old can follow in the same path. The state of opinions, and old creeds. Ours is the oldest society which produced a Lincoln, and oth- in the world. It is her august privilege, it ers like him, is a good tree, - an excellent is also her glory and her strength. But, in tree, whose fruits cause no envy in the pro- order that this strength, applied to public ducts of any monarchy or of any aristoc- and social life, should not fail nor waste itracy. I know very well that there are oth- self in vain chimeras, it is necessary to imer fruits more harsh and less savory, but merse it, without ceasing, in the living wathese are sufficient to authorize the confi-ters of the time in which God has brought dence and hope that I feel, and with which us into life, in the current of the emotions, we should inspire all those who make a of the legitimate aspirations of those whom point of having, not only their bones, as God has given us for brothers. Let us Lacordaire says, but their heart and their profit then, by what the Almighty has caused memory, on the side of virtue. Let us turn us to witness of this great triumph of liberour thoughts from everything which in the ty, of justice, and of the gospel; of this Old World carries us away, by a too natural great defeat of evil, of selfishness, of tyranpropensity, to discouragement, to debase-ny. Let us thank him for having given to ment, and to apathy; and let us seek be- Christian America, sufficient strength and yond the Atlantic to inhale the breath of a virtue to keep so gloriously the promise. better future. Those who, like myself, Let us adore his kindness, which has spared have grown gray in the faith of the future of us the shame and the grief of seeing misliberty, and of the necessity of its alliance erably abortive this great hope of modern CH. DE MONTALEMBERT. with religion, ought without ceasing to re-humanity. call the beautiful words of Tocqueville to Madame Swetchine. * Letter of Feb. 2, 1857. TRANSLATION FROM VAPEREAU'S DIC- CHARLES-FORBES, Count de Montalembert, is a Publicist and a French statesman. His father, Marc Rene, was a peer of France. M. de Montalembert who has varied much in the application and the sig! nificance of his principles, has always declared himself Catholic and Liberal. At his first appearance, he accepted that alliance of Catholicism and Democracy of which Lammenais was the apostle, and was counted amongst the first writers in the journal L'Avenir. Beginning from that time a sort of crusade against the University, he opened on the 2d April, 1831, with MM. de Coux and Lacordaire, a school called Ecole libre, which brought them before the police court. During the trial, having become a peer of France by the death of his father, he claimed the high jurisdiction of the Chamber of which he was a member, and was finally tried and condemned to pay a fine of one hundred pounds. His speech in defence, pronounced from such a tribune, may be considered as his debut in the political career. Being re-elected to the Legislative Assembly by the department of Doubs, and, at the same time, by that of the Côtes-du-Nord, M. de Montalembert showed still more strongly his lofty personality. Excited by the rival eloquence of M. Victor Hugo, who be. came, as it were, his natural adversary, he displayed there a remarkable talent as an orator. At the beginning of 1851, at the epoch of the first recriminations of the Assembly against the President of the Republic, he often separated himself from his party, in order to take up the President's defence, by declaring that he was neither his counsellor nor his confidant, but his witness, and by protesting "against one of the blindest and least justified ingratitudes of this time." His last grand struggle against M. Victor Hugo took place in June, 1851, at the time of the bill for the revision of the Consti tution. At the time of the coup d'état of the 2d December, M. de Montalembert protested against the im prisonment of the Deputies. Nevertheless he took part with the second deliberative commission, and was elected to the Corps Legislatif by the department of Doubs, in 1852. He there represented, almost alone, the opposition. In 1854, upon the occasion of a confidential letter written by him to M. Dupin, published against his will in the Belgian ordered a prosecution against him, which terminated in an ordinance of non lieu. In the last elections of 1857, M. de Montalembert, beaten-notwithstanding all his efforts by the candidate of the government, has, from that time, been withdrawn entirely from public life. The condemnation of Lammenais in the Roman court, led M. de Montalembert back to the most severe orthodoxy, and he devoted himself to studies on the middle ages, whose influences upon him have been decisive. His famous life of St. Eliza-journals and hawked about Paris, the Assembly beth of Hungary dates from 1836. In 1842 he combated, to the utmost, the bill of M. Villemain, on the occasion of the discussion in the Chamber of Peers respecting the relations of the Church and the State; he published his Manifeste Catholique; and, in the following year, the Union of Church and State; then returned the following year, to deliver in the Chamber of Peers his three speeches upon "The Liberty of the Church," "The Liberty of Teach ing," and "The Liberty of the Monastic Orders." In this last speech, he openly defended the Society of Jesus. As another result of his liberal principles, he maintained the cause of oppressed nationalities. In a speech upon Political Radicalism, he prophesied the Republic three months from date: it anticipated that time. M. de Montalembert seemed to rally frankly to the new state of things, and offered his services to the democracy in a manifesto. He presented him. self at the elections of the Constituent Assembly, in the department of the Doubs, where his family had great estates; was elected, the last on the list, by twenty-two thousand votes, and took his seat on the extreme right. As a member of the Electoral Committee of the Rue de Poitiers, he generally voted with the moderate party. However, he declared himself with the left against the re-establishment of giving bonds by the journals, and against the maintenance of a state of siege during the dis. cussion of the Constitution; was opposed to the admission of Louis Bonaparte; and refused to approve of the Constitution as a whole. But, at the end of the session, he subordinated singularly one of his two principles, liberty, to the other, authority; supported, in a remarkable speech, the bill for restrict ing the press, presented by M. Dufause; and gave his unqualified adhesion to the expedition to Rome Aristocrat and Liberal, admirer of English institutions, and devoted to the traditions of the Court of Rome, equally absolute and radical in the most opposite theories, M. de Montalembert has a phase of his own in the midst of contemporary politics, and has more than one kind of influence. Chief of a small fraction of distinguished men whom he has baptized with the militant name of Catholic party, he declares himself at the same time a passionate worshipper of liberty. But, confounding it with a certain concession of individual freedom which is nothing less than privilege, he places its golden age in the middle age, in the epoch of Evêques Seigneurs. This commingling of principles, more or less reconcilable, has at least allowed him to express successively the most contrary opinions, without appearing in contradiction with himself; but, with the majority, and, nothwithstanding his rupture with L'Univers, his name is now, as it has long been, the symbol of political and clerical authority carried to its highest expression. As an orator, at once brilliant and full of unction, M. de Montalembert has made himself known; as a writer, by works which have earned for him, at the French Academy, the chair formerly of Droz, Feb. 5, 1852. His discourse, the ideas of which M. Guizot, who was appointed to reply to him, was eager to adopt as his own, was a very spirited attack against the conquests of 1789, and, in general, against the Revolution. From Macmillan's Magazine. CHARLES LAMB: GLEANINGS AFTER HIS BIOGRAPHERS. THE life of Lamb is a subject which many have attempted, and in which no one, as it seems to us, has been very happy. We do not get at the man in any of these pen-andink paintings; and that is precisely what we should wish to get at. They are as unsatisfactory as his portraits, which are all unlike one another, and none of them very like the original. All that has been done hitherto in this direction has helped, more or less, to swell the stock of materials, with which somebody hereafter will have to do his best. We must be thankful to Mr. Barry Cornwall for his "Recollections; " and the late Mr. Justice Talfourd laid the world under obligations, to a certain extent, by the "Memorials" which he gave to it of his friend. But neither of these books realizes our conception of what a Life of Lamb ought to be. Miss Lamb, in an unpublished letter to a correspondent, speaks of their her's and her brother's-what-wedo existence. There is want of a volume yet, which should describe that for us, which should paint the Lambs' fireside, and present to us a view, or even glimpses, of those two, as they were and moved, even at the hazard of a little pre-Raphaelitish detail. The Lambs, we apprehend, were not genteel people in the severely conventional acceptation of the term; and it is to be added that the times in which they lived were, unhappily for them or happily for us, not quite such genteel times as we find ourselves cast in. This delightful and accomplished couple had not only poor and humble antecedents, but at the outset and for some long while after, their own circumstances were poor and humble; and there were certain old-world notions, archaic ways, in which they were born; and with these they grew up and died. A fearful domestic tragedy had darkened their youth, and coloured all their after-life: there was insanity in the blood; and, one day, the mother fell by the daughter's hand. Thenceforth, the brother and sister lived to each other, one and indivisible; and the bond, which was knit in sorrow, was severed only by death. This is, so far, old ground, and these are familiar facts. It seemed desirable to pursue the beaten rout to a certain distance, and then, if we could, to strike into a fresh track or two. being fairly said of the last "Life of Lamb;' and we shall consequently do our best to steer clear of it. An inaccurate account is there given, however, singularly enough, of the origin of the friendship between Miss Lamb and one of her most intimate and valued friends, Miss Sarah Stoddart, who afterwards became the wife of William Hazlitt. The fact is that Miss Lamb and Miss Stoddart had become acquainted some time before the year 1803, and that in that year the two ladies were in active and affectionate correspondence. Lamb had met Miss Stoddart's brother, Dr. Stoddart, at Godwin's and at William Hazlitt's elder brother's in Great Russell Strect; and in this way the friendship must have sprung up. Miss Stoddart and William Hazlitt were not married till 1808; and in the intervening five years (1803-1808) a series of letters passed between the future Mrs. Hazlitt and Miss Lamb, of which a few have been preserved. They are those written by Miss Lamb. Miss Stoddart's letters seem to have perished. The existing remains of this correspondence supply perhaps the most ample and valuable information that we have upon the domestic and fireside life of the Lambs; they are equally admirable, whether we look at them as pictures or as compositions; and heretofore they have been passed over in complete silence, for the simple reason that they have never been printed, and still remain in private hands. They do not, of course, tell us all that we might like to know, but they tell us much, and they suggest to us much. Nor should it be forgotten that the years they illustrate are years for which a biographer is likely to feel grateful by an accession of light. In September, 1803, Miss Stoddart was fluctuating between one of two gentlemen who were paying her attentions, and to both of whom she appears to have extended a certain share of encouragement. She took Mary Lamb entirely into confidence, and reported to her from time to time how her love-affairs sped. Now it was Mr. who was in the ascendant, and at another, Mr. Somebody else. Miss Lamb took occasion to tell her correspondent candidly that she could not enter so completely into her feelings as she would have wished, for that her ways were not Miss Stoddart's exactly. But there was one point in which Miss Lamb found serious fault with Miss Stoddart, and it was the want of confidence she displayed towards her brother the doctor, and Mrs. Stoddart, and her failure to acquaint them with what she was about. It would be an ungracious duty, from which on more than one account we rather shrink, to point out all that is capable of FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. V. 127. "Charles is very unwell" We are obliged to plunge a little in medias | that free communication of letters and opinres; for the fact is that the correspondence ions, just as they arrive, as Charles and I begins abruptly and imperfectly, and the do, and which after all is the only groundearlier portions might be sought for in vain. work of true friendship. The first article in the series is, in fact, of the 21st September, 1803, and here Miss Stoddart is "my dear Sarah," and the relations are evidently most intimate and cordial. There had been, we may be sure, many previous interchanges of thoughts and gossip. Miss Lamb here says, in reference to Miss Stoddart's, in her opinion, most injudicious reserve : — "One thing my advising spirit must say use as little secrecy as possible, and as much as possible make a friend of your sister-in-law. You know I was not struck with her at first sight, but upon your account I have watched and marked her very attentively; and, while she was eating a bit of cold mutton in our kitchen, we had a serious conversation. From the frankness of her manner I am convinced she is a person I could make a friend of, why should not you? .. "My father had a sister lived with us. of course lived with my mother, her sisterin-law; they were in their different ways the best creatures in the world, but they set out wrong at first. They made each other miserable for full twenty years of their lives. My mother was a perfect gentlewoman; my aunty as unlike a gentlewoman as you can possibly imagine a good old woman to be; so that my dear mother (who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart), used to distress and weary her with incessant and unceasing attention and politeness to gain her affection. The old woman could not return this in kind, and did not know what to make of it - thought it all deceit, and used to hate my mother with a bitter hatred; which of course was soon returned with interest; a little frankness, and looking into each other's characters at first, would have spared all this. . . . My anut and my mother were wholly unlike you and your sister; yet in some degree theirs is the exact history of all sisters-in-law; and you will smile when I tell you I think myself the only woman in the world who could live with a brother's wife, and make a real friend of her partly from early observation of the unhappy example I have just given you, and partly from a knack I know I have of looking into people's real It is clear enough how this bears upon the early and painful history of the Lambs; and here we have, what we can get nowhere else, Miss Lamb's own sentiments about her mother and the family affairs, almost antecedently to her brother's acquisition of a name. In 1804 the same year in which Coleridge, it may be recollected, visited Dr. Stoddart at Malta the doctor's sister also went out on a visit; and she was in fact there to receive Coleridge when he arrived. There are two letters from Miss Lamb to Miss Stoddart during this Maltese trip; and, if we add one more from Lamb himself to Southey (only discovered quite recently), we have before us the entire Lamb correspondence for the year! What Miss Lamb says about her brother and herself, and their common home, in these two communications, may therefore be worth copying out. In the first (9th April, 1804), she says: Charles has lost the newspaper; but what we dreaded as an evil has proved a great blessing, for we have both strangely recovered our health and spirits, since this has happened, and I hope when I write next I shall be able to tell you Charles has begun something which will produce a little money, for it is not well to be very poor, which we certainly are at this present writing. Is a quiet evening in a Maltese drawing-room as pleasant as those we have passed in Mitre Court and Bell Yard?".. When the second letter was written, Coleeridge had arrived out, and his safety had been announced by Miss Stoddart. It must consequently be referred to June, 1804. There had been a misunderstanding between Lamb and Miss Stoddart's mother about the postage of certain letters. It would be a matter scarcely worth notice here, were it not that Miss Lamb, in explaining it to her correspondent, touches interestingly on the character of Charles: 66 My brother," she writes, "has had a letter from your mother, which has distressed him sadly, about the postage of some letters being paid by my brother. Your silly brother, it seems, has informed your mother (I did not think your brother could have been "By secrecy I mean you both [Miss S. so silly) that Charles had grumbled at payand Dr. S.] want the habit of telling each ing the said postage. The fact was, just at other at the moment everything that hap- that time we were very poor, having lost the pens, where you go, and what you do Morning Post, and we were beginning to characters. ... practise a strict economy. My brother, who never makes up his mind whether he will be a miser or a spendthrift, is at all times a strange mixture of both; of this failing the even economy of your correct brother's temper makes him an ill judge. The miserly part of Charles, at that time smarting under his recent loss, then happened to reign triumphant, and he would not write or let me write, as often as he wished, because the postage cost two-and-fourpence; then came two or three of your poor mother's letters almost together, and the two-and-fourpence he wished, but grudged, to pay for his own, he was forced to pay for hers.... Charles is sadly fretted now, and knows not what to say to your mother. I have made this long preamble about it to induce you, if possible, to reinstate us in your mother's good graces. Say to her it was a jest misunderstood; tell her that Charles Lamb is not the shabby fellow she and her son took him for, but that he is now and then a little whimsical or so." What has gone before is worth half a bi ography of itself. It is certainly an admirable passage, and Miss Lamb was as certainly an admirable letter-writer. The bottom of the sheet is occupied by a few lines from Charles himself: "MY DEAR MISS STODDART, "Long live Queen Hoop — oop oop – 000 and all the old merry phantoms. "Mary has written so fully to you, that I have nothing to add but that, in all the kindness she has expressed, and loving desire to see you again, I bear my full part. You will perhaps like to tear this half from the sheet, and give your brother only his strict due, the remainder. So I will just repay your late kind letter with this short postscript to hers. Come over here, and let us all be merry again. "C. LAMB." So much for the letters of 1804. In one of 1805, directed to Miss Stoddart at Salisbury, the writer starts with this characteristie passage: -"I have just been reading over again your two long letters, and I perceive they make me very envious. I have taken a bran new pen and put on my spectacles, and am peering with all my might to see the lines in the paper, which the sight of your even lines had well nigh tempted me to rule. I have, moreover, taken two pinches of snuff extraordinary to clear my head, which feels more cloudy than com Charles to write to your brother by the conveyance you mention; but he is so unwell, I almost fear the fortnight will slip away before I can get him in the right vein. Indeed it has been sad and heavy times with us lately. When I am pretty well, his low spirits throw me back again; and, when he begins to get a little cheerful, then I do the same kind office for him. . . . "Do not say anything, when you write, of our low spirits; it will vex Charles. You would laugh, or you would cry, perhaps both, to see us sit together, looking at each other with long and rueful faces, and saying, How do you do? and, How do you do? and then we fall a-crying, and say we will be better on the morrow. He says we are like toothache and his friend gum-boil, which, though a kind of ease, is but an uneasy kind of ease, a comfort of rather an uncomfortable sort. "Do not, I conjure you, let her [Mrs. S.'s] unhappy malady afflict you too deeply; speak from experience, and from the opportunity I have had of much observation in such cases, that insane people, in the fancies they take into their heads, do not feel as one in a sane state of mind does." . . . Here Miss Lamb touches a delicate chord, and in a subsequent letter (14th November, 1805), written after a recovery, she returns: to the same ground; in this case, however,. explicitly speaking of her own occasional derangements. She says: "Your kind heart will, I know; even if you have been a little displeased, forgive me, when I assure you my spirits have been so much hurt by my last illness, that at times I hardly know what I do. I do not mean to alarm you about myself, or to plead an excuse, but am very much otherwise than you have always known me. I do. not think any one perceives me altered; but I have lost all self-confidence in my own actions; and one cause of my low spirits is, that I never feel satisfied with anything I do. A perception of not being in a sane state perpetually haunts me." There is further allusion to this illness in. a letter of November 18, 1805: "I have made many attempts at writing to you, but it has always brought your trouble and my own so strongly into my mind that I have been obliged to leave off, and make Charles write for me. . . . I have been for these few days in rather better spirits, so that I begin almost to feel myself once more a living creature, and to hope for happier times; and in that hope I include the prospect of once more seeing my dear Sarah in peace and comfort. . . .. How did I wish for your presence to cheer my |