us no alarm; we should have been glad to wither her Waterloo “ laurels *.” A very amiable disposition, no doubt, on the part of M. de Chateaubriand, considering that he was at that moment the servant of a monarch who had been twice restored to his throne by the exertions of England, and by her profuse expenditure of the blood with which those laurels were sprinkled. But something still more curious remains. In a short history of the insurrection of the Spanish colonies, he tells us that England would have interfered long before the period to which he is referring, but that she was restrained by certain considerations. “England could not openly attack the “ Spanish colonies, because the king of Spain, a prisoner in “ France, had become her ally; she even passed Acts of Par“ liament to prevent the subjects of His Britannic Majesty “ from giving any assistance to the Americans; but never“ theless six or seven thousand Englishmen enlisted to sup

port the insurrection in Columbia.” Upon this singular statement it is only necessary to remark, that the beloved Ferdinand was released from his captivity by Bonaparte in the year 1814, and that the foreign enlistment bill was passed in the year 1819, upon complaint made by the Spanish ambassador of the number of British subjects who were embarking in the service of the new republics. The future historian, for whose labours M. de Chateaubriand informs us that he intends his work to furnish materials, will find some difficulty in persuading himself that such passages as this, of contemporary history too, could have been penned by a statesman who occupied during an eventful period the post of foreign minister to the crown of France.

We do not find in these volumes much that relates to the personal character of the Duke of Wellington, but there is in one of the earlier chapters a passage from which we may infer that our author does not entertain a very high opinion of His Grace's political talents :

“The Duke of Wellington had done to legitimacy the injury of forcing the services of Fouché upon the crown, and had committed against the nation the crime of winning the battle of Waterloo. With the exception of five or six men of genius, all great captains have been but sorry creatures (des pauvres gens). No renown is more brilliant than the renown of arms, or less deserves the glory which is shed around it. It was in vain to caress the successor of Marlborough in order to draw him aside from the policy of his country; it was all lost time. Sa Gráce, pour se désennuyer de nous, cherchait à Vérone quelque des Ursins qui pút écrire à la marge de nos dépêches interceptées : POUR MARIÉE-von."

In this passage there is one observation with which we are well disposed to agree. We have ever thought of martial glory much as our author thinks, and we are convinced that military talents are very far from holding the highest rank among intellectual endowments; but we are quite unable to understand how the fact that the caresses of M. de Chateaubriand were wasted in the attempt to seduce the Duke of Wellington from the policy of his Government can be taken for an indication of the mental inferiority which he ascribes to our illustrious countryman. We have printed the concluding lines in French, because they are not more obscure in the original than in the translation; but in this instance the obscurity is not the fault of the translator; the anecdote alluded to is not very generally known in England.

The Princess Orsini, the favourite of the queen of Philip the Fifth of Spain, was placed about the person of her Majesty by Louis XIV., that she might watch over the interests of France at the Spanish court. After some time her enemies, anxious to destroy her influence, represented her conduct, both private and political, in an unfavourable light to the French king. It is said that on one occasion, having caused the courier of the French ambassador to be stopped, she found that in some of the despatches directed to the King her character was virulently assailed. Among other things it was alleged, that her over-intimate connexion with a certain D’Aubigny, her homme d'affaires, gave rise to a general belief that they were married. The Princess, stung to the quick by this accusation, lost all command of herself, and wrote upon a corner of the despatch the words pour mariée, non, and was rash enough to forward it, with this marginal commentary, to the King. So strange a justification of her conduct in one particular was naturally taken as an admission of all the rest. But how does this apply to the Duke of Wellington? Does M. de Chateaubriand mean to insinuate that His Grace was attempting to bribe some wretch to stop the messengers of the French embassy on the highway, and rob them of their despatches? We do not believe one word of it; and the mere supposition, resting on no better foundation than the poetical fancy of M. de Chateaubriand, is rather apt to give an idea of what the Frenchman was capable of, than likely to induce any one to suspect the English statesman of such nefarious practices. But the conceited Viscount, thinking himself the greatest minister at the congress, fancied that every cabinet must be anxious to be informed of his dreams, no matter by what means, or at what sacrifice of honour, the knowledge was obtained.

We have thus endeavoured to lay before our readers a correct account of a work, to which the author attaches much importance, as describing his conduct, and the motives by which he was actuated, in the most eventful period of his versatile existence, a period during which it was permitted to him to exercise considerable sway over the destinies of his own country, and to overthrow the liberties of an adjacent state. Our task would have been less irksome had we found in these volumes more which we could conscientiously have praised. We have not forgotten that there is at least one act of the life of M. de Chateaubriand, which justly earned for him the respect and admiration of Europe—his conduct upon receiving the intelligence of the Duc d'Enghien's murder. The moment he heard of that horrible crime, he hastened to resign the embassy to which he had recently been appointed by Napoleon ; thus braving the fury of the despot at a moment when his power was near its zenith, and his passions in their most terrible excitement. The manner too in which he was dismissed from office in 1824 by that bad race whom it was then his fate to serve, and his subsequent fidelity to their desperate cause, cannot fail to enlist sympathy in his behalf. But in reviewing the Congress of Verona we could not hesitate as to the tone which it behoved us to adopt: when a work from the pen of so distinguished a writer professes, as this work does, to furnish materials for history, it imposes upon his reviewer the obligation of exposing, as best he may, the vanity of its pretensions, the hollowness of its principles, and the inaccuracy of its assertions.

ARTICLE VIII.

Poems of Many Years. By R. M. MILNES.
Memorials of a Residence on the Continent. By R. M. MILNES.
These volumes have as yet been printed for private circula-
tion only; we understand, however, that it is the intention
of their author to give them to the public at some future pe-
riod; and we may, therefore, venture to direct towards them
the attention of the readers of poetry, in the hope that they
may not long be debarred from the pleasure which we have
derived from their perusal. The specimens which we shall
lay before them, in vindication of our favourable judgment,
will, we trust, speak for themselves; and every opinion is
now required to give some account of itself, if it hopes to be
considered respectable. Moreover, poetry. is less plentifully
supplied to us at present than it was a few years since, or,
which comes to the same thing, everybody has agreed to say
that such is the case, and every notice of a new writer is ex-
pected to begin with “ In the existing dearth of poetry," or
some equivalent expression. Much, too, has been said and
written, not merely to prove the fact of such scarcity, but to
demonstrate its necessity, and thereby to prepáre us to expect
its continuance; with all which, however, we are not other-
wise concerned, than to point at it as a justification of the
general nature of the remarks suggested, under such circum-
stances, by the appearance of these volumes. If a pheno-
menon be rare, there is the more need for observing it accu-
rately. If, indeed, there were a natural law ordaining that
periods of literary plenty should alternate with periods of
famine, it would be difficult to look back upon the last thirty
or forty years without anticipating the latter for the coming
generation. Few will deny that such a view presents us with
a body of poetry, to which, for extent, originality, and beauty,
any age and any nation might refer with pride; inventive,
not imitative, one of those outbreaks which mark an æra, and
distinguished not more by genuine vigour than by the unpa-
ralleled width and variety of its range. From Crabbe, the
poet of daily realities, sometimes humorous, sometimes fear-
ful, and in the spirit of accurate truthfulness verging as nearly