highest place at feast and synagogue; he thought more highly of himself than he ought to think; and of the spirit of meekness, humility, and forgiveness of injuries, he had no more notion than a Red Indian. He was, in truth, one of the most unamiable, as well as one of the most unhappy of men. He really loved no one but himself; he heartily appreciated no genius but his own; his posthumous Memoirs, which he wrote with the view of raising a grand temple to his own fame, are filled with portraits of his contemporaries, scarcely one of which can be called either generous or cordial, few of which are just, and most of which are snarling, bitter, and malignant; some of them, where the originals had defeated or eclipsed him, being painted in colors which transgress even the bounds of decency. We may give one example, among the worst no doubt, but still by no means unique.

"M. de Talleyrand, appelé de longue date au tribunal d'en haut, était contumace: la mort le cherchait de la part de Dieu, et elle l'a enfin trouvé. Pour analyser minutieusement une vie aussi gâtée que celle de M. de la Fayette a été saine, il faudrait affronter des dégoûts que je suis incapable de surmonter. Les hommes de plaies ressemblent aux carcasses de prostituées les ulcères les ont tellement rongés qu'ils ne peuvent servir à la dissection."❤

:

Talleyrand also left memoirs behind him, but with the direction that they should not be published till fifty yours aftor his death. Chateaubriand's autobiography, assailing and blasting nearly every publio and living rop utation, was sold during his lifetime, and given to the. world the same your in which he died,

A great MAN Chateaubriand can scarcely, in any truo Ronso of the word, be called; his soul was too much eaton away by hollow allocations and porila vanition for that. But amid all his weaknossos and littlonossos ho had the faculty of producing upon his contemporarios the impression of "grandour and of strongth. A gront writer he certainly was; and probably it was his unrivalled coTomo VI. p. 242.

pacity in this line that deceived both himself and others into fancying him a thinker and a statesman. He offers, perhaps, the most remarkable instance the world ever saw of the extent to which the power of style can disguise and even supply the absence of higher gifts. We cannot better conclude this long paper than by a few sentences from the pen of Albert de Broglie.

"Between 1814 and 1848, France for thirty-four years tried her hand at representative government. Three unfortunate tempers have twice led to a sad failure of the trial: a general and systematic spirit of opposition to authority, extravagance of personal pretensions, and the bitterness of personal animosities. Never have these three characteristic national features — which render constitutional government almost impossible-appeared so strongly as in M. de Chateaubriand. He was an active public character for fifteen years: he opposed every government; he put forth pretensions to every post; and he ended by hating everybody."

I

M. DE TOCQUEVILLE

is a very difficult question to decide at what distance of time after a great man's death his biography should be given to the world. If it is put forth at once, as interest and affection would naturally dictate, while the world is yet ringing with his fame and his friends yet grieving for his loss, when every one is eager to know more of a man of whom they had heard so much, the sentiments it excites will be more vivid, and the treatment it receives will be more gentle; it will be read more widely, and handled more tenderly; enmity will be silenced and criticism softened by the recency and the sadness of the severance. But, on the other hand, much must be sacrificed for the sake of those advantages. If the deceased has been a statesman, considerations of political propriety compel silence, or only half-disclosures, in reference to transactions which perhaps more than most others would throw light upon his character; his reasons for what he did himself, and his judgments of what was done by others, have often to be suppressed out of generous discretion, or from obligations of promised secrecy; and thus only a mutilated and fraginentary account of his thoughts and deeds can be laid before the public. Or if, without being a politician, he has mixed largely with his fellows, as most great men must have done,if he has lived intimately with the celebrated and the powerful, and poured out in unreserved correspondence with his friends his estimates of the characters and actions of those whom he has known and watched, -and if his abilities and opportunities rendered these estimates of singular interest and value, we are

#

doomed to a still severer disappointment. For these, which are precisely the things we most desire to learn, and for which we should most treasure his biography, are precisely the things which must be withheld. His contemporaries and associates, the objects of his free criticism, and it may be of his severe judicial condemnation, are still living; their characters must be spared, and their feelings must be respected; the work must be garbled and impoverished by asterisks and omissions, and all the richest and most piquant portions of it must be postponed to a more distant day. If, in order to avoid these inconvenient and enforced discretions, the publication of the life be delayed till the generation to which it belonged has passed away, the necessity for suppression will be escaped, but half the interest in the subject will have died out. The man, unless he belonged to the very first order of great men, will have become one of the ordinary figures of history; his memory may still be cherished by many, but his name will no longer be in every mouth. The delineation of his character may be incomparably more complete and perfect than it could have been at an earlier period, but comparatively few will care to read it; it may be infinitely more instructive, but it can never be half as interesting, for those who would especially have drawn interest and instruction from its pages are gone where all biography is needless. If the subject of the narrative were a public man, his life may still furnish valuable materials for the history of his times; if he were a great thinker, or philosopher, or discoverer, the details of his mental formation and operations may throw much interesting light upon psychology and morals; but if he were only, or mainly, a good man or a social celebrity, it is often hard to see why, after so many years, any account of him should be given to the world at all.

But these are not the only doubtful questions which those who contemplate biography have to consider. It is not easy to decide who would be the fittest person to undertake the delineation of the character and the nar

ration of the career, a widow, a son, or a brother, or a bosom friend, or an unconnected literary man, capable of full appreciation, but not disturbed by too vivid sympathies. The family of the deceased may of course be expected to know him more thoroughly than any mere acquaintance could do; they have watched him more closely and more continuously; they alone have seen him in his most unbent and therefore most natural, though not perhaps his best, moments; they, more than others, can tell what he was in those private relations of life which usually, but not always, afford the clearest insight into the inner nature of the man. But, on the other hand, they will seldom have known him in his younger days, his widow rarely, his son never; they will generally be withheld by reverence from any keen critical judgment of his attributes or actions; or, if not, their criticism will carry with it a semblance of unseemliness, and they will scarcely be able to estimate rightly the real space which he filled in the world's eye, the particular points which the world will wish to hear, and the degree and kind of detail which it will bear. They will be apt to. fall both into indiscriminate and excessive eulogy, and into voluminous and wearisome minuteness. A very intimate and attached friend, especially if he be not also a man of the world, will be exposed to many of the same dangers, though in a less degree. On the other hand, if the materials are put into the hands of a professional writer, well chosen and really competent by comprehension and just appreciation to treat the subject, the probability is .that he will give the public what it wants to know, and will bestow that righteous and measured admiration which the general judgment can ratify; but it is certain that he will never satisfy the family, who will be pretty sure to condemn him as unsympathizing, critical, and cold.

Again: how, and on what principle, is the biographer to hold a fair balance between what is due to his readers and what is due to his hero? The real value of a biography consists in its fidelity, fulness, and graphic truth;