His writings, varied in their range,-romantic, religious, polemic, and biographical,—are all peculiar and characteristic, and full of energy and warmth. By the common consent of his countrymen, he is regarded as having carried the poetry of prose composition to a pitch never approached by any one before or since, except Rousseau; and in that style of refined acrimony, quiet thrusts with polished rapier, and graceful throwing of poisoned epigrammatic javelins, which is so peculiarly French, and which Frenchmen so inordinately value, he had confessedly no rival. He was, moreover, a real power in literature: his controversial writings undeniably exercised great influence over political transactions, and his sentimental writings exercised a still wider and more indisputable influence over the taste and tone of the lighter productions of his age. His character, finally, both in its strength and its weakness, was peculiarly French. His unsociability apart, he might almost be taken as the typical man of his class, time, and country,-greatly exaggerated however, especially in his defects. A sense of honour, quick, sensitive, and fiery, rather than rational or deep; an hereditary high breeding, which displayed itself rather in exquisite grace and urbanity of manner than in real chastening of spirit; a native chivalry of temper and demeanour, but too superficial to render him truly either generous or amiable; vanity ignobly excessive and absolutely childish; and egotism carried to a point at which it became quite a crime, and almost a disease;-such were the prominent features of Chateaubriand, according to every portrait we possess.

Of Chateaubriand's early years we know little that is reliable; for we know nothing beyond what he has told us himself. His reminiscences of this period, it is true, occupy quite a suffi cient portion of his autobiography; but the Mémoires d'outre Tombe, in which he records them, though begun when in the prime of life, were so often retouched and altered in later years, when his memory was failing and his imagination was every day growing more lawless and untruthful, and they are, moreover, so uniformly and obviously the production of a writer who sought to discover what was becoming rather than to remember what was correct, that we can trust their statements only when in themselves probable and characteristic. We do not mean to charge him with intentional falsehood in relating the events either of his earlier or later life; but his fancy was so vivid and his vanity so irritable and insatiable, he had so rooted a conviction that every thing connected with the Vicomte de Chateaubriand must be singular and wonderful, he was so constantly en représentation both before himself and before the world, he was so full of the most transparent affectations as to his own sentiments,-in a word, he was so habitually insincere with himself

(whether consciously or unconsciously we cannot pronounce), that we never know, unless we can check his narrative from independent sources, how far we are dealing with fact or fiction. We come across instances of this inaccuracy and unfaithfulness in almost every page of his Memoirs; so that we can proceed only with doubt and caution, making ample allowance as we go along for the motives which we know to have been at work.

François-René de Chateaubriand was born September 4th 1768, at Saint-Malo in Brittany,-most reluctantly, as he informs us, against his strong desire and in cruel disregard of his most vehement protests. The distaste for life, which he loses no opportunity of expressing-and which we may well conceive was in a measure genuine, for selfish men and proud men are seldom happy-manifested itself in him, we are required to believe, before his birth. He was not the eldest son: his father wanted a second boy, in order to secure the transmission of the family name; but Chateaubriand was so unwilling to come into the world that he sent four sisters before him, one after another, in the vain hope of quenching his parent's insatiable desire of offspring. "Je fus le dernier de ces dix enfants. Il est probable que mes quatres sœurs durent leur existence au désir de mon père d'avoir son nom assuré par l'arrivé d'un second garçon : -je résistais; j'avais une aversion pour la vie."* He was a delicate infant his life was in some danger, but was spared at the instance of a vow made by his nurse to the patron-saint of her village. His way of recording this childish peril is so characteristic in the turn of sentiment and expression, that it is worth quoting: "Je n'avais vécu que quelques heures, et la pesanteur du temps était déjà marquée sur mon front. Que ne me laissait-on mourir? Il entrait dans les conseils de Dieu d'accorder au vœu de l'obscurité et de l'innocence la conservation des jours qu'une vaine renommée menaçait d'atteindre."

The father of Chateaubriand was a Breton gentleman of ancient family but decayed fortunes. He had acquired a moderate competence himself by a step which in those days indicated much good sense and force of character: he had entered the mercantile marine, made one or two successful voyages, and then settled for some years in the West-Indian colonies. As soon as he was in a position of reasonable independence, he returned to his native land, purchased at Combourg, near Saint-Malo, an old ancestral estate and chateau; but the soil was poor, the chateau dreary, and the site desolate and forlorn. The son has left a most uninviting picture of both the paternal residence and the paternal character-the one cold In another passage he speaks of "la chambre où ma mère m'infligea la vie" (vol. i. p. 23).

and gloomy, the other severe, silent, passionate, and morose, with an inordinate pride of name and race as his predominating moral features. In reference to this family pride, we must notice one of the first of Chateaubriand's affectations and insincerities. He pretends to despise all such weakness; he loudly proclaims the hollowness of all such pretensions; he stigmatises them as "odious in his father, ridiculous in his brother, and too manifest even in his nephew;"-and he adds with some naïveté, "Je ne suis pas bien sûr, malgré mes inclinations républicaines, de m'en être complétement affranchi, bien que je l'aie soigneusement cachée." So far is he, however, from being either free from this weakness or able to hide it, that he betrays it in his every page. He loses no occasion of enumerating his ancestral glories and connections; he describes with irrepressible self-glorification his entering the royal carriages and hunting with the kingprivileges only granted to those of undoubted noble birth; he devotes a whole chapter to his pedigree; he returns to the subject again and again; when his father dies, he gives an extract from the mortuary register detailing in full all his titles and formalities; he assures us that "if he inherited the infatuation of his father and his brother," he could easily prove his descent from the Dukes of Bretagne, the intermingling of his blood with that of the Royal Family of England; and he adds a long note, with further particulars and pièces justificatives, at the end of his Memoirs. And then he descends to the unworthy affectation of apologising for these "vieilles misères" and "puériles récitations," on the ground that they are given for the sake of his nephews, "who think more of such matters than he does," and in order to explain the dominant passion of his father. "Quant à moi" (he says), "je ne me glorifie ni ne me plains de l'ancienne ou de la nouvelle société. Si, dans la première, j'étais le chevalier ou le vicomte de Chateaubriand, dans la seconde je suis François de Chateaubriand ; je préfère mon nom à mon titre."

The young inheritor of all these past and future glories suffered from a defective education and a neglected childhood. He passed some portions of interrupted years at the seminaries of Dol, Rennes, and Dinan successively, before which period he seems to have spent his time in wandering along the wild shore of Brittany, or playing with the village urchins of SaintMalo. He read fitfully, but learnt nothing thoroughly. He gained the admiration of his instructors, he tells us, on account of his singular memory for words,-it seems to have been his one special faculty in youth;-but he adds characteristically, "One thing humiliates me in reference to this: memory is often the endowment of fools; it belongs usually to heavy minds,

rendered yet more ponderous by the baggage with which they are overloaded." He actually feels ashamed of possessing a good memory because he cannot have it all to himself, but must share the endowment with ungifted men! The remainder of his youth was passed principally in his ungenial home at Combourg, lost in idleness and reveries, roaming among the woods, gazing at sunsets, building castles in the air, and indulging in those vague, semi-erotic, semi-ethereal fancies, so common to imaginative minds at the opening of life; but of whichfull of his notion that every thing relating to him was anomalous and unique-he says; "I do not know if the history of the human heart offers another example of this sort of thing." His sister Lucile, who seems to have been a charming person, was his sole companion and comfort in this ungenial and unprofitable life. Even with her it was melancholy enough; without her it would have been insupportable. It nourished and enriched his poetical imagination, beyond question; but it nourished and consolidated all his moral failings at the same timehis farouche and sombre humour, his unamiable egotism, his slavery to passion and to fancy, and his normal attitude of selfstudy, self-wonder, and self-worship. His father rose at four o'clock, summer and winter; and his harsh voice calling for his valet resounded through the house. At noon the family assembled for dinner in the great hall, previous to which hour they worked or studied in their own rooms, or were supposed to do so. After dinner the father went to shoot, or fish, or look after his farm; the mother went to her oratory; the daughter to her room and her tapisserie; and the son to the woods, or to his books and dreams. At eight o'clock they supped; then the father shot owls, and the rest of the family looked at the stars, till ten o'clock, when they retired to rest.

"The evenings of autumn and winter were passed in a somewhat different manner. When supper was over, and the four convives had returned from the table to the fireplace, my mother, with a sigh, threw herself upon an old couch, and a stand with one candle was placed beside her. Lucile and I sat by the fire; the servants cleared the table and retired. Then my father began his walk, and never stopped til bed-time. He wore an old white robe-de-chambre, or rather a sort of mantle, which I have never seen on any other man. His head, nearly bald, was covered with a great white cap, which stood straight up. When he walked away from the hearth, the large room was so dimly lighted by its solitary taper that he became invisiblehis steps only were heard in the darkness. Gradually he returned towards the light, and emerged little by little out of the gloom, like a spectre, with his white robe, white cap, and long pale face. Lucile and I exchanged a few words in a low voice while he was at the other end of the room, but we were silent the instant he approached us. As he

passed, he inquired of what we were speaking. Seized with fear, we made no reply, and he continued his walk. The rest of the evening nothing was heard but the measured sound of his steps, my mother's sighs, and the whistling of the wind. The castle-clock struck ten. My father stopped; the same spring which had raised the hammer of the clock seemed to have suspended his steps. He drew out his watch, wound it up; took up a large silver torch with a large wax taper, went for a moment into the little western tower, then returned torch in hand, and went towards his bed-room in the eastern tower. Lucile and I put ourselves in his way, embraced him, and wished him a good night. Without replying, he bent towards us his hard and wrinkled cheek, proceeded on his way, and withdrew to the bottom of the tower, and we heard the doors close after him.

Then the charm was broken; my mother, my sister, and myself, all transformed into statues by my father's presence, suddenly recovered our vitality. The first effect of our disenchantment was to produce a torrent of words. If silence had oppressed us, it paid dearly for it.

The flood of words being exhausted, I called the chamber-maid, and conducted my mother and sister to their apartment. Before I withdrew, they made me look under the beds, up the chimneys, behind the doors, and search the staircase, passages, and neighbouring corridors. All the traditions of the castle, its robbers and spectres, suddenly recurred to their memory. The people were firmly persuaded that a Count de Combourg, with a wooden leg, who died three centuries before, appeared at certain epochs, and that he had been met on the grand staircase of the tower: sometimes, also, the wooden leg walked by itself along with a black cat."

We may readily concede that a youth thus passed was not calculated to inspire any vivid love of existence, and we have no doubt also that Chateaubriand was constitutionally of a melancholic temperament; but still that weariness and ennui of life which he so ceaselessly parades in his Memoirs becomes nauseous at last. It is thrust in our faces on all occasions, and without occasion: it is exaggerated, it is morbid, it is carefully fostered, it is profusely manured; and it is never checked or modified by any Christian sentiment or any manly principle. Chateaubriand's early years were undeniably full of gloomy and depressing influences, but they were amply redeemed by subsequent successes. He achieved fame while still young; he rose to the height of grandeur and renown, according to his estimate of such things; he was loved by many and admired by all; he lived long, he lived actively, he lived on the scene of the most thrilling events, and he lived through a period more replete than any other with interest and excitement. If he had been less of an egotist, or more of a Christian, he must have been thankful for life at least, even if he had not consciously enjoyed it. Yet the burden of his song is the same at every age. In the Natchez