life: too proud, too indolent, and too fastidious for any; having no object and no purpose, because he himself bounded his own horizon. As a literary man, the same fatal want re-appears: he has grand powers, grand thoughts, grand conceptions even, but no mighty aim outside of the gigantic MOI; no creed but his own genius, no goal but his own glory, no joy but in his own success. When he enters the political arena, the native vice is still uppermost, rampant as ever, and yet more intolerable, because the stage is so noble and the interests so momentous. In his Monarchie selon la Charte, he intimates the personal ground on which he so greatly valued parliamentary institutions; they offer a career and an interest to those who have passed the age of pleasure and are satiated with literary fame. "Was it not," he asks, " very hard to be employed in nothing at an age when one is fit for every thing? To-day the manly occupations which filled the existence of a Roman, and which make the career of an Englishman so noble, are offered to us on all sides. We need no longer lose the middle and the end of our life; we can now be men when we have ceased to be youths. We can console ourselves for the lost illusions of our earlier days in endeavouring to become illustrious citizens; we need not fear time, when one may be rajeuni par la gloire." Throughout his Memoirs, whenever he speaks of his political career his mingled affectation and discontent break out. He repeatedly tells us that "he has no ambition;" that "there is no renown or power on earth which could tempt him to stoop for an instant to pick it up;"* that all ministries and embassies and political triumphs are "wretched baubles," far beneath a man like him qui de mon char domine le train de rois." "Que m'importaient," he exclaims, "pourtant ces futiles misères, à moi qui n'ai jamais cru au temps où je vivais, à moi sans foi dans les rois, sans conviction à l'égard des peuples, à moi qui ne me suis jamais soucié de rien, excepté des songes!" All this sounds something worse than paltry, when we remember that this man-without ambition, without political conviction, above all desire for glory, looking down from the height of his fancied supremacy on kings and all that kings could offer, wishing for nothing but repose, caring for nothing but dreams—is the same Chateaubriand who was insatiable in his pursuit of office; implacable towards those who rivalled him; bitter against those who thwarted or refused him; restless and not over-delicate in his intrigues for advancement; ungenerous, to say the least, towards his friends; simply ferocious towards his antagonists; savagely morose under defeat; haughty and contemptuous in success. His one virtue as a politician-and in France, no * Mémoires, ii. 110, iv. 273, i. 148, iii. 401.

66

.

doubt, it is a great one-was fidelity to his party; a party which he adopted from sentiment and connection, without sharing its principles or being able to guide its policy.

Was his religion of deeper root or purer alloy than his patriotism? Was he truer and less egotistic as a Christian than as a statesman? It is difficult, after what we have seen, to think so. He patronised Christianity; he did not bow down. before it. He was its appreciator, not its votary. He cared much for its beauty, little for its truth: he valued it because so closely associated with his fame; but, whether he really believed in it or not, assuredly he never regulated either his feelings by its spirit or his life by its precepts. Few men of decorous life and conversation were ever less imbued with the peculiar virtues of the Christian character. He chose the 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 colours 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 years after his death. Chateaubriand's autobiography, assailing and blasting nearly every public and living reputation, was sold during his lifetime, and given to the world the same year in which he

died.

A great MAN Chateaubriand can scarcely, in any true sense of the word, be called; his soul was too much eaten away by hollow affectations and puerile vanities, for that. But amid all * Tome vi. p. 242.

his weaknesses and littlenesses he had the faculty of producing upon his contemporaries the impression of grandeur and of strength. A great writer he certainly was; and probably it was his unrivalled capacity 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 impossibleappeared 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 every body."

ART. II.-FREDERICK THE FIRST, KING OF ITALY. Gedichte des Mittelalters auf König Friedrich I. den Staufer und aus seiner so wie der nächstfolgenden Zeiten. Von Jacob Grimm. Berlin 1844.

Folchetto Malespina. From the Italian of Varese. London: 1860. Of all the many odd freaks of diplomacy which we have seen of late, perhaps the very oddest was when an Austrian statesman last year defended the possession of Lombardy by his master on the ground that that province was "a fief of the German empire." Considering that there never was such a thing as "the German empire;" considering also that, if there was, Lombardy never was a fief of it; considering, again, that Francis Joseph of Lorraine is in no sense the heir or successor of the old German kings; considering also that, if he were, it would by no means prove his right to any particular fief of their kingdom;-considering all this, the statement, whether as a historical assertion or a political argument, is certainly remarkable in all its parts. We do not undertake to decide whether the

diplomatist who made it was really so strangely ignorant himself, or whether he was, after the manner of diplomatists, merely practising upon the presumed ignorance of others. In either case it shows the reckless way in which people allow themselves to turn the facts of past times into political arguments about present affairs. If it is true in any sense that " Lombardy is a fief of the German empire," it is equally true of all Germany, of the greater part of Italy and Belgium, of nearly all Holland, all Switzerland, and about a third of France. If Francis Joseph was lawful master of Lombardy, because Lombardy was "a fief of the German empire," his claim must be equally good to be absolute lord of all the countries we have reckoned up, to say nothing of vaguer claims to superiority over Poland, Denmark, England, and the world in general.

We have mentioned the above diplomatic escapade as an instance of the way in which the ancient relations of Germany and Italy may be misrepresented or misconceived from the German side. We have transcribed, as a specimen the other way, the title of a translation of an Italian novel, fairly interesting, but not very remarkable, which shows how they may be misrepresented or misconceived from the Italian side. The novel of Folchetto Malespina deals with the days and the deeds of since the great Charles himself-the greatest German who ever set foot upon Italian soil. Now most certainly any one who drew his idea of Frederick Barbarossa from that story alone, would set him down as having as little business in Italy as Francis Joseph has at Venice and Cracow, or Louis Napoleon at Rome and Chambery. It would never occur to a reader of Folchetto Malespina that Frederick, German as he was, was the elected, crowned, and anointed King of Italy and Emperor of the Romans, a king whose sovereignty was acknowledged in theory by all, and was zealously asserted in act by a large portion of the nation.

It is most desirable, for the sake both of the present and the past, that misconceptions of this sort should not be allowed to confuse the right understanding of either. We undertook in a late article to show that Louis Napoleon Buonaparte was not the successor of Charles the Great. We now assert, with equal confidence, that Francis Joseph of Lorraine is just as little the successor of the Saxon Ottos or the Swabian Fredericks. The legal and traditional rights of the old Teutonic kings have absolutely nothing in common with the brute force of the modern Austrian tyranny. Let this be well understood on both sides, and it will be alike impossible to dress up an imposture of yesterday in the borrowed plumes of a fallen but still venerable power, and needless to pervert and depreciate a great cause and

a great man, because, at a superficial glance, his career seems to run counter to the cause which has the sympathy of every generous heart of our own day.

Our immediate business is to give a picture, both personal and political, of Frederick Barbarossa, as the greatest and most typical of the German kings of Italy, and therein to show how absolutely nothing there is in common between the position of the old Swabian and the modern Austrian. We have chosen Frederick, both as being the most famous name among the Teutonic kings, and because he is really the best suited for our purpose. Charles the Great stands by himself, alone and without competitor. He was the founder; those who came after him were at most his successors. And again, the four centuries which elapsed between Charles and Frederick had greatly altered the position of the world. Charles belongs to the debatable ground between ancient and mediæval history. Frederick belongs to a century which is the most typical of all the middle ages. In the days of Charles much was still living and practical which in the days of Frederick had become matter of learning and tradition. Charles was really a Roman Augustus; he stepped, as naturally as a barbarian Frank could step, into the place of which the female usurper at Byzantium was declared unworthy. Frederick was a real King of Germany, and one almost equally real of Italy; but the imperial title was now little more than a magnificent pageant, to be disputed about by priests and lawyers. In the days of Charles, the Bishop of Rome was as clearly the subject of the emperor as his rival at Constantinople. In the days of Frederick, the Popes had reached that ambiguous condition, neither subject nor sovereign, which was really the source of their most efficient power. In short, it would require the ingenuity of a French bishop to see any resemblance between Charles the Great and any thing now on the face of the earth. But Frederick comes near enough to us to be easily misunderstood. In his days the old "Francia" had vanished. Germany, France, and Italy, in the modern sense of those words, already existed. A King of Germany warring in Italy, now conquering, now conquered, building up with one hand and pulling down with another, has enough of superficial likeness to phenomena of our own times to make it worth while to stop to show the points of real unlikeness. And again, Frederick is the best suited for our purpose of the post-Carolingian emperors, if only because he is far the best known. Like Charles the Great, he has become a hero of romance; he has become, as it were, the patriarch of a nation, and his memory still lives in the German heart as the impersonation of German unity. Frederick was perhaps not personally superior to his predecessors