Review was competent to deal with French politics but himself, and because, if his sentences were not in Macaulay's snip-snap style," he could produce a more truthful and an equally picturesque article. But even Brougham in his turn had to break open packets of MSS. to find, instead of a proof, one of those curt announcements which sound like a knell to all the hopes of a sensitive soul "Returned with thanks."

Even Jeffrey-Francis Jeffrey, the omniscient and versatile Jeffrey-knew these sensations, and in those rooms in Buccleugh Place where Sydney Smith, Horner, Brougham, and Murray met to talk over the suggestion for establishing the Edinburgh Review, there were three or four MSS. lying about which had been sent to all the existing magazines and returned. Jeffrey had six articles in the first number of the "buff and blue," and two or three of these, I shrewdly suspect, were articles that were perfectly familiar with the post-bag of the London and Edinburgh coach, and knew what it was to be tossed about, with cigar-ends and Odes to the Spring, in a waste-paper basket.

These illustrations might be multiplied ad infinitum. But I must stop. And yet there is one more instance which ought to be mentioned, because it is an instance that carries a moral with it to those who think of making literature a profession. I refer to George Henry Lewes, the founder of the Fortnightly Review. He was one of the most thoughtful and careful of writers, a man who held that precision of thought and expression alone constitute good writing. Yet George Henry Lewes had one

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of the first articles which he sent to the Edinburgh Review returned by the editor to be rewritten all through, and the second edition was so far superior to the first, even in the opinion of its author, that he never after sent his first brouillon to press, but invariably wrote everything twice and sometimes thrice before he thought of submitting it to an editor. The consequence was, of course, that he seldom had a Ms. returned. He constituted himself his own editor, and returned his own MSS. It is an admirable plan, and if with that plan men would only act upon Dr. Johnson's advice, and strike out of their articles everything that they think particularly fine, we should hear a good deal less than we do at present of rejected MSS." Any one can scribble-if he only knows how to spell; but writing is an art-cne of the fine arts-and the men who have had the fewest MSS. returned are the men who have taken the greatest pains with their work: Macaulay, for instance, who wrote and rewrote some of his essays, long as they are, three times over; Albany Fonblanque, the most brilliant and successful of English journalists, who wrote and rewrote many of his articles in the Examiner newspaper six and seven times, till, like Boileau, he had sifted his article of everything but the choicest thoughts and expressions. Perhaps if all writers did this we should have shorter articles and fewer books; but more articles that now perish with a single reading might be worth reprinting, and more books might stand a chance of descending to posterity.Belgravia Magazine.

To those who are interested in modern history, these two volumes will be the book of the season. They contain fewer stories and fewer sketches of society than we had expected; often, too, there is little explanation of the motives of political acts; they have few of the charms of style, except simplicity and

Memoirs of Prince Metternich, 1773-1815. Edited by Prince Richard Metternich. Translated by Mrs. Alexander Napier. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

directness, and they will be read with a certain distrust of their exact truthfulness, but they are full of interest, nevertheless. Prince Metternich stood at the very centre of European politics, at a most excited time; he knew intimately most of the personages who were dominating or delivering Europe; he was aware of, or shared in, some of the wildest plans; and he was himself a calmly reflective man, very tenacious of opinions once formed, but at the same time very

observant of the direction of the currents of his time. He was fairly unprejudiced, though a slight contempt for the great Frenchmen of the day, as new men, peeps out in his writing, and though self-opinionated and even conceited in a high degree, reasoned on all facts and motives justly and coolly. Of his intimate character very little indeed is revealed in these pages, beyond the fact that while theoretically always intent on justice, he was, when the interests of the House of Hapsburg required it, politically unscrupulous in the extreme, as ready to obtain any territory by a sudden and unjust seizure, as to purchase an estate. He was, too, both Conservative and Legitimist to the core, taking the greatest part in forcing the Bourbons back on France, in spite of the resistance of Czar Alexander, who intended and proposed to raise Bernadotte to the throne; but this did not stop his acceding to the plan for marrying Napoleon to the Archduchess Louise, or from joining directly in a project for the extinction and partition of Turkey. In the former case he had more justification, perhaps, than is supposed. If Metternich had any religious opinions, they were Catholic, like those of his court, and he affirms, as simple matter of fact, that neither the Papacy nor the Austrian Court considered Napoleon married, the pope when he crowned the empress having been deceived by the bishops. His union with Josephine had been a civil ceremony, and admitted under the law of being ended, and it was therefore considered by the Catholic Church a nul lity, in no way preventing another and religious marriage. The religious question being thus got rid of-whether honestly or not, rests in Metternich's conscience--he had no other scruple, observing that princesses of Austria were not accustomed to choose husbands for themselves, and agreeing with his master that the marriage would give Austria a few years of peace. He does not, indeed, seem to have repented, even when Napoleon-who, by the way, treated the archduchess very well-said with brutal frankness that he bitterly repented the marriage, which was an effort to bind together things new and old. As to the other project, it appears certain that Napoleon seriously intended in 1808

to partition Turkey. He had arranged the matter with St. Petersburg, and settled, in his own mind, that, France was to have Egypt, the Morea, and some of the islands, as colonies; Russia, the Crimea and the country south of the Balkans, including Constantinople; and Austria, the Principalities, Bosnia, and Bulgaria. His leading motive in this dreamy plan, which alarmed Talleyrand, besides his desire for Egypt and for colonies-neither of which he could have got with the British Fleet in the way— was to compel Austria into a permanent alliance with France. She would, he reasoned and said, be so alarmed by seeing Russia at Constantinople, that she would be always thenceforward compelled to rely on France. Napoleon never could tolerate an ally, but still he wished for this alliance, his idea being, in Prince Metternich's opinion, not to annex Europe, or much of it; but to obtain a hegemony in it for France, and the position for himself of European Emperor. M. de Metternich, when consulted about this vast project, declared it contrary to Conservative principles and to morality, but agreed to assist in it, and share the spoil. He communicated his opinion to Count Stadion, at Vienna, with the most cynically simple frankness. "We must sacrifice much for the preservation of the Porte, but our real existence and political credit, the chief elements of the life of a great State, must put limits to our desires. We cannot save Turkey; therefore we must help in the partition, and endeavor to get as good a share of it as possible. We cannot resist the destructive and invasive principles of the Emperor of the French, and we must, therefore, turn them away from ourselves.' It is perhaps to be regretted that this extraordinary project fell through, chiefly, it would seem, because Napoleon fancied that Russia and Austria would make a secret league of partition and attack him, as the war would have exhausted him as much as the war with Russia, and have liberated Eastern Europe more than half a century earlier. The plan, however, dropped, and the prince had shortly afterward to report an audience in which Napoleon directly menaced Austria, in the presence of the Russian Ambassador. The book is full

of such incidents, related usually in the calmest and most phlegmatic tone, as if a lawyer were writing about estates, and not an ambassador about kingdoms. Perhaps the most striking is the account of the renewal of the war after the return of Napoleon from Elba. Prince Metternich had received the information from the Austrian Council-General at Genoa, but laid the despatch aside (March 6th, 1815), as probably unimportant. Being sleepless, however, he opened it, to occupy himself, at 7.30 in the morning :

"I was dressed in a few minutes, and before eight o'clock I was with the emperor. He read the despatch, and said to me quietly and calmly, as he always did on great occasions: Napoleon seems to wish to play the adventurer; that is his concern; ours is to secure to the world that peace which he has disturbed for years. Go without delay to the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia, and tell them that I am ready to order my army to march back to France. I do not doubt but that both monarchs will agree with me.' At a quarter past eight I was with the Emperor Alexander, who dismissed me with the same words as the Emperor Francis had used. At half past eight I received a similar declaration from the mouth of King Frederick William III. At nine o'clock I was at my house again, where I had directed Field-Marshal Prince Schwarzenberg to meet me. ten o'clock the Ministers of the four Powers came at my request. At the same hour adjutants were already on their way, in all directions, to order the armies to halt who were returning home. Thus war was decided on in less than an hour. When the Ministers assembled at my house, the event was unknown to them. Talleyrand was the first to enter. I gave him the despatch from Genoa to read. He remained calm, and the following laconic conversation took place between us :

At

Talleyrand. Do you know where Napo leon is going?'

Metternich.-'The despatch does not say anything about it.'

Talleyrand.-'He will embark somewhere on the coast of Italy, and throw himself into Switzerland.'

Metternich. He will go straight to Paris.' This is the history, in its full simplicity."

To the general reader, the most attractive portion of these volumes will be the sketches of character. Metternich had studied Napoleon profoundly, and like all who did so, arrived at the conclusion that he was an extraordinary being, but greatly assisted by the immense ruin which before his ascendancy had fallen on all European institutions. He "had confiscated to his own advantage the whole Revolution." He held him

to be a man of grand simplicity of mind, while in action he was the most formidable of beings :

"While in his conceptions all was clear and precise, in what required action he knew neither difficulty nor uncertainty. Ordinary rules did not embarrass him at all. In practice, as in discussion, he went straight to the end in view, without being delayed by considerations which he treated as secondary, and of which he perhaps too often disdained the importance. The most direct line to the object he desired to reach was that which he chose by preference, and which he followed to the end, while nothing could entice him to deviate from it; but then, being no slave to his plans, he knew how to give them up or modify them the moment that his point of view changed, or new combinations gave him the means of attaining it more effectually by a different path."

He believed Napoleon to have been a Catholic, at least politically, but to have considered himself a separate being, formed to govern, utterly disdainful of his subjects' lives, and with few affections, except for his relatives, and for Hortense Beauharnais, his step-daughter, whom he really loved :"

"His opinions of men were concentrated in one idea, which, unhappily for him, had in his mind gained the force of an axiom. He was persuaded that no man, called to appear in public life, or even only engaged in the active pursuits of life, was guided or could be guided by any other motive than that of inter

est. He did not deny the existence of virtue and honor; but he maintained that neither of these sentiments had ever been the chief guide of any but those whom he called dreamers, and to whom, by this title, he, in his own faculty for taking a successful part in the afmind, denied the existence of the requisite him on an assertion which my conviction refairs of society. I had long arguments with pelled, and of which I endeavored to show him the fallacy, at any rate to the extent to which he applied it, but I never succeeded in moving him on this point."

Of the Emperor Alexander of Russia he draws a very unfavorable picture, holding him to have been a man with a mind real, indeed, but very shallow, easily mastered by ideas, which, with him, gradually formed themselves into systems:

"A long observation of the moral peculi. arities of this monarch and of his political course led me to discover, what I have called above, the periodicity of his thoughts. This periodicity followed a measure of about five I do not know how to express this obyears. servation more exactly. The emperor seized an idea, and followed it out quickly. It grew in his mind for about two years, till it came to

be regarded by him as a system. In the course of the third year, he remained faithful to the system he had adopted and learned to love, listened with real fervor to its promoters, and was inaccessible to any calculation as to its worth or dangerous consequences. In the fourth year, the sight of those consequences began to calm down his fervor; the fifth year showed an unseemly mixture of the old and nearly extinct system with the new idea. This new idea was often diametrically opposite to the one he had just left."

1822.

a

The effect of this constant alteration was, of course, constant disappointment and a reputation for cunning, and in 1825 Alexander died of thorough weariness of life-a death he had anticipated, in speaking to the Emperor Francis in There were probably in him strong traces of the family disease, hypochondria, amounting almost to madness, for he actually, when annoyed, one day, seriously informed the Emperor of Austria that he intended to challenge Prince Metternich, and this not as façon de parler, but as a design so serious that the emperor put his chancellor on his guard. The challenge was not sent, but it appears to have been really contemplated, in spite of the fixed etiquette of sovereigns, which forbids them to offer or accept challenges, except from persons of royal blood. Of the other great person in the triad of emperors, the prince speaks with genuine, though unenthusiastic, respect, representing Francis of Austria as a man of singular impartiality, wisdom, and even goodness, the latter a quality not attributed to him by other writers. Francis had the most singular influence over the czar, perhaps as being the only friendly person who could speak to him on equal

terms:

"The Emperor Francis united in himself the most valuable positive qualities. His calmness, impartiality, soundness of judgment, and unvarying and tranquil temper inspired Alexander with a feeling of devotion which almost resembled the veneration of a child. This feeling was afterward height

ened by a coloring quite peculiar to the mind of this prince. It was religious. The Emperor Alexander considered his friend as a monarch after the will of God, as the representative of God's will, and of godly wisdom, and almost worshipped him. On several occasions, when the Emperor Francis directly opposed the personal inclinations of Alexander, the opinion of the wise monarch sufficed to arrest the decisions of Alexander, and to decide him either to relinquish or change them."

Of Talleyrand, Prince Metternich thought but little, except that he was the best man in the world to prevent a decision, and was so used by the emperor Napoleon; and he reports a very singular judgment passed by the Emperor on Bernadotte : He has plenty of brains. I have always found this to be the case, but I foresee he will have a good deal of difficulty in maintaining his position. The nation expects everything from him; he is the god from whom they demand bread, but I cannot see that he has any talent for government; he is a good soldier, and that is all. For my part, I am delighted to have got rid of him, and I ask nothing better than his removal from France; he is one of those old Jacobins, with his head in the wrong place, as they all have, and that is not the way to keep on a throne. That judgment turned out all wrong, and was probably due to an inner jealousy, which was not without foundation, as Bernadotte, in Prince Metternich's opinion, undoubtedly looked for and intrigued for the throne of France, an aspiration in which he was strongly supported by the Emperor of Russia.

The future volumes of these memoirs, which will describe the Metternich era in Europe between 1815 and 1848, and contain the prince's own political opinions, will be eagerly looked for, and the two volumes now offered are choked with matter of the greatest interest to the historical student.-The Spectator.