veteran marshals of Napoleon, and to suffer the imaginative faculty to divert it from its preconceived aim. Charlemagne is returning home from a victorious campaign against the Moors of Spain, and passes by the town of Narbonne. He asks the name of the fair city haughtily seated on a seacrowning height. His chief warriors answer evasively. The name, however, is wrung from them in the end, and the emperor says he must have' Narbonne, and asks which of those around him will take it. All hang back, one from this reason, one from that. In vain the glorious Cæsar talks to them of glory and fame, or even of riches-in vain he promises Narbonne itself to whomever will make it his own. There is no temptation sufficient for these chieftains, who are full of prosperity and weariness at once. The Duke of Bavaria suggests that the emperor should 'buy' Narbonne, not besiege it, for he says they have all had enough of that kind of work. The Comte de Dreux declares himself sick, and needful of repose; Hugues de Cotentin affirms that his 'very saddle is falling to pieces,' that his accoutrements are out of order, and that he envies the day labourer in the fields. 'Donnez Narbonne à d'autres' is his answer; Richard of Normandy, and the Count of Ghent, and Eustace of Nancy, and Gerard of Roussillon, and Eudes of Burgundy, and Ozier of Denmark, and all his 'peers,' all, refuse Charlemagne to do any more work! 6 Scarcely has the great chief covered his followers with shame in a bitterly indignant harangue, than a beardless boy stands forth from the ranks of the glutted elders, and breathes a benison upon Charlemagne. "Saint Denis guard the king!' says the lad, respectfully; at which the king and emperor turns round, exclaiming Who and what art thou? and what is it thou seekest?' The boy looks him steadily in the face, answering, I wish to be he of whom it shall be said, that "he took Narbonne !" The concluding lines of the poem are too remarkable for us to deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting them. "Hé! c'est Aymerillot, le petit compagnon." Aymerillot reprit le Roi, dis-nous ton nom." Aymery! Je suis pauvre autant qu'un pauvre moine Deux liards couvriraient fort bien toutes mes terres Après, je châtierai les rieurs, s'il en reste." Charles, plus rayonnant que l'archange celeste, "Tu seras, pour ce propos hautain, Le lendemain, Amery prit la ville.' Now Hugo's Political Aim. 337 Now it is our belief that Victor Hugo began this beautiful poem chiefly with the intention, as we have said, of stigmatizing the conduct of Napoleon's marshals in 1814, and holding up to shame those who, when their personal interests have nothing more to demand, seek enjoyment and repose, and unchivalrously refuse to serve any longer or to deserve. But once fairly launched into his subject, mere imagination evidently takes the place of other faculties, and we have a poet only instead of a moralist or a patriot. Aymerillot springs, all armed and radiant, from the poet's brain with Minerva-like suddenness. The brave boy, with his purity and simplicity, his material poverty and boundless mental wealth, owes nothing to any preconceived plan, or any desire, whether to teach or preach: he is perfectly chivalrous, and exclusively poetical. We wish our limits would permit of our speaking at equal length of several of the other poems contained in the two volumes before us. We should have much to say, especially of Le Parricide,' of 'Le Petit Roi de Galice,' of 'Le Regiment du Baron Madruce,' and of 'Les Raisons du Momotombo. In 'Le Regiment du Baron Madruce,' occurs one of the finest apostrophes to Liberty that we know of in any tongue, not excepting Coleridge's glorious Ode to France,' or the perhaps even finer burst of patriotism entitled Fears in Solitude,' inspired by the invasionpanic of 1798. But this name leads us back to Villemain, than whom no one of all our native critics has ever more truly appreciated the fine frenzy,' the Pindaric inspiration of Coleridge. Speaking of him from the point of view of the sources of his inspiration, Villemain calls him a bright witness of the past;' and says he is the image of a great moral influence exercised over the human mind,' and the example of a soul's rebound towards justice and truth, when crushed beneath the weight of the meannesses and iniquities attendant on conquest and the brutal rule of force.' It is from this point of view precisely that we must judge Victor Hugo (who, be it noted en passant, has more of Coleridge than it is easy to conceive in a Frenchman), and it is this point of view also that forces us back to M. Villemain and his Treatise on Enthusiasm,' which, as we said in our opening pages, is of even greater importance to the cause of lyrical poetry itself than would be volumes upon volumes filled with the verses of lyrical poets. For Villemain, lyrical poetry in this present age of debasement in France, means the soul's best and surest escape from wrong,' and therefore, forasmuch as it does really represent this strong Protestant feeling is it well that we should register its manifest ations. 6 loftiest, youngest, is deliberately set down in the book we speak of as right. What the wise denominate foolish, and the weak, imprudent; what is too passionate for the cold-hearted, too generous for the calculating, too bold for the timid, too uncompromising for the worldly, too simple for the cautious, too true for the conventional-all this is proposed, held up to universal admiration by a man whom his worst enemies cannot call other than grave among the gravest. Had a dreamer of two-and-twenty ventured to say all that Villemain has said in his Essay-above all, if he said it in verse-it could easily be smiled down by that formidable phalanx of the respectable,' whose bond of union, formed by their moral and intellectual deficiencies, is perhaps the very strongest of any. But what is to be attempted against a work in prose, alarming even to some from its implacable erudition, and whose author, after fashioning the mind of the youth of his country for a quarter of a century, and taking a leading, active part in the councils of the state, forces society to acknowledge the triple authority of talent, experience, and character? That such a book by such a writer may fall unpleasantly upon that portion of the French public whose every thought and deed justify the most indignant protestations of the book, that is conceivable; but revolt against it is possible from no side. The mass of the enslaved and the corrupt have nothing for it but submission, for in this book are laid down intellectual laws. Dura lex' as much as you choose, 'sed lex.' Here are no hymns, or odes, or sudden outpourings of the heart which you condemn (!) by stigmatizing them as youthful-here are literary dogmas which you must obey or be content to pass for a literary heretic, even with the elders of your own faith. Yet here, in these pages, more than in 'La Légende des Siècles,' is laid down the usefulness of all that you have pronounced useless, the gravity of what you would fain believe to be futile the usefulness of poetry, the advisability of enthusiasm! This perfect concordance between a great poet and a great thinker, between two men so utterly different in all other respects as Victor Hugo and Villemain, appears to us a great fact, and one that it would be wrong not to notice seriously. The tendencies of both-the one from instinct the other from reflection are heroic; and while the one almost unconsciously, and thanks to that 'flame of enthusiasm' that is burning within him sings of chivalrous and heroic deeds, the other calmly, and in the tone, we repeat, of a literary legislator, pronounces that 'flame' to be a good, wise, noble, useful thing. There must be something wondrously compelling in the reaction of mind against matter, of spirit against clay, of the bright, the bold, the pure, against the groping, the base, and the mean, for here, in two countries which have not one thought or feeling alike, and Agreement between Hugo and Tennyson. 339 in the past, present, or future, nothing save only antagonism, making a very virtue of dislike, here in France and in England we have lyrical poetry manifesting the same identical tendencies, and Tennyson and Hugo going, as it were, hand in hand. Both turn in the same distaste from the materialism of our age, and equally aspire towards a period of heroic manners, heroic deeds, and heroic characters; and whilst the one finds what is prompted him by inspiration, laid down as precept by the greatest aesthetician of the day, the other meets his panegyrist in a Chancellor of the Exchequer. Both have with equal earnestness striven to glorify 'that great name which,' as Mr. Gladstone said some months ago, the admiration of all ages has consecrated-the name of hero.' This identity of purpose (shown so lately) between Victor Hugo and our own Tennyson is not a circumstance that should pass by unnoticed. We would advise all our readers to turn from the Idylls of the King' to the poems we have quoted in La Légende des Siècles." They will find in one as in the other that 'flame of enthusiasm, esteemed so highly by Villemain, that strong Protestant feeling which makes lyrical poetry 'the soul's escape from wrong.' ART. IV.-1. The People's Friend. on Liberty: by H. J. Berlin. Amsterdam: 1859. Art. London: 1859. 2. On Liberty. By John Stuart Mill. THAT the modern literature of Southern Europe should be tinged with despairing views of liberty and progress is not to be wondered at. This fact is the natural result and reflex of the later history of Italy-a history of short-lived triumphs, of inspiring hopes, and of sad and long reverses. A feeling of doubt and despondency is impressed upon the productions of its greatest writers, of which Leopardi may be cited as a fair example. How bitterly he felt the degradation of his native land-on whose glories he had mused, while a prodigy of learning at twelve, and to whose welfare and moral liberation he had devoted his genius until prematurely worn out at the age of thirty-two-may be gathered from his noble apostrophe to his Italia.' Why thus unarmed, with naked breast and brow? What hand hath brought thee to this sad estate? * Mr. Gladstone's speech at Cambridge on the Gospel Missions to Africa. It is a notable fact, however, that a comprehensive survey of Europe at large, and of the conditions of society both at home and abroad, has left a similar feeling of distrust and dissatisfaction in the minds of some of our own most eminent writers. Occasionally we hear it remarked that 'liberal institutions are upon their trial' in America, or at the antipodes; but if we revert honestly to the experiences of the last hundred years,-if we look at the revolutions in France and Germany, Spain and Greece; at the heroic struggles of the Pole, and of the uncrowned demigods' of Hungary; at the Crimean war in defence of the vitality and independence of Turkey,and then survey the present aspect of all those kingdoms, we shall be led to conclude that there is some deeper and wider principle at the bottom of this condition of things than any one mere form or mechanism of government. It is a question of civilization, of morals, and of universal liberty which awaits solution. One or two terrible facts cannot be hidden: for, in spite of our talk of progress-in spite of press, platform, and pulpit,—in the face of the moral suasions of every kind, with which we have been deluged during the last seventy years,-standing armies and national debts have increased to a prodigious extent, constitutional kingdoms have been blotted clean out, and at this moment Europe is dominated over by three imperial despotisms of gigantic dimensions; around whose dominions liberty resembles some small spots or oases on the borders of a mighty sahara. In perfect correspondence with this outside manifestation of the state of Europe, is the interior character of its populations, the psychological condition of its individual minds and classes. The mental barometer is as low and threatening as the political. All things presage change and tempest, and warn us of danger and destruction. The acute and watchful Bunsen, in his Signs of the Times,' has drawn a parallel between the condition of Europe now, and that which existed when the Roman Cæsars ascended the throne of universal empire. The north is being invaded by those despairing views of the world prevailing in Southern Europe. The unimpeachable results of investigation are rejected as infidel, and that which has essentially proceeded from a deep moral and religious earnestness is stigmatized as godless. . . The pretensions to a divine right of the clerical office over conscience, and as far as may be over the whole mental culture of the human race, are everywhere the same. . . The incredible, in one form or other, appears to all parties and peoples credible; nay, the impossible, probable; few or none of the existing powers or faiths are held to be secure. . . The fears of one party are the hopes of the other. Selfishness and passion not only step boldly into the foreground, but bear unblushingly on their brow the sign of the highest and the holiest.' We need not allude to the illustrations derivable from |