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yet stand to him in our conceptions of this order! But surely there are others with whom the case is far otherwise than with those who maintain all this! There are yet among us who believe that the mind of man has an exercise assigned to it, and incumbent on it, where the knowing faculty takes its end; nay, that this knowing faculty itself is strongest where, by incessant dashing against this limit, it works by way of rebound. There are who believe that while those conceptions of the human race which appertain to the relations of the parts of visible nature within itself are varying, and probably on the whole progressive, the feelings and convictions which must ever accompany them respecting the relations of visible nature as a whole to what is invisible, form a necessary and permanent species of thought. [As there are teachers in the former, whose teachings become antiquated, so there are teachers in the other, who, more or less clearly and purely, transmit and maintain the truth everlasting. While the earth voyages through the heavens, while it spins on its silent axle, while the crowds that inherit it cling to its orb, and the day and the night alternate to them, and the winds pipe their mournful music, and men sin and repent, toil and are bereaved, birth and death will still be thought of but as separations from the universal mystery, and imagination will still cast anchors beyond them. Hence, in such writings as the meditative and philosophic treatises of Browne, there is a value that does not lessen with the march of science. There is surely a piece of divinity in us; something that was before the elements, and owes no homage to the sun.' This is his text; and those who, in any sense whatever, can say that they believe in it, will read him with love and favour, while for those that can avow it as his fellow-Christians, the agreement will be still more rich, satisfactory, and intimate.]

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ART. VII.-Histoire des Grandes Opérations Financières, Banques, Bourses, Emprunts, Banquiers, Fournisseurs, Acquéreurs des Biens Nationaux. Par M. CAPEFIGUE. Paris: Librairie d'Amyot.

1856.

THE author of the work whose title we have placed at the head of this article is a native of Marseilles, in which city he was born in the beginning of this century. Though his father occupied in the great commercial city of France the humble position of a draper, or marchand de drap, yet he boasted of a noble Italian origin, and laid some stress on the fact that several of his ancestors filled high magisterial places in the Republic of Genoa. Capefigue, like his compatriots, Thiers and Mignet, commenced his law studies at Aix, somewhere about 1817 or 1818, a couple or three years after the now celebrated writers we have named had left for Paris. He arrived in the French capital in 1821. Unlike Thiers and Mignet, however, our author was of the Royalist, Religious, and Anti-Voltairean school, affected great piety, after the fashion in which piety is understood by pure Papists, and enrolled himself a member of certain societies in which the Parti Prêtre had influence. The result was that he was patronized by the ultra-Royalists, who gave him some literary employment in the Société de Bonnes Lettres, and procured his admission to the Ecole des Chartes. In 1823 he was selected to write the history of the Expedition of the Hero of the Trocadero into Spain, a feat which he accomplished in one of the sorriest productions that ever issued from the press. As the star of the Duc d'Angoulême soon declined, his historiographer assumed somewhat of a more liberal tone, and was selected by the eloquent and accomplished Martignac, in 1827, to defend that minister's policy in the Messager des Chambres. The Martignac ministry did not live long; but before its demise, Capefigue had made his peace with the Ultramontanists by the publication of a life of St. Vincent de Paul, a personage who, having been first a simple shepherd, next a Barbary captive, ended by founding what are called les missions religieuses in France. At the close of 1827, Capefigue became a writer in the Moniteur de Commerce, which he soon left for the liberal Courrier Français. This he quitted in turn for the ultra Gazette de France, with which he remained in connexion till the commence ment of 1830. After the Revolution of the three days, several new journals were established, and, among others, a paper called Le Temps, set on foot by an enterprising cooper of Bordeaux, one Jacques Coste, who had made a good deal of money in his

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trade. To this journal the flexible Marseillais Capefigue attached himself. From 1827, however, he laboured concurrently at literature, composing, compiling, and gathering together matter for all sorts of speculations and undertakings. One of the fruits of this industry was soon to appear. This was the History of the Restoration, in ten volumes, the first two or three of which were given to the public in 1831. A good deal of the material for these, and indeed for the whole work, is supposed to have been supplied by Pasquier and Decazes, who were for a considerable time prominent actors on the political scene in France. Certain it is the Histoire de la Restauration is by far the best written and most readable of all Capefigue's productions, and may be consulted with fruit even to this day. From the period of its appearance the compiler seems to have made somewhat of a name with publishers, and thenceforth he engaged in a variety of works, not discontinuing meanwhile to supply articles to the Paris press whenever they were demanded of his fertile pen. In this talent of supplying the reading French public with leaders, the natives of Marseilles, like the natives of Ireland in London, have a wonderful facility. In 1848 there were at least a dozen Marseillais leading-article writers connected with Parisian journals. Capefigue was in that year and still is an anti-English writer in the Assemblée Nationale, with his fellow-townsmen Mery, Barthélemy, and Amedée Achard. Jules Gondon, another Marseilleois, then as now wrote Ultramontanism and abuse of England in the Univers, whilst Taxile Delord, Eugène Forcade, Alexandre Rey, Pougoulat, Eugène Guinot, and Louis and Charles Reybaud, all Marseillais, were connected with other Parisian journals. During the last five-and-twenty years, there can be little doubt, we should think, that M. Capefigue has written at least 4000 newspaper leaders, and compiled and written about eighty volumes of history, politics, sketches, literature, &c. It is evident that such a persevering penman was born for the epoch of book-making industrialism in which we now live.

Many of our readers may, from what we have stated, suppose that Capefigue, like Alexandre Dumas, has half-a-dozen intelligent literary journeymen under his orders, who fill in and colour his rough outlines, but we believe the fact to be otherwise. Any one who takes the trouble of reading, or running through here and there, sixty out of the eighty of M. Capefigue's volumes, will perceive that the scissors and paste play a great part in the composition and manufacture of them. Where the matter is not compiled and heaped together from other publications, you are sure to find a string of common-places written in the most slipshod and ungrammatical French, in which the writer repeats

Capefigue a Pirate and Plagiarist.

179

himself, over and over again, in the most wearisome iteration. From this censure the History of the Restoration, of the Consulate, and of Louis Philippe must be excepted; but in all his other works M. Capefigue is a regular literary pirate, a plagiary seizing on the thoughts and views of others, and too often disfiguring and defacing them. This must necessarily be so with a literary journeyman, who is equally ready to undertake a life of Mahomet, or the Apostle Paul, of Philippe Augustus, or Augustus Cæsar, of Nadir Shah, or of Nicholas of Russia. To exhaust a gallon of schoolmaster's ink, to cut up a gross of grey-goose quills, and to scribble over six reams of French foolscap, or bank post, is with M. Capefigue the work of a very few months. Should any taking subject arise, or should any great work be in preparation, he issues out to Dufey, to Vezard, or to Amyot, lays down his views, sketches his plans, and undertakes, foi d'honnête homme, to have his three volumes launched in the literary market long before any rival is more than three-fourths through the task which has occupied him for six, eight, or ten years. This was the manner in which Capefigue set himself up as a kind of rival, and procured the publication of his works, in an opposite sense to M. Thiers and to M. Mignet, on the History of the Consulate and of the Reformation. No one acquainted with the literature of France, for a moment, of course, supposed that Capefigue would produce works to compare with those of Thiers or Mignet, but he regarded Napoleon and the Reformation in a different point of view from those popular and successful authors; and there were not wanting a sufficient number of dissidents among the French public to give M. Capefigue a hearing, and therefore the sale of a paying number of copies.

France having, during the last three or four years, become a stock-jobbing, share-holding, railway-brokering, and highly speculative country, in which men and women dabble in the funds with a view to become suddenly rich, the bustling Capefigue bethought him it would be a good speculation to give a history of financial operations-of banks, exchanges, and loans, of bankers, contractors, and purchasers of national property, and the result appears in the volume at present before us.

In the first volume, published about seven or eight months ago, we were given a history of the Fermiers Généraux, which was for the most part a compilation; in this volume we have what M. Capefigue, with modest assurance, calls a history of the finances and financiers of the French Republic, with various statements as to the system of assignats, and a great many illarranged details as to English finance. From the manner in which M. Capefigue speaks of the Revolution of 1789, and the

men who figured between that epoch and 1792, one would conceive that he was a regular talon rouge-a duke or peer de la vieille cour, at the very least. Every one at that period showed a 'pitiful spirit,' if we are to believe this one-sided writer. Nothing was apparent in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies but vain mediocrity; all the financial Acts of these two assemblies were marked by ignorance and weakness. Mirabeau was the 'most corrupt and declamatory of men'-the financial committee was composed of economists, philanthropists, and cliqueists— classes of persons at whom M. Capefigue turns up his aristocratic nose with utter disdain. With more reason he objects to the abolition of the impôts indirects, which were not very onerous and easily collected, and to the repeal of the taxes on wines, salt, the dixième, vingtième, péages barrières, octrois, &c.

The dons patrioques,' he terms a farce, and certainly they do not appear to have been very considerable. For instance, patriotic women laid on the altar of their country, as it was called, their ear-rings and silk stuffs-the men, old worn-out fire-arms -and the priests, their chalices and pyxs. These, it must be confessed, were not very valuable in a national point of view. The seizure of the silver utensils of the corporations and churches, M. Capefigue denounces as sacrilege. The decree directing the melting down of church bells, he calls odious and ridiculous. The spoliators, however, were disappointed in the metal of the church bells; it was found that it was composed of five-sixths of copper and one-sixth of pewter, mixed with a little antimony, so that it was useless for money, except for the copper it contained.

M. Capefigue holds that the first Revolution inundated France with two classes of people who were marked with the mark of the beast. These were first, les financiers Suisses, whom this senseless bigot says reproachfully were always Protestants; and the second class were les Juifs des bords du Rhin et d'Allemagne. These Swiss Bankers, this senseless author says, had none of the grace the prodigalités artistiques (such abominable French is untranslateable) of the Fermiers Généraux of the age of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., those noble protectors of the intelligence, the luxury, and the intoxication of civilization, 'ces nobles protecteurs de l'intelligence, du luxe, et des ivresses de la civilisation. To this and to many other such stupid platitudes there is a foot note, Voyez mon Louis XV. This is an artifice of advertisement to which this literary tradesman has on every occasion recourse. If he be writing of Napoleon, Louis XVIII., or Charles X., you are sure to find a foot note, Voyez mon Louis XIV., or mon Louis Philippe, or if he be only on Louis

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