to that of the "Wealth of Nations." France cannot fail to profit by the study of such a work; and there are still many, both legislators and others, on this side the channel, whose notions of commercial affairs would be greatly improved by a careful examination into its leading doctrines. This being the case, we cannot say any thing less complimentary to the wisdom and forbearance of the late ruler of the French people than that he prohibited the publication of a second edition of the "Traité d'Economie Politique." It contains too many recommendations in favour of a free trade, and of freedom in general: it dissuades too earnestly the officiousness of rulers from interfering with the projects of individual enterprise: it teaches too irresist ibly this important truth, that commerce flourishes most when left to the discretion of the merchant, and that private interest has much more knowledge, and calculates much more wisely, than crowned heads or servile courtiers. ART. XVI.-France. By Lady Morgan. Four Appendices, on the State of Law, Finance, Medicine, and Political Opinion in France. By Sir T. Charles Morgan, M. D. 2 vols. 8vo. 2d edit. Colburn. London, 1817. THIS is a work written against time. The authoress premises "that starting from the post with many abler competitors, her object was, if possible, to distance those by time if she could not rival them in skill." She was bound to her publisher to be ready by April: a very sufficient apology for "inaccuracies of haste." The said publisher, however, did not fulfil his part of the bargain. The sheets were "composed à trait de plume," (which we venture to translate in vulgar English at a dash of the pen,) and sent off chapter by chapter without "comparison," or "the hope of correction from proof sheets:" it was not to be expected that the press would wait upon the chances of wind and tide; and the curiosity of the world of fashion was not to suffer from a cold and formal fastidiousness as to proprieties of language, sentiment, or principle. Wind and tide wafted these leaves of our travelling sibyl across the Straits of Dover: "So may the Cyprian Queen divine, And the twin stars, with saving lustre shine." The precious deposit arrived safe; and still the publisher was not ready! On his shoulders the lady reasonably lays the burthen of blame for a delay equally " injurious to the interest of the work and the reputation of the author." The travelling authors, male and female, whom her ladyship had fairly outstripped by wheel and sail, by cabriolet and packet, by common-place book and copy for press, had now a chance of coming up; and "the jargon of the court or the cottage, the well-turned period of the duchess, or the patois of the peasant," as Lady Morgan caught and took them down in her tablets" à vive voix," (that is, we presume, from word of mouth,) might have passed for gleanings at second-hand. But the speed of our authoress was triumphant even with her procrastinating publisher at her back; she is still foremost in the race: even critics come lagging at a distance: the giant capitals of "second edition" stared out upon us in the columns of the Morning Post, before we had well nibbed our pens and adjusted our spectacles: "Reviews behold her spurn their bounded reign, The author complains in her preface that one of our critical contemporaries, most strangely, it seems, had once accused the writings of Miss Sidney Owenson of "licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty, and atheism." The reply to this strange accusation is, we admit, quite satisfactory. Her novels have found readers, and she has found a husband. But the most victorious refutation will naturally be supplied in the work before us. Whether an apprenticeship in novelwriting be the best possible preparative to a work of this nature, we do not take upon ourselves to determine. That practised familiarity with the charming, the agitating, and the surprising; that artist-like facility in painting sketches, where every cottage is romantic, and all is sentimental down to pigs and poultry; that attention to rounded arms, flushed cheeks, and floating draperies, may possibly give a fine pleasurable seasoning and effect to observations on real incidents and actual characters, places, and things; and to this study of effect, and this tendency to what is so sentimentally termed an "elegant voluptuousness," it is probably owing that our author is enabled to describe with such lively colourings of style the hotels and furniture; the velvet hangings and lace quilts; the confectionary and ices; dressed fish, pastry, and salads, only found in France:" to delineate so much con amore the glowing form and unstudied attitudes of Madame Recamier in her salle de bain and to descant with such spirit on the philosophical and decent libertinism of French wives; on the happy abundance of clean linen and high beds; on the wisdom of coffee served round pour la digestion; and on the superlative excellence of green tea punch. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mirabeau, French travellers, Bonapartists, and Irish pariots, supply the rest. It is fit and right that the historian of French society should hate England, and despise the Bible. 66 : The utility of the above-mentioned apprenticeship to the craft of novel-writing is very apparent in matters of style. "The miserable cross-roads, which usually lead to the gentilhommerie or château," are described as "buried deep in some sequestered copse, and accessible only by paths, narrow and difficult as those to heaven!" We are told, and are very glad to hear, that "the finest flowers in France are now to be found in the peasants' gardens: the native rose de Provence, the stranger rose of India, entwine their blossoms, and grow together amidst the rich foliage of the vine, which scales the gable, and creeps along the roof of the cottage:" and suddenly we have this Ossianico-Irish flourish of pathetic patriotism: "Oh! when shall I behold, near the peasant's hovel in my own country, other flowers than the bearded thistle, which there waves its lonely head" and scatters its down upon every passing blast; or the scentless shamrock, the unprofitable blossom of the soil, which creeps to be trodden upon, and is gathered only to be plunged in the inebriating draught, commemorating annually the fatal illusions of the people, and drowning in the same tide of madness their emblems and their wrongs. "Honey, it seems, is much used in France; and this branch of rural economy is cultivated in the Orleanois with a peculiar ingenuity worth recording." (The ingenuity with which it is recorded is, to say the least, fully equal to that of the contrivance itself.) "When" the flowers hang down their heads to die, "and their honied essence has been completely rifled by these little brigands of nature, the hive is carefully wrapped up in linen-cloths, and the whole busy state is then transported to the confines of the noble forest of Orleans; where the morning sun, and the luxuriant blossoms of the wild heath, peculiarly fine in that district, open a new source of ways and means to some noisy bustling little Chancellor of the Exchequer; who, having run through the whole string of usual expediency, avails himself of the supplies which others have accidentally presented, and prides himself on results, for which he had made no provision." The French are the most injured and calumniated people upon the earth; and the most amiable and charming. We like to use this epithet, for it is a favourite of the authoress. The peasants all speak with "the intelligence and frankness peculiar to the lower classes of France:" the boys and girls skip along the road-side with that graceful lightness and flexibility of figure and motion peculiar to the French youth:" but if an unfortunate English soldier is met, riding in a charrette, we hear directly of "the English physiognomy; with a certain mechanical immobility of the well-drilled countenance;" and this is contrasted with the ever-shifting expression of intelligence in the coun tenance of a French waggoner: this intelligence is, indeed, for the sake of candour, said to be distorted into grimace; but still it is intelligence. We have, indeed, a spruce corporal opposed to the "cold and solemn-looking English serjeant:" the corporal, however, is Irish; and he makes himself agreeable to a round-faced black-eyed little demoiselle, who runs over all "the little_coquetries" which Lady Morgan seems so well to under stand. This scene in the waggon gives occasion to the philanthropic remark, that "the English soldier no longer tracked his progress in blood, nor carried desolation to the hearth of the French peasant." The author had forgotten the admission of a peasant-soldier, quoted by herself, as to the "great discipline" and "moderation of the English troops." She then proceeds with her favourite tragic interjection: "Oh! why should nations" we shall not trouble our readers with the sentiment at large. a In a note, we are favoured with an extract from the letter of " gentleman of considerable talent and experience," telling us, that Mr. Canning, when at Paris, had talked in a numerous circle, in which were many of the military, about England "keeping the French under a rod of fire." The military said nothing; and Madame de Stael undertook of herself to reply to these insults. As Mr. Canning was speaking of victories achieved by the English, she told him that if those gentlemen would only once sever themselves from the Russians, the Prussians, the Germans, and honour us with a tête-à-tête, she could engage that it should not be declined. To the humbled vanity of French men and French women much may be allowed: but what shall be said of a woman, calling herself British, who gives her shameless assent to these Bobadil absurdities? who, to her Parisian friends, confesses the inability of England to meet France "single-handed;" who consents that the plans of Wellington, and the courage and discipline of his followers, which drove the French across the Pyrenees, are due to the allied Spaniards and Portuguese: and that the heat and toil of the day of Waterloo were borne by Blucher and his Prussians?—It is needless for us to say that, in our opinion, Mr. Canning, as an English gentleman and a senator who had a reputation to maintain, never could have exposed himself thus grossly in a French assembly: and the gentleman of "talent and experience" is, therefore, nothing better than a self-betrayed libeller, and retailer of petty spiteful scandal. The author talks also of "the equitable restitution of the pictures" in sneering italics. They were, she says, "the wellearned spoils of France by the law which, from time immemorial, had disposed of empires and of nations, by the law of conquest:" and she does not perceive that if the law of conquest placed the pictures in the gallery of the Louvre, the same law of conquest might take them back again. But every thing is hallowed by the ruffian touch of a Frenchman. She also stoops to repeat the lie of Bonaparte's surrendering himself with voluntary trust in the magnanimity of England; and the impudent and exposed falsehoods of his hourly insults and privations; the chance pigeons shot for his breakfast; and his stinted allowance of wine. We cannot stay to trifle with the impertinencies of imbecility, or the chatterings of flippant falsehood. "The peasantry, it appears, submit with difficulty to the ennui of idleness, imposed on them by the new regulations, which enforce the observance of the Sabbath; an observance unknown in most CATHOLIC Countries:" and the authoress is edified at finding an old gardener "working in a flower-knot, although it was Sunday." The grandmother, however, "apprend à notre petit bon homme à prier le bon Dieu; and in fact we found notre petit bon homme, a fine boy of four years old, on his knees before his ancient grandmother:" who replaced her missal and her beads at the entrance of the party. They who have heard the phrase "le bon Dieu," as used by all orders of people in France, will appreciate the sort of devotion here described. The mutterings of dervises, in their circular dance, have as much meaning and spirituality as the forms of Romish devotion. "Le bon Dieu," in its reverent sense, is laid on the shelf with the beads and the missal: it is a word of incantation, or a bye-word of jest; and after being applied to the ghastly images that crowd up the cells and stare upon the walls of their churches, is bandied about as a risible ejaculation, or used as a bug-bear to frighten children. We will permit Lady Morgan herself to describe the state of what was called Christianity in France; as it is a passage creditable to her understanding, and as such passages do not frequently occur. "It is the fashion to declaim against the decline of religion in France in the present day; and comparing it to its former state, under the old régime, to lament it has so little influence over the peasantry and lower orders. But what was the religion whose decline is thus lamented? what was its influence on a people, buried in the grossest superstition and darkest ignorance? While it permitted its ministers to mingle in the intrigues, and foment the disunions, of all the courts in Europe, and to countenance the vices of the most licentious of its courts; while it induced the King of France to compromise matters with his conscience, by sending away his mistresses in Lent, and by taking them back at Easter!! and enabled him to quiet his death-bed VOL. X. NO. XX. |