BOSTON LECTURES. 1870. CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM. By Presidents Harris of Bowdoin College, Woolsey of Yale, Profs. Herrick of Bangor, Mead of Andover, Seelye of Amherst, Peabody of Harvard, Fisher of New Haven, Smyth of Andover, Diman of Brown University and Porter of Yale College. Boston: Congregational Sabbath-School and Publishing Society. JUST PUBLISHED AT THIS OFFICE: CLEMENCE D'ORVILLE; or, From the Palace to the Steppe. A Novel of Russian High Life. And CLELIA, from Family Papers. Translated for, and first published in America in, THE LIVING AGE. One vol., price 38 cents. NUMBERS OF THE LIVING AGE WANTED. The publishers are in want of Nos. 1179 and 1180 (dated respectively Jan. 5th and Jan. 12th, 1867) of THE LIVING AGE. To subscribers, or others, who will do us the favor to send us either or both of those numbers, we will return an equivalent, either in our publications or in cash, until our wants are supplied. PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money. Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars. Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers. PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS. For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in num. bers, price $10. DIED In Brookline, Mass., May 17, 1870, Aged 73 Years, ELIAKIM LITTELL, For twenty-six years Editor of The Living Age. From The Quarterly Review. the absolution for the past. He has done no wrong; he can do none. Let him, on the "other hand, be checked, like Washington, by patriotism or public virtue, and he is relegated at once to the second or third rank of greatness; if, indeed, he is admitted to be in any sense great. Cæsar, Cromwell, and Napoleon are the three self-raised men, three architects of their own fortunes, who have filled the largest space in history. None of these was ever troubled by a scruple when a decisive step was to be taken or his personal position was at stake; and it is a remarkable fact that the one amongst them whose rise and career are the most wonderful, was the freest from any sort of moral restraint whatever. M. LANFREY'S "History of Napoleon is a book which even in its unfinished state, cannot fail to inspire the highest respect for the author and the deepest interest in the trains of reflection which it suggests. Independently of its merits as a succinct, original, lucid and severely accurate summary of events, it vividly reproduces and helps to solve problems of incalculable importance to society. Is greatness hopelessly incompatible with goodness? Must the brightest of mankind be invariably the meanest ? "The feather that adorns the royal bird supports his flight. Strip him of his plumage, and you fix him to the earth." Is the plumage of soaring ambition made up of Some thirty years since a prize was ofdeceit, dissimulation, vain glory, and false fered at an Italian university for the best pretences? Should we fix it to the earth essay on the thesis: "What man since the by stripping off its feathers, or by weighting creation of the world has acquired the most it with honour, probity, and truth? Field- extended celebrity ? " The pre-eminence ing leaves it to be inferred, if he does not was awarded to Napoleon, and a similar actually maintain, that the only essential pre-eminence would be awarded to him if difference between Jonathan Wild and the the question had been, "What man since conquerors who are popularly called "the the creation of the world has combined so great," lay in the scale of their respective much that is mean, petty, wicked, and repexploits, in the narrowness or boundless-rehensible, with such lofty ambition, such ness of the field on which the common fac- comprehensiveness of view, such grasp of ulty for mischief and lust of rapine was dis- mind, such superhuman energy, such verplayed. Nor, if Jonathan had not com- satility and universality of genius and camitted the mistake of getting hanged, is it pacity?" by any means clear to our minds that he would have failed to command a considerable amount of admiration from the modern school of hero-worshippers, whose sole criterion of merit is success. With them, the means or instruments are little or nothing; the results everything. In their eyes, it is comparatively immaterial whether the coveted celebrity, elevation, or aggrandisement is attained by appealing to the noblest or the basest feelings, by the unbought suffrages of the wise and good or by flattering and corrupting the foolish and the bad "Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.” Let the aspirant only climb or creep to the highest pinnacle, let him become the enslaver of his country or one of the arbiters of the world's destiny, and he receives full • Histoire de Napoleon Ier. Par P. Lanfrey. Tome Premier et Tome Deuxieme. Paris, 1867. It may fairly be assumed that M. Lanfrey had this or some such question in his mind when he planned his history, for its clear scope and tendency throughout are to disabuse the public mind of a cherished error and at least compel a discriminating judgment from posterity. He is the most useful and enlightened of iconoclasts. Improving 66 Go and on Oxenstiern, he says in effect: see with how little principle the world is governed; by what paltry arts it may be deluded and enslaved; how power, rank, titles, honours, may be won and kept by talents and qualities combined with knav ery and effrontery, which would have been missed or forfeited by the same talents and qualities combined with a sense of honour and self-respect; how often men are exalted by their worst qualities and depressed by their best!" For it is not simply the central figure, with its colossal proportions, that is made to point the moral. The at tendant groups are graphically sketched as | semblance of reason or plausibility, and to 66 tensity of the moral sense, the love of right, the hatred of injustice, the scorn of falsehood, that constitute the strength of M. Lanfrey, and have enabled him to move among the accumulated mass of trustworthy illustrations of the epoch, and, as was to be excuse or palliate everything that by no anticipated, the circling satellites reflect the possibility of construction could be made to spots without the splendour of their sun. bear praise. He rarely, if ever, thinks of The discriminating estimate of Napoleon's submitting any Napoleonic scheme or excharacter and conduct which now bids fair ploit to the ordeal of principle, until it has to become the recognized one, was formed been condemned by what he calls la jusand expressed half a century ago by Eng- tice des temps,” i. e. by the event; when he lish writers and statesmen, whose earnest blames it (as Talleyrand blamed the exewarnings and high toned protests were at-cution of the Duc d'Enghien) more as a tributed to national antipathy and preju- blunder than a crime. Now, it is the indice.* How little progress had been made till recently in dissipating the delusive halo that enveloped his name, is shown by the influence of M. Thiers' "History," which made that name again a spell to conjure with, a thing of life and motion, which and apocryphal materials at his disposal, wafted back in triumph the cherished freight of bones (not ashes) from St. Helena, blow the slumbering embers of Imperialism into a flame, and led by an obvious train of causes to the restoration of the dynasty. Factitious effects are never lasting. A rude shock was given to the military infallibility of the idol by Colonel Charras, when he ruthlessly exposed the blunders of the campaign of 1815, with the falsification of facts, dates and documents subsequently perpetrated to cover them. The authors of "Le Conscrit " did good service by showing the cost of glory in national suffering and privation, and the terrible retribution that may be exacted when the parts of vanquished and victor, invaded and invader, are reversed. But it was reserved for M. Lanfrey to complete the disenchantment, to cast down the brazen image, and compel even worshippers to acknowledge that their adoration has been often miserably misplaced. 66 armed, as it were, with the Ithuriel spear of truth. Incomparably the most important of these, constituting, indeed, the groundwork and main dependence of his work, is the Correspondence of Napoleon," of which the 28th volume, bringing it down to July, 1815, has recently appeared.* But a startling amount of new material for Napoleonic history has been brought to light within a few years in the shape of Memoirs, Letters, and Despatches, and the whole of these have been subjected to the minutest investigation by M. Lanfrey, who has thereby been enabled to light up his narrative with numerous traits and touches that give it an air of novelty, even when the scene is crowded with familiar faces and the main action is well known. In his pages the boyhood and early youth of Napoleon arrest attention, although one would have thought that there was nothing new to be said or suggested till we come to the period The contrasted characters of the two writ- when the germs of ambition began to stir ers, approaching their subject from diamet-in him, and the distinctive features of his rically opposite directions, rendered inevitable the startling discrepancy between M. Thiers and M. Lanfrey. The brilliant historian of the Consulate and Empire started with a determination to award the entire credit of success to Napoleon when he succeeded, and to throw the entire blame on his subordinates when he failed; to praise everything that could be praised with a We may refer our readers to some of the earliest numbers of the "Quarterly Review" in which the real character of Napoleon was exposed. See, for example, "Q. R." vol. iv. p. 1 seq.; vol. v. p. 73 seq.; vol. vi. p. 38 seq., and several subsequent volumes. character were fixed. * "Correspondance de Napoleon Ier., Publiee par Ordre de l'Empereur Napoleon III." The first sixteen volumes, ending August, 1807, were published without alteration or reserve, and it is these which Lanfrey, whose fourth volume closes with the battle have been principally laid under requisition by M. of Essling (May, 1809.) The effect of this unreserved publication on the great man's memory having disappointed expectation, a fresh Commission was issued in 1864, with instructions to be more cautious. The last twelve volumes, therefore, are by no means so compromising or so valuable. A capital selection has appeared under the title of "Napoleon Ier Peint par Lui-meme. Par M. Raudot, Ancien Representant de l'Yonne." Paris, 1856. ple! They have done to his effigy what they would have been glad to do to his person." It was in Corsica that the embryo great man first tried his hand at a coup d'état, and it was there, again, that recovering as by a strong effort from his fever of public virtue, he definitively laid aside the loyalty and disinterestedness of his youth. Each of these episodes is illustrative; each of them casts its shadow before. "The bargain (says M. Lanfrey) is struck. At the moment when history is about to take possession of Bonaparte, calculation and ambition have already got the better of all other motives. Behold him disengaged from every scruple of opinion, steeled against every political predilection, on the best terms with the conquerors without being irreconcilable with the conquered, disembarrassed of all the generous illusions of the past, and measuring in his mind's eye the unlimited field opening before him. This predestined of glory has already no counsellor but his insatiable genius, no rule but a certain ideal of greatness, and what he himself calls circumstances, that is, accomplished facts, success, fortune. Let the opportunity arise, he will not let it escape. It did not delay presenting itself with an eclat beyond his hopes." "I was born," to use his own words, "when my country was perishing; the cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, the tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth." So ingrained were these Corsican influences, that he narrowly missed becoming a patriot on a small scale, the vindicator of the oppressed of his native country, instead of the oppressor of half the countries of the globe. To re-enact the part of Paoli and restore the independence of Corsica, was more than the dream of his boyhood. It was his highest ambition for five years after he received his first commission; and for the realization of this project he ran risks which place his earnestness beyond dispute. In his seventeenth year (1786), on leaving Brienne, he joined the regiment de la Fère, then in garrison at Valence, with the rank of second lieutenant. He here received that essential part of masculine education which Prince Pückler Muskau calls the education of the drawingroom, and which Lord Chesterfield recommends so strongly and repeatedly in the famous Letters. He formed a close friendship with a young married woman, attractive and distinguished, who undertook his introduction to society. Not even at this The siege of Toulon was the commencesusceptible age, however, does it appear ment of his military reputation, which rose that female influence. sank deep. In a with unprecedented rapidity during the Ital"Dialogue sur l'Amour," written at Val-ian campaign of 1794. This he really dience, he gravely and seriously lays down, that "Love does more harm than good, and it would be the good deed of a protecting divinity to rid us of it." He began a history of Corsica at Valence, and in 1791 he published his Lettre à Matteo Buttafuoco, the principal instrument of Choiseul in the annexation of Corsica to France, who is overwhelmed with invective and contumely, whilst Paoli is exalted to the skies. Buttafuoco sat as deputy of the Corsican nobility in the Convention, and a passage in the letter alluding to this circumstance is a curiosity, as regards both sentiment and style: rected whilst acting as General of Artillery under Dumerbion, an old and worn out officer, who commanded in chief. Compromised by his connection with the Robespierres, he was recalled: his fortunes once more hung wavering in the balance, and absolute destitution stared him in the face. In the summer or early autumn of 1795, during the financial crisis brought on by the over-issue of assignats, he was so pressed for money as to be obliged to share the slender resources of Junot and Bourrienne, and even to sell his books. His state of mind under these trials is described as fluctuating between ardent hope, high imaginings, and blank despondency. There were "O Lameth! O Robespierre! O Petion! O moments when he dreamed of nothing more Volney! O Mirabeau! O Barnave! O Bailley! than a comfortable retreat in the country, O Lafayette. Behold the man who dares to seat with the calm of domestic life; and it will himself by your side. All dripping with the be remembered that the Duke of Wellingblood of his brothers, sullied by crimes of every ton, when a subaltern, exhibited a parallel kind... As if he were the choice of the peo-blindness to what providence had in store |