to our fathers-nay, to ourselves thirty years ago-would have seemed impossible. They would fain recall the superstitious formulas of a bygone age, without its natural childlike faith, and its joyous sense of life. They would bring back these formulas, without the earnest faith which once ennobled and animated them. Superstition is ever born anew with faith, folly with truth. Perhaps thou wilt again take note of birds' flight, or other natural signs, like the middle ages, or heathen antiquity. Nay, thou art in danger of falling into something much worse, self-devised signs of wood and tables. But how elevated a

wisdom lies in that old faith,-in the flight or cry of the living sharers of our carthly lot, which thou hast so often laughed at,-as compared with the senseless and soul-destroying divination of our time! Mormonism, slavery, appeals to the deceased, star-consulting, table-turning, are signs of the lowest declension at once of the intellect and the heart." (pp. 88-91.)

As the sole cure for such extravagances, the author suggests a rational faith in a well-attested religious system, bound up with the history of the human race-a Scripture. We will cite only one more passage:

"Whithersoever thou turnest, there remaineth for thee nothing but thy moral reason and the world's history. Yet of external histories thou dost not desire to hear. No, thou wouldst fain survey in the reflection of thousands of years the history of thy own spirit and of the eternal thought which dwells in its inner depths-yea, survey them in the mirror of a book which all can understand. It must be a book that would speak to thee of the actual, of the temporal; that would tell thee, what divine consciousness it is that has actually governed the world's history. But thou art as little desirous of a mere outward history as of a philosophical system-as little of a pious legend as of a deepthoughted myth. The book must contain a true historical kernel, and reflect back to thee a genuine, personal, human consciousness. It must possess a unity in itself-a luminous centre-point for what is darkan inner soul for its outward manifestation. It must exhibit to thee the eternal and the temporal-the eternal as the temporal, the temporal as the eternal. It must give thee answer to the questions: Whence comes this race of men? Whither is it going? To this issue all thy questionings finally tend. It is after this that something within thee inquires, not from mere curiosity, or the thirst for scientific lore. It is the purely human within thee that impels thee with a divine power to ask: Whence do I come? Whither do I go? What ought I to do? And simply because this longing is within thee, and thou hast the living faith that the realities of history, rightly viewed, must meet it with their verification, that there must be a divine answer to it, adjusted to the wants of our time,-precisely for this reason, mankind do possess such a book. This book is called by thy own people, by the world in which thou livest-'the Book'-'the Scripture; it is the book in the highest sense." (pp. 92, 93.)

We may judge from this extract, in how popular-in some passages we might say, how rhetorical-a tone, a large portion of M. Bunsen's book is written. Some of its best criticisms are those on the prophets, into the spirit of whose teachings it enters with a full and genial recognition. Those on Joel, Jonah, and Daniel are remarkable for their happy union of unbiased freedom of judgment with strong religious feeling. Speaking of the forced interpretations so often put on the latter writer, in defiance of history and criticism, he says, "We are not to make the pious patriot and seer a liar, in order to make him a prophet after our own system." (p. 530.) If more scriptural criticism were expressed in this tone of mingled honesty and reverence, it would render great service to genuine religion, and help to raise the Bible, often so blindly read and so dimly felt, to its proper rank as the grandest literature in the world.

Not seldom M. Bunsen has reminded us in this book of Herder. He has all the fervour, and something of the vagueness and generality, of that graceful and suggestive writer. With many claims on our approval, the present work has some obvious defects. Its general views are often sounder than the particular applications of them. The author draws his inferences in many cases too confidently from slight resemblances and uncertain grounds. His reference of the prophetic faculty to a purified clairvoyance (pp. 142-151) will not, we suspect, meet with general acceptance; and his unhesitating ascription to Baruch, the amanuensis of Jeremiah, of works so different in style and in thought as Lamentations, the latter part of Isaiah, and Job, does not appear to us to satisfy the conditions of a cautious and discriminating criticism. Altogether the work lacks compression, and a more systematic distribution of its materials. It wants also a more uniform and consistent character. It exhibits too

great a mixture of the learned and the popular. It professes to be written for the instruction of the general reader; yet for this purpose the philosophical introduction is too abstruse and obscure, and is marked by too constant a recurrence of abstract formulas of thought borrowed from the schools. In some of the insulated disquisitions,-the result apparently of the learned researches of former years, the author goes minutely into critical questions of which only scholars are competent to judge. Other parts of his subject, again, he has treated with a superficiality of which the learned will be apt to complain. Judging from a rapid survey of his work, we suspect that he has left himself open to attack in several points of detail. If it be so, we shall much regret it; because it will furnish those who grudge his useful labours, and are envious of his wide social

influence, with a plausible pretext for depreciating them, and may blind others to the real merit and noble purpose of his undertaking. We are jealous of M. Bunsen's reputation. Germany at this time can ill afford any lessening of the moral and intellectual weight of such a man on behalf of popular enlightenment and religious freedom. His high social position, his antecedents, and his being a simple unfettered layman, qualify him in no ordinary degree for mediating between the hard material unbelief and the rigid uncompromising orthodoxy, which threaten for the present to divide his country between them; while his genial spirit, his comprehensive views, his wide and ready sympathy with all that is good and generous, must commend much of what he writes-could he only abridge its volume and simplify its expression-to the cordial acceptance of the popular mind. It would be a public misfortune, if any hasty assertions and unguarded statements, inviting hostile and unscrupulous criticism, should weaken the impression and limit the circulation of a book which, though it may not in its present form fully satisfy the demands of the scientific, nor fully meet the wants of the less instructed, is still conceived in the true spirit of religious earnestness, and is sent out bravely and honestly in the right direction.

ART. VII.-THE MEMOIRS OF ST. SIMON.

Mémoires complets et authentiques du Duc de Saint-Simon sur le Siècle de Louis XIV et la Régence, collationnés sur le manuscrit original par M. Chéruel, et précédés d'une Notice par M. SainteBeuve, de l'Académie Française. Paris, 1856-7. Hachette et Cie.

THE Memoirs of St. Simon were first published in a complete shape after an almost exact interval of a century had elapsed since the period to which the record of his times was brought down by the author. They end with the year 1723, and the first. edition was published in 1829. After the death of St. Simon, they passed out of the hands of his family, and were kept under the control of the government, from a fear of indiscreet revelations. Privileged persons were, however, suffered to have access to the manuscripts; and the Duke of Choiseul, when minister, lent some of the volumes to Madame du Deffand, who wrote to Horace Walpole in extreme delight at the stores of

amusement and gossip she found in these unknown memoirs. In and after 1784, portions began to get into print, and small compilations or mutilated extracts were published at intervals; and at last, in 1829, the whole memoirs were given to the world. Since that time the interest they have excited has gone on steadily increasing; and several fresh editions have appeared, each aiming at greater correctness of text and greater convenience of reference. A new edition is now in course of publication at Paris, adorned with every luxury of type and paper, most carefully edited by M. Chéruel, and preceded by a notice of St. Simon written by M. Sainte-Beuve. No one can wonder that Frenchmen should recur with unwearied eagerness to a writer who paints the inner life of the great era of the French monarchy, who has so many national qualities in an eminent degree, whose wit, causticity, and felicity of expression are so peculiarly French, and who has left so many exquisite portraits of French men and women. In England, however, the number of persons who read through these memoirs will always be very small; and there will probably never be an Englishman who can say, as M. Sainte-Beuve says, that he has read them through ten times. Fortunately there is no book in which it is so easy to dip: we are amused, and can understand what we read, if we open any part of any volume of this long series. All that we require, in order to do this with pleasure and profit, is to know the general outline of St. Simon's life, the general cast of his character, and the more prominent faults and excellencies of his memoirs. We shall attempt in the following pages to lay before our readers a brief sketch of what a cursory and irregular reader of St. Simon might be glad to know beforehand.

Louis de Saint-Simon was born in 1675, and was the only son of Claude first Duke of Saint-Simon. His father had risen through the personal favour of Louis XIII.; and he is said to have owed this favour to an ingenious device, by which he enabled the monarch to pass from one horse to another without touching the ground. When the Duke of Orleans forced his brother to make Puylaurens a "duke and peer," the king comforted himself by conferring a similar distinction on his chief equerry; and it was thus that the father gained the dignity which it was the great business of the son's life to uphold. After the death of Louis XIII., the Duke of Saint-Simon lived retired and forgotten in the country. His son was born to him when he was far advanced in years, and the boy grew up in an almost complete isolation from persons of his own rank. His mother, who was of the family of Laubepine Chateauneuf, had no near relations who could be of assistance to her son; and

she often strove to impress the boy with a notion of the difficult task that lay before him in life,—the task of upholding his nominal position without great estates or high connections. She strove to give him the best education in her power; but he confesses that his taste for study and for science was too small to permit her endeavours to be very effective. For history, however, he felt a real relish; and it was his admiration for the old chroniclers of France that determined him, at the early age of nineteen, to attempt to emulate their fame, and himself write the memoirs of his own time.

He entered the army when he was sixteen; and being required, like all the young nobles of his day, to join one of the two regiments of musketeers, he was placed in that of the "Greys," as the captain, Maupertuis, was an old friend of his father. His family had great difficulty in providing the proper outfit and equipage for the young soldier; and their embarrassment was increased by the roguery of a steward, who chose this unlucky time to decamp with fifty-thousand francs. St. Simon served with credit at the siege of Namur and the battle of Neerwinde. He rose to the rank of captain, and commanded a regiment called by his name; but he never got any further. He was not in the line of promotion. He went to court, as every young officer and nobleman went, as a matter of course, but he was never in favour: he came there backed by no support from influential families; he did not make his way there by rendering any service to Madame de Maintenon. He felt the depressing hopelessness of his position; and the consolation to which he had recourse was that of writing his beloved memoirs, noting every little fact that could form a part of them, practising his powers of observation, learning to look on men and things with that penetration, and to paint them with that fidelity, which had attracted him in the pages of Froissart, Joinville, and Ville-Hardouin. The world has profited by the bitter mortifications to which the young Vidame de Chartres, as he was called during his father's lifetime, must have found himself subjected. Had he been noticed, flattered, and promoted, he would have been much too busy and contented to have given us these voluminous and cynical memoirs.

The first Duke of St. Simon died in 1693; and in 1694 the young duke was urged by Madame de St. Simon to marry. Her son was willing to follow her advice; but said, that nothing would tempt him to a misalliance, and yet that he must have money. He therefore requested time to look about him; and his choice soon settled on the Duke of Beauvilliers. It was this nobleman whom, he expressly tells us, he wished to marry, through the medium of one of the duke's daughters. The duke

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