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his triumph was accomplished on Friday morning, the 20th of August 1718. He draws a plan of the chamber in which the sitting was held, and shows exactly how those present were arranged. He lingers over every preparatory step; until at last he brings us to the great announcement, made by the chancellor, that the bastards were reduced to their proper rank. He describes how every word was eagerly caught up by the ears of the listeners; but no one felt the same deep intense joy that he did. "I was," he says, "dying of joy; and thought I should have fainted; my heart, dilated in excess, could find no further room to swell. The violence I had to exert to prevent my feelings displaying themselves was infinite; but still this torment was delicious. I reckoned up the years of servitude, the mournful days in which, dragged as a victim to the parliament, I had served so often to the bastards as a cause of self-gratulation. I went over the different steps by which they had risen above the rest of the peers; I tried to estimate the depth of their fall. I knew I owed all the triumph to myself, and thanked myself for being the cause of all that was being done. I considered the glorious splendour of all this happening in presence of the king and of so august an assembly, and triumphed and was avenged. I revelled in my vengeance; still I did not fail to listen to the reading of the sentence, every word of which sounded on my heart like the bow on an instrument, or to examine the different impressions it was making on each of those around me." If it were not for a few such moments of keen enjoyment, human nature would perhaps be too weak to go through the harassing combats of public life. At any rate, we seem to know St. Simon much better than before when we have read this frank confession of what passed in his heart; nor can we fail to remark how native and unfailing must have been his love of observing and dissecting the thoughts of other men, when he could manage to indulge it even in a moment of such absorbing and acute feeling.

In the last years of the fatal administration of Dubois, St. Simon had the mortification of seeing the step undone, and the bastards restored to their place above the peerage. He had also the mortification, almost equally deep, of seeing the bull Unigenitus registered by the parliament, and made a part of the law of France; an object at which Louis XIV. had aimed in vain, even in the plenitude of his power, but which was now effected without opposition at the bidding of an ecclesiastic who had purchased a cardinal's hat with money received by him as a bribe from a foreign power, and who waited till he had attained the rank of archbishop, to avow his mistress openly. St. Simon retired to the seclusion of his country-seat,

and made no attempt to interfere with matters of state. At last the death of Dubois recalled him to the side of the Duke of Orleans; but he had hardly resumed his old post of confidential adviser of the regent, when that prince died, in December 1723. At this point St. Simon brings his memoirs to a conclusion. He wisely determined that they should end at some particular period; and not continue to a wearisome length, protracted by the garrulity of old age, after the writer had relinquished that personal familiarity with the great world which is the foundation of their excellence. Having, shortly after the death of the regent, received a hint from Fleury that his attendance at Versailles would not in future be wished for, he withdrew to his country-seat; and spent the remainder of his long life in shaping, correcting, and polishing his memoirs. He died in 1755, at the age of eighty.

At the conclusion of his memoirs, St. Simon addresses his readers, and claims for what he has written the merit of truth. It was the love of truth, he says, that had injured his worldly prospects. He asks that his readers should, as a recompense to him for his disinterested conduct, put a generous confidence in what he has written. As for impartiality, he makes no pretensions to what he considers an impossibility, as it was not in his nature to hate or to love slightly. All that he wishes us to believe is, that in stating his aversions he has not stated them unfairly; that he has not consciously made bad worse in order to add to the effect of his descriptions. Most readers in these days will, we think, be inclined to give St. Simon credit for the virtue he claims. The general impression left by the memoirs is certainly not that their author was a malevolent man. On the contrary, the more we read of them, and the more we enter into the whole character of the writer, the higher is our opinion of him, not only as a man of genius, but as a man of sense and honour.

Undoubtedly it is impossible that in a gallery of so many hundred portraits all should be likenesses. St. Simon must often have done injustice, have seen qualities distorted,—have estimated motives inaccurately,-have been the victim of his own great powers of observation and delineation. The editors of a recent edition of The Memoirs of the Marquis of Dangeau, the court-loving contemporary of St. Simon, invite attention to the dull pages of that panegyrist, as a means of correcting many false conceptions to which the Memoirs of St. Simon would be likely to give birth, and of thus doing justice to all whom St. Simon maligned. St. Simon is not to be set right in this way. He is so incomparably the ablest, shrewdest, acutest writer of his time; his point of judgment is so much the most right; his

position as an observer so much the most favourable,—that he will always stand alone. It is at once the prerogative, and the greatest responsibility, of genius, that the stamp which it places on men and things is almost ineradicable. To the end of time men will think of those whom St. Simon painted in the light in which he regarded them. The only really available means of aiding our judgment when we come to examine these successive portraits is, to keep before our minds all that we know of the author. We cannot tell how much or how little epithets laudatory or depreciatory are deserved when bestowed by him on individuals not known to us otherwise, or known to us only through persons far less fit to judge than St. Simon. But we can gain a general notion of what St. Simon was; and that will, on the whole, enable us with tolerable success to measure the probable degree of his approach to the real truth.

ART. VIII. THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE ENGLISH

MINISTRY.

Correspondence relating to the Affairs of Naples. Parl. Paper. 1857. Papers relating to the Proceedings at Canton. Parl. Paper: 1857. WE are not Ministerial partisans. We are not members of "Her Majesty's Opposition." We feel as little inclination to blame every thing that has been done, as to find fault with whatever it is suggested might have been done instead. We-can no more follow the Government in all their proceedings than the Tories in all their criticisms. Neither party shall drag us through their mire. We think Ministers very open to attack for certain actions and omissions. But if any thing could induce us to give them plenary absolution and a general letter of license, it would be the reckless and unprincipled manner in which they are assailed by their professional antagonists on every occasion, and for every thing they do or leave undone. If any thing could transform us from our proper character as public watchmen and censors into thick-and-thin supporters of the powers that be, it would be the indiscriminate and perpetual warfare carried on against them by the powers that wish to be-but are not. It is difficult to watch the conduct and language of the Opposition without coming to the conclusion, that their censures are suggested less by their opinions than by their position; that, had they been in the place of

Ministers, they would have acted as Ministers have done; and that, had Ministers taken the precise course now recommended by the Opposition, they would have been assailed by the Opposition for having done so. All this does great harm: it makes the country sick and weary of ordinary parliamentary encounters; it saves Ministers from blame and punishment where they really deserve it; and induces thoughtful people to retain and forgive them, from the consideration what manner of men are those who are their antagonists, and would therefore, in case of a defeat, be their successors.

We fully believe the members of the actual Government to be in the main honourable and just men; aiming at nothing but what they deem right and fair, earnestly desirous to promote the welfare and credit of their country, and anxious that other nations should be prosperous and happy likewise; but not very hopeful of human progress, and greatly disposed to mistrust popular action in every country but their own. The faults we find with them in relation to foreign politics their opponents share in a far more liberal measure: these are, the want of a clear and settled principle of action; want of adequate power to carry out their views; and want of care, and, if not of conscience, at least of a sufficiently solemn sense of responsibility, in their diplomatic appointments. The first is an intellectual defect; the last a moral delinquency; the other is a misfortune, for which partly their own want of resolution, partly the unscrupulous tactics of their rivals, and principally a general dereliction of duty on the part of the constituencies, are to blame.

It is the fashion, we know, with a large number of politicians, both in and out of parliament, to contrast Lord Palmerston's foreign policy unfavourably with that of his quondam rival and recent colleague, Lord Aberdeen, in a manner and to a degree scarcely warranted by what we know of the actual results of each. Lord Palmerston is one of those men, to be found in all walks of life, who, for some reason or other, enjoy a reputation which is by no means borne out by the facts of their career, so far at least as those facts are patent to the world. He is very generally regarded on the Continent, and very generally represented here, as one of the most uncomfortable and dangerous foreign ministers this country ever possessed-litigious, pertinacious, aggressive, and imperious; always inclined to assert the pretensions of Great Britain too haughtily, and to push them too far; quick in resentment, prompt in interference, and extreme in his demands; luxuriating in hot-water; revelling in angry protocols; and always on the verge of a quarrel with one neighbour or another.

Yet look at the facts of the last quarter of a century, during far the greater portion of which Lord Palmerston held the seals of the Foreign Office. He took the direction of our international relations at an epoch of singular difficulty and peril, when one of the principal nations of Europe, our nearest neighbour, had just discarded its ancient dynasty by a popular revolution; when other Continental countries were agitated by corresponding movements, and a general ferment prevailed which menaced spreading convulsions and contingent wars; and when the forcible severance of Belgium and Holland presented a problem for the great powers which few believed could be solved without a war. Since that time he has had to deal with many delicate and dangerous questions of diplomacy and statesmanship, to tide over many crises of no ordinary gloom, to soothe many wounded susceptibilities, to stand firm against many unreasonable demands, to defeat many unwarrantable intrigues. Questions of American boundaries and American ambitions; questions of Russian designs on Turkey, and French hankerings after Egypt; questions of great perplexity between Austria and Italy, as between France and Switzerland,-have threatened disturbance to the harmony of the world. A third revolution, a sanguinary civil strife, and a daring coup-d'état, have intervened in France, and ren-dered our relations with that country such as required both strong clear views, and great suavity and steadiness in pursuing them, to maintain in a satisfactory condition; while nearly the whole of Europe was subjected to a series of political convulsions, which overthrew ministers, dynasties, thrones, and constitutions, like houses of cards, and called for the exercise of a degree of sagacity and firmness in the foreign minister of England which more ordinary times neither need nor test. Yet during the whole of that trying time England enjoyed unbroken peace at home, and the often imminent peril of a European war was as often successfully averted. By one means or another, thanks to singular good fortune, or to skill yet more singular, the critical and menacing conjunctures of 1831, 1840, 1848, and 1852, passed over without rupture and without hostilities, so far at least as we were concerned. But no sooner had Lord Palmerston resigned the Foreign Office to a minister whose prudence, conciliatory demeanour, and genial disposition, had always been the theme of general praise, than a war of most formidable character broke out, and threatened to last for years and to involve all Europe in its vortex. The peace minister" par excellence found himself under the hard necessity of declaring war. The minister whom it was the fashion to represent as perpetually occupied in bringing us to

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