'At his return from St. Germain's, the King declared what he had just done for the Prince of Wales. The Pope's nuncio remains at St. Germain's, and as soon as the old King dies, he will recognize the Prince as king.-Tuesday, 13th September, 1701.

The poor King of England sent early this morning for the Prince of Wales, and said to him, "Come near me, my child, I have not seen you since the King of France has made you king; never forget the obligations which you and we owe to him, and remember that God and religion are to be preferred to all temporal advantages:" he then fell back into an insensibility, from which no remedy could recover him; whenever he has an interval, he talks with a degree of piety and reason which edify all who hear him; indeed, it seems that he speaks with more sense than before his illness.-Wednesday, 15th Sept. 1701.

'The King of England is still worse than he was yesterday, and it is not thought that he can out-live the day. The king (of France) sent Degranges, master of the ceremonies, to prevent any ceremony; the body will be deposited at the English Benedictine Convent, and as soon as he is dead, the queen will go to Chaillot.-Thursday, 15th Sept. 1701. 'The King of England died at St. Germain's at three o'clock; he has always desired, from a sentiment of piety, to die of a Friday.— Friday, 16th September, 1701.

The king, on going abroad, went to,St. Germain's to visit the new King of England, James the Third; he did not stay long with him, and then went to visit the Queen his mother.

All the foreign ministers came as usual to the king's levee, except the English ambassador, who affects to be angry at the king's recognition of King James the Third. There is, however, nothing in that contrary to the treaty of Ryswick; there are even examples of two kings of the same country recognized at the same time; King Casimir, whom we have seen die in Paris, was, before he was King of Poland, recognized as King of Sweden, though there was another king on the throne, with whom even, we were in alliance.-Thursday, 20th September, 1701.

6

King William was at dinner at Loo when he heard of the death of James, and that the king had recognized the Prince of Wales: he pulled down his hat in anger, and did not open his mouth. They add, that it is thought he will immediately recall his ambassador.-Thursday, 29th October, 1701.'

The two following extracts are worth quoting, the first as a pleasant instance of credulity and ignorance the second as a melancholy and almost Theban example of fratricide.

A ship is arrived at La Rochelle from Canada with accounts that our colonies are in want of speedy succours. The Bishop of Quebec has sent missionaries into parts which have been hitherto considered as imaginary. He reports that he has discovered a people, whose hair, both of the head and body, is like the plumage of parrots; and another of which all the men are hump-backed and the women all lame.Sept. 17th, 1690.

There has been, within these few days, a shocking duel at St. Ger

main's.

main's. Two Englishmen, brothers of the Earl of Salisbury, quarrelled, fought, and severely wounded each other :-after the duel, they were reconciled, mutually asked forgiveness, sent for a priest and abjured the protestant religion in which they had been brought up ;--the eldest, who is but nineteen years old, is since dead of his wounds, the younger is still very ill of his, and only waits his recovery to throw himself into the monastery of La Trappe.-March 28th, 1691.

These brothers were Thomas and Edward Cecil, sons of third Earl of Salisbury: the unhappy survivor did not, it would seem, retire to La Trappe, as he was himself murdered shortly after in Rome.

Our readers will easily judge, from the specimens we have given, that these Memoirs contain the most ample illustration of the personal character of Louis XIV.; and it is indeed to this circumstance that we are chiefly indebted for the first of these works, and altogether indebted for the second. Madame de Genlis thinks that this minute history of the life of the monarch does him honour, she has accordingly published it with eulogistic commentaries and 'notes; and we own that we meet, with pleasure, a great number of anecdotes like the following, which are creditable to the justice and good nature of Louis, to whose character, in these points, it seems that justice is not generally done.

'After the council the king called the good old Montchevreuil into his closet, and said every thing that was kind and the most proper to alleviate his sorrow for the loss of his wife. He concluded by saying, "Don't look upon me as your master or your benefactor, but as your best friend, and in that character consult me upon all that can interest you or your family."-31st Oct. 1699.

'The king transacted business with M. de Pontchartrain this evening as usual, and he made a promotion in the gallies.-Only one gally was vacant, and M. de Pontchartrain in enumerating to the king those officers who might be selected for this appointment, dwelt upon the name of the Chevalier de Froulé. The king said to him, "I perceive that you interest yourself for M. de Froulé, and he deserves it; but there are others older than he who deserve it as well-they have no interest, and I am, therefore, bound to take care of them ;" and he gave the place to the next in seniority-15th Dec. 1699.'

The play is at a prodigious rate, the king having heard that the servant who keeps the accounts of the play had paid out of his own pocket, a mistake which had been discovered in the counters, sent for him, praised his conduct, and repaid him his money.-12th June, 1698. 'The Marquis De Coigny died on Sunday morning after a tedious illness-he had no place, but the king allowed him a pension, and during his very long illness the king had the charity to send him assistance in secret.-1st Dec. 1699.

This morning in council, the king condemned himself in a law-suit which he had with the Prince of Carignan; the sum in question was

as much as 200,000 livres: the matter was not without difficulty, but im all doubtful cases the king generally decides against himself.-28th December, 1699.'

M. Lémontey, on the other hand, evidently belongs to the revolutionary or Buonapartean school, which took or made occasions to depreciate the character of Louis even while the Usurper was, like the frog in the fable, bursting himself to imitate his magnificence: and, as Lémontey saw in Dangeau but too many topics of accusation against Louis, he has diligently extracted every thing of that nature which Madame de Genlis had omitted, and appended to it a dissertation on the administration of that monarch, which he need hardly have told us was written at a period when his family appeared exiled from his throne for ever.' M. Lémontey mentions this fact as a guarantee for his impartiality; but we own that we see it in quite another light; and we think that those who read this tedious dissertation, will agree that the spirit of the production is perfectly consistent with its date. We do not, however, intend to enter here into the litigated question of the character of Louis; as we shall probably have occasion very soon to bring that discussion distinctly before our readers. At present we must confine ourselves to Dangeau and his editors.

We are sorry, sincerely sorry, to be obliged to charge Madame de Genlis with at least as much unfairness in the pursuit of her panegyric, as M. Lémontey has exhibited in his dissertation, and with this serious aggravation, that Lémontey only misrepresents and mistates in his own character, while Madame de Genlis commits her offences under the name of Dangeau.

Madame de Genlis pledges herself that she read over every syllable of this vast collection, and that she re-read all the memoirs of the time to enable her to explain obscurities, and avoid tautologies, and she adds—' I am certain of not having omitted, in my abridgment, one line of the original which can be regretted.'-Dis. Prel. p. 32. Now upon this we have to say-first, that Madame de Genlis has re-read all the Memoirs to little purpose, or at least with little benefit to us; for her explanations are scanty and trite, and the natural dryness of Dangeau's narrative is made still more so by the absence of notes which should convey some of that information which is only to be found in contemporaneous memoirs. have ourselves read a good deal in this line of French literature, and yet we own that we should have been very grateful to Madame de Genlis if she had occasionally assisted our memory with such illustrations as her recent and purposed perusal of the Memoirs must have afforded. This, however, is but a minor cause of complaintthe two next are more serious,-Notwithstanding her pledge that she had not omitted one interesting line of the original, M. Lémon

We

tey

tey has contrived to select an octavo volume, consisting of one thousand articles omitted by Madame de Genlis, and we must confess that, of the two, we consider M. Lémontey's collection as more interesting than her's, as, perhaps, our readers, by the extracts we have made, may have already discovered: but this is not all; we are sorry to say that the articles omitted by Madame de Genlis are those which, generally speaking, do least credit to Louis XIV., and are therefore least favourable to her hypothesis of his character. This then wears the appearance of an unfair suppression; and this suppression has been exercised not merely on entire articles, but on parts of articles which appear not to have suited her views: for instance, her zeal for the Roman Catholic religion has not only induced her to suppress all the extraordinary and extravagant attempts by force, bribery, &c. which Louis made to convert his Protestant subjects, but even to conceal the doubts which Dangeau throws on the story of the conversion of Charles II. If our readers will look back to page 469, they will see marked in italics the passage which Madame de Genlis has omitted-an omission which we cannot call by any milder term than a falsification; and we are surprised and sorry that Madame de Genlis could imagine that the cause of religion was advanced by such a conversion as Charles's, or such a finesse as her own.

In the same spirit, she has suppressed the death-bed acts of two Popes, (Nouv. Mém. 23d August, 1689. 14th Jan. 1691.) which, in her opinion, were not altogether creditable to those holy persons; and in giving an account of James the Second's foolish wish that he might die on a Friday, she puts a reason for it into Dangeau's mouth (from a feeling of religion,') which is not in the original.

Sometimes her anxiety for Louis induces her to change the too simple expressions which Dangeau attributes to him, into something which she considers as more noble; thus, Dangeau had said,

After the death of the Dauphine, the king took the Dauphin into his closet, and said to him, You see what the greatness of this world comes to! You and I must come to that ourselves.—20th Ap. 1690.'

The words in italics Madame de Genlis exalts into Behold what awaits you and me: may God give us the grace to end as holily!'

These alterations are, it must be added, not many, and, for the most part, of but little importance-they nevertheless throw a doubt over the candour of Madame de Genlis, which our respect for this agreeable and instructive writer makes us regret. We still have some faint expectation that as there are known to exist several manuscripts of Dangeau, that which she consulted may not have contained the passages which M. Lémontey has found in his; and as some of the differences are altogether unessential, there seems

reason

reason to hope that Madame de Genlis may be able to show that her copy really differed from that of Lémontey.

Lémontey informs us that his copy is enriched with notes by an

unknown hand.

'I am ignorant,' says he,' of the name of the author or authors of these additions, and I did not recognize the hand-writing of any of those persons who have left us memoirs.-One thing only seems certain, that the unknown annotator was a contemporary of Dangeau; that he survived him some years; and that he was well acquainted with the domestic affairs of the great families, and with the most secret anecdotes of the court.'-Avertissement.

This account of M. Lémontey convinces us, (as several previous instances had induced us to suspect,) that he is not very well read in the Memoirs of the time, and consequently not very well fitted for the work which he undertook.-We ourselves can make no pretension to cope with a Frenchman in French literature, and particularly in a department to which he has devoted himself, yet we think we can inform M. Lémontey that his annotator is not 'unknown;' that he is a person who has left us memoirs;' in short, that he is no other than the Duke of St. Simon whom we have already often quoted, and whom also M. Lémontey quotes now and then, though we think we shall show that he has not very attentively read the works of that bitter but most entertaining writer.-We shall select a few of these notes, and afterwards add St. Simon's account of the same person or transaction, that our readers may judge whether we are wrong in attributing them to the same source.

We shall begin by the character of the President Rose, the private secretary of the king, and our translations shall be literal in order that the comparison may be perfect.

Annotator.

'Rose held the king's pen, that is, he wrote all the letters in the king's own hand; whose handwriting he imitated so that they could not be distinguished, and he had an inimitable style-he was a man of sense, sly and adroit, bold and dangerous, and he was not to be offended with impunity-there are stories without number about him.-A word more of this good man, with his calotte of satin, his grey hair, his band almost like an Abbé, his little cloak, and a handkerchief always between his unbuttoned coat and his waistcoat, with a tolerably handsome countenance and piercing eyes sparkling with sense.'-p. 134.

St. Simon.

Rose for fifty years had held the king's pen:—to hold the pen is to be an official forger, and to counterfeit so exactly the King's writing, as that one cannot be distinguished from the other. It was not possible to make a king speak with more dignity than Rose did. The good man was sly, cunning, adroit, and dangerous; there are stories without number about him. Rose was a little man, neither fat nor lean, with a tolerably

handsome