She

though rather rhetorical and diffuse. has consequently produced a very valuable and most interesting Memoir, to which there is only one marked objection: the almost inevitable result of her own formed habits, her modes of thinking, and her sex. She is the author of some thirteen or fourteen popular novels, besides the two 'Lives' mentioned in her title-page; and the woman, the novelist, the religious biographer, may simultaneously be traced in her treatment of Montalembert: giving an undue preponderance to the romantic, sentimental and sensational elements or aspects of character, and placing the clerical enthusiast in broad relief. In the following sketch-our limits forbid it to be more we shall endeavor to redress the balance by giving the orator, statesman, author, and accomplished man of the world, his due.

A noble French and a noble Scotch race met in the person of Charles Forbes René de Montalembert, who was born in London on the 15th of May, 1810. The Montalemberts can be traced back to the Crusades, the proudest boast of an ancient family in France. It was one of the same stock to whom Francis I. alluded in his memorable challenge: Here are four of us, gentlemen of La Guyenne: J. Sauzac, Montalembert, and La Chasteigneraye, ready to encounter all comers.' The paternal grandfather of our hero was an emigrant; his maternal grandfather a retired Indian merchant or civil servant; and Mrs. Oliphant, after expatiating_on 'the beautiful melancholy face, replete with tragic associations,' of the expatriated noble, exclaims :

Thus stands Jean de Montalembert at one side of the portal; and on the other James Forbes, with trim peruke and calm countenance, strong in English order, prosperity, and progress, expecting nothing but good, hearing of nothing but victory, raises with cheerful confidence the

curtain of life for the new actor about to step upon that tragic stage. No young beginner could have had predecessors more perfect in their typical character; no new soul could have more perfectly embodied in one those two great currents of the past.'*

The father, Marc René, the son of Jean, had served with the British army in India, and thus, it would seem, became acquainted with Mr. Forbes. Instead of settling down in England, he and his wife were constantly on the move. By some lucky accident he carried the first news of the abdication of Napoleon to Louis XVIII.; and in due season he was rewarded for his zeal and fidelity by being named a peer of France and minister plenipotentiary to Stuttgart.

We must suppose that the Scotch wife was as much absorbed by political movements and intrigues as the French husband, and was equally ready to throw off the parental cares and duties which might have interfered with the exciting stir and bustle of her life; for, from the time he was fifteen months old, the boy was given over entirely to the keeping of James Forbes, who had already afforded the strongest and strangest manifestation of interest by dedicating to him, when scarcely a year old, the great work (Oriental Memoirs' in forty-two volumes quarto) by which the name of Forbes was to live for ages to come. He watched over his young charge with the fondest affection; but Charles was eight when it was finally determined, after a painful struggle for both, that he should go to school at Fulham, and the event is thus announced in a letter, dated Albemarle Street, 28th April, 1818, from the grandfather to the mother :

The day of our separation arrived last week, to me a trial of no common kind, for except at short intervals, I have never lived alone for fiftyone years until now, and I felt it deeply. I told him I would take him after breakfast, or, if he liked it better, he might dine with me and we would go to the school in the evening. He hesitated a little and then said: "As I am to go, I had rather go at once.

They set off accordingly, and when about half-way, the boy suddenly flung his arms round the grandfather's neck and adjured him by the love of truth which he had so sedulously inculcated, to answer one question truly :—

"You know, my dear grandpapa, that I have left my papa and mamma, my brother and sister at Stuttgart, to be your child; and now you and I are everything to each other until we see them again. Tell me therefore-but you must tell me truly if since we left Paris I have been the boy

s'enorgueillir de leur descendance des comtes de Granard.'

you expected and wished me to be, and if you love me as much as when we were there all together?" It was almost too much for me; but I could with truth assure him that he had been all, and even more than all, I anticipated. Then said he, "I am the happiest boy in the world, nor shall I drop one tear when you leave me;" nor did he.'

He lost his affectionate grandfather in the course of the following year, and forthwith took up his abode in Paris with his father and mother, who were too much occupied with diplomacy and society to pay much attention to the bringing up of their children: Charles, Arthur (two years younger), and Élise. The first glimpses we get of his mental progress are from the diaries which he began keeping when he was thirteen, and continued with occasional breaks through life. At this early age he At this early age he anticipated the conclusion to which a grave scholar and statesman was brought by experience that life would be tolerable but for its amusements; and he appreciated time like a grey-headed philosopher. More than one record of a so-called pleasure party concludes: Day lost, like so many others.' He was already a politician, and a proselytising one; for we find him exacting an oath of eternal fidelity to the Charter from his little brother, who, puzzled and half frightened by his earnestness, recoils with a protest: 'Mais qu'est-ce que c'est que la Charte ?' Charles knew very well what it was, for in September, 1824, there is an entry that Louis XVIII. died after a long illness, which he endured with an heroic patience worthy of the august author of the Charte Constitutionnelle.'

He was fourteen when the Abbé Nicolle, head of the Collége Sainte-Barbe, induced his parents to place him under a regular course of study, and was at the pains of examining him from time to time to judge of his proficiency. To the entry of one of these examinations, when M. Nicolle expressed himself satisfied, he appends, which is more than I am myself.' He is wearied to death by what is called society, regards the theatre as a penance, and is absolutely indignant at the notion that he should be supposed to need distraction or could find enjoyment in un-idea'd idleness. It was the sage remark of Falstaff, 'There's never any of these demure boys come to any proof;' but Montalembert was rather a serious and thoughtful than a demure boy. There was a strong dash of romance

in his day-dreams and self communings;, and his reading was calculated to foster the imagination as well as to mature the judgment and supply the memory with facts. It appears from the Journal that he had read Shakespeare's best plays carefully and critically. The Tempest' he finds sublime in some parts, but in others ridiculous:' the Midsummer Night's Dream,' un peu ennuyeux ?' 'Twelfth Night' niediocre;' but King Lear,' 'sublime;' 'Hamlet,' 'divine;' and 'Othello,' 'too touching.'

It is a curious fact that his' De l'Avenir

politique de l'Angleterre' was dimly foreshadowed in a diary of his fifteenth year, when à propos of a work on English institutions (De Lolme) he sets down, 'Few works have produced so much impression upon me as this. It has convinced me of what I had long suspected, that England is the first nation in the world.'

A French college has something in common with both an English college and an English public school, without exactly resembling either. Montalembert entered the College Sainte-Barbe (now Rollin) at sixteen and left it at nineteen. Amongst the warm and lasting ties he formed there was his friendship for M. Léon Cornudet, who, along with many other interesting memorials of their boyish days, has published (in the Contemporain') a solemn league and covenant by which they pledged themselves to God and each other, to serve their country to the best of their ability, and consecrate their lives to the cause of God and Freedom. This document was suggested and drawn up by Montalembert, who proposed that they should sign it in blood; to which his calmer associate objected, that blood drawn for such a purpose was not exactly the same as blood shed for a great cause on a battle-field; and the two signatures were affixed in ordinary ink. He was seventeen at the date of the signature, and about the same time (April 23, 1827) he wrote down amongst the meditations in his commonplace book,—

'God and Liberty-these are the two principal motive-powers of my existence. To reconcile these two perfections shall be the aim of my life!'

Going over these memorials of the past in long after years, he has written opposite this entry, in red ink, the word Déjà !!! It is certainly a most remarkable anticipa

tion of what was to come; and we should be puzzled to specify another career or character of anything like the same eminence which was so clearly shadowed out at every step of its formation or its growth. We call especial attention to this phenomenon, for it is the best answer to the imputations so frequently levelled at his consistency. His probable liability to them even then dawned upon him: 'What shall I do? What will become of me?

How shall I reconcile my ardent patriotism with religion?' He would neither have found nor feared any difficulty of the kind if he had meant religion in the broad sense of the term. He was clearly speculating on the difficulty of reconciling love of country with ardent uncompromising devotion to the Catholic Church. In August, 1828, he records a fixed determination to write a great work on the politics and philosophy of Christianity, and, with a view to its completion, to waste no more time on the politics or history of his own time. Three notes of admiration in red ink are set against this entry in the original journal. He attends the debates in the Chamber of Peers, and finds them d'une médiocrité effrayante. In fact his thoughts, his plans, his subjects of interest, were those of a matured intellect, of a formed man, who felt 'cabin'd, cribb'd, confined within the walls of a lecture room; and we can well believe that it was a glowing recollection of what he had suffered from want of free expansion for body and mind at Sainte-Barbe, in the universitarian barrack as he called it, that made him long after exclaim at Eton: What a difference between this place and the houses where we were educated-true prisons walled up between two streets in Paris, everywhere surrounded by roofs and chimneys, with two rows of miserable trees in the midst of a paved or gravelled court, and a wretched walk every week or fortnight among the suburban lanes!'

Yet he quitted Sainte-Barbe with regret. His pained and softened fancy ranged over and reproduced hours upon hours of consciously improving study or delightful interchange of heart and mind; and he must now look his last of the familiar places and faces, must break away from his books and his loved companions, to be thrown upon the wide world, and become more deeply impressed than ever with 'the profound uselessness of life.' He

me fais vieux,' he sets down; giving vent to a sentiment of frequent recurrence in the mouths of young people in their teens. Far from looking forward with fervent expectations of enjoyment to his approaching introduction to society, he foresaw no gratification in mingling undistinguished in the crowd:

B

:

I can imagine Pitt or Fox coming out of the House of Commons where they had struck their adversaries dumb by their eloquence, and enjoying a dinner-party. I can imagine Grattan amusing himself, after fifty years of glory, playing hide-and-seek with children. But for an obscure and unknown individual, lost in the crowd of other men, or at the best numbered only

among the élégants who feel themselves obliged where they are half stifled under pretence of ento wander every evening into three or four houses joying themselves, I see neither pleasure nor honor in it. I see only a culpable loss of time,

and mortal weariness."

In this mood he starts to join his father, then French ambassador at Stockholm, viâ Belgium and Holland, lingering on the way to see everything worth seeing, and duly recording his impressions as they arise. Received at once into the gay circles of the Swedish capital, he was with difficulty induced to lay aside his stiffness and reserve; his manner naturally enough gave offence to the light-hearted and haply frivolous companions who were forced upon him; he was voted a prig; and it was not till some time after his arrival, when his really gentle and unassuming nature began to be recognised, that one of the leading belles, the Comtesse d'Ugglas, ventured to confide to him that she had thought him pédant et altier. This was a stunning blow to his self-love, and a valuable lesson which (he intimates) he was not likely to forget. Happen what might, in whatever society, congenial or uncongenial, he might be thrown, he would never merit the description of pédant et altier again. He actually consents to take part in a special quadrille, got up for a ball at the French embassy, which,' he says, we were to have the absurdity of dancing before the king and queen:' the ladies initiated him into its mysteries, and (as he confesses with a mixture of shame and complacency) it went off very well. All this time he is studying the institutions of the country, drawing grave political conclusions, and keeping his enthusiasm for great things alive by corresponding with his friends. Do not, I beseech you,' he writes to Rio, 'abandon yourself to that

political discouragement which Burke justly calls the most fatal of all maladies. Do not despair of the cause which you have adopted, or give up sound principles, because a generation without faith and without soul seems to dishonor them by pretended attachment.'

In another letter to Rio he says, 'I am reading Kant, which I find horribly difficult. M. Cousin recommended me to give myself up to this study; but I shall not follow his advice.' He distrusted Kant's philosophy, as tending to undermine faith, and he lent a ready ear to the Abbé Studach, of whom he says, 'I have made a precious discovery here, that of a Catholic priest, who is at the same time a philosopher, and who believes that faith may be reached by knowledge. His toleration is as great as his knowledge.' The abbé brought him acquainted with a school, boasting numerous disciples in the Bavarian and Austrian universities, which undertook to combine religion with philosophy; but metaphysics were never much to his taste, and he was wont to arrive at conviction by a shorter road than argument. Truths divine did not come to him mended by the tongue of a theologian: they came by insight, by intuition, by inspiration; and they went forth from him with the lightning flash of genius, in spontaneous and irresistible bursts. Burke and Grattan attracted him far more than Kant and Schelling. 'Grattan above all,' says Rio, as the unwearied champion of the greatest of causes, acquired rapidly the grandeur of the hero of a crusade to the eyes of his young admirer, whose enthusiasm, heightened day by day by the fame of O'Connell's patriotic orations, led him a little later to make an excursion, full of attractions for him, into the country of that great man.'

Steeped to the lips in Irish oratory, he resolves to write a history of Ireland, which was to be partly founded upon the speeches of Grattan, and to include translations of the most remarkable passages. This plan, including a journey to the Green Isle -this projet adorable-was suddenly sus pended by a domestic bereavement. The failing health of his only sister, Élise, four or five years younger than himself, to whom, since he was domesticated with her at Stockholm, he had become passionately attached, required a warmer climate, and the duty devolved on him of accompanying her and her mother across Germany to the

South. They arrived at Besançon on the evening of the 29th October, 1829. She asked him to sit up with her that night, to which the mother objected, and she was left to the care of her maid; but in the middle of the night he was summoned to what in a few hours was to be her deathbed. The Cardinal de Rohan, Archbishop of Besançon, administered the last sacraments, and offered whatever consolation could be afforded to the brother and mother; but Montalembert left Besançon in the deepest compunction and despondency, heartbroken at the thought that, unconscious of her danger, he had reluctantly abandoned his Irish expedition to accompany her.

Many months ensued before he could shake off his melancholy, brace his mind to a fresh effort, or even fix it on a definite object. He was left free to choose a career, but was utterly unable to make a choice. At one time he was disposed to take holy orders: at another he commenced the study of the law; and under a passing impulse he thought of joining the army of Algiers as simple soldat. There is a well-known saying of his, quoted by M. Fossier, ‘Je suis le premier de mon sang qui n'ai guerroyé qu'avec la plume; mais qu'elle devienne un glaive à son tour.' He had no real military ardor, and the pen in his hands was a more trenchant weapon than the sword.

During this interval of suspense he wrote an article on Sweden, which was submitted to M. Guizot, as editor of the Revue Française,' for insertion in that periodical. It was accepted upon condition that it should be cut down to half its length; and he submitted to this Procrustean process, the most painful act of self-sacrifice that can be imposed on a young writer, with an expression of despair, Encore une illusion perdue. Finding it still too long, M. Guizot ruthlessly struck out those very passages which Montalembert considered the gems of the composition, especially a spirited sketch of the soldier king of Sweden, Bernadotte, whom he describes as a true Gascon: 'He told my father that he considered himself the natural subject of Charles X., and that, should that monarch ever require his services, he would leave his throne to his son, and hasten, a simple soldier, to offer his sword to his native Sovereign.'

About the same time Montalembert formed his first connection with the Correspondant' by contributing to it an article

on Ireland which was by no means an unqualified success; for he subsequently records of this and the Swedish article that one of his friends found the first wearisome and the second commonplace. His father, however, who happened to be in Paris at this time, was delighted by the article on Ireland, as indicating a talent which he had never suspected in his son; and the literary aspirant was cordially received as a confrère by the leading men of letters-Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, and Lamartine.

Had he foreseen the dangers impending over his cherished Charter, it may be doubted whether he would have left Paris on his Irish expedition till the cloud had burst or blown over. But it was at London, where he had just arrived, that he heard the startling news of the Revolution of July, which, at the first blush, he was disposed to hail as a sublime victory.' Mortified at not having been present to aid in it, and eager to retrieve the lost opportunity, he immediately returned to Paris, where his ardor rapidly cooled down, after a calm view of the situation in reference to the personal as well as public consequences which it involved. His father was on the eve of resigning his post as ambassador: his brother, one of the royal pages, had escaped through a window at the peril of his life, and was equally without a career. The abolition of the hereditary peerage was threatened, and, with it, the road to distinction on which he had confidently reckoned. The cause of the Church was not likely to be advanced by the change of dynasty, and, as to freedom, he was not many days in arriving at the conclusion that 'it never gains by such violent movements: it lives by slow and successive conquests, perseverance, and patience.' In a word, the glorious Three Days grew less and less glorious as he dwelt upon them: his sympathies, by some law of his nature, were invariably with the losers in the political conflict: Je n'aime pas les causes victorieuses, was his frequent avowal ::

‘Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.' In this state of uncertainty as to the line he should take in French politics, his views reverted to Ireland, and in the August of that momentous year, 1830, he is crossing the mountains of Kerry, on his way to 'interview' the Liberator. He travelled on horseback with a lively and intelligent

Irish boy for his guide. The weather and the splendid scenery were at their best. His spirits rose, his bosom swelled, his expectations were on tiptoe, when he dismounted from his hired steed at Derrynane. But here, alas! the picturesque part of the pilgrimage ended, and the prosaic reality began. The motley friezecoated throng that besieged the entrance, squabbling and vociferating about their own petty grievances, was not a favorable example of a nation rising in its majesty for the vindication of its rights; and the figure of the great man himself, which had loomed so grandly at a distance through the mist, was reduced to very moderate dimensions by familiarity and proximity. Nor was his enthusiasm revived by seeing O'Connell, soon afterwards, the centre of a numerous and disorderly meeting, at which, adapting his tone to his audience, he exhibited the rude coarseness of the demagogue and indulged in language rather vernacular than high-flown. But his inexperienced critic lived to learn that popular influence is not obtained or retained by pure patriotism or heroic flights, any more than revolutions are made with rose-water; and due reflection brought him back to his original conviction that O'Connell was the heaven-born advocate of the most sacred of causes-a man to whom no impartial historian would refuse the epithet of great.'

Mrs. Oliphant thinks that it was this visit to Ireland that decided the future of Montalembert. He had come to see the Liberator and was disappointed, but he had seen the Island of the Saints, the island in which Liberty was making common cause with Faith, in which the standard of patriotism was waved from the altar by the priest; and he came back burning with eagerness to bring about a conjunction of the same kind in France. But if the train was laid in this fashion, it was fired by his being brought into simultaneous contact with two men who more or less influenced all the remainder of his life. These were the Abbé de la Mennais and the Père Lacordaire.

Félicité de la Mennais, born 19th June, 1782, at Saint-Malo, was the son of a shipowner who had received letters of nobility from Louis XVI., so that he was legally entitled to the noble prefix which, in a fit of democratic equality, he laid aside after 1834. Neglected by his father, whom he