resentment, if resentment could listen to the charm, but then it only won for him a momentary dispensation of his fate, till he should answer the inquiry, whether he would be shot in front or rear. That moment, however, was every thing to him; for during the discussion, the Cross, named of Victory, approached, and the enraged crowd, falling on their knees, relinquished their intended victim. A formal process acquitted the accused, who succeeded this time in regaining Madrid, where he was found by Napoleon. His celebrity marked him out for an office of distinction, which it might be more dangerous to refuse than to accept. On the French retreat from Spain, however, Melendez, as one of the Afrancesados, prepared to accompany them. As he quitted his native soil, he kneeled upon the ground and kissed it, saying, ' I shall never tread thee more!' and the Bidasoa received his parting tears. He died at Montpelier in 1817.

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It has been said of the poems of the younger Moratin, for as a dramatic writer we cannot now pause to weigh his various merits, that they have a silver sound; his versification is, indeed, clear, sweet and flowing, as a crystal spring, and his diction is elegant and pure. His Elegy on the death of the learned Conde,' the historian of the dominion of the Arabs in Spain, although rather too long, a fault to which the Spanish poets are but too much addicted, is a very beautiful and tender tribute of friendship full of poetry, and poetry of a high order. Arriaza and Quintana are, if we mistake not, still living in Spain.

Like brotherless hermits, the last of their race,

To tell where a garden has been."

米

Arriaza's muse is fluent and harmonious; Quintana' sstately and profound: Arriaza, full of fancy, is deficient in deep feeling; Quintana, with great depth of feeling, writes more by the light of judgment than the inspiration of fancy. In his Ode on the Battle of Trafalgar,' Arriaza has perhaps made the best of the Spanish side of the subject, though much of the imagery is conceived in bad taste. Quintana, also, in his Ode on the Expedition to introduce Vaccine Inoculation into America,' is less poetical than patriotic; but in his eloquent odes To Beauty,' and To the Sea,' his title as a poet of great power is fully vindicated, and we are struck alike with the compass and originality of his thought, and the simple severity of his taste. The specimens which, under the title of Poesias Selectas Castellanas, Quintana published from the Spanish poets, and the able essay which he prefixed to the collection, whilst they attest his critical discri

*M. Maury, a sexagenarian, is resident at Paris, a voluntary exile.

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mination,

mination, prove the interest he has taken in that literature of which he is the living ornament and representative, and to which he still attaches himself with constancy, through sunshine and through storm, amidst the most melancholy forebodings, and mournful recollections. But, alas for the Spanish muses! Where are they to look for the repose that is to restore their influence with the echoes of their voiceless harps? Where, indeed, but to the ready answerer of doubt, to the soother of dismay, to the restorer of paths to dwell in,' to the universal promiser of splendid things,-the TO-MORROW of desiring Hope! It is even thus that M. Maury turns, like ourselves, from the dark picture which forces itself upon his thoughts.

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'What has been,' he says, with a concluding sigh, for the last twenty years, the success of the Iberian muses? Where indeed have they sojourned? Scattered like leaves by the autumnal blast, our men of letters like our statesmen are departed. An universal silence, with the exception of some few publications of trifling consequence, has left without a vestige the very existence of those rivals who promised the most noble strains. The tribune that resounded to the voice of genius is mute. Spain is agonized in every muscle of her frame, and expects relief from time alone. But TIME, at least, is infallible, and he will replace in that scale of eminence for which Nature designed it, a country in which she puts forth with profusion the germs of every accomplishment.'

ART. III.-Les Jésuites, les Congrégations, et le Parti Prétre en 1827. Mémoire A. M. le Comte de Villèle, par M. le Comte Montlosier. Paris. Décembre. 1827.

So much has been written about the causes of the revolution in France, that we may well excuse ourselves from again discussing them. They have been sought for in every thing. That great event has been attributed to court intrigues, to family dissensions, to financial difficulties, to atheistical clubs, to_quack statesmen, to encyclopedists, to freemasons,-nay, to Jesuits. Sometimes it is described as the consequence of paltry cabals, which would hardly suffice to upset the states of Brentford or Brunswick, sometimes as the consummation of a mighty conspiracy, the existence of which is as apocryphal as that of the Rosicrucians,-sometimes set down as the natural result of the embarrassments of an exchequer burthened with a debt which, under proper management, would scarcely have inconvenienced a power of the third order. The great cause of all has not, indeed, been entirely overlooked, but it is often forgotten. The Duke of Orleans

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Orleans might have schemed, Voltaire jested and Rousseau raved, the ministers might have been dotards or charlatans, and the Encyclopédie as brilliant as its antagonists were dull,—one set of fanatics might have exclaimed, Ecrasez l'infame,' and another exerted itself to bring back the especial soldiery of the Pope. All these things, and much more, might have happened, without overturning the throne of a thousand kings, but for the grinding misery of the lower orders. Other causes might be subsidiary, but this was paramount. The governed, oppressed and trampled upon, had no sympathy with the governors, and they awaited only an impulse, it scarcely mattered from what quarter, to shake off the yoke under which they groaned.

The oppressors were the privileged classes, whose claims were exacted with the utmost rigour,-the nobles and the priesthood. An aristocracy cannot long continue to exist without property, and the French nobles had, as a body, lost theirs. A clergy has no chance of supporting its authority, if it hopes to crush all appeals to reason, while its members laugh at the mystery by which the church is supported, as mere jugglery and imposture, and the atheism of the French clergy was as notorious as its profligacy. Harrison long since demonstrated in his 'Oceana,' (what, indeed, Aristotle had demonstrated before him,) that power follows property; and, by a strange instance of prophetic talent, drawn from political sagacity, by applying that maxim to the state of France, predicted, in the most high and palmy condition of its monarchy, that, from the very nature of its constitution, its days were numbered. It required no possession of exclusive foresight to predict the ruin of a church which contrived to combine within itself the elements of contempt for its nominal doctrines, and of persecution against those who dared to utter what its pastors thought.

D'Argenson, upwards of thirty years before the revolution, pointed out the vulnerable part of France. Having been minister of the interior, he knew the condition of the kingdom, which he described as a painted sepulchre,-imposing when viewed externally, but full of materials of decay and corruption, when examined on the inside. He foretold the coming storm, and the quarter from whence it was to come. Louis XV., who, Voltaire used to say, had more good sense than any man in his kingdom, and whom, without going so far, we may safely pronounce to have been a very shrewd and sagacious observer, was impressed with the same feeling. The deluge, which he foresaw was to happen after his days, and for which he therefore cared but little, swept away his imbecile successor, a man who appears to have been made on purpose as the prey of a revolution. The torrent was not to be resisted. The

hated

hated and feeble nobles-the abominated church, were carried away without power of lifting a hand to stem the flood. In some districts, where the nobility had linked themselves with the people, and where the priesthood was free from the vices and impieties of their brethren in other parts of France,-in such districts as La Vendée, where the landlords were friends, and the clergy, fathers-the cause of the old dynasty was upheld with a heroism and a devotion, which nothing but the holy feelings of religion. and gratitude will inspire. Everywhere else the downfal of church and king was hailed with rapture—and the crowd ran about rejoicing at having got rid of a burden not to be borne.

What acts of wickedness followed the overthrow of the old constitution, it is needless here to relate. The nickname which Voltaire gave his countrymen has been often verified in their history, and the singe-tigres proved, on this occasion, that their claim to the last part of the compound epithet was well earned. It would be almost, if not altogether, impossible to produce any parallel for the horrors of the two or three years succeeding the commencement of the French revolution; it appears impossible even to conjecture the motives which dictated the perpetration of some of the most outrageous actions of the reign of terror. The deeds and speeches of Marat, Robespierre, Danton, &c.; the diabolical spirit of the mob of Paris, Marseilles, and one or two other places, and the reckless cruelties of the mock courts of justice, threw such a blot of blood over all the proceedings of the revolution, that people were often inclined to participate in the exclamation of the gentleman recorded by Dr. Moore, who could not help crying out, when he heard of these villainies being committed for the sake of liberty: 'D-n liberty! I hate its very name. In this country, the eloquent writings of Burke,-the political knowledge which they displayed, the almost prophetic power which they exhibited, the clearness of argument, as well as splendour of language, with which he demonstrated the mischiefs which the anarchical doctrines of the revolutionary leaders would bring upon all political society, and the destruction of all international order, which they were meant to occasion, rendered, from the very beginning, the changes in France unpopular in this country among the friends of good government; and this unpopularity was not diminished by the atrocities to which we have referred, or by the circumstance that the new principles were most noisily advocated in England by the enemies of the constitution, by the worthless in politics, the scoffers and blasphemers in religion. War speedily broke out between the two countries, and the whole world was engaged in conflict

As likeliest was, when two such foes met armed.'

The

The progress of war changed the face of the revolution. The successful soldier, as Burke had predicted-as history had pointed out, mounted the throne. The republic was gone, and with the new order of nobility,-for a monarchy must have a nobility, -the cruelties of the roturiers risen into power, and thirsting for vengeance, or yielding to the horrible pleasure of new authority, passed away. There had, however, been no freedom as yet. To borrow an illustration from the Hindoo polity-the Brahmins had made way for the Sudras, or rather Pariahs—and they, in their turn, had surrendered their shortlived authority to the caste of soldiers. The rigid government of the old despotism was succeeded by the saturnalia of the slaves, and the slaves had shrunk into their pristine insignificance before the wielders of the bayonet or the sabre. The insolence of the soldiery at last earned its fitting chastisement in defeat and humiliation; and, for the first time, since France had lost the opportunity of being Protestantfor the first time since the apostasy of Henry IV., the fatal step to which she may primarily attribute the loss of her liberties, she had a chance of real freedom-of a government not dependent on the caprices of the mistresses, priests, and petits-maîtres, the lettres de cachet and Bastiles of the old regime, the grim Brutuses of the guillotine, or the blustering insolence of an upstart soldier, no matter how successful might be in the field, the mathematics of his tactique, or the science of his strategy.

The Bourbons, say their enemies, came back without having learned or forgotten any thing. We cannot agree in this censure. Now that the exaggeration of the moment has passed by, after the songs, and stanzas, and sighs and orations of the Jacobins, whining after their bayonet-lord, are forgotten; history must remark that the counter-revolution which put the Bourbons back again, was, perhaps, attended by fewer circumstances of revenge, than almost any other. Ney and Labedoyère were the only actual victims-a third, whom it was intended to sacrifice, Lavallette, escaped and was pardoned. We shall not enter into the cases of these men; but they make, at all events, a very short muster-roll. So far, then, as mere individual vengeance is concerned, we may safely exculpate Louis XVIII. from any charges of cruelty. Personal offences the Bourbons had forgotten-or had appeared to have forgotten. One thing, however, was fixed in their memories or in those of their advisersthe former splendour of the aristocracy and of the priesthood; and with the recollection of that, was connected the insatiate desire of restoring it.

As for the nobility, their case was soon found to be hopeless; and, accordingly, none but the craziest of the Ultras ever dreamt

of