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FOR ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, EDINBURGH: AND
LONGMAN, Hurst, rees, ORME AND BROWN,

LONDON.

1816.

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THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

FEBRUARY, 1816.

ART. 1. Mémoires de MADAME LA MARQUISE DE LAROCHEJAQUELEIN; avec Deux Cartes du Théatre de la Guerre de La Vendée. 2 tomes. 8vo. pp. 500. Paris, 1815.

THIS HIS is a book to be placed by the side of Mrs Huchison's delightful Memoirs of her heroic husband, and his chivalrous Independents. Both are pictures, by a female hand, of tumultuary and almost private wars, carried on by conscientious individuals against the actual government of their country:and both bring to light, not only innumerable traits of the most romantic daring and devoted fidelity in particular persons, but a general character of domestic virtue and social gentleness among those who would otherwise have figured to our imaginations as adventurous desperadoes or ferocious bigots. There is less talent, perhaps, and less loftiness, either of style or of character, in the French than the English heroine. Yet she also has done and suffered enough to entitle her to that appellation; and, while her narrative acquires an additional interest and a truer tone of nature, from the occasional recurrence of female fears and anxieties, it is conversant with still more extraordinary incidents and characters, and reveals still more of what had been previously malignantly misrepresented, or entirely un

known.

Our readers will understand, from the title-page which we have transcribed, that the work relates to the unhappy and san guinary wars which were waged against the insurgents in La Vendée during the first and maddest years of the French Republic; but it is proper for us to add, that it is confined almost entirely to the transactions of two years, and that the detailed A

VOL. XXVI, No. 51.

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