6

• Socialist disease must not be expected from legislation alone, but depends on the free and active co-operation of all classes of the people.' That co-operation, however, neither German Ultramontanes, nor Prince Bismarck, nor German Liberals have hitherto afforded. Never has a wide and deadly conspiracy against human freedom been met with more self-satisfied carelessness than by the whole body of German politicians. German Liberals, above all, may be assured that, unless they bend all their energies to the combining of free and educated intelligence against Socialist corruption, reactionary legislation is now a matter of course. The real battle with German Socialism has to be fought in the arena of German thought. It behoves German Liberals to pluck their enemies' keenest weapon out of their hands by demonstrating the irreconcilableness of liberty with Socialism and Militarism' alike.

The insidious principle underlies the whole Socialist movement, that, as a Hungarian delegate expressed it at Ghent, what workmen should aim at is 'social liberty,' not 'individual 'liberty.' Modern civilisation loves both, but social liberty, to be worth the name, must rest on individual liberty. Socalled social liberty, which has not this foundation, is another name for the autocracy of a coterie, whether inspired by a Lassalle or a Marx. It is this sort of communal liberty, extolled by M. de Laveleye as existing in Russia, which is a ready instrument for getting rid of inconvenient brethren by handing them over to the conscription. Schemes such as M. de Laveleye favours for the establishment of land-occupying communities of labourers, who should be labourer and farmer in one, and have no landlord but the State or the commune, are to be deprecated especially for this reason, that they relax the sense of self-dependence, and encourage men to look elsewhere than to their own energy for the working out of their own welfare. Continental Liberals understand this truth as yet scarcely better than continental Conservatives. Liberals are as prone to covet the control of the State, as the specific for reforming abuses, as Conservatives for perpetuating them. German Liberals, if they are successfully to combat the claim of Prince Bismarck to be given a dictatorship for the defence of life and property, must teach German public opinion to repress plots against society more effectually than police agents. The motto of Social Democracy is social liberty, not individual liberty; it must be shown that the only safe principle of modern civilisation is 'social liberty because individual liberty.'

ART. VI.-Mélanges et Lettres de Ximenes Doudan. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris: 1877.

WE hope there are still some readers of the Edinburgh

'Review' who can recall the traditions of Holland House, under its late accomplished master and mistress, and to whom the name of John Allen is not unfamiliar. He was the faithful unambitious bedesman of a great house and a great society, a never-failing referee on all questions of history, a just though severe critic of literary excellence-always ready to take a part in conversation, never to exceed it. The salon of the Duc de Broglie in Paris and at Coppet was in many respects the Holland House of France. It was a centre of liberal opinions and cultivated taste. It had the traditions of Madame de Stael, for her daughter presided over it. The tone of conversation was less negative and somewhat more doctrinaire than at Holland House; with equal knowledge, with equal wit, with equal attachment to the cause of constitutional freedom, the most polished society of Paris bore away the palm from that of London in finesse, variety, and the graces of conversation. If the present generation amongst ourselves has no successors to Hallam, Macaulay, Sydney Smith, Tom Moore, Lord Holland, Lord Melbourne, Lord Lansdowne, and their friends, how much less shall we find in Paris a society like that of which the Duc Victor de Broglie, M. Guizot, Villemain, Cousin, Rossi, Charles de Rémusat, Alexis de Tocqueville were the incomparable members! In these houses, on either side of the Channel, John Allen and Ximenes Doudan, though little known to the outer world, maintained respectively an essential place. They lived for that position, and, though capable of greater things, never aspired to go beyond it. The parallel between these two men is singularly close, though in point of character and opinions there were great differences between them.

To the gift of conversation, in which he modestly excelled, M. Doudan added the art of writing letters, and he carried it to the highest perfection. In mastery of that delicate instrument of criticism, pleasantry, and compliment-the French language he had no living superior. The secrétaire perpétuel of the great Academy was himself content to submit his writings to the more critical eye of Doudan. These letters fortunately remain, and they bring before us once more the living images of the whole family which had become bis own, and the whole society which clustered round the well-known hearth. By a

few passing touches the character, the habits, even the personal appearance, of every individual are marked with the utmost power of identity. They are all gone; but we see them all living and talking before us. We know not if these volumes will have the same power over other countries and other times, by which Madame de Sévigné and M. de SaintSimon bring back to life the society of another age; but the reception the book has met with in France shows that its qualities are of the highest order. Here and there we meet with touches as droll as Molière or as deep as Pascal-yet M. Doudan has no claim to be ranked with those, or any other, illustrious names, because his whole existence was desultory, valetudinarian, incapable of sustained effort.

It may be a question which class of readers is likely to derive the greatest gain from this work. Perhaps the genuine literary epicure, who, like Doudan himself, loves to linger over a phrase, a paragraph, or a page of exquisite and finished prose. On the other hand, the wit will be arrested by epigrams that delight him, and by maxims that enrich him. Then comes the historical reader, who will here see the events of fifty years reflected in a mind of great probity and of no common calibre-thrones and dominions falling, reputations made and ruined, battles lost and won, schemes elaborated, and utopias ill realised. And the thinkers who linger over Doudan's pages will confess that they have seldom seen expressed with greater propriety, or with greater candour, the vicissitudes of opinion, and the difficulties of action, in a century which contrives to present the extremes of thought. In France-the France of Ximenes Doudan-both Catholicism and Positivism have enlarged their borders. We have the fanaticism of affirmation, the fanaticism of negation, that of medievalism and that of novelty, and everywhere that of proselytism. The Vatican, in particular, may be seen recovering many of the spaces from which her waters had, at the beginning of this century, been forced to retire; while the development of antagonistic thought has now reached a climax of moral and social disorder. Society in France has become impossible-it is broken up into cliques. To one of these cliques, the best and the most educated, Doudan belonged; and with the eyes of a philosopher he watched all the conflicting tides, and all the shifts of wind. He was not fond of novelty for its own sake, but he deprecated mere obscurantism, and the wilful rejection of such light as science and criticism, or experiment, can throw upon truth. Brave and respectful enquiry he held to be in our days the necessary test and trial of a truth or of

a principle; but as the years went on the incessant, restless heavings of society wearied him, and he grew to despair of a nation of which he could not say that it ever

'thinks it knows

The hills where his life rose,

And the sea where it goes.'

M. Ximenes Doudan was born at Douai in 1800. His family held honourable positions in the magistracy of his district; but his own parents died when he was quite a child, and a youth of poverty and labour seemed to prepare him for the obscure career of a schoolmaster. He went, however, to Paris, became an usher in the College of Louis-le-Grand, and soon the bare, half-furnished room in the shabby street of the Sept Voies, where he lodged, became the rendezvous and resort of many men as diligent and as gifted as himself. He was popular and respected. Of individuality he had a great deal, and of egotism very little. His few relations lived in the north of France, and at a distance; but he continued through life to correspond with them. He had few wants, and never spoke about himself or his affairs; though in later life, when his health became delicate, he certainly became a little hypochondriacal. He never married, and was a marked exception to Balzac's cruel saying, that elderly, childless people acquire either vices or manias. He had neither the one nor the other. He existed in the lives and careers of others; never lost or dropped a friend; was unambitious, silent, gentle, and so critical, that, though easy to please, he was very difficult to satisfy. His tastes were all of the greatest delicacy, and his life was stainless. Like Erasmus, whom it pleased him to be told that he resembled in person, he abhorred a paradox or an exaggeration. His logical, dispassionate reasoning was the very antipodes of blague, as his singularly reserved and decent speech was unlike the licence of too much that passes for Gallic' wit.

Among his first friends were De Sacy, Duchâtel, and St. Marc-Girardin. To the last of these he was united by all the sympathies of taste and hope, and their friendship never knew a break. Both of them in youth were liberals of the school of Benjamin Constant; but both accepted the Restoration and the Charter, with the most pleasurable anticipations for the fortunes of France and of society. In the meantime, believing the era of violence to be passed, they gave themselves up to the peaceable study of literature. St. Marc-Girardin was the first to be drawn into political circles. He entered the office

of the Journal des Débats,' and at his recommendation M. Doudan, at that time employed in the College of Louis-leGrand, became tutor in the family of the Duc de Broglie. The mistress of the house was the daughter of Madame de Stael, the grandchild of that M. Necker whose reforming policy had, in the early part of his administration, so greatly disgusted the old Marshal duc de Broglie. There was a legend current in the family that the Marshal, full of the instincts. of the old régime, had gone one morning with great reluctance to pay his respects to the man whom the king honoured with his confidence. On going in he met his old friend M. d'Haussonville, grand-louvetier of France, a man who had also but little taste for the reforms that preceded the Revolution. "Ah!' said the Marshal, let us go in together, and you can present me.' 'I- Do you think I know him any more than you do?' The friends then agreed to name each other to the minister; and as they left his rooms they certainly would have betted against the chances that M. Necker's granddaughter would be Duchesse de Broglie, and his great-grandchild Comtesse d'Haussonville. Already, however, has this been the case. When M. Doudan entered the household of Duc Victor de Broglie, he found in it its gifted and gracious mistress, and the children Louise and Albert, whose future he was to follow with so much solicitude and care. The duke's was a noble, patriotic, and useful life. When he was made Minister for Foreign Affairs he nominated Doudan as his chef de cabinet, and never regretted his choice. He had found a subordinate who was diligent, but not over-zealous; who was no busy-body, and who could bring to the consideration of all the questions of the day an intelligence full of penetration and of good sense. Doudan, in return, found under this roof all the work and all the rest, all the trust, and, in a word, all the happiness that is compatible with the conditions of our human existence.

A shorter biography than this does not exist. M. Doudan lived through the siege of Paris, and but for this fact his life would have been absolutely without a vicissitude. There are no hairbreadth escapes to narrate, and no love griefs; but on the other hand we have a loyal helpful nature, an intense love of letters, duties scrupulously fulfilled, and that inward satisfaction which the sound mind derives from the development of its faculties, in the same way that the sound body enjoys the exercise of its muscles.

M. Doudan once said, after reading some German memoirs, that the imaginations of these people were as foreign to him as