have become acquainted for the first time when we began the book, but because they are the very persons we have lived with from our infancy. His descriptions of scenery are not luxuriant and glowing pictures of imaginary beauty, like those of Mrs Radcliffe, having no resemblance to actual nature, but faithful and graphic portraits of real scenes, drawn with the eye of a poet, but the fidelity of a consummate draughtsman. He has combined historical accuracy and romantic adventure with the interest of tragic events: we live with the heroes, and princes, and paladins of former times, as with our own contemporaries; and acquire from the splendid colouring of his pencil such a vivid conception of the manners and pomp of the feudal ages, that we confound them, in our recollections, with the scenes which we ourselves have witnessed. The splendour of their tournaments, the magnificence of their dress, the glancing of their arms; their haughty manners, daring courage, and knightly courtesy; the shock of their battle-steeds, the splintering of their lances, the conflagration of their castles, are brought before our eyes in such vivid colours, that we are at once transported to the age of Richard and Saladin, of Bruce and Marmion, of Charles the Bold and Philip Augustus. Disdaining to flatter the passions, or pander to the ambition of the populace, he has done more than any man alive to elevate their character, to fill their minds with the noble sentiments which dignify alike the cottage and the palace, to exhibit the triumph of virtue in the humblest stations over all that the world calls great, and, without ever indulging a sentiment which might turn them from the scenes of their real usefulness, to bring home to every mind the "might that slumbers in a peasant's arm." Above all, he has uniformly, in all his varied and extensive productions, shown himself true to the cause of virtue. Amidst all the innumerable combinations of character, event, and dialogue, which he has formed, he has ever proved faithful to the polar star of duty; and alone, perhaps, of the great romance writers of the world, has not left a line which on his deathbed he would wish recalled.

Of such men France and England may well be proud; shining, as they already do, through the clouds and the passions of a fleeting existence, they are destined soon to

illuminate the world with a purer lustre, and ascend to that elevated station in the higher heavens where the fixed stars shed a splendid and imperishable light. The writers whom party has elevated, the genius which vice has seduced, are destined to decline with the interests to which they were devoted, or the passions by which they were misled. The rise of new political struggles will consign to oblivion the vast talent which was engulfed in the contention; the accession of a more virtuous age buries in the dust the fancy which was enlisted in the cause of corruption; while these illustrious men, whose writings have struck root in the inmost recesses of the human heart, and been watered by the streams of imperishable feeling, will for ever continue to elevate and bless a grateful world.

To form a just conception of the importance of Chateaubriand's Genius of Christianity, we must recollect the period when it was published, the character of the works it was intended to combat, and the state of society in which it was destined to appear. For half a century before it appeared, the whole genius of France had been incessantly directed to undermine the principles of religion. The days of Pascal and Fenelon, of Saurin and Bourdaloue, of Bossuet and Massillon, had passed away; the splendid talent of the seventeenth century was no longer arrayed in the support of virtue; the supremacy of the church had ceased to be exerted to thunder in the ear of princes the awful truths of judgment to come. Borne away in the torrent of corruption, the church itself had yielded to the increasing vices of the age; its hierarchy had become involved in the passions they were destined to combat; and the cardinal's purple covered the shoulders of an associate in the midnight orgies of the Regent Orleans. Such was the audacity of vice, the recklessness of fashion, and the supineness of religion, that Madame Roland tells us, what astonished her in her youthful days was, that the heaven itself did not open to rain down upon the guilty metropolis, as on the cities of the Jordan, a tempest of consuming fire.

While such was the profligacy of power and the audacity of crime, philosophic talent lent its aid to overwhelm the remaining safeguards of religious belief. The middle and the lower orders could not, indeed, participate in the luxu

rious vices of their wealthy superiors, but they could well be persuaded that the faith which permitted such enormities, the religion which was stained by such crimes, was a system of hypocrisy and deceit. The passion for innovation, which more than any other feature characterised that period in France, invaded the precincts of religion as well as the bulwarks of the state: the throne and the altar, the restraints of this world and the next, as is ever the case, crumbled together. For half a century, all the genius of France had been incessantly directed to overturn the sanctity of Christianity; its corruptions were represented as its very essence, its abuses as part of its necessary effects. Ridicule, ever more powerful than reason with a frivolous age, lent its aid to overturn the defenceless fabric; and for more than one generation, not one writer of note had appeared to maintain the hopeless cause. Voltaire and Diderot, d'Alembert and Raynal, Laplace and Lagrange, had lent the weight of their illustrious names, or the powers of their versatile minds, to carry on the war. The Encyclopedie was a vast battery of infidelity incessantly directed against Christianity; while the crowd of licentious novelists, with which the age abounded-Louvet, Crebillon, Laclos, and a host of others-insinuated the poison, mixed up with the strongest allurements to the passions, and the most voluptuous seductions to the senses.

This inundation of infidelity was soon followed by sterner days; to the unrestrained indulgence of passion succeeded the unfettered march of crime. With the destruction of all the bonds which held society together, with the removal of all the restraints on vice or guilt, the fabric of civilisation and religion was speedily dissolved. To the licentious

orgies of the Regent Orleans succeeded the infernal fury of the Revolution; from the same Palais Royal from whence had sprung those fountains of courtly corruption, soon issued forth the fiery streams of democracy. Enveloped in this burning torrent, the institutions, the faith, the nobles, the throne, were destroyed; the worst instruments of the Supreme Justice, the passions and ambition of men, were suffered to work their unresisted way; and in a few years the religion of eighteen centuries was abolished, its priests slain or exiled, its Sabbath abolished, its rites proscribed,

its faith unknown. Infancy came into the world without a blessing, age left it without a hope; marriage no longer received a benediction, sickness was left without consolation; the village bell ceased to call the poor to their weekly day of sanctity and repose; the village churchyard to witness the weeping train of mourners attending their rude forefathers to their last home. The grass grew in the churches of every parish in France; the dead without a blessing were thrust into vast charnel-houses; marriage was contracted before a civil magistrate; and infancy, untaught to pronounce the name of God, longed only for the period when the passions and indulgences of life were to com

mence.

It was in these disastrous days that Chateaubriand arose, and bent the force of his lofty mind to restore the fallen but imperishable faith of his fathers. In early youth, he was at first carried away by the fashionable infidelity of his times; and in his Essais Historiques, which he published in 1792 in London, while the principles of virtue and natural religion are unceasingly maintained, he seems to have doubted whether the Christian religion was not crumbling with the institutions of society, and speculated what faith was to be established on its ruins. But misfortune, that great corrector of the vices of the world, soon changed these faulty views. In the days of exile and adversity, when by the waters of Babylon he sat down and wept, he reverted to the faith and the belief of his fathers, and inhaled in the school of adversity those noble maxims of devotion and duty which have ever since regulated his conduct in life. Undaunted, though alone, he placed himself on the ruins of the Christian faith; renewed, with Herculean strength, a contest which the talents and vices of half a century had to all appearance rendered hopeless; and, speaking to the hearts of men, now purified by suffering, and cleansed by the agonising ordeal of revolution, scattered far and wide the seeds of a rational and manly piety. Other writers have followed in the same noble career: Salvandy and Guizot have traced the beneficial effects of religion upon modern society, and drawn from the last results of revolutionary experience just and sublime conclusions as to the adaptation of Christianity to the wants of humanity; but it is the glory of Chateaubriand

to have come forth alone the foremost in the fight; to have planted himself on the breach, when it was strewed only with the dying and dead, and, strong in the consciousness of gigantic powers, stood undismayed against a nation in

arms.

To be successful in the contest, it was indispensable that the weapons of warfare should be totally changed. When the ideas of men were set adrift by revolutionary changes, when the authority of ages was set at naught, and from centuries of experience appeals were made to weeks of innovation, it was in vain to refer to the great or the wise of former ages. Perceiving at once the immense change that had taken place in the world which he addressed, Chateaubriand saw that he must alter altogether the means by which it was to be influenced. Disregarding, therefore, entirely the weight of authority, laying aside almost everything which had been advanced in support of religion by its professed disciples, he applied himself to accumulate the conclusions in its favour which arose from its internal beauty; from its beneficent effect upon society; from the changes it had wrought upon the civilisation, the happiness, and destinies of mankind; from its analogy with the sublimest tenets of natural religion; from its unceasing progress, its indefinite extension, and undecaying youth. observed that it drew its support from such hidden recesses of the human heart, that it flourished most in periods of disaster and calamity; derived strength from the fountains of suffering, and, banished in all but form from the palaces of princes, spread its roots far and wide in the cottages of the poor. From the intensity of suffering produced by the Revolution, therefore, he conceived the hope that the feelings. of religion would ultimately resume their sway; when the waters of bitterness were let loose, the consolations of devotion would again be felt to be indispensable; and the spirit of the Gospel, banished during the sunshine of corrupt prosperity, return to the repentant human heart with the tears and the storms of adversity.

He

Proceeding on these just and sublime principles, this great author availed himself of every engine which fancy, experience, or poetry could suggest, to sway the hearts of his readers. He knew well that he was addressing an impas