London, April to September, 1822. MY UNCLE M. DE BEDÉE—HIS ELDEST DAughter. BEFORE Continuing my literary investigations, I must interrupt them for a moment to take leave of my uncle de Bedée: alas! it is taking leave of the first joy of my life: frano non remorant dies—“no rein can stay the flight of days." See the old tombs in old crypts; they themselves, vanquished by time, decayed and without memory, having lost their epitaphs, they have forgotten even the names of those they enclose. I had written to my uncle on the subject of my mother's death; he sent me a long letter in answer, containing some touching words of regret; but three-fourths of his double folio sheet was devoted to my genealogy. He especially impressed upon me, when I returned to France, to seek out the documents and titles of the descent of the Bedées, entrusted to my brother. Thus neither exile nor ruin, neither the destruction of his dearest friends nor the immolation of Louis XVI., warned him of the revolution; he was still in the days of the States of Brittany and the assembly of the nobility. This fixity of idea in a man's mind is very striking, in the presence, as it were, of the decay of his bodily powers, the flight of his years, and the loss of his relations and friends. On his return from emigration, my uncle de Bedée retired to Dinan, where he died, within six leagues of Montchoix, without seeing it again. My cousin Caroline, the eldest of my three cousins, is still alive. She has remained unmarried, notwithstanding several respectable proposals, made when she was no longer young. She writes me ill-spelt letters, in which she calls me thou, addresses me as chevalier, and speaks to me of the good old time in illo tempore. She was gifted with fine black eyes and a pretty figure; she danced like Camargo, and thinks she recollects that I was desperately in love with her, though in secret. I reply to her in the same tone, putting on one side, after her example, my years, my honours, and my fame: "yes, dear Caroline, thy chevalier," &c., &c. It must be thirty or five-and-thirty years since we have met: Heaven be praised for it! for truly I know not what we should think of each other if we should happen to meet! Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, honourable family friendship, your age is past! We no longer cling to our native soil by a multitude of flowers, branches, and roots; we are born and die separately. The living are eager to cast the deceased into the abyss of eternity, and to free themselves from the burden of his corpse. Of the friends, some follow the coffin to the church, grumbling meanwhile at having their hours and habits deranged; others carry their devotion so far as to follow the funeral procession to the cemetery; the grave once filled, all memory of the dead is effaced. You will never return, days of religion and tenderness, when the son died in the same house, in the same great chair, and by the same hearth, where his father and his grandfather died before him, surrounded, as they had been, with children and grand-children in tears, receiving the last paternal benediction ! Farewell, my dear uncle! Farewell, maternal family, which is fast disappearing like the other portion of my family! Farewell, my cousin of old times, who still love me as you loved me when we listened in company to my good aunt de Boistilleul's doleful history of the hawk, or when you were present at the performance of my nurse's vow, at the Abbey of Nazareth! If you survive me, accept the legacy of gratitude and affection which I here dedicate to you. Put no faith in the false smile faintly gathering on my lip while I speak of you; my eyes, I assure you, are full of tears. Revised in February, 1845. London, April to Sept. 1822. ENGLISH LITERATURE-DECAY OF THE OLD SCHOOL-HISTORIANSPOETS-CIVILIANS-SHAKESPEAR. My studies, carried on in reference to the Génie du Christianisme, had by degrees (as I have already said) led me to a closer investigation of English literature. When I took refuge in England in 1793, I found that I must change most of the judgments I had drawn from critiques. Among the historians, Hume bore the reputation of a Tory and retrograde author; he, as well as Gibbon, was accused of having crowded the English language with Gallicisms; Smollett, who continued his history, was a greater favourite. Gibbon, a philosopher during his life, become a Christian at his death, remained, as such, impeached and convicted of being a poor man. Robertson was still spoken of, because he was dry. As regarded the poets, the "Elegant Extracts" served as an exile for some pieces of Dryden; Pope's rhymes found no pardon, although people visited his house at Twickenham, and cut pieces from the weeping willow planted by his hand and withered as his fame. Blair was looked upon as a tiresome critic à la Française ; he ranked much below Johnson. As to the old Spectator, he was laid on the shelf. The English works on politics have little interest for us; those on political economy are less circumscribed; the calculations on the wealth of nations, the employment of capital, and the balance of trade, are in some degree of European applica tion. Burke sprang from the national political individuality; in declaring himself an opponent of the French Revolution, he drew his country into that long career of hostilities which ended on the field of Waterloo. Still, some majestic figures remained; everywhere one met with Milton and Shakspeare. Did Montmorency, Biron, Sully, successively ambassadors from France at the courts of Elizabeth and James I., ever hear of a strolling player, acting in his own farces and in those of others? Did they ever pronounce the name, so barbarous in French, of Shakspeare? Did they suspect that there was in this name a glory before which their honours, their pomp, and their rank, would sink into insignificance? The actor playing the ghost in Hamlet was the great phantom, the shade of the middle ages, rising above the world like the star of night, at the moment when those middle ages had nearly disappeared among the dead-stupendous centuries, opened by Dante and closed by Shakspeare. In his "Memorials of English Affairs," Whitelock, who was a contemporary of the author of "Paradise Lost," speaks of him as a certain blind man, called Milton, Latin Secretary to the Council of State." Molière, the buffoon, played his own "Pourceaugnac;" and Shakspeare, the mountebank, made grimaces in his own "Falstaff.” to These disguised travellers, who come from time to time to sit down at our table, are treated like common guests; we remain ignorant of their nature till the time of their disappearance. As they leave this world they are transformed, and say us, as the angel said to Tobit, "I am one of the seven spirits who stand continually in the presence of the Lord." But if they are mistaken by men, in their passage, these divinities never mistake one another. Milton felt sure that "Sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy's Child," had no need of monuments in marble and brass to consecrate his venerated bones. Michael Angelo, envying the lot and genius of Dante, exclaims : "Pur fuss'io tal Per l'aspro esilio suo con sua virtute Darei del mondo più felice stato." "Would I had been such as he! I would have given all the happiness of the world for his bitter exile, together with his genius!" Tasso celebrated Camoëns, when he was still almost unknown, and contributed to his renown. There is nothing more worthy of admiration than this society of illustrious equals, mutually revealing themselves by the signs of their genius; addressing themselves to, and conversing with, one another, in a language understood by themselves alone. Was Shakspeare lame, like Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and the Prayers (prières), the daughters of Jupiter? If it was so in reality, the Box of Stratford, far from being ashamed of his infirmity, like the author of "Childe Harold," never hesitated to recal it to the mind of one of his mistresses : Shakspeare must have had many love affairs, if we may reckon one for every sonnet. The creating genius of Desdemona and Juliet must have grown old without any cessation of his attachments. Were the unknown women to whom he addressed his immortal verses proud and happy at being the objects of the poet's sonnets? It may be doubted; glory is to an old man, what diamonds are to an old woman: they adorn, but cannot embellish her. The great English dramatist wrote to his mistress in the following strain : "No longer mourn for me when I am dead; Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell! When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay; But let your love ever with my life decay." Shakspeare loved; but he believed no more in love than he did in any other thing. A woman in his eyes was like a bird, a breath of wind, a flower-something which delights and fleets away. From indifference to, or ignorance of, his fame, from his station, which kept him apart from society, or placed him beyond the reach of obtaining it, he seemed to regard life as a lightsome leisure hour-as a brief period of sweet enjoy ment. In his youth, Shakspeare met with some old monks, driven out of their convents, who had seen Henry VIII., his reforms, destruction of monasteries, his court fools, his wives, mistresses, and executioners. When the poet died, Charles I. was sixteen years old. Thus, with one hand, Shakspeare had been able to touch the hoary heads that had been threatened by the sword of the last but one of the Tudors, and with the other, the brown locks of the second of the Stuarts, which the axe of the Parliamentarians was destined to bring to the dust. Resting upon these tragic supporters, the great tragedian went down to the tomb. filled the interval of the days in which he lived with his spectres, his blind kings, the punishment of ambitious aspirers, and women in misfortune, in order, by analogous fictions, to connect the realities of the past with the realities of the future. He Shakspeare is one of five or six writers who satisfy all the wants of the mind, and furnish aliment to thought; these maternal geniuses seem to have brought forth and reared all the others. Homer impregnated antiquity; Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Horace, and Virgil, are his |