blood; for it implies the counterpart idea, that some nonsense may also be on our side. Practically, to tolerate the notion that another man may be right in some things while we are in the wrong, is a very difficult thing; a thing very different from the parade which it is now the fashion to make of religious toleration; a thing which many very orthodox people never learn at all; a thing which only the habitual spiritual application of that golden rule, "Do unto others," &c. can enable a man to attain to. If we are to pay any regard to the opinions of impartial foreigners, oftentimes repeated, we must confess ourselves, notwithstanding our gold and our machinery, to be bigots in some things. Let us go to Germany, and study toleration. Let us remember what Guizot says; "It is necessary, if religion is to accomplish its end, that it should become accepted by liberty,--that man should submit himself voluntarily and freely to it,-that he should be free, notwithstanding his submission. This is the twofold problem that religion is required to solve." Therefore let neology quietly work its own purification. "Erasmus has laid the egg;" God will send some "Luther to hatch it" when the fulness of time shall come. And if the Germans have not laid any real egg in metaphysico-theological matters, they have at least started some new ideas, which we, with our broad practical understanding, may condescend to lay hold of and apply. Even this man, Jung Stilling half woman as he unquestionably is-may teach us much. He may teach us to unite the most zealous and jealous evangelism with a certain free latitudinarianism, that has not the least kindred with indifference. We may learn from him that religion is not theology, and piety is not church-going. We may learn to forego the letter which killeth, and seek after the spirit which maketh alive. We may learn even of ourselves-even by reading the depths of our own hearts-to know that which is right. We may arrive at the great and important conclusion, that the practical regeneration of the moral nature of man, which is the beginning and the end of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a very different thing from any local ordinance, whereby a man is tattooed and tabooed into the traditions of the elders.

ART. II.-Mémoires sur la Reine Hortense et la Famille Impériale, par Mademoiselle Cochelet, Lectrice de la Reine. (Madame Parquin) 4 tom. Paris, 1836-1838.

WHAT a crowd of half-forgotten sensations are called up by the phrase of the Imperial Family of France! Fear, admiration, wonder, expectancy, and depression, the energies of late vengeance, and active hostility, with the pulses of final triumph, of sympathy, and even sorrow for those who filled so long so splendid a place in history. Yet this downfal and desolation was as complete as their earlier felicity. The feelings that then filled our minds, and formed a material part of our every-day existence, as involving the very principle of our national, if not individual, welfare, now lie unnoted and overlaid by subsequent changes and events, or rise but as half-forgotten dreams amidst the long oblivion of the past. The very associations to which those days were attached, the circumstances that sprung out of them, the order of things to which they more immediately led, even these are but as the tale of yesterday, yielding their influences to those of the actual time. The system last formed is based upon their ruin, and its foundations are composed of their broken and jumbled components. The rising generation but knows them as the theme of history or a moral, while that which rose, lived with, and has survived them, recalls slowly and with difficulty the scenes of their domination. It is a drama at which they had once assisted, but whose pageants are closed and the dresses divested now; the audience has long retired, while the last expiring lights gleamed only on empty benches and naked boards, daubed canvass, the pulley, and the beam.

But names that could once so deeply interest can never lose all their power over the spirit. The charms of that acted romance were too closely interwoven with our own youthful thoughts, opening prospects, and panting aspirations not to retain for us who have outlived them, and who alone were conscious of their stern but gorgeous reality, the tribute which the human bosom pays ever to living truth and this it pays with a sincerity and simple sadness totally unlike all the ideal of fancy's boldest creations. These beings of recent history lived and breathed, felt, loved and hated, like ourselves. We grant the same fact theoretically in other instances, but we know it in this case of our own experience; and when the robes of pomp and tinsel with which circumstance invested them at the moment, have fallen and faded in the damps of decay; when the factitious glare of elevated station has died, and the sole light that haloes their

mouldering forms springs from the cold corruption of the grave, the deepest moral that human wisdom ever taught sinks upon the heart in that silence of desolation; a tie that, far stronger than interest, pride, hatred, hope or ambition, binds man to the tomb of fallen greatness in the instinctive brotherhood of humanity. We feel in them for ourselves and hear the echoes of their destiny in mute consciousness that it is also the doom of our own perishable nature.

To emotions such as these for the world of survivors at large, another, and not always a more creditable feeling may be added in the land of those who filled the subordinate parts of the drama; or who, from their vicinity, were most mixed up with its effects. The interest necessarily felt by those who were the instruments of that greatness, has led to a systematic attempt on the part of ingenious, but unprincipled writers, to take advantage of their state of feeling for their own sordid purposes, by misleading public recollections and falsifying history. No labour, no cost, no talent has been spared to concoct inconsistencies and dovetail disjointed facts; filling up the unavoidable fissures with surmises instead of certainties, inferences for results and bold assumptions of incongruous falsehoods, whilst art and impudence plastered the whole together with a layer of glossy varnish to conceal the defects of workmanship. The public bought and read, commented with praise or censure, viewed with love or detestation the objects of the concealed writer's affection or hate; till, detecting the fraud, a general scepticism arose, and the artifice, like all others, was found to cheat its own contrivers at the last.

The eminent publisher of the volumes before us has felt, like many of his bookselling brethren, the ill effects of this reaction on the public mind. To the scandal that has been so freely spread over various members of the once Imperial family we shall, like himself, only passingly allude. But it is necessary, in presenting these volumes to the notice of the world, to quote the species of certificative authority put forth for its publication.

"About a fortnight since a porter presented himself in our warehouse with a parcel directed to us, and on it was only written Papers on business.' No letter of advice had preceded it, nor was any delivered with it.

"The next day, a friend came to us and said: You have received a parcel; it contains the Mémoires de Mademoiselle Cochelet (Madame Parquin) they must be printed by the 25th of this month, and this is the only condition for their publication.'

"After reading the manuscript we found that its object was to make known the history of an august person, whose reverses have always been

greater than the attendant good fortune; who after twenty years' exile from home, has left, not France only, but Europe for twenty more, in order to rejoin and save a son, the only one who remained out of three nourished in the bosom of grandeur. We are proud and happy to have been chosen to contribute to the publicity of authentic facts, accompanied with irrefragable proofs, and which substitute truth for a series. of prejudices and errors, too long believed and cherished.

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Lastly we have seen that the manuscript (which by dint of great exertions we succeeded in publishing by the required time) was of a nature to attract the interest of the public to a young girl, who has just lost her mother, and whose father is confined on a serious accusation. These various motives were more than sufficient to do away with any scruples we might have had. (Signed) C. Ladvocat.

Paris, the 25th of November, 1836."

Mademoiselle Cochelet was the daughter of the advocate-general of the bailiwick of Charleville, belonging to the Prince de Condé, and a deputy of the tiers-état. She was brought up at St. Germain under Madame Campan, and there commenced her intimacy with Mademoiselle Hortense de Beauharnais. Advanced to the station of reader to her early friend at the elevation of the latter, she shared also her exile in Switzerland and died lately at Thurgovia, leaving, it appears, a large quantity of papers and correspondence with some of the most celebrated personages of the times, but of these the only portion intended for publicity are the contents of the present volumes, referring to the years 1815, 1814, and 1815.

From her situation in the household it may be easily guessed that her sphere of action and vision was extremely confined; and that the impressions of characters received by Mademoiselle Cochelet are, like those of Chinese printing, all on one side. The light, conventional tone of the writer's mind was certainly better calculated for society than biographic labour; but she was brought by circumstances into contact with persons whose names give their characteristic features to the events of those times of trouble, and the side-lights thus offered may, according to the reader's own estimation of their value, serve to assist his judgment, in some degree at least, as to the parties referred to. The work of course is one of the lightest possible reading, as the reader may gather from its commencement.

"The year 1813 commenced more sadly than those preceding it. The first day of the year was on a Friday !--what a sinister presage!After all the disasters of our armies we could not but think that further disasters were reserved for us-and everybody said What can result from a year that bears the number 13, and begins on a Friday? To what misfortunes is France, is Europe still to be subjected?

"Superstition with the majority is only a jest others attach import

ance to it. For myself, I said, nothing can happen worse than we have experienced ;--but the excess of the evil gives hopes of its termination."

Marshals, generals, and officers, she proceeds to say, returning daily, brought home the most fearful reports: but the prompt arrival of the emperor re-assured everybody; hope returned, and gaiety re-appeared.

For

A matter of scarcely less importance, to the individual concerned at least, as would appear, occupies the next pages. family dinners with the emperor, &c. the queen was in the habit of dressing in about five minutes ;-the children were always

with her.

"While her hair was being dressed, they amused themselves with running after one another between their mother's chair and the hairdresser, who, on account of the length of the hair, was obliged to keep at some distance from the chair, and thus formed a little arch under which they passed. The poor hairdresser was meanwhile in a cold sweat, and dared not complain. But when the queen, with a garJand on her head, which was sometimes put on right, and sometimes wrong, had left the room, he would break out: I am losing my reputation; it is impossible to dress the queen's hair well; she does not give me time.' And then, in the most serious tone, he would add : · What will the emperor think or say of me?--That I am an idle, awkward rascal, and do not know how to dress hair!''

-P. 21.

The queen, notwithstanding the especial favour with which she was regarded by Napoleon, and which she appears to have deserved by her devotion to him throughout, was placed with her household under espionnage by the Duke de Rovigo. She expressed utter indifference at this circumstance, ascribing it merely to his innate propensities, and declared it harmless and not worth notice.

"Yes, the queen said that, and nevertheless the Duke of Rovigo came one day to advise her to observe me more closely, as I was in correspondence with Russia, and was constantly receiving visits from foreigners; and said that if the Emperor knew it, he would force her to p. 69.

remove me.

The queen was greatly beloved by her attendants, and deservedly for the mildness of her manners, even in reproof.

"I have sometimes been a week in endeavouring to console one of her women, who felt great pride in winning her approbation, and who never ceased weeping, only because the queen had said, in her usual mild manner,—I have had a very bad night; I have not slept at all; the bed was not well made.' Any one who had seen the maid in tears, would have said that she had at least been beaten; and if I had not myself heard the reproach made with so much mildness, I should have imagined that she had received a very severe reprimand.”—p. 72.