castles, lords, ladies, water-parties,-scenes on the race-course, -at the ball, the opera, at Ranelagh-with chit chat and endless loquacity. The scene was not long in changing to Italy; lovers crossed the Alps in the midst of fearful perils and horrors of soul enough to melt lions; the lion shed tears! the jargon of good society was adopted. Among the thousands of novels with which England has been inundated for half a century past, two have kept their ground: Caleb Williams and The Monk. I never met with Godwin during my exile in London, but saw Lewis twice. He was a young member of Parliament, very agreeable, and had all the air and manners of a Frenchman. The writings of Mrs. Radcliffe form a species of themselves. Those of Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Burney, &c., have, it is said, a chance of living. "There ought," says Montaigne, "to be laws of coercion passed against silly and useless scribblers, as there are laws against vagabonds and idlers. Such as I am, and a hundred others, would be banished from the hands of our people. Scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of a dissolute age." All those different schools of novelists-whether sedentary, or travellers by diligence or post, novelists of lakes and mountains, of ruins and phantoms, or novelists of cities and drawingrooms-have, however, now all perished in the new school of Walter Scott; just as poetry has gone headlong after the steps of Lord Byron. The illustrious Scotch writer made his début on the theatre of literature at the time of my exile in London, by a translation of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen. He continued to gain reputation by his poetry, and the bent of his inclination led him at length to the novel. He appears to me to have created a false species; he has perverted both the novel and history: the novelist has tried to write historical novels, and the historian to embellish histories. If, in reading Walter Scott, I am often obliged to pass by interminable conversations, it is, doubtless, my fault; but, in my eyes, one of his great merits is, that his writings may be put into every one's hands. It demands much greater efforts of ability, to interest while keeping within the limits of order, than to please by passing beyond its bounds; it is less easy to regulate the heart than to disturb it. Burke kept English politics in the past; Walter Scott carried the English back again to the middle ages; all that he wrote, made, and built, was Gothic: books, furniture, houses, churches, and castles. But the lairds of Magna Charta are now the Fashionables of Bond Street; a frivolous race, who reside in their ancient mansions, waiting the arrival of new generations, who are preparing to drive them out. RECENT POETRY-BEATTIE. AT the same time in which the novel became romantic, poetry underwent a similar transformation. Cowper abandoned the French school, in order to revive the national one; Burns began the same revolution in Scotland. After them came the restorers of ballad poetry. Several of these poets, from the year 1792 till 1800, belonged to what was called the lake school, because these writers lived on the shores of the Cumberland and Westmoreland lakes, and sometimes celebrated their beauties. Moore, Campbell, Rogers, Crabbe, Wordsworth, Hunt, Knowles, Lord Holland, Canning, and Croker, are still alive for the honour of English literature; but a man must be English-born duly to appreciate the merits of a peculiar species of composition, which comes home to those alone who are natives of the soil. In a living literature, no one is a competent judge, except of works written in his own language. It is vain to hope for a thorough feeling of a foreign idiom-the nurse-milk is wanting, as well as the first words which have been learnt while in our swaddling-clothes: certain tones can only belong to fatherland. Of all our men of letters, the English and the Germans have the most extraordinary notions; they admire what we despise, they despise what we admire; they neither understand Racine nor Lafontaine, nor even Molière completely. It makes one laugh to hear who are our great writers, in London, Vienna, Berlin, Petersburg, Munich, Leipsic, Göttingen, and Cologne-to hear what people read with a rage, and what do they not read at all. When the merit of an author consists especially in diction, a stranger never can form an accurate estimate of this beauty. The more his powers are individual and national, the more his mysteries escape a mind which is not, so to speak, a fellowcountryman of their talents. We admire the Greeks and Romans upon tradition; we derive this admiration from authority, and the Greeks and Romans are no longer here to scoff at the opinions of us barbarians. Which of us can form any adequate idea of the harmony of Demosthenes' and Cicero's prose-of the musical cadences of Alcæus and Horace-as these were seized upon and felt by a Greek and Latin ear? It has been mentioned that real beauties are those of all times and all countries. Yes, beauties of sentiment and thought, but not beauties of style. Style is not, like thought, a cosmopolite: it has a native land, a climate and sun of its own. Burns, Mason and Cowper died during my exile in London, before and during 1800; they closed the century: I commenced it. Darwin and Beattie died two years after my return to France. Beattie announced the new era of lyrics. "The Minstrel, or the Progress of Genius," is a description of the first influence of the Muse upon a young bard, still ignorant of the power with which he is tormented. At one time the future poet goes and sits down upon the sea-shore during a storm; at another he leaves the village sports to listen apart, in the distance, to the sound of the bagpipe. Beattie has run through the whole series of dreams and melancholy ideas, of which other poets have believed themselves to be the discoverers. Beattie proposed to himself to continue his poem, and he has, in fact, written a second canto: Edwin one evening hears a grave voice proceeding from the depths of a valley; it was that of a hermit, who, after having seen the vanities and illusions of the world, had buried himself in this retreat to study the inward life of his own soul, and celebrate the wonders of the Creator. This hermit instructs the young Minstrel, and reveals to him the secret of his genius. The idea was a happy one; the execution was far from equal to the conception. Beattie was destined to shed tears; the death of his son crushed his heart: like Ossian after the loss of Oscar, he hung up his harp on the branches of an oak. Perhaps Beattie's son was that young Minstrel of whom a father had sung, and whose steps he no longer saw on the mountains. London, from April till September, 1822. LORD BYRON. IN Lord Byron's poetry, striking imitations of the Minstrel are to be found; at the time of my exile in England, Lord Byron was at school at Harrow, a village ten miles from London. He was a boy, I too was young, and as much unknown as he; he had been brought up amongst the heaths of Scotland, on the sea-coast, as I had been on the landes of Brittany, bordering the ocean; he at first delighted in the Bible and Ossian, as I loved them; in Newstead Abbey he sang the remembrances of his youth, as I recorded mine in the chateau of Combourg. In my excursions about the neighbourhood of London, at the time when I was so unhappy, I have twenty times passed through the village of Harrow, without having any idea of the genius which it contained. I have sat in the cemetery, at the foot of the elm under which, in 1807, Lord Byron wrote the following lines, at the very time of my return from Palestine : How do thy branches, moaning to the blast, And seem to whisper, as they gently swell, "Take, while thou canst, a lingering last farewell." Oft have I thought 'twould soothe my dying hour- Here might I sleep, where all my hopes arose, And I too say, hail! venerable elm, at the foot of which Byron, when a boy, gave free scope to the fancies of his age, when I also was dreaming of René under thy shade, under the very same shade where the English poet came at a later period to dream of Childe Harold! Byron asked of the burying-place, which was the witness of the sports of his early life, an humble grave; a useless request, which renown will never grant. Byron, however, is no longer what he was; when living at Venice, I met with his name everywhere; in the very same city, some years afterwards, his name was blotted out from memory, and nowhere known. It was no longer repeated by the echoes of the Lido, and if you asked the Venetians about him, they knew not of whom you spoke. With respect to them, Lord Byron is dead; they no longer hear the neighing of his horse; the case is the same in London, where his memory is dying out. Such is the lot of men. If it happened to me frequently to pass through Harrow, without knowing that it was then the abode of the boy, Lord Byron, Englishmen have passed through Combourg without suspecting that a little truant, brought up in its woods, would ever leave a trace of himself. Arthur Young, in his "Farmer's Tour through France, Spain, and Italy," has thus described Combourg : the "To Combourg, the country has a savage aspect, husbandry not much further advanced, at least in skill, than among the Hurons, which appears incredible amidst inclosures; people almost as wild as their country, and their town of Combourg one of the most brutal, filthy places, that can be seen; mud houses, no windows, and a pavement so broken as to impede all passengers, but ease none. Yet here is a château, and inhabited; who is this M. de Chateaubriand, the owner, that has nerves strung for a residence amidst such filth and poverty? Below this hideous heap of wretchedness is a fine lake, surrounded by well-wooded inclosures."-(Vol. ii. p. 83.) This M. de Chateaubriand was my father, the retreat which appeared so horrible to the agriculturist in an ill-humour, was, notwithstanding, a noble and beautiful residence, although somewhat heavy and sombre. As for myself, I was then but a feeble plant of ivy, just beginning to climb those rude towers; and how could Mr. Young, whose attention was wholly engaged with our harvests, have been able to perceive me? Let me here be allowed to add to those remarks written in England in 1822, some others written in 1814 and 1840; these will finish my notice of Lord Byron, or rather this notice will be complete, when my readers see what I again say of the great poet, on my visiting Venice. There may be, perhaps, some interest in observing hereafter the concurrence of the two chiefs of the new French and |