ing himself, without these Memoirs, Essays, and Criticisms of Mr. de la Curne de St. Palaye. At any rate, all that was necessary in these might have been compressed in ten or twelve pages, instead of an hundred. Yet, as Mr. Johnes has chosen to translate and prefix them to his work, of which they form no inconsiderable part, we have, out of a deference to the translator (though the microscope of his attention has somewhat magnified its object) taken more notice of them than in our own judgment they are entitled to*; yet, at the same time, there may be readers, who, like Mr. Johnes, may never be wearied of inquiries and discourses about so celebrated and captivating an historian.

We proceed now, at length, from Mr. de la Curne de St, Palaye, to converse with a much greater man, as well as entertaining a companion, Froissart, or, as he is called in some MSS. Sir John Froissart himself.

(To be concluded in our next.)

The Political and Confidential Correspondence of Lewis XVI. with Observations on each Letter. By Helen Maria Williams. 3 vols. 8vo. Robinsons. 1803.

THESE volumes come to us through the medium of a lady of whom it is difficult to predicate whether she be maid (spinster we mean), wife, or widow. Whether she is to be called miss, or mistress, Williams or Stone, are knotty points which we shall not attempt to unravel. It is enough for us and our readers, that she gives her literary feats of notoriety under her spinster name.

The Correspondence appears under rather a questionable shape. We do not pronounce it to be a fabrication; but there is not certainly sufficient proof of its authenticity laid before the public. There is, indeed, not a grain of proof besides what the matter and manner of the Letters themselves furnish. They might, they may have been written by the unfortunate Monarch; but if the collectors and intended editors of this Correspondence had the means of proving its authenticity, which it is to be presumed they had, why leave us in the dark with respect to a matter of such importance? The translator and commentator has, indeed, told us, that she has "consulted such persons

*These three pieces, though they might have been greatly abridged, if not altogether spared, are introduced as introductory to the History of Froissart, not without propriety. But when, prefixed to the Chroni cles, we find a whole printed sheet concerning the poetry of Froissart, we are apt to suspect that Mr. Johnes, in his enthusiasm, had forgotten his design or subject, which was, the Chronicles of Froissart, not Froissart himself and his poetry, which does not appear to us to be above mediocrity, amidst the poetry of an age (distinguished chiefly by far fetched, and long spun conceits) below mediocrity,

as were most likely to be informed on the subject-men who now fill eminent offices under the republic! (meaning France under Buonaparte!), and others, who exercised the highest functions under Lewis XVI. and that they had "no doubt whatsoever of the authenticity of the papers." This Helen Maria Williams says; but the public, we suspect, will require something more substantial on which they are to hang their belief, than the mere assertion of this lady. We, for our part, are not disposed to give unlimited credit to this ipse dixit of H. M. Williams; we wish to have seen the names and attestations of the well-informed persons hinted at, and to have had the grounds of their belief fully stated: we should then have been able to form some judgment on the subject.

The translator is rather shy in giving reasons for what she calls the delay" of the publication, by the collectors of the Correspondence; and equally shy with respect "to the means by which these MS. volumes fell into her hands." It is "unnecessary," she says, to mention the former, and still more so the latter, (Pref. p. 18). It is true, the passage says "less;" but this is only one of her many blunders in language: her meaning is perfectly clear. Had she employed inexpedient instead of unnecessary, we incline to think that she would have made a nearer approximation to truth. We have our suspicions that the Correspondence, as it was at first intended to have been published (for it does not appear that it ever was published by the compilers), was kept back by the hand of power. Why? because it was accompanied by a preface which spoke well of Lewis XVI. and did not spare revolutions and revolutionists. We are of opinion, too, that it was put into the hands of the translator for the very purpose which she has executed in her commentary, viz.-to blacken the Monarch, and whitewash the Revolution. Shall we go too far if we say, that there might be directions for properly garbling the MS.? Why does not the preface to the MS. appear in Miss Williams's publication? Was that inexpedient, or, according to her, unnecessary? If the lady is not satisfied with our conjectures, it is to be hoped that she will, in some future publication, tell us all the truth. Our conjectures are, however, founded on passages in her own preface, which we shall lay before the public, leaving it to judge how far we have probability on .our side.

She makes the French compilers say:

"We dare declare, in the name of future generations, that Lewis XVI. on the throne of the Bourbons, had no other reproach to make himself in the difficult art of governing, than that irresolution which neutralizes every thing, that want of self-confidence which renders the Monarch null, and that weakness which destroys."

To which she answers:

These are, no doubt, blemishes in the princely character; and, if nothing farther had been intended in this justification of Lewis XVI. than the display of his private virtues, respect for his misfortunes would have left his faults unnoticed. But to defend the memory of Lewis XVI.

appears

appears less the aim of his friends, than to calumniate the memory of those who have rendered themselves illustrious by rescuing their country from the ignoble servitude under which it was oppressed. This generous effort is stigmatised in the prefatory address, as a 'series of useless crimes, producing only useless disasters.' The Revolution, by changing all the elements of social order, is stated to have caused the most enlightened nation of Europe to make a retrograde step towards barbarism,' and, which is still more disastrous, to have rendered indocile to the yoke the people whom the King's birth had condemned him to govern.'

The defence of Lewis XVI. is therefore no longer the point in contest, or at least becomes only a point of secondary consideration. His friends have shifted the grounds on which they might have remained secure, and, by enlarging their means of defence, have left themselves and the object of their idolatry open to attack. It is no longer the King they mean to defend; it is the Revolution they are earnest to criminate. Let them not be displeased, therefore, if in the observations which have suggested themselves on reading these letters, they sometimes discover an attempt to defend that barbarism towards which the most enlightened country of Europe has made a retrograde step."

Here the Lady at once reveals the object of her work. It is to defend the Revolution; and, amidst all its enormities, to hold it forth as the greatest blessing to the human race that the evolution of ages has produced. The actors, therefore, in this beautiful, sublime, terrific, and stupendous" scene, especially the Brissotines, are, with her, the benefactors of mankind, and Lewis XVI. the impotent and guilty impeder of its innumerable blessings-which, unfortunately, are all to come. Rapt in extacy by her revolutionary cogitations, she breaks forth into downright poetry:

"And what period in the annals of mankind more calculated to awaken solemn, rapt attention, to seize every faculty of the soul, to call forth every feeling excited by the sublime and the terrible, than the epocha of that Revolution, which in its effects, will change the condition, and almost the destinies, of man? How long will posterity pause on the solemn page which marks its mighty records! In reading history, we pass rapidly over the common flight of years and ages, like the traveller, who diligently pursues his way through a country which presents only ordinary objects: but, when this astonishing æra unfolds itself to the intellectual view, the reader will feel a sensation similar to that of the same traveller, when, suddenly bursting on his sight, he beholds scenes of overwhelming majesty, and finds himself surrounded by images of nature, the beautiful, the sublime, the terrific, the stupendous, which fill his mind with astonishment, or swell his bosom with enthusiastic emotion."

She afterwards speaks of the "exalted principles in favour of the human race, which the Revolution was destined to establish." Unhappily we are not in possession of her Brissotine Spectacles. "Setting fire to the four quarters of the world" (the boast of Brissot), is certainly terrific and stupendous; but its beauty, as we are not of the initiated, is to us not discernible. Nor can we discover that the French Revolution,

Jution, after a lapse of years of blood, and every species of infamy and atrocity which can degrade or brutalize man, has established any thing but a military despotism, under which the greater part of Europe now groans. We may here, with a small variation, apply to the writer what she herself says on the defenders of Lewis XVI. "We are led to suspect either that we have hitherto mistaken the meaning of terms, or that conscience is a more accommodating principle with thepartisans of revolution' than with other persons, or that the still, small voice' of conscience is too feeble to be heard amidst the beautiful, the sublime, the stupendous, the terrific, &c. &c. explosions of the revolutionary volcano." What are the fruits of the lady's boasted Revolution, which we have seen and felt, and which we now see and feel? They are rapine, devastation, and massacre, the violation of every social tie, whether domestic or public, the philosophistical, and short reign of some, the atrocious mobarchy of others, the extermination of every man of worth, and who was respected in France, the exaltation of all that is vile and despicable, the murder of Louis XVI. and the reign and adoration of Buonaparte. The Revolution promised at once to deliver mankind from evils which the natural progress of society was lessening every day; while, instead of the accustomed rod of power, it has produced the scorpion lash of despotism. The lady seems to have a sort of suppressed consciousness that every thing is not yet as it should be; but dear Revolution still dwells at her heart, and she wishes us to look forward with the eye of faith to the blessed Millennium which is-to come-when? ad Græcas calendas. We fancy that the world has seen and felt enough, not to have very sanguine expectations of sailing in the revolutionary "seas of milk" in ships of amber." The storm still rages with undiminished violence, and we must wait with fortitude and resignation till the Almighty voice shall bid the waves be still. The writer is, or pretends to be, a Brissotine, and that party, she confesses, was republican. How can she, then, say, that all is as it should be in France? How can she have the effrontery in her book to give it the appellation of a "Republic?" She was formerly a writer of verses, and has, perhaps, been tempted by the Abbé Delille to "go a whoring after Baal," to worship in the high places" of the Corsican son of Ammon*. For

this

* We give him this appellation, as we imagine that he, like Alexander, would wish to have sprung from a nobler stock than he can now lay claim to; and that, like him, he would have had no scruples in sacrificing the reputation of his mother, always supposing that she had a reputation to lose, to an origin more suitable than his own to the imperial dignity. It would be an enterprise worthy of the savans who went to Egypt, to discover an ancient MS. wherein it is announced, that an Arabian girl, of the tribe of Koreish, and impregnated by the well-known potency of Mahomet, had been brought a prisoner to Corsica, and that there was undoubted

this tergiversation she has the example of her party to offer. She herself informs us, that the faction of Brissot, when they found, though they had ridden for a moment" in the whirlwind" of their own raising, that they could not "direct the storm;" finding that their darling engine, the mob, had been seized by Robespierre, Marat, &c. proposed to coalesce with royalty. There is some difference, it is true, between these coalitions; that of Brissot and his party with Lewis XVI. is somewhat more respectable than H. M. Williams's with the Despot of France; but the difference springs only from circumstances; the motive to both (self-interest) is the same.

Led away by our attention to the translator and commentator, we had almost forgot to give our readers an idea of the Letters themselves. The volumes contain the Correspondence of Lewis with his Ministers, and other persons, from 1774, till he was shut up in the Temple. They every where evince a heart replete with general benevolence, and peculiarly solicitous for the happiness of France; they display, too, an acuteness of mind, and soundness of understanding, which a great part of the world is not disposed to allow him. But they, at the same time, lay open that want of self-confidence, that yielding to other, and worse counsels, that want of prompt and vigorous decision, which rendered him unequal to the guidance of the helm during the revolutionary storm, in which he perished. He foresaw, he predicted the result of the demagogue machinations; yet from an aversion to blood, he could not be persuaded to oppose timely defensive force to offensive violence; he therefore, necessarily, lost his crown and life in the contest; and since that period the Rights of Man, the holy Right of Insurrection. and the right of the strongest, have drenched Europe in blood; and the regenerators of the human race have not left a single right of man unviolated.

The spirit, the essence of the commentary may be concentred in a few words. The commentator lays hold of every real or seeming unsteadiness of the King, in his transactions with the revolutionists, These she attributes solely to the want of principle, and spreads them out, and dwells on them with much exultation and complacency; while she is most solicitously careful to keep a profound silence as to the measures of his opponents, which were so various, and so con

undoubted proof of the lineal descent of Buonaparte from this noble source. But it is supposed that they venture not as yet to produce the MS. as the will of the great man on this subject has not hitherto been signified to them. Some conjecture that, from his frequent appeals to Fate, Buonaparte would rather make choice of a Pagan progenitor, and that, to claim kindred with Alexander, he has, at the proper time, determined to ascertain his filiation from Jupiter Ammon. While others, with no less probability, maintain, that he only waits till it be convenient completely to unpope the poor Bishop of Rome, when he will publish to the world his legal descent from that truly sublime personage Judas Iscariot.

tradictory,