of the excluded population in great and wealthy towns consists of the lower orders, it is hardly possible to conceive a case which calls more loudly for the immediate attention of the legislature. We rejoice therefore in the success of Lord Harrowby's measure, because it has taken away one ground of reproach from our church establishment. But we rejoice still more in the hope which it affords of future benefits. It might perhaps be more satisfactory to see these important services undertaken by the heads of the church themselves. And we cannot frame to ourselves a line of conduct more worthy of a Christian bishop than such an undertaking. But we are aware at the same time of the difficulties he would meet with, and of the feeble influence which a single prelate, or even the whole order of prelates would possess, compared with that of a member of the cabinet. It is well for us that the cabinet contains some men, sincerely attached to the establishment, not merely as an engine of state, but as a pillar of christianity. And while we admire the firmness and decision which has been displayed by Lord Harrowby in prosecuting the late measure, we are inclined also to augur well of any future efforts, from the discretion, temper, and moderation which are not less conspicuous in the whole proceeding.

ART. IV. Correspondance Littéraire,* Philosophique et Critique, addressée à un Souverain d'Allemagne pendant une partie des Années 1775-1776, et pendant les Années 1782 à 1790 inclusivement. Par le Baron de Grimm, et par Diderot. Troisième et dernière Partie. 5 tom. 8vo. Paris. 1813.

WE ventured to suggest, on a former occasion, that the five ponderous octavos which we then noticed, and of which those before us contain the sequel, might have been compressed into two, certainly without injury to the readers, and probably with advantage to the publishers of the work; and we find that this suggestion has since been adopted by our London booksellers. But the advice, however well calculated for the latitude of our northern metropolis, was, it seems, founded on an inaccurate estimate of the quantity and quality of Parisian curiosity. The sale of the first series was so rapid that, within three months, a second edition was called for. We are not therefore to wonder that the discovery of a farther lot of this profitable merchandize, was immediately followed by the offer to the public of a quantity

We are given to understand that five more volumes of this Correspondence will shortly be published, comprizing a period of time anterior to that contained in the series which we before announced, and which will therefore bear the title of Première Partie.' The whole work will therefore extend to fifteen volumes.

equal

equal to the former, nor that we are promised the future delivery of a fresh cargo.

It appears, however, that even in Paris itself some surly critics were found to question the necessity of so voluminous a publication, and to deny the importance of its contents. We have seen a little book, entitled Grimmiana,' the compiler of which professes to give in about one hundred duodecimo pages all that is worth notice in the five octavos of the former series; nay more, to throw many notable sayings and anecdotes of Mademoiselle Sophie, unnoticed by the Baron, into the bargain. This is certainly improving on our own notions of economy. But if all that was worth preserving in the last publication could be contained in such a nutshell, we are forced to admit that a still smaller would be fully capable of answering the same purpose with respect to the present. Whether the advance of that dismal era of the Revolution really made itself felt by such symptoms as are the usual forerunners of great concussions in the natural world, and the gaiety and vivacity of Frenchmen gradually gave way to the gloomy heaviness of that moral atmosphere which surrounded them; whether, without resorting to an hypothesis which may be set down among the reveries of Swedenborg and Rosicrucius, we may find a more obvious solution of the phenomenon in the advancing age of the Baron, or whether we suppose that he grew at last a little tired of his office of hired correspondent to a German prince, and committed the discharge of it to inferior hands, we are pretty certain that (at least in the article of mere amusement) the volumes now before us will not justify all the expectations which the perusal of the first set must have excited.

We have been favoured with the sight of one volume of the MS. Correspondence, which we before announced as being now in a private library in this country. It was for the entire year 1775, and agrees with that published in the present series, sufficiently to confirm us in our supposition that the one Correspondence is principally, if not entirely, the duplicate of the other. In a notice prefixed to that volume, the name of M. Meister is inserted as the author of a very large proportion of the articles it contains; and a female writer, whose name is not given, is mentioned as having contributed several others, so as to leave but a small number, certainly not near half the quantity, to Grimm himself, and (if we remember rightly) none at all to Diderot. The inference we would draw from these facts is, that during the whole continuance of the correspondence, the nominal writer was greatly assisted by a number of others; and it is probable, therefore, that his personal labours decreased with the advance of age and its attendant inactivity. In other words, the whole work may, we imagine, be fairly con

sidered

sidered in the light of a literary journal, of which the Baron was the editor, and, in that capacity only, responsible for a very large proportion of its contents. We wish that this matter had been more fully explained by the present editors, and that they had pointed out to us such of the articles as are of Grimm's own composition, and such as may have been written by other persons of any name in the literary and philosophical world at Paris. Without such a clue to guide us, it will be impossible to draw from the work, what we hoped it had furnished us, any just or accurate estimate of the character, talents, or opinions of the ostensible author.

The miscellaneous nature of this work may be sufficiently collected from the substance of our extracts from the former series. The space occupied in the present volumes by notices of insignificant books and analyses of theatrical pieces of ephemeral notoriety, appears to us to be considerably larger than before. Of the prevailing fashions of the day, the whims and caprices, the vices and follies which, from time to time, shed their influence over Parisian society and marked its character, we certainly find no unamusing record in these pages. The literary disputes and intrigues of the Academy are a never-failing source either of ridicule, or of observations which the real insignificance of those broils invests, at this distance of time, with the air of ridicule. Whether it be M. de la Harpe, who at last received the palm due to his triumphs,' while his rival Marmontel, under colour of extreme naïveté, pronounced an éloge which the laughter of the audience converted into a pungent epigram; whether it be the act of petty treason' by which M. le Comte de Tressan seated Condorcet,* in violation of his promise to Bailly, and secured to d'Alembert the victory which his superior skill in arithmetic had obtained for him over the French Pliny;' or whether we contemplate the twelve mareschals of France assembled in conclave to decide on the important question of the admissibility of a member of the Academy of Inscriptions into the ranks of a more illustrious fraternity, we are equally carried back in imagination from the present to the past, and appear to be eye-witnesses of the scenes set before us in so lively a manner. In this view, we are not altogether ill disposed to enjoy the fragments of academical discourses which are rather unmercifully heaped upon us, although they are so well

We do not remember before to have met with the Soubriquet bestowed on this revolutionary chieftain. Speaking of one of his pamphlets, published in 1786, the writer of the critique says, il est aisé d'en reconnaître l'auteur à cette precision d'idées qui caractérise sa manière d'écrire, et à cette amertume de plaisanteries qui, melée aux apparences d'une douceur et d'une bonhomie inaltérables, l'a fait appeler, dans la société même de ses meilleurs amis, le mouton enragé?

characterised

characterised by a contemporary academician, Ces discours, passé le jour où ils ont été prononcés, ressemblent aux carcasses enfumées d'un feu d'artifice tristement éteint,'—and although, as it is maliciously added, some among them'avoient, par malheur, le jour même de la fête, tout l'air du lendemain.' Our notions of the dignity of this pompous assembly are equally shocked by the popular storms and tempests which signalised so many of their later sittings, and elevated by the picture of the splendid reception of the foreign kings and princes who from time to time solicited the honour of admission to partake of their solemnities. Among others noticed on this occasion, we particularly distinguish the 'Comte du Nord,' who visited the academy in June 1782, and of whose bon-mots the work contains some better specimens than we should altogether have expected from the future Sovereign of all the Russias,' and patron of Mr. Charles Small Pybus. One proof of his discrimination, which the authors of this journal do not seem disposed to acknowledge as such, was his choice of La Harpe to fill the same place, of correspondent, which Grimm occupied in that of the Duke of Saxe Gotha and other princes. In this quality the faithful journalist thought it his duty to present himself daily at the gate of his patron's hotel. His tender assiduities at last began to be troublesome, but betrayed the goodnatured prince into no expression of greater irritation than the following, M. de la Harpe est déjà venu me voir cinq fois; je l'ai reçu trois; j'espère qu'il ne sera pas mécontent. He wanted to hear Beaumarchais' comedy of the Marriage of Figaro read to him, but said with great good humour, (which the journalists probably interpreted as a serious compliment to his genius,) Je n'ose pourtant pas accepter cette lecture sans avoir entendu celle que doit me faire M. la Harpe, il ne faut pas risquer de se brouiller avec ces grandes puissances. With all the urbanity which these and other similar anecdotes seem to indicate, and which we are somewhat surprised to meet with in one who, some years later, cut off the English pig-tails, even he was not always able to escape the complaints and censures of the irritable class of the community. Nothing, however, could ruffle the benignity of his temper. One M. Clérissaut, conceiving that some imagined services had been neglected, strutted up to him one day and said, 'M. le Comte, I have been frequently at your door and never found you.'- J'en suis bien fâché, M. Clérisseau; j'espère que vous voudrez bien m'en dédommager.''No, no, M. le Comte, you did not admit me because you would not admit me, and this was very ill done of you; but I will write to Madame votre mère.'-' Je vous prie de m'excuser; je sens, je vous assure, tout ce que j'ai perdu.'

Nothing is so easy as the transition from one fashion of the day

to

to another, and Gluck and Piccini are quite as amusing as the Counts du Nord and De Haga. The history of those feuds belongs, however, to the former series of the Correspondence, and are only alluded to in this on occasion of the death of Sacchini, founder of a sect branching out of the German heresy, and distinguished as a sort of mitigated Gluckists, who no otherwise belong to that faction than by virtue of their mutual hatred and jealousy of Piccini.'

From the mitigated Gluckists' we pass to the followers of Mesmer* and Cagliostro, the admirers of Montgolfier and of the man who walked across the Rhone in wooden slippers, or rather who professed to do so, but who, like our bottle-conjuror, gave his followers the slip. Nor is another celebrated professor to be passed over in silence, he who recommended himself to the ladies as an adept in the art de fixer les traits et les garantir des outrages des temps.' And yet this is the French nation, characterised elsewhere as celle qui n'inventa jamais rien, excepté les ballons! In the midst of Montgolfier's balloons and Kempelen's automata, we are called off to attend at the apotheosis of Madame St. Huberti, the first female singer at the Opera: another proof of the sober sense of the Parisians, who had only a few years before paid precisely the same honours to Voltaire. This is sufficient to render all the absurdities of the Diou de la danse quite rational, and we can hardly help regarding him in the light of an equal power, when we read of the consternation which seized the whole house of Vestris on the arrest of young Vestrallard, on which occasion the father is reported to have exclaimed, the tears starting into his eyes, 'Hélas! c'est la première brouillerie de notre maison, avec la famille des Bourbons!'

The theatre is almost always uppermost with the writers in this Correspondence, and we are not unfrequently relieved from the unprofitable catalogue of dead plays and farces, by anecdotes which throw a strong light on the opinions and characters of the age, and by pieces of sound and judicious general criticism. The English reader will be (or at least ought to be) highly gratified by the temperate and unprejudiced manner in which the dramatic genius of Shakspeare is treated in many long articles of good national criticism. Some of the most judicious of these observations are produced by the attempts of Marmontel and Ducis to adapt the most celebrated tragedies of the English poet to the French theatre, an attempt which is justly censured as impracti

It may be doubted whether La Fayette ever forgave Louis XVI. the compliment which that unfortunate monarch paid him on his attachment to the mysteries of animal magnetism, on his departure for America. Que pensera Washington quand il saura que vous êtes devenu le premier garçon apothicaire de Mesmer?'

cable.