Whenever, therefore, we find a page studded with illustrious names, flung out in all the careless ease of everyday acquaintanceship, and read, "I was with Her Royal Highness on that morning at breakfast when the news came," &c. &c. ; or “walking one evening in the garden at St Cloud with the Duc d'Orleans, when we came to that little group, representing," &c., we are cheated for the moment into a sense of expectancy-we say to ourselves, "Here is a prince about to open his heart to us; for once we are about to know what these men are by nature-how in the freedom of their friendships--" and then we come upon a little twaddling remark or a small jest that might have been said by His Highness's valet. Very disappointing is all this but there is worse-far worse, in the conceited self-complacency of the narrator, impressing upon us at every word what good fortune is ours to have met with him-what a happy turn of fate it was that led us into his company. I suspect that a really good diary would be a very difficult literary performance, and one totally out of the reach of any but a very gifted individual: to record briefly, sharply, and yet clearly, passing incidents; to jot down the leading events of a life, giving them the degree of importance hereafter that would illustrate the time they were written in, and the light they would throw upon the manners of an age; to seize the characteristics of an era, and preserve them by a story or an anecdote; to connect the great events of the time with the smaller ones that were simultaneous with them; to be at once thoughtful and at ease; to exert your mind to treat the events of the hour sagaciously, and yet never lose the tone of intimacy, which is the best feature of a journal-to write, in fact, as you would talk to a friend over the fire, when that friend was one to whom you would not willingly show your self as dull, incompetent, or commonplace :-all this cannot be so easy as to be the gift of each and every who writes his Life and Times. It is quite certain that no small part of the pleasure such books as these afford us is derived from the fact that they exhibit great people, the mighty rulers and conquerors of the world, pretty much in their ordinary lives as small and as everyday as ourselves. An Emperor with a lame charger or a tight boot, or a court beauty with a disaster to her back hair, is not a whit more dignified in her wrath than the stockbroker our neighbour when upset in his cab, or his lady wife when disappointed by her dressmaker. We like to know how, besides taking their share of the ills that flesh is heir to, Kings and Kaisers have their fits of sulk and moroseness, and suffer their little mortifications of wounded self-love and vanity like the rest of us, and it is very pleasant to us to hear that, even to the common forms of our everyday use, these people must come when they want to express themselves, just as they have to breathe the atmosphere with us in common, and grow warm under the same sun. Still, I opine, all this is not very instructive or very elevating reading. I suspect that we are all prone enough to deterioration without being urged to it by a stimulant. So far from any overestimate of those above us, I think the turn of our age is to hold them too cheaply, and we certainly do seize upon any disparaging element in a great character with an avidity akin to that we display in unmasking a rogue and exposing an impostor. To all these varieties of our bad taste, these memorial-mongers minister. They say, Here is a gossiploving public to whom nothing is sacred. The more we can reveal to them of the private life of our victims the better. Let us display them, then, in their hours of sickness and depression-in their times of exaggerated gaiety and folly-in their moments of excited vanity and success. Strange if some words of weakness, some dropping syllables of self-love or absurdity, will not escape them; and what a triumph to show how the conqueror of Blenheim could be shabby over a sixpence, or the hero of Trafalgar shed tears of delight over his own praises in a song! Were the allied fleets of France and Spain, was the fatal marksman in the main top, as terrible an enemy of poor Nelson as the biographer who lately wrote of his life at Dresden? Had the great Emperor such a foe in all his fiery career as that Doctor who chronicled his last years at St Helena ? And these are the people whom we encourage and foster, notice in all our leading journals, and nourish to fifth editions. O evil generation of gossips! why will you revel in your neighbour's shortcomings? Is there one of those who has made his name great amongst us of latter years who would not have been greater without his biographer? Why is it that the Great Duke stands forth pre-eminent above all? is it not that it is by his own glorious acts, told in his own honest words, that we must regard him? His despatches defy the biographer. He stands there beyond the perils of praise or slander. Think of poor Moore! All who knew him-and there are some left can recall the bright sunshine of his presence, his beaming eye, his smile, his chirping accents, whether in wit or song-and read of him in Lord Russell's biography, and with what bitterness, what positive anger you turn to traits in his nature of which you should never have been told. Why were these brought into the Record? What of carelessnesswhat of indelicacy-was there in not cancelling what mere taste, if there were no friendship, would have erased? Was there ever yet that man whom biography could not make little? Take him who deals with the greatest themeswith the highest powers of mindand has he not his ills and ailments, his days of depression, his seasons of fretfulness and impatience, and his times of distrust and disbelief? Is it of these we ask the registry? do we want the chronicle of the words he uttered in his pain, or the bitter syllables that broke from him in his passion? We are severe in our execration of the wretches who strip the dead on the field of battle, but we have no words of blame for those who do infinitely worsewho strip the fair fame of such as have shed lustre over our age, and made our own lives more enjoyable -as have, so to say, admitted us dull folk to the warmth of their glowing genius, and let us feel for the moment the ecstasy of their own gifted natures. For these spoilers we have nothing but praise. Of course there is the other school, those who hold a brief for their hero, and make him out a monster of unmitigated virtue. I declare, if I were driven to the choice, I had rather have my "life taken" by the former than by these. The great statesman we are now mourning has not escaped the indiscreet zeal of these ill-advised admirers. Not satisfied to chronicle the genial traits of a charming nature-not content to dwell upon the graceful qualities by which friends were won and adversaries were conciliated-they insist upon presenting him to us as a sayer of smart things-sharp, pungent, and epigrammatic. Now, Lord Palmerston had not a particle of Wit. There is not on record one saying of his which might not have been uttered by any member of his Cabinet; and this is to say all that need be said. He was the essence of a "man of the world;" but it was the " man of the world" elevated by great cares and great duties; accustomed to deal with the weightiest interests and the grandest themes, his good sense stimulated to its highest exercise, and his elastic temperament pressed, but not crushed, by the weight upon it. They said he "knew Parliament well;" but I am certain he knew "the Salon" better; and it was in transferring to "the House" the happy tone and manner that won success with the world, that he achieved his great triumphs in public life. Madame Lieven said of the great Duke, that he had a little more common sense than all the rest of the world; so might it be affirmed of Lord Palmerston, that he had a little more tact than all the rest of mankind. Even in France, the land of tact par excellence, he had not his equal. Let none take a low estimate of the quality, which is, after all, epigram in action, being the quickwittedness of one whose sympathies embrace so many temperaments, that he is never at a loss for the argument to address, the flattery to apply, the palliative to suggest. What a boon to a great deliberative body to have had a man thus gifted ever infusing this spirit into its deliberations! What a gain to less happily endowed natures that this fine genial temperament was able to contribute its wealthy resources to all around, and make a very atmosphere of influence about him! It was the rarest thing imaginable for him to speak in a more elevated tone, or to treat a question in a more lofty spirit, than he would have used in talking to a friend over a bottle of claret. The very stories that made his apropos," the jests that supplied his points, were precisely such as mingle through after-dinner talk. 66 The day of witty people is gone by. If there be men clever enough nowadays to say smart things, they are too clever to say them. The world we live in prefers placidity to brilliancy, and a man like Curran, in our present-day society, would be as unwelcome as a pyrotechnist with a pocketful of squibs. That Lord Palmerston's personal qualities gave the whole popularity his administration enjoyed, none will deny. His racy, manly, highhearted temperament was a great element to throw into a Cabinet of dreary Whigs and speculative Radicals. The Irishry of his nature was a spell that told upon the phlegmatic materials he was allied to, and his geniality was the link that connected the Cabinet with the country. They take very low ground for Lord Palmerston, to my thinking, who simply regard him as the restraining element in the late Ministry-the power by which headstrong and venturesome men were held in check, and their projects for change firmly and resolutely resisted. By assigning to him such a part as this, they represent him to us pretty much in the light of a military chaplain at a mess table, whose presence is just sufficient to repress the levity of the company, but whose influence has never gone far enough to introduce a more elevated tone in conversation, and whose departure will be the signal for all sort of excess. I think higher of Lord Palmerston than this. I believe that in restraining his colleagues he gave the country time for reflection, and that in that interval the country became Conservative-not Conservative in the interest of this man or of that, but in a spirit of distrust in great charges-in a settled confidence that we were well governed— in the conviction that the country exercises a greater and more direct influence over the men they sent to Parliament than was ever possessed before, and in a growing belief that to increase the pressure of such influence might not be either salutary or safe. Such, to my thinking, were some of the late lessons of Lord Palmerston's life, and we owe him, for them, a far more enduring gratitude than had he been a wit and an epigrammatist; and they who would invest him with these are but forg: ing his name to a bill which his fame will dishonour. "Make me not Rich nor Poor," was the prayer of one who knew wisdom; and how many of those whose lives we have lately been reading would willingly have made the same supplication? It is time, however, to discour age these Brummagem biographies -these jotting down diaries, which, assuming the tone of intimacy, think they can dispense with good taste. That they fail egregiously in all truthful evidence of what they treat, is in almost every man's. experience to prove. Most men who have moved at all in the world, have met occasionally persons of note and distinction, and yet, let any one of those endeavour to convey some notion of the traits of those same celebrities—their look, manner, tone, or gesture- and will he not own that his sketch does not recall, even to his own eyes, the original; that in the very tableau of which they formed part, there was so much that assisted the scene, that gave it vigour and reality, to omit it is fatal, and yet it cannot be revived? What deeper bathos is there than to hear the jest repeated by dull mediocrity that you once had heard from Sydney himself? And this is just what these reminiscence people are doing every day and every hour. Boswell was forced to descend to a Parasite that he might rise a Biographer. These people want the crown without the martyrdom; nay, more, they ask for a share of their hero's honours, and a place beside him on his throne. Good biography, like good champagne, is all that is excellent, healthful, and agreeable. It is the fictitious liquor that is baneful, the stuff that acidifies while you drink it, and actually engenders a dislike to the noble tipple it counterfeits. "Campbell," said Lord Lyndhurst, referring to the 'Lives of the Chancellors,' "has added one more to the terrors of death; for if I do not outlive him, he will write my life." Now, though I never was charged with the custody of the Queen's conscience, my own tells me that the sentiment was a most natural one. INDEX TO VOL. XCVIII. Adams-Russell correspondence, the, 539. Alpine air, the effects of, on health, 485 et seq. Alpine hotels, the, 481. Alps, accidents among the, 341. Americans in Switzerland, sketches of, Angerstein, Mr, speech of, at the hust- Anonymous authorship, O'Dowd on, 28. Arabia, sketches in, 732 et seq. Arpentigny, M. d', his work on the ART-SEASON, THE LONDON, 234. Benefit society, a new, *539. Bills, system of, and economy of capi- Blackford, Captain, 563. Bonheur, Rosa, painting by, 245. Brown, Mr Madox, the paintings of, 243. C. L. N. O., the Obstinate Titan, by, Astbury, improvements in pottery by, Canning, the alleged treatment of, by ATLANTIC CABLE, THE LAYING OF THE, Aytoun, William, the death of, 384. Bahamas, shetches in the, 270. Baines, Mr, the vote on his franchise Baker, Colonel, 563, 568. Bank, recent rise in the rate of interest Bank of issue, a single, advantages and Bayonet fights, rarity of, 394. BEAMISH'S PSYCHONOMY OF THE HAND, Bel Alp, the hotel on the, 481. 163. the Tories, 624. CAPITAL, OUR INVISIBLE, 701-its ori- CARLYLE'S FREDERICK THE GREAT, re- Carné, M. de, on universal suffrage, 616. Catlett's Station, defeat of the Federals Cedar Run, the battle of, 407, Charleston, blockade-running into, 273 Cheque-system, the, and its economy CHESTER, MR Gladstone at, 107, 132. Clearing-houses, origin, &c., of the, 711. Clotusitz, the battle of, 46. |