with the name of Mazarin, imposed as a condition a fortune fully tantamount to three millions sterling; but nothing could be more contrasted than their characters and tempers. She died at Chelsea in 1699; but, long before, in 1675, her Memoirs, in the first person, as if by herself, though, in fact, written by St. Réal, were published by the Elzevirs, at Amsterdam, under the impress of Cologne, "chez P. Marteau," with the title of D.M.L.D.M. significative of "Madame la Duchesse de Mazarin," in 12mo. Still earlier records, however, exist of the monarch's juvenile propensities; and abundant, as may be supposed, was the fuel ministered to the flame; for, while yet a mere boy, the Duchess of Châtillon (shame to the illustrious house of Coligni!) tried to engage his heart, if premature, in the seduction of his person, as the poignant lines of Benserade, quoted by Brienne, too plainly testify. "Châtillon, gardez vos appas Pour votre beauté, Il faut bien autre chose, Qu'une minorité." This high-born, but mean-principled lady, was the widow of Gaspar de Coligny, duc de Châtillon, and greatgrandson of the celebrated victim of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He changed, however, his paternal creed, and died in 1639, leaving a son, whose early demise extinguished the great Admiral's descendants. His widow, here introduced, Angélique de Montmorency, was the daughter of the Count de Boutteville, executed in 1627, for a fatal duel, and sister to the Marshal Luxembourg, the disciple, perhaps the equal, of his kinsman Condé. She subsequently became the wife of the Duke of Mecklenburgh. Madame de Sevigné, in a letter, dated the 3rd of February, 1695, makes no laudatory mention of this duchess, whose sister, Mademoiselle de Boutteville, was courted by Condé. There exist, doubtless, families of earlier authenticated antiquity than that of Montmorency, of which these ladies and the Marshal were members, (See Gent. Mag. for September, 1840, p. 249), and whose illustration is coeval with the Capetian Bourbons ; but that illustration has ever since, that is, since the tenth century, shone in undimmed splendour. If the house of Bourbon were to perish,” said Henry IV., "none would more worthily replace it than that of Montmorency." It reckons in its annals six constables, the highest office of the kingdom, eleven marshals, and four high admirals of France; and claims kindred, in some degree, with almost every crowned head in Europe. Nor was the surname of Dieudonné, of which I have stated the origin, left unsung either in panegyric or ridicule; the former, of course, in multiplied elaborations; but the following example of the latter has all the sting and point of an epigram. It is ascribed to Bussi-Rabutin, whose "Histoire Abrégée de Louis le Grand," (1699-12mo.) is, on the other hand, a most fulsome encomium of the same monarch! I derive it from De Brienne's Mémoires, vol. ii. p. 304. "Ce Roi si grand, si fortuné, Plus sage que César, plus vaillant qu' Alexandre, On dit que Dieu nous l'a donné : * Brienne subjoins a sonnet communicated to him, he says, by Boileau, though believed not to be its author. The admirers of Louis may contest its truth, in application to him; but its literary merit entitles it, I think, to attention. "Ce peuple que jadis Dieu gouverna lui-même, Trop las de son bonheur, voulut avoir un Roi: 6 "Eh bien !' dit le Seigneur, peuple ingrat et sans foi, Tu sentiras bientôt le poids du diadème. Celui que je mettrai dans le pouvoir suprême, D'un empire absolu voudra régner sur toi ; Ses seules volontés lui serviront de loi, Et rien n'assouvira son avarice extrême. He habitually used, it seems, as a prayer-book, a volume, in which were described the numerous cornuted husbands of the court, under the semblance of saints, those unfortunate úroλoides, as they are metaphorically designated by Theophrastus, whose honour, in the feeble custody of their consorts, unguarded by virtue, fell, like a defenceless citadel, too easy a prey to the seductive powers of aggression that assailed it; while the example of the sovereign, and triumphant ascendancy of his victims, overshadowed the hideousness of vice, and He Probably, the only serious, though eventually unsuccessful, resistance encountered by Louis, in his licentious pursuits, was that of Louise de la Vallière; for the long-distant instance of Madame de Maintenon offers no fair parallel. Rulers seldom experience much difficulty in these conquests; and to none did they prove of easier achievement than to him. needed not the formal authorisation of a law, similar to that meditated, we are told, by Cæsar, which should place at his command such, and as many, wives as he might desire, "liberorum quærendorum causâ." (Suetonius, cap. 51.) This we find confirmed by DioCassius, or rather, Xiphilinus, who writes, (Lib. xliv. 7.) “Αμέλει καὶ γυναιξίν, ὁποίαις καὶ ὅσαις ἂν θελήσῃ Il cherchera partout mille nouveaux moyens Ainsi régne aujourd'hui, par les voeux de la France, This sonnet would, at least, as well suit the character, and be much more apposite to the position and fortunes of Napoleon. It is generally ascribed to the poet Hesnault, better known as the author of the famous "Sonnet de l'Avorton," written on the crime or mishap, as reported, of one of the queen's maids of honour, usually supposed, though certainly in error, to be Mademoiselle de Guerchi; for the event referred to by Hesnault occurred some years previous to this lady's misfortune. Voltaire also fell into this mistake. ("Siécle de Louis XIV. Anecdotes.") The sonnet is a tissue of antitheses, but, as a specimen of the taste which gave it celebrity, I may quote it. "Toi, qui meurs avant que de naître, Assemblage confus de l'être et du néant, Rebut du néant et de l'être. Toi, que l'amour fit par un crime, Et que l'honneur défait par un crime à son tour, Funeste ouvrage de l'amour, De l'honneur funeste victime. Donnes fin aux remords par qui tu t'es vengé, Et du fond du néant, où je t'ai replongé, N'entretiens point l'horreur dont ma faute est suivie : Deux tyrans opposés ont décidé ton sort; L'amour, malgré l'honneur, t'a fait donner la vie, L'honneur, malgré l'amour, t'a fait donner la mort." The Jesuit Bouhours, "Manière de bien Penser," &c. p. 371, has criticised this composition, which La Place (Piecès Curieuses, v. 162,) attributes, unauthorisedly, to St. Evremont. Bayle has devoted an article to Hesnault; and a reference to the sonnet has, I believe, been made by some of our British essayists. Myrto and Xantippe is now believed to be a falsehood. (See Plutarch, in Vitâ Aristidis, ed. Bryant, vol. ii. p. 326, and the Lectiones Atticæ of J. Luzac.) In the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1840, page 22, an extract is introduced from St. Simon's Memoirs, stating the origin of the name of Beauharnais, on the occasion of the death of Madame de Miramion, widow of J. J. de Beauharnais, Seigneur de Miramion, whose father had exchanged his previous unseemly patronymic for this sonorous appellative. The lady, after the loss of her husband, though very young, only eighteen, beautiful and rich, devoted her long widowhood of forty-eight years to acts of piety and beneficence. She had rejected numerous suitors, and, amongst others, Bussi-Rabutin, who, under the protection of "le Grand Condé,"-a heroic act not omitted, I hope, by his recent biographer, Lord Mahon,* contrived *The notice of this work in the recent Quarterly Review, No. 141, is ample in space and attractive in narration; but I may venture to assert, that it contains little of moment that has not been anticipated, under various heads, in the columns of this Magazine. I must also observe, that several inaccuracies have escaped the writer, when relying on his own stock of knowledge, and moving independently of his guide; for Lord Mahon's narrative, whenever directly referred to, appears historically correct. To his lordship, surely, cannot be imputed the anachronism at page 114, where it is affirmed that, at the last moments of Louis XIII. "the little Dauphin, now seven years old, exclaimed, with childish exultation, "Je suis Louis Quatorze," for, on his father's death, the 14th May 1643, the Dauphin, born the 5th September 1638, was still under five years of age. And at page 121, the Duke of Orleans, born the 25th April, 1608, (le jour de St. Marc, as stated in his Memoirs,) is called old Gaston in 1646, when only 38, his lordship's own age! See Mémoires de feu M. le Duc d'Orléans, &c. 1682, 12mo. anonymous, but written by Etienne Algay de Martignac. Cardinal de Retz (pp. 147, 153, 155, &c.) is written du Retz, and lettre de cachet, (p. 163) du cachet; an error which I am willing to assign to the press; but that excuse will hardly apply to the interposed de, in the name of Bussi-Rabutin, also at p. 163. Rabutin de Bussi might, not improperly, though not usually, be said; for the title was (Rabutin) Comte de Bussi; but Bussi de Rabutin is a complete misnomer, or inversion of the proper names. As well might a Frenchman say, Lord Wardour of Arundel, Lord Walden de Howard, Mr. Wilson of Croker, or transpose any other noble or eminent name. That of Bussi appertained to several families-BussiBrach, Bussi Le Clerc, Bussi d'Ambroise, &c. which it was necessary to discriminate, and equally so, this junior branch of the Rabutins from the elder, Rabutins-Chantal, to which belonged Madame de Sévigné. Apparently insignificant as these aberrations may be to a foreign ear, to the native they betray an imperfect acquaintance with the persons and usages of the time and country, as the not-uncommon Sir Peel, Sir Graham, &c. instead of Sir Robert, Sir James, in French writers, similarly evince an ignorance of our customs. At page 113, Mazarin is stated to have originally been a domestic-if understood as a menial, it is incorrect, but if meant in the sense and relation that so many now noble families stood, in their origin, to Wolsey, it is quite true; for Richelieu was still more powerful than our Cardinal, while the expression should have been less ambiguous. (See Gent. Mag. for September, 1840, p. 251.) Nor is the praise (p. 106,) given to Horace Walpole's French Style, as "of admirable purity, even by the admission of native critics," exact; for the merit assigned to it was by no means its purity, but the strength infused into it by a tincture of foreign idiom, and accomplished her abduction. But even this unprincipled man was awed by the dignity of her resistance into an abandonment of further violence; and, thenceforward, all her faculties of will and deed were consecrated to the moral improvement and personal relief of her fellow-beings. She was truly an admirable woman, as her Life (Paris, 1707) by her cousin, the Abbé de Choisy (Gent. Mag. April, 1842, p. 379) demonstrates. Madame de Sévigné, in her letter of 29th March, 1696, only three weeks preceding her or English energy, compared with Madame Dudeffant's feebler diction-"La langue Française, (says Voltaire,) est une guese fière, à qui il faut faire l'aumône malgré elle ;" but it now accepts what it then fastidiously rejected or ungraciously received. In the quotations from the noble author several faults occur, which, I am quite sure, could not have been committed by him, particularly at pages 158 and 160; for the transcripts from his lordship's volume generally, are perfectly correct in language; but they are too few to warrant any decided opinion on his style, though, from early education, habitual use of the tongue, and long establishment in the country, I may not be wholly unauthorised to pronounce one. I shall, however, observe, that his models appear rather chosen from the classical than the romantic school, from the purer and more chastened sources of the preceding centuries-than the more glowing and irregular system of modern composition. Still he will find, as a critic has remarked on such attempts, 46 que la langue Française est un instrument qui se laisse difficilement manier par un étranger." This article of the Review would afford various other grounds of animadversion, were I not apprehensive of prolonging the notice of it beyond due limits; for the subject certainly was little familiar to the writer. Nor are our neighbours less aberrant in their conception of our language or literature. In the "Revue des Deux Mondes," a journal on a parallel rank with the Edinburgh or Quarterly Reviews, the special contributor for our English politics is M. Duvergier de Hauranne, whom we find, in the number for November last, page 612, quoting an expression of Mr. Joseph Sturge-" the selfish aristocracy and rampant church of England," which he gives in the original, and translates, "l'aristocratie égoïste, et l'église servile d'Angleterre." The ungracious epithet, by which Mr. Sturge characterizes the Church of England, could hardly be rendered in a sense more inverse to its meaning; but, as in French, the word rampant signifies creeping, the writer sought no further, and applied the English in synonymous acceptation. In heraldry, too, the term bears quite a different construction from its French version by M. de Hauranne. Yet this gentleman, an old deputy, is considered the first political writer in France on British affairs, though I may refer to the Gent. Mag. for Novem-. ber, 1841, p. 488, for a blunder of his, in confounding Lord Stanley with his father, the Earl of Derby, in character and person, and that, too, after having passed some days with these noblemen, who so little resemble each other in feature or manner, at Lathom House. He is the son of one of the principal merchants at Rouen, also a deputy, and my neighbour, for some years, in the "rue neuve des Mathurins," at Paris, where he died about 1832. In the same periodical, M. Philaréte Charles, to whom, especially, are committed the essays on English literature, at pages 638, 639, &c. represents the poet Burns as anterior to Cowper, ("suivi par Cowper,") and Barry Cornwall as the genuine name of the fictitious Procter! According to him, again, the Ballantynes of Edinburgh, when on the point of ruin by overtrading, were rescued and sustained by Scott. This is not their story. But, far less pardonable, in another article, at page 612, the Constable of France, Du Guesclin, it is stated, "prêchait...... surtout la haine de l'Anglais,❞——“ mot,” adds the reviewer of the warrior's life, “ qu'il a fait, et qui vivra autant que la France." Heaven forbid that such language should provoke a vindictive reciprocity! But these are no unfair specimens of the talent or liberality of the leading Parisian review; and further evidence could be easily adduced of similar tenor. Yet, while I fear that our transgressions in French literature are often quite as glaring, our national antipathy is less inflamed by our public writers, and old prejudices less embittered, because unaggravated, as with our rivals, by the rankling impatience of national pride to wash away the humiliation of defeat in the blood of their victors. But their Conqueror still survives. "Maxime Teucrorum ductor, quo sospite, nunquam Eneid, lib. viii. 470. own death, in communicating that of Madame de Miramion to the Abbé de Coulanges, emphatically concludes, "Pour Madame de Miramion, cette mère de l'Eglise, ce sera une perte publique." Her only child, a daugh. ter, married into another family; but her husband's brother was the progenitor of the fortunate Beauharnais, who have mingled their blood with so many of the sovereign houses of Europe; though, as Gibbon exhorted the ducal and lordly Spencers to consider the name of their poetic kinsman, the author of the Faerie Queen, as the brightest jewel of their coronet, well may this prosperous race feel a legitimate pride in the association of Madame de Miramion's truly ennobling memory with their plebeian origin. No virtue, however, could redeem in St. Simon's estimation this inherent stain; and, indeed, numerous additional proofs of the novelty of the family's noblesse, have occurred to me since the article referred to was written. But it contains an error, which I am bound to rectify. At page 24 the historian Bignon is quoted as confounding Charles d'Hozier, the genealogist, with Bouvet de l'Hozier, (it should be de Lozier,) while he properly distinguishes them. Both, however, were engaged in the conspiracy of 1804, against Bonaparte, for which they, with seven others, though convicted, were granted their lives; when Georges, the Vendean Chief, forfeited his, and Pichegru fell a sacrifice, either to his own sensitive, or the Corsican's vengeful feelings, most probably to the former. And I equally believe Bonaparte innocent of any direct part in the death of Captain Wright, the following year, notwithstanding the contrary assertion of M. Henoult, his fellow-prisoner in the Temple. The unfortunate Wright was a native of Cork, born here in 1769. (See Gent. Mag. for October 1842, p. 365.) Having, at the close of a note in page 593 of this Magazine for December last, intimated the intention of correcting some misconceptions in respect to Madame de la Vallière and Bussi-Rabutin, I have here endeavoured to fulfil the implied engagement. But before I allow myself to conclude this portion of my present address, I cannot forbear pointing the reader's attention to the contrast exhibited by the seductive, unhappily too seductive, delineation transmitted to us of the French Court, caricatured by our own, at that period, in vulgar and vicious imitation, with the frigid, repulsive picture presented in Madame D'Arblay's narrative of royal life, under our austere George the Third, and his consort, the virtuous, unattractive, Charlotte. 66 The bitter change Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce, From beds of raging fire to starve in ice." Paradise Lost, i. 598-600. It is, indeed, much to be regretted, that so important an advantage should have been passively surrendered, with out an emulative effort to enliven the abode of morality, and, for the torpor and frivolousness of an ultra-Spanish ceremonial, to substitute the graces and charms of purified social intercourse. In the instance adverted to, on the contrary, we see evaporate the spirit and powers of youth, and its elastic vivacity, chained in fetters of vapid forms, ultimately sink in languor and inaction; its time consumed and its talents dissolved; for greatly inferior, surely, will be found the gifted lady's subsequent writings to those which preceded her splendid servitude. Even a palace, immersed in solemn dulness, soon loses the enchantment with which popular illusion complacently invests all royal associations, and becomes one of "dim night," as expressed by the dying Romeo. Yours, &c. J. R. (To be continued.) MR. URBAN, Feb. 13th. THE Bill of Mortality for the metropolis, which appears in your current number, exhibits the burials from Dec. 27 to Jan. 24 as amounting to 827; a view of the state of public health which would be highly gratifying if true, but produced, I am afraid, by the accidental substitution of one week's return for the result of four. Since the commencement of your time-honoured Magazine, a brief summary of the bills of mortality has been considered worthy of a place in your |