production of Bailly; but no one was more successful than Guillotin in exposing the imposture, which, I regret to perceive, is again exercising its delusive influence. Incarcerated during the days of terror, M. Guillotin narrowly escaped the fatal stroke of his patronised engine; but he survived till 1814, when he expired at the age of 76. The deplorable instance of comparatively recent superstition, alluded to in the same paragraph by your correspondent, is, I apprehend, not without foundation. The circumstance there stated is as follows:-A note in Millot's Histoire de France, (volume ii., page 364, ed., 1820,) says, that, in 1764, the Parliament of Dôle condemned a person to be burned, who, "ayant renoncé à Dieu, et s'étant obligé par serment de ne plus servir que le diable, avait été changé en loupgarou. Voyez Mémoires de l' Académie des Inscriptions, tome 16." But not much more remote, and quite as senseless as this judicial sentence, was the perverted application, all over the Christian world, of the Mosaic ordinance in Exodus, xxii., 18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," which has been the source and declared sanction of incalculable bloodshed, while here, it is a wolf, supposed, indeed, to have been a human creature, who is sacrificed, if there be any truth in the statement.* * The loup-garou is, of course, an ideal animal, as uniting the man and beast, though believed, in superstitious apprehension formerly, to have real existence. Sorcerers were supposed to have the power of thus transforming themselves, but it was the beast who suffered death. In our old dictionaries it was translated, were-wolf, or man-wolf, (λvкávůρoñog,) but now is properly rendered-a "bugbear-or raw-head and bloody-bones," to frighten children; nor is the word understood at present otherwise in France. In Latin, the word is versipellis, as indicative of the power of transformation, The inquisition similarly sheltered its horrors under the scriptural warrant of the text, "Compelle intrare, Compel them to come in," (kai àvåyaoov éweλ0eîv,) of St. Luke, xiv., 23; but atrocious as were the deeds of that fell tribunal, its local sphere of action was far more circumscribed; for several Catholic states indignantly repelled its introduction.* The compulsory enforcement of creed was of an early date, and universal prevalence "Inde furor vulgo.... ...... quum solos credat habendos Esse deos, quos ipse colit." (Juvenal xv., 35.) We even find it countenanced by St. Augustin, (Epist. 50 and 204,) as cited, with others, by Calvin, in his "Defensio Orthodoxæ Fidei .... contra Servetum," (1554, 8vo.,) and by Beza, in the volume such as Jupiter is described to possess, in the long prologue to the Amphytrion of Plautus-(line 120, &c.) "In Amphytrionis vertit se imaginem Juppiter, Ita versipellem se facit." And this faculty, it appears, enabled the Pagan ruler of Heaven to indulge his licentious propensities by assuming a favored lover's form, in the eyes of his unconscious mistress. *In 1844, there appeared at Tübingen, a large octavo volume, by one of the University's professors, Doctor Hefell, under the title of "Cardinal Ximenes, and Condition of the Church, at the end of the fifteenth, and commencement of the sixteenth century." It enters deeply into the question of the Inquisition, and, though a Protestant, exposes the exaggerations and malevolent spirit of the Spaniard Llorente, (whose History of the Inquisition was printed in 1817, at Paris, in four octavo volumes.) Like so many other profound and impartial recent German inquirers into history, such as Hurter, Voigt, and others, Doctor Hefell, necessarily reprobating the Holy Office, as it is, per antiphrasin, termed, still reduces its acts to the standard of truth. Every religion has been by turns intolerant, while the fixed and permanent establishment of this tribunal was a systematic institute of persecution. To inspire a detestation of it, required no exaggeration; but Llorente, at the close of his work, confessed the fact. printed same year and place. "De Hæreticis a Civili Magistratu puniendis." How much more in harmony with genuine religion, good sense, and humanity, I am gratified in the opportunity of repeating, was the precept of St. Bernard, the last recognised Father of the Church-" Fides suadenda, non imponenda," (Sermo lxv. ed. Benedict. 1719,) though his ardent exhortation of the second crusade was not altogether so consistent with this maxim, which, we may easily believe, he extended not to the Infidels.* *St. Bernard's epitaph, allusive to the monastery of Clairvaux, (Gibbon, vol. xi., page 112,) of which he was the founder and abbot, may, for its iterative singularity, be associated with the lines on Ruyter, and the Dordrect (or Dort) Synod, nuga, indeed, though far from canora, transcribed at page 197 of our first volume : "Claræ sunt valles, sed claris vallibus Abbas Clarior his clarum nomen in orbe dedit: Clarus avis, clarus meritis, et clarus honore, Clarus, et ingenio, religione magis; Mors est clara, cinis clarus, clarumque sepulchrum, Clarior exultat spiritus ante Deum." This is no imperfect sample of the Latin poetry of the middle ages, which substituted the striking for the simple, and sacrificed taste to sound. The following attempt to make "the sound the echo of the sense," lately caught my eye. It is supposed to represent the clangor of a trumpet; but one expression, it will be observed, is of pure invention, imitative of a footman's knock at a hall-door. "Tympana tenta tonant: taratantara rauca fragorem The author was Frederick Taubman, a German critic of the sixteenth century, who probably had in mind the ludicrous inflation of the verse generally attributed to Nero in Persius. (Sat. i., 99.) "Torva Mimaloneis implerunt cornua bombis." Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, when, to illustrate his own precept, he represents Camilla as flying "o'er the unbending corn," could hardly have found an epithet less expressive of swiftness, or of less rapid transition, than the word unbending. Racine's narrative of the death of Hippolytus, in his Phédre, (act v., 6,) long enjoined in schools as a task of recitation, is now viewed with little critical, or even popular favor. The similar passages of Homer, Virgil, Tasso, &c., are too familiar to need special reference. The Abbé Millot, from whom, or his continuator, the circumstance adverted to by your correspondent is derived, I think it right to observe, because he is so frequently cited as an authority, just reckons in France as Goldsmith does with us, popular and pleasing in style and manner, but utterly superficial, and devoid of all original research. His history of England is, like Goldsmith's, modelled after Hume's. Though in orders, his orthodoxy was not unimpeached; and he owed his election to the French Academy, as the successor of Gresset, in 1777, to the assurance of D'Alembert to the philosophic, then the predominant, faction of the Society, "qu'il n'avait de prêtre que l'habit." (See page 459, ante,) I should receive, however, the assertion from such a source with extreme diffidence of its truth, though not of its having been made. He died 21st of March, 1785; on the nineteenth anniversary of which day, his pupil, the Duc d'Enghien, was so treacherously sacrificed to the fell passions of Bonaparte.* Millot's academic seat was, in the ensuing July, assigned to the Abbé Morellet, whom D'Alembert's recommendation much better suited, and of whose reception Grimm (tome iii., page Although we may indulgently believe that Napoleon did feel an internal regret for the crime, yet he never fairly acknowledged to it as such; and we cannot forget that not less than half a million of his devoted followers were sacrificed to his ambitious pursuits, too often, we know, with chants of triumph and jubilation, instead of the mournful feelings this immense effusion of blood should have excited-Byron (Ode to Napoleon,) truly says— "With might unquestioned-power to saveThine only gift hath been the grave, To those who worshipped thee." When thus lavish of blood, emulously shed to feed his ardent passion of conquest, we may judge how little it must have cost him to spill that of any obnoxious individual, with utter indifference as to the means of satiating his thirst for that blood-(See the last lines of page 414, ante.) 300,) gives a narrative, as does Morellet himself in his Mémoires, tome i., page 285. This writer, (see Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1842, page 33,) had charge of Lord Shelburne's eldest son, Lord Fitz-Maurice, for some time, and had paid more than one visit to Bowood. He had, besides, translated several English works; and yet, so habitual is the misconception by foreigners of our nobiliary shades of rank, that, in his Mémoires, (tome i., page 283,) although he must have daily seen Lord Henry Petty, when a child, at his father's, and have heard of him in after years as conspicuous in public life, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, &c., and while still a younger brother, yet, the Abbé, notwithstanding these impressive opportunities of special knowledge, thus, (adverting to the year 1784,) writes-"J'avais proposé à Milord Shelburn de m'envoyer son fils aîné, (with whom he had already travelled,) depuis Lord Whycombe, (sic,) alors Sir Fitz-Maurice, son père n'étant pas encore marquis de Lansdown, titre qui, comme celui de duc, donne le titre de lord au fils aîné." I need not dwell on the faults of this paragraph, which makes a Knight or Baronet of an Earl's eldest son, who could not, in Morellet's conception, be entitled a Lord, a distinction erroneously restricted to the eldest sons of Dukes and Marquesses. These Mémoires were not concluded until Sir Fitz-Maurice had become Marquess of Lansdowne; but time had not rectified the misnamed Abbé's misconception. From the constant habit of addressing the Duke of Wellington as His Grace, while in command of the Army of Occupation" at Paris, (1815-1818,) it was supposed to be a general title of nobility; and I 66 |