Pompeian walls saw scenes Roman enough to have satisfied the taste of the Arbiter Elegantiæ. But the Pompeian dwelling was not a success. The Prince attempted baths after the Roman fashion, and they made the house too damp to live in; and gradually he got tired of his toy and of playing at being a Roman, and the villa Diomede was abandoned. Those who saw the Palais Royal when it was Prince Napoleon's might well have wondered why a man with such a house should want to be anything better than a Bonaparte prince in an Orleanist palace. To do justice to the Prince, the palace showed that its temporary owner was a man of refined taste and high culture, both in art and letters. I quote an account of the Palais Royal written while the Bonaparte dynasty still swayed the fortunes of France: "His Palais Royal is one of the most tasteful and elegant abodes belonging to a European prince. The stranger in Paris who is fortunate enough to obtain admission to it—and, indeed, admission is easy to procure must be sadly wanting in taste if he does not admire the treasures of art and vertu which are laid up there, and the easy graceful manner of their arrangement. Nothing of the showplace is breathed there; no rules, no conditions, no watchful, dogging lackeys or sentinels make the visitor uncomfortable. Once admitted, the stranger goes where he will, and admires and examines what he pleases. He finds there curiosities and relics, medals and statues, bronzes and stones, from every land in which history or romance takes any interest; he gazes on the latest artistic successes - Doré's magnificent lights and shadows, Gérôme's audacious nudities: he observes autograph collections of value inestimable; he notices that on the tables, here and there, lie the newest triumphs or sensations of literature, the poem that every one is just talking of, the play that fills the theatres, George Sand's last novel, Renan's new volume, Taine's freshest criticism; he is impressed everywhere with the conviction that he is in the house of a man of high culture and active intellect, who keeps up with the progress of the world in arts, and letters and politics." Some slight solution of the enigma of the Prince's life is perhaps to be found in the following lines, written by him in the Revue des deux Mondes a few years back: "I have always had for the Emperor, my cousin, a thorough devo. tion, of which I think I have given him sufficient proofs by the frankness of my conduct, even by the very opposition I have shown to many acts of his government a thankless rôle, which rarely confers power and influence, and which exposes its supporter to every kind of calumny. I found my only satisfaction in the sentiment of duty accomplished. My personal rôle, sometimes effaced, sometimes preponderating, has always had the same aim,-the greatness of France, to be obtained by the alliance of the Napoleons with democratic ideas." Prince Napoleon has always been persistently disbelieved; it never seems to have entered into the minds of his enemies that he could possibly speak the truth. Yet the course of his life has been generally in accordance with his own statements, and his declaration that the aim of his life has ever been the greatness of France, to be obtained by the union of Bonapartism and Democracy, has never been belied by any action of his career. Indeed, it is to this strange faith in an impossible combination that his unsuccess might very fairly be attributed. His Bonapartism has injured him with the Democrats, his Democracy with the Bonapartes. The result has been that want of power and influence over which his deeply disappointed ambition was compelled to utter one cry in the confession of faith we have quoted. From the Gentleman's Magazine. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (BARON MACAULAY) (1800-1859) S AN essayist Macaulay constitutes a class of his own. He has had many imitators, but as his prose style depends for its success on the same ear for rhythm (musical time) he shows in his ballads, he can be successfully imitated only by those who, with his almost miraculous memory for detailed facts, have also the "ear" which will enable them to balance their clauses as he does in musical antithesis. What in him is a triumph over the natural becomes when others fail to achieve it, obviously disagreeable and unnatural. Whether or not we may agree with Morley that imitation of Macaulay and Carlyle has been a calamity to English literature, we cannot fail to recognize that Macaulay himself is one of the world's great masters of style. It may be denied with reason, that it is "English" style. In any strict or evolutionary sense it is not. The English of King Alfred, which is as good in its way as that of Macaulay, illustrates the genius of a language whose spirit expresses itself with greatest force in direct and independent sentences, each inclosing a single definite idea. English, however, has become very largely Latinized since Alfred's time, and it is in a Latin style that Macaulay expresses himself. He has been called the greatest nineteenth-century disciple of the school of Cicero, and he had no one to dispute the title with him except Taine, his younger contemporary and admirer. For flexibility, for capacity to marshal the largest possible number of facts, and to carry them through the most rapid military evolutions in the least possible compass, these great commanders of language have no superiors in modern times. An incident of their method is an almost irresistible tendency to sacrifice to the necessary manoeuvering of their clauses much that is valued by less brilliant writers. Macaulay, himself, seems to have recognized this, for he generally takes pains to sum up the evidence against his own position with a formidable showing of impartiality; but when all is said, he remains in his essays the most brilliant, admirable, and convincing of all special pleaders. Of his "History," it is only necessary to say here that he did not cease to be « an essayist in becoming a historian, but used the same style and the same methods which he had developed as a critical reviewer. If we are to make the necessary distinction between a genuine essay and a critical review, we must look for Macaulay's essays as episodes of his reviews rather than in the completeness of the reviews themselves. Some of his most celebrated reviews consist of several essays, each complying with the Greek rule of completeness by having a beginning, a middle, and an end," while the review itself begins nowhere in particular and ends only with the exhaustion of the space in the magazine he had to fill. Thus, if we take the review of Southey's edition of "Pilgrim's Progress," written by Macaulay for the Edinburgh Review in 1821, we have in it one of the most admirable essays in the English language or any other; but it does not begin until the fourth paragraph of the review - the whole introduction to which consists of a comment on the attractions of a particular edition of the book. Another incident of Macaulay's style as a critical reviewer is what becomes on occasion an almost intolerable insolence, as when he showed his unquestionable superiority over the unfortunate and by no means unmeritorious Montgomery, or when, perhaps, after refreshing his own memory from the Greek grammar, he proceeded to expose Croker's unguarded pretensions to extraordinary scholarship. Such peculiarities as this, however, are peculiarities of Macaulay's time and of the profession of the critical reviewer which he followed as an amateur. His idiosyncrasies are all amiable. He is good-natured as a rule and an admirer of everything that is most admirable, a hater of cant and sham, a lover of freedom and justice. He was a great Liberal, who might have been an extreme Conservative had he been born a lord; or the greatest Radical of the century, if the English aristocracy, always quick to recognize and conciliate menacing merit, had not adopted him as a favorite. He was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, October 25th, 1800. After leaving the University of Cambridge where he was educated, he was called to the bar in 1826, and four years later began a brilliant political career by entering Parliament, where he served for many years. At various times he was a member of the Supreme Council in India, Secretary-at-War in the English Cabinet, and Paymaster General. Two years before his death, which occurred December 28th, 1859, he was raised to the peerage as « Baron Macaulay." As a poet, orator, and essayist, he illustrates the extraordinary command of language which depends fundamentally on a high development, not merely of the intellectual faculties of co-ordination, but on a corresponding development of the musical sense which makes possible a knowledge of the intrinsic harmonies of language. Macaulay ́s ballads are closer in their music and in their form to the genuine epic style of the popular ballads he imitates than the work of almost any one else who has attempted to succeed in this difficult field. His speeches have the same simplicity of diction and the same musical movement which found its freest illustration in the ballads. The "antithesis" which he has been accused of indulging at the expense of accuracy is a development of the natural laws of the mind in language, and especially of the natural laws of poetical expression. Macaulay is at times a statesman, frequently a philosopher, and, if we except times when he is at his worst as a critical reviewer, we may say, without great danger of overstatement, that he is always essentially a poet,-the Shakespeare of the English historical essay. W. V. B. THIS JOHN BUNYAN AND THE "PILGRIM'S PROGRESS>> HIS is an eminently beautiful and splendid edition of a book which well deserves all that the printer and the engraver can do for it. The life of Bunyan is, of course, not a performance which can add much to the literary reputation of such a writer as Mr. Southey; but it is written in excellent English, and, for the most part, in an excellent spirit. Mr. Southey propounds, we need not say, many opinions from which we altogether dissent; and his attempts to excuse the odious persecution to which Bunyan was subjected have sometimes moved our indignation. But we will avoid this topic. We are at present much more inclined to join in paying homage to the genius of a great man than to engage in a controversy concerning church government and toleration. We must not pass without notice the engravings with which this beautiful volume is decorated. Some of Mr. Heath's wood cuts are admirably designed and executed. Mr. Martin's illustrations do not please us quite so well. His Valley of the Shadow of Death is not that Valley of the Shadow of Death which Bunyan imagined. At all events, it is not that dark and horrible glen which has from childhood been in our mind's eye. The valley is a cavern; the quagmire is a lake; the straight path runs zigzag; and Christian appears like a speck in the darkness of the immense vault. We miss, too, those hideous forms which make so striking a part of the description of Bunyan, and which Salvator Rosa would have loved to draw. It is with unfeigned |