QUARTERLY REVIEW.APRIL - JULY, 1817.
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FRANCE! Lady Morgan appears to have gone to Paris by the high road of Calais and returned by that of Dieppe. In that capital she seems to have resided about four months, and thence to have made one or two short excursions; and with this extent of ocular inspection of that immense country, she returns and boldly affixes to her travelling memoranda diluted into a quarto volume, the title of FRANCE! One merit, however, the title has - it is appropriate to the volume which it introduces, for to falsehood it adds the other qualities of the work, - vagueness, bombast, and affectation. This does not surprize us, and will not surprize our readers when they are told that Lady Morgan is not other than the ci-devant Miss Owenson, the author of those tomes of absurdity - those puzzles in three volumes, called Ida of Athens, the Missionary, the Wild Irish Girl, and that still wilder rhapsody of nonesense, O'Donnell - which served Miss Plumptre, kindred soul! in her famous tour through Ireland,* as an introduction to society, a history of the country, and a book of the post-roads. [* Quarterly Review, No. XXXII, Art. III.] Lady Morgan remembers - with more anger than profit - the advice we gave her in our first Number on the occasion of Ida of Athens; and, in the Preface to her present publication, treats us with the most lofty indignation - she informs us, that we made 'one of the most hastily composed and insignificant of her early works, a vehicle for accusing her of licentiousness, profligacy, irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty, and atheism. To cure her (she adds) of these vices, we presented a nostrum of universal efficacy; and prescribed (by the way Lady Morgan's language smells vilely of the shop since her marriage) a simple rememdy, a spelling-book and a pocket-dictionary, which, superadded to a little common sense, was to render her that epitome of female excellence, whose price Solomon has declared above riches.' - p. viii. There is an inveterate obliquity in Lady Morgan's mind, which prevents her from perceiving, or stating a fact as it really exists. In copying our recipe (to accomodate our language to her ear) she has omitted the principal ingredient. We were not so lightly impressed with the danger of her case, as to suppose that it might be alleviated by a spelling-book and a vocabulary only: there was, as she well knows, another BOOK, which we recommended her to add to the list; and it was on the humble and serious study of this, (need we add that we spoke of the BIBLE?) that we mainly relied for that amendment in her head and heart, which her deplorable state seemed to render so desirable. In the wantonness of folly she tells us, that, in 'pursuace of our advice, she set forth "like Cœlebs in search of a wife,"' - not quite, as we shall prove to Lady Morgan before we have done with her - 'and, with her ENTICK in one hand, and her MAVOR in the other, obtained the reward of her improvements, in the person of a Doctor Morgan; and, in spite of "the seven deadly sins," which the Quarterly Review laid to her charge, is become, she trusts, a respectable, and she is sure, a happy mistress of a family.' Lady Morgan does well to speak thus modestly of the former part of her position: - of the latter, she may be as positive as she pleases. Happiness is a relative term, or, as it is more correctly explained by Slender to his cousin Shallow, thereafter as it may be. We have noreason to believe that all the captives of Circe were unhappy. But to proceed - 'The slander thus burled at her happily fell hurtless; the enlightened public,' as she informs us, 'by its countenance and favour, acquitted her of all the charges; placed her in a definite rank among authors, and in no undistinuished circle of society.' As the climax of her triumph over us, she boasts that O'Donnell has been translated into three languages. What three languages she does not state; but if the English be one of them, we humbly beg to be informed where the work is to be had, that, by the help of the said translation, we may have the pleasure of opening its treasures to our readers. Lady Morgan, in the passages just quoted, seems strangely anxious to persuade the world that we accused her of personal licentiousness, profligacy, &c. but she does both us and herself injustice. We spoke then, as we shall do now, only of her works. We disclaim all personal acquaintance with Lady Morgan - we never saw her; and, except as a book manufacturer, know absolutely nothing about her - and it is not without sincere pain that we feel ourselves obliged to repeat, on the occasion of her latest and most important work, the same charges, (but with increased severity and earnestness,) which were forced from us by her earliest and most insignificant. Before we proceed to show how little Lady Morgan is mended of Miss Owenson's graver faults, and how very like FRANCE is to Ida of Athens, we must notice a more venial error which we formerly recommended for correction, and which we lament to find as bad as ever. Lady Morgan's readers will recollect that almost the only intelligible passages in her former works were those in which, confessing that her manuscript was 'illegible,' she assured us, that many of her errors were merely errors of the press; and we therefore thought it not inexpedient to suggest to this young lady, (such, ten years ago, we supposed her to be,) the advantage of taking a few lessons in 'joined-hand' in order to 'become legible.' On the subject of this friendly hint we are sorry to find her still very wrathful, though she affects to receive such criticism with all the dispassionate coolness of Sir Fretful Plagiary: but her bitter gratitude carries her too far, when she says that she has proftied by our lesson so much, as to have learned to write legibly; or, as she expresses it, 'to have received a reward' (viz. Dr. Morgan) 'for her caligraphic acquirements.' Unfortunately for her veracity, we find, on the very next page, the following flat contradiction of this assertion, and downright denial of her caligraphy. 'The publisher feels himself called upon to state that the delay which has taken place in the appearance of this work as arisen, in the first place, from the very illegible state in which the manuscript was transmitted to him, and which therefore required twice the usual time to print.' - Advertisement. This, we must observe, is the publisher's reply to an accusation made against him by the writer, having 'intirely caused a delay equally injurious to the interests of the work, and to the reputation of the author:' but this attack on her publisher is, in truth, rather intended to afford an excuse for Lady Morgan's own errors, and to give a colour to the stale apologies by which she has already more than once endeavoured to lay her own blunders to the charge of her printer. She tells us, that - 'The following pages have been composed between the months of November and March, from the heads of a Journal kept with regularity during my residence in France, in the year 1816, and having bound myself to my publisher to be ready for the press before April, I was obliged to compose à trait de plume, to send off the sheets chapter by chapter, without the power of detecting repetitions by comparison, and without the hope of correction from the perusal of proof sheets.' - p. vi. This indiscreet squabble (bellum plusquam civile) between the author and the publisher, lets the world a little too much behind (as she would call it) the typographical scene: the uninitiated will be shocked to find that the sylphid Miss Owenson, the elegant Lady Morgan, is in fact a mere bookseller's drudge, (we tremble as we write it!) and that this large and valuable quarto volume, so pleasantly denominated France, was written under contract, to be delivered, like other Irish provisions, between the months of November and March. Lady Morgan treats our former strictures as 'unfounded calumnies,' and with great acrimony appeals from our judgment to that of (what she calls) the public; namely, the 'no undistinguished circle' in which she lives, and the buz of which she fancies to be the voice of renown. As on the present occasion we are obliged to renew, with increased force, all our charges against the former works of this lady, we may be sure that she will be still more indignant; and it therefore behoves us to proceed methodically, and lay the case more fully before the public than we formerly thought it worth while to do: but to anticipate Lady Morgan's future complaints of falsehood, scurrility, and calumny, we shall take the precausion of judging her, absolutely and literally, out of her own mouth: she shall be her own critic; and all the severity which we shall use will be to quote her own words, and all that we shall think it necessary to do will be to arrange our extracts under the particular heads to which they seem to belong. We trust our readers will excuse us for paying so much attention to what they will find to be so worthless a publication; but the subject of that publication is important, and the manner in which Lady Morgan treats it deserves the severest reprehension. Our charges (to omit minor faults) fall readily under the heads of - Bad taste - Bombast and Nonsense - Blunders - Ignorance of the French Language and Manners - General Ignorance - Jacobinism - Falsehood - Licentiousness, and Impiety. - These, we admit, are no light accusations of the work; but we undertake, as we have said, to prove them from Lady Morgan's own mouth. BAD TASTE. - The work is composed in the most confused manner, and written in the worst style - if it be not an abuse of language, to call that a style, which is merely a jargon. There is neither order in the subjects nor connection between the parts. It is a huge aggregation of disjointed sentences so jumbled together, that we seriously assert that no injury will be done to the volume by beginning with the last chapter and reading backwards to the first; and yet it has all the affectation of order: it is divided into parts, and the parts into books; and each book has a running title, as 'Society,' 'Peasantry,' &c. But Lady Morgan has a very convenient way of getting rid of the trammels of order to which the division into parts and books might have subjected her excursive genius - she every here and there breaks off her subject and, interposing a long line of asterisks, thus - * * * * * * * * * * * * * proceeds to any other topic which occurs to her. In her first book there are no less than sixteen of these gaps, and if there had been a gap wherever there was a breach in the order of narration, or a change of subject, there would have been several hundreds. As to the running titles of her book, these are convertible amongst themselves, and the chapters which are called 'Peasantry' might be quite as truly denominated 'Paris,' and vice versa. Of these statements, we cannot, from the nature of the case, lay before our readers such distinct proofs as we shall upon other points. To give them a full idea of the disorder in which Lady Morgan has flung out her observations, our Article must have been as long as her volume. Of her bad taste in other respects instances will be found hereafter, but one is too remarkable not to be here especially quoted. Lady Morgan despises Racine: to be sure, he was guilty, in her eyes, of the atrocious offence of piety; and for this she rather more than sufficiently sneers at his inbecillity. 'Dieu m'a fait la grâce, (says the feeble Racine to Madame de Maintenon,) en quelque compagnie que je me suis trouvé, de ne jamais rougir de l'évangile ni du roi.' 'Racine, who associates the king and the Gospel so intimately in his familiar letters, talks in his work on the Port-Royal of the great designs of God on the mère Agnès, (one of the founders of that religious community,) such was the intellectual calibre of the author of Phédra.' (Phèdre). - Part i. 48. But her rage against his memory is carried so far that, in defiance of the unanimous voice of France, and the assent of all Europe, and in contempt of a century of fame, she (Lady Morgan, who does not understand his language, and cannot write correctly the name of his best known tragedy) has the wonderful audacity to pronounce him no poet! - ii. 95, 98. BOMBAST and NONSENSE. - This also would be a very long chapter if we were to do full justice to our subject, but we shall only select a specimen or two. - A clock gives rise to the following observations. 'To count time by its artificial divisions, is the resource of inanity. The unoccupied ignorance of the very lowly, and the inevitable ennui of the very elevated, alike find their account in consultations with a time-piece. It is in the hour-glass of energy and of occupation, that the sand is always found lying neglected at the bottom.' - i/ p. 37. - Some profound remarks on national character are introduced in this simple, elegant, and intelligle manner. 'National idiosyncrasy must always receive its first colouring from the influence of soil and of climate; and the moral characteristics of every people be resolvable into the peculiar constitution of their physical structure. Religion and government, indeed, give a powerful direction to the principles and modes of civilized society, and debase of their own institutes. But the complexional features of the race remains fixed and unchanged, the original impression of nature is never effaced.' - i. p. 85. - The following pathetic exclamation breaks forth at the sight of some tulips growing at a cottage door in France. 'Oh! (these groans are very frequent with Lady Morgan,) 'Oh! when shall I behold near the peasant's hovel in my own country, (Ireland,) other flowers than the bearded thistle, which there waves its lonely head and scatters its down upon every passing blast, or the scentless shamrock, the unprofitable blossom of the soil which creeps to be trodden upon, and is gathered only to be plunged in the inebriating draught, commemorating annually the fatal illusions of the people, and drowning in the same tide of madness their emblems and their wrongs.' - i. 29. We do not pretend to guess what this passage can mean; but we will readily pay Lady Morgan the compliment of saying that the flowers of her eloquence are just such flowers as the thistle and shamrock. - Having a note to write in French she consults her footman, and, in return for his assistance, she compliments him with the title of an illiterate literatus, (p. 207) and expression which we the more readily adopt into our language, as it seems to afford a generic name for the very class of writers to which Lady Morgan belongs; we really know not how we could better express her merits than by calling her an illiterate literata. - Lady Morgan thinks the period at which she visited Paris was very favourable for observation - 'The agitated surface, still heaving with recent commotion, was strewn with the relics of remote time thrown up from the bosom of oblivion.' - p. 109. - Diderot had said, foolishly enough, that to paint a woman, you should dip your pen in the hues of the rainbow, and dry the writing with the dust of butterflies' wings - Lady Morgan contrives to turn this silly hyperbole into still ranker nonsense. 'To paint the character of a woman,' says Diderot, 'you must use the feather of a butterfly's wing.' - i. 163. BLUNDERS. - This also is a plentiful crop - we shall only amuse our readers with some samples of the article, which savour very strongly, not of French but Hibernian origin. - During a royal visit to the theatre, at which Lady Morgan was present, she was afflicted with such a squint in her mind's eye as to see 'That the King and Royal Family occupied a centre box on one side.' - ii. p. 134. -In her admiration of General La Fayette, she intends to dignify him with the title of patriarch, but by an unhappy ignorance of her own language contrives to make the general's children and grand-children the patriarchs. 'We found General La Fayette surrounded by his patriarchical family, his son and daughter-in-law, his two daughters and their husbands, and eleven grand-children.' - ii. p. 183. - But this is not quite so extraordinary as the fact which she has discovered, that, in the families of the emigrant nobility, the children are all the same age, or nearly so with their own parents; 'the old emigrant nobility, and their scarcely younger offspring.' (i. 113) After this sensible exordium, she goes on to pour out a torrent of falsehood and jacobinism upon that 'prejudiced,' 'ignorant,' 'selfish,' 'bloody' and 'revengeful faction,' the royalists of France. - Although it does not belong to this part of the subject, we cannot refrain from asking Lady Morgan to instance one drop of blood shed by the emigrants since the restoration. - The rights attached in most other countries to primogeniture, have been abolished in France. This fact Lady Morgan pleasantly blunders into the abolition of a practice which, except in the case of twins, has obtained in all countries since the world began. 'There is no primogeniture in France!' - i. 22. In the same blundering way she transforms the 'Palais du sénat conservateur,' into the 'Palais conservateur,' (ii. 34.) a title which all the directories, councils and senates which have in turn inhabited it, regret that it so little deserves. - The king's surgeon, because he was one of the frères de la Charité, she mistakes for the king's confessor, and on this low and stupid blunder of her own, insults Louis XVIII. and builds a comparison between the spiritual influence of the former and that of the Père de la Chaise, the confessor of Louis XIV. - ii. 131. - Milton sings of towers and battlements, 'Where perhaps some beauty lies Our learned Lady believes that the place and not the beauty is the cynosure, and informs us that the court of the Grand Monarch 'Was the fatal cynosure of the women of France,' - i. 160. - In the dispute between the real and pseudo Amphitryons in Molière's play, one of them, to establish his identity, appeals to the company whether he had not invited them to dinner, upon which Sosia, in pleasant ridicule of the way in which parasites decide in doubtful cases, says 'Le véritable Amphitryon This, Lady Morgan had heard, we presume, applied with pleasantry and success; and resolved to make the most of so good a joke, although she does not see where it lies, she quotes the words in a dozen different places, and in every one of them with about as much success as he of whom Joe Miller relates that he let fall a shoulder of mutton and then begged pardon for a lapis linguæ. 'Cider is not held in any estimation by the véritables amphitryons of rural savoir vivre.' - i. 71. The other instances are equally pointless and absured. IGNORANCE OF FRENCH LANGUAGE and MANNERS. - The allegation that the manuscript was illegible and the long list of Errata prefixed to the work, induced us to impute to mistake a thousand instances which we might otherwise have introduced under this head; but enough remains to show, that of the manners of France ancient or modern, and of the language, with which she so affectedly, - et usque ad nauseum, - interlards her pages, she is more ignorant than a boarding-school girl. - She describes the cottages in Normandy as 'Deeply buried in their BOUQUETS d'arbres, or knots of fruits and forest trees.' - i. p. 35. If it were not for Lady Morgan's own officious translation we should have thought bouquet, a nosegay, a mere error of the press for bosquet, a grove or tuft of trees; but, with the assistance of the translation, it becomes evident that Lady Morgan found the word bosquet in her notes, and not remembering what it meant she turned it into bouquets: but on consideration, not very well understanding what a bouquet d'arbres could mean, she recollects that bouquet is a knot of flowers and that it may therefore also be a knot of oaks. - The word 'Menin,' the name of some young officers who attend the Dauphin of France, Lady Morgan translates the minions of the Dauphin, (i. p. 99.) We could not guess where she found this strange mistranslation, but happening to look into Boyer's School Dictionary, we there found 'menin, minion:' how it got there we cannot tell, but if Lady Morgan knew any thing of the French language or French history she would have known that the English minion comes from the French mignon, and that this name, in its peculiar, offensive meaning, was applied to Joyeuse, d'Espernon, &c. well known as 'the minions of Henry the Third.' In speaking of Buonaparte, Lady Morgan says - 'He was quite a different personage to the few who had les petites entrées, and the many who had ONLY les grandes.' - i. p. 213. - The fact is itself false - and a story which Lady Morgan builds on it, is miserably silly; but we only quote the passage as proof of her ignorance of the French language and manners. Deceived by the term petites, which seems to apply itself to the few, as grandes to the many, she reverses the true meaning of the words. The ordinary reception at court which is given to every body is called les petits entrées - the more intimate admission into the royal society is called les grandes entrées. This blunder is not a mere slip of the pen, for Lady Morgan repeats it in more than one place; and we notice it the rather, because, ignorant as it proves her to be of the very terms which were used in the old court of France, she on all occasions affects to be a nice critic in its etiquettes, and a severe censurer of its manners. - We shall presently see how she can bungle a Greek name into something which is both Latin and French, and yet neither. - The whole Ægean family is fatal to poor Lady Morgan. - She assures us that she saw with her own eyes Gerin's (she means Guerin's) pictures of Phædra and Hyppolita. She may have seen a picture; but she certainly could not have understood it, nor even have read Racine's play, from which it is taken. - The fact, we take to be, that this learned Lady's knowledge of the history of Theseus has been supplied by the Midsummer Night's Dream, in which there happens to be no Hypolitus, and to be an Hypolita. - Of the Place du Carrousel she says, 'In 1622 Louis XIV. gave here his famous fête to Mad. La Valière, and strove to win her heart by flying Turks, whose sorties from the angles of the court, are said to have given it is present name, by a forced etymology of Quarré-aux-ailes, orginating the modern appellation of Carrousel.' - ii. 24. Here is a delightful bunch of blunders. The Carrousel is not a modern appellation - it was not first called by that name in the time of Louis XIV. It is derived not from Quarré-aux-ailes, but from Carouse, Carousel, meaning in old French, as in old English, feast, festivity; and Louis XIV. was not born for nearly twenty years after Lady Morgan describes him as a flying Turk. - Some French wag, seeing her taking notes, must have imposed this story on her simplicity. - Lady Morgan is mightily familiar with the princesses, duchesses, countesses, &c. &c. of France, and intimates pretty roundly that her own 'personal talents and celebrity' obtained her admission into French society to which few if any other foreigners were received. i. 241, 242. Yet there is hardly one of those 'dear,' 'beautiful,' 'gracious,' and 'witty' friends, (for this is the coin in which she repays her entertainers,) whose name she can spell; and though she talks as familiarly of these Parisian 'lions As maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs,' she is so portentously ignorant as to confound the husband of her 'dear' friend Madame Lefebre Desnouettes, with Lefevre Duke of Danzick. ii. 258. Another 'dear' friend she calls the Duchess of Biron-Gonteau. She confounds Madame de Staal and Madame de Staël; calls the unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe the daughter of the Duke de Richelieu, and throws away a wonderful deal of applause, meant for the painters Girodet, Gerard, and Guerin, upon three phantoms called Gerodet, Girard, and Gerin. She places la bonne et bourgeoise Mad. Geoffrin, as the French call her, in 'the first class of nobility,' to evince her acquaintance with the great; and in her rage for fine writing, talks of 'the glance of an ennuyée Du Deffand.' ii. 154. Madame Du Deffand was as well known for her blindness, as celebrated for her conversational and epistolary wit. These would be trivial mistakes, if they were not so numerous as to be the proofs of ignorance and not of inadvertency; and if they were not delivered in a tone of the most impertinent self-sufficiency. - But amidst all her pyebald quotations and her arrogant criticism from French authors and on French language and society, a confession slips out which shows how well fitted she is to be the judge of such subjects: when she visited the Institute 'She held in her hand the "ordre des lectures;" and, though acquainted with the subjects which were to be discuessed, she found it extremely difficult to follow the speakers, or rather the readers.' - ii. p. 161. Notwithstanding this avowal, that she could not follow, that is, understand, what was said, though she was previously apprised of the subject of the discourses, she fearlessly gives and account of the several speeches, and finally concludes by condemning the whole Institute in a lump. 'Something wearied for the discordant and declamatory tones I had so long listened to, and not particularly edified or entertained by the subjects or compositions of the various discourses, I felt both my ear and spirits relieved by the breaking up of the Institute, which upon the whole gave me an impression little favourable to incorporated bodies of learning, or confraternities of taste.' - ii. p. 163. And this condemnation of academies in general she supports by the shrewd observation, that 'neither Homer nor Ossian belonged to an academy.' - ii. 163. We shall conclude this topic, with producing a witness whose authority Lady Morgan will not deny, namely, the translator, hired by herself, or, (to use the publisher's more gentle term,) procured, to bring out a Paris edition of her work. - On the occasion of some of her French scraps, the poor perplexed translator subjoins a note to say 'that, though the words are printed in the original to look like French, he honestly confesses he does not understand them.' - Vol. i. p. 84. - French edition. And he slyly adds, 'Nous sommes fâchés de ne pouvoir les TRADUIRE à nos lecteurs.' It is, we believe, peculiar to Lady Morgan's works, that her English readers require an English translation of ehr English, and her French readers a French translation of her French. GENERAL IGNORANCE. - This chapter would properly be a recapitulation of the greater part of the volume. As to quotation, we are in an absolute 'embarras de richesses,' or, as we should rather say, de pauvretés: we must, therefore, take what we find next our hand. - She is told 'that in Auvergne, LA Bretagne, and THE Béarnois, the subject of the modern idylliums may be found not less touching, or naive, than the ancient. Nor indeed are the Theocriti and Sannazaris of the Théâtre des Vaudevilles et de la Variété, unfaithful to their originals.' - p. 43. We beg our readers to ponder a little on this passage, and to try to discover (for we cannot) why the French article should be prefixed to La Bretagne, and the English to the Béarnois - why the adjective naive should be in the feminine gender and singular number, to agree with a plural neuter or masculine, we know not which? why this exact writer should talk so carefully of Theocriti and Sannazaris, and give the Greek name a Roman, and Roman name an English declension? why, amid so much pretension to scholarship, she offends our ears with modern idylliums? and finally, why she supposes that Theocritus and Sannazari wrote farces, and whereabouts in Paris she found the Théâtre de la Variété? - But there is another writer for the stage, with whose plays Lady Morgan seems not much better acquainted than with the farces of Theocritus, we mean Shakespeare. 'The belles lettres of national literature seem to come to the French youth as reading and writing did to Touchstone, by nature.' - p. 149. We do not recollect any thing is As You Like It which resembles this, and we vehemently suspect that Lady Morgan alludes to the observation of our old friend Dogberry; which she may have heard quoted in company: if she had read the admirable scene in which it is to be found, she could not have forgotten it. - Lady Morgan is desperately enamoured of Buonaparte and all his generals, for which, indeed, the best excuse seems to be that she knows little or nothing about them. In page 214 she tells a flaming story of the devoted attachment of General Rapp to Napoleon, which story is probably a fabrication; but in the course of it, to excite a greater interest in favour of her hero, she calls him a veteran. Unhappily for Lady Morgan's accuracy, Rapp was hardly thirty when he was made aide-de-camp to Buonaparte; even now he cannot be more than forty-five years of age, and the circumstance, if any thing like it ever occurred, must have taken place ten years ago; and if Lady Morgan had looked with attention at some of the pictures which she so flippantly attempts to describe, (ii. 21.) she could not have forgotten the figure of Rapp, which is any thing but that of a veteran. - But her ignorance upon all other subjects is a blaze of light - her arrangement is the perfection of lucid order, compared with the confusion which she makes of every thing connected with the reign of Louis XIV. (a portion of history the best known even to ordinary readers) and her floundering efforts to persuade the world of the meanness and pride, prodigality and penury, refinement and bad taste of that too-long-mistaken monarch, and of his so much boasted age. She begins, as we have seen, by exhibiting him at a masquerade twenty years before he came into the world; - she would have had him a patron of learning at the same early period, and she is mightily indignant that he waited to be born before he began to patronize Molière. 'Amid the false glare which has been flung over the reign of Louis XIV. the ascribing a more than proportionate share of talent to the day he flourished, and the attributing its existence to the munificent patronage of the sovereign, are positions equally false and unfounded; - Molière had already nearly ran (run) his great career of glory, and was crowned with fame and opulence beyond his desires, before his pieces formed the amusement of the Court - He was already entertaining the Marshals of France at his villa near Paris, when the sun of royal favour first turned its rays upon him. - When he first arrived with his troupe in Paris in 1635, he played at the sign of La Croix Blanche, in the Faurbourg of St. Germain - He did not receive his patent from the king for his theatre till 1660.' - ii. 115, 116. Louis was born in 1638, so that he could hardly have seen Molière at the Croix Blanche in 1635; and it seems his tardy patronage of Molière commenced when he was only twenty-two years old. And Lady Morgan, it appears, does not consider the Tartuffe, the Misanthrope, L'Ecole de Femmes, L'Ecole de Maris, Le Malade Imaginaire, or Le Mèdecin malgré lui, as contributing to Molière's glory, as they were all produced under the royal countenance. - In two several places she mentions Cardinal Richelieu as the minister of Louis XIV. (ii. 116-150); and to his councils she attributes the vanity and despotic disposition of that monarch. Louis must indeed have had earlier and more extraordinary talents than even the flatterers whom Lady Morgan so indignantly censures, attribute to him, as he was only four years old when the Cardinal died. - If she is ignorant of the time when this remarkable sovereign was born, she is no less so of that of his death; for she gravely assures us that she herself saw and conversed with or was present at a conversation between two officers who had served in the armies of Louis XIV. or, as she impudently calls them, in the revolutionary jargon which insults age and loyalty, 'two voltigeurs de Louis XIV.' (i. 117) As these gentlemen go to court and walk up and down the stairs of the Tuileries, Lady Morgan cannot suppose them to be more than eighty years of age; and if they were only fifteen when they began to serve, it follows according to Lady Morgan's chronology, Louis (dancing with his mistress in 1622, and living still 1750) must have attained the age of at least 150 years. And all this ignorance she betrays in her blundering and mischievous anxiety to ridicule the ancient nobility, men as respectable for their early loyalty as for their subsequent devotion to their duties. - In the same way she fancies that the battle of Fontenoy was fought in the reign of Louis XIV.; and she has here divested herself of the shift to which she usually has recourse, - of laying the blame on the printer for substituting that monarch instead of Louis XV.; for in the same spirit of ridiculing all that belonged to the ancient monarchy, she laughs immoderately at the bloodless and inglorious campaigns of Louis XV. les campaignes à la rose, (i. 115.) as she calls them. We presume even Lady Morgan's ignorance cannot mean to treat the battle of Fontenoy as a 'campagne coleur de rose,' which is what she mean by her jargon of campaignes à la rose. - After this our readers will not be surprized to find that 'the great Condé' was incarcerated in Vincennes, and that 'his original crime, and the cause perhaps of all his after errors, was his devotion to a beautiful wife whom he refused to resign to the romantic passion of - Henry the VIth.' This is certainly the best apology we have yet heard for the errors of the great Condé; but we fear that it cannot be admitted to be valid by those who, like ourselves, venture to believe that the great Condé was not born, and of course (we presume) not married, till many years after the death of the supposed paramour of his 'beautiful wife.' - Lady Morgan is equally well informed in architectural history. 'The palace of the Tuileries, as it now stands, was built by Cartherine de Medicis, in 1564. It is curious to observe, that in the apartments of the rez de chaussée occupied by Catherine de Medicis, Napoleon Buonaparte, ex-king of Rome, held his fairy court; and while the baby king dispensed smiles and sugar-plums in one of the wings of the palace, the holy representative of St. Peter lavished demi-francs and benedicites from the windows of the other.' - ii. 28, 29. Catherine, unluckily, did not build the Tuileries as they now stand; she began the palace, but it was not till the degraded reign of Louis XIV. that it was finished as it now stands: and we are sorry to be obliged to spoil Lady Morgan's excellent jokes upon the Pope, who lavished his benedicités from one wing, while young Napoleon dispensed sugar-plums from Catherine de Medicis' apartments on the rez de chaussée (how topographically accurate Lady Morgan is!) in the other wing. Alas! the wings are precisely those parts which were not built nor even begun till after Catherine's death. - With equal accuracy she describes another palace. 'The Palais Bourbon, one of the most splendid palaces in Europe, was built by Louis XIV. for his natural daughter, the Princesse de Condé, after the design of Gerardin. The Palais Bourbon was not built till several years after the death of Louis XIV. and this learned lady, who so carefully distinguishes Grecian from Cortinthian architecture, and the Corinthian portico from the rest of the building, will be a little astonished to learn, that the whole edifice is Corinthian, and that there is no peristyle, (Grecian, Roman, French, or even Irish,) to be found in the structure: it is quite clear that she does not know the meaning of the word peristyle; and it is equally so, that she thinks the Corinthian portico is of the same date as the rest of the palace, though the former was built about the year 1730 and the latter about 1800. - She is equally flippant, equally ignorant, on all subjects connected with the arts. 'The majestic Parthenon frowns beside the superb temple of Pæstum, and contrasts in its sever simplicity,' &c. - ii. 42. She imagines that there is but one temple at Pæstum, and that it is superb, compared with the frowning and severe simplicity of the Parthenon; and yet she tells us that she had seen the models of these edifices: if so, she must have mistaken the one for the other; for our readers well know that the temples at Pæstum are in the earliest and severest style, and that the Parthenon, though in the purest taste, was adorned with all the splendour of sculpture. - Lady Morgan hardly knows, surprizing as such ignorance must appear, the difference between sculpture and architecture. 'Sculpture, an art which peculiarly belongs to a free country, and which has rarely flourished amongst slaves, wholly declined in the reigns of Louis XIII. and XIV. and, with the exception of the Porte of St. Denis, left nothing of these times in France that is not inferior,' &c. - i. 19. The pompous assertion with which this passage begins, is unfounded; it might be more justly said that sculpture never flourished in any free state except Athens, and there only during the dictatorial administration of Pericles. But the truth is, that all such generalities are nonesense. No nation, which is sufficiently enlightened to have any taste in the fine arts, can be enslaved to such a degree as to affect the genius of the sculptor more than any other artist: and Lady Morgan would be very much puzzled to produce specimens of any gret works of the fine arts produced by what she would call free countires. Where are the statuses of the Roman republic - where are the paintings of the Commonwealth of England? But the Porte St. Denis is a specimen, it seems, of sculpture, - we had always thought it was a specimen of architecture. All ornamented architecture must have a certain degree of sculpture in the first and extended meaning of the expression; but it so happens that, of all the triumphal arches in the world, the Porte St. Denis has the least sculpture on it, even in this sense; and in the more technical meaning in which we and Lady Morgan use the word sculpture, as the representation of animal life, it has none at all. As the apex of her ignorance in these points, she calls Buonaparte's arch in the Carrousel, 'the GRAND triumphal arch:' - it is not only smaller than the three other arches which Lady Morgan must have seen at Paris, but it is unluckily the smallest in size, and most trifling in execution of all the arches in the world! - We have seen how well skilled Lady Morgan is in French, - she also favours us with a few specimens of her knowledge of Italian. She talks with great indulgence of 'the frailties of a French woman of fashion, as long as they are peccate celatE.' - i. 185. and when she would describe the comfort of having a home to one's self, she employs the phrase, which we copy punctatim: 'Casa-mia, piccolina, che sia.' - ii. 8. We are much mistaken if her Italian translator (if she can procure one) does not lament his inability to translate her Italian, as her French translator desparied of her French. -Lady Morgan, who never lets pass the double opportunity of shewing her ignorance and her irreverence for sacred things, talks of 'the aërial character of the little cherubim, the maudit page in Beaumarchais' play of Figaro.' - ii. 47. Some one, however, seems to have informed her that the word cherubim is plural, and thereupon the learned lady, as usual, charges the mistake upon her printer, and in her elaborate list of Errata requests us to alter cherubim to cherubin, which latter she takes to be the singular number of the former. 'Thus fools rush in where angles fear to tread.' - When Lady Morgan talks of the litterati of France, she takes occasion to tells us, in a tone of regret, that 'even the superior effusions of Parny, author of Eloge à Elénore, Les Guerres de Dieux, &c. &c. are scarcely known in this country by name.' - ii. p. 206. Will our readers believe that this Parny - whose superior effusions Lady Morgan would have known in England - is the most beastly, the most detestably wicked and blasphemous of all the writers who have ever disgraced literature! that the Eloge (as she calls it) of Elénore, is neither more nor less than a system of debauchery, detailed in the language of the brothel! - the language, did we say? - it is detailed ' - cum verbis, nudum olido stans and that the other work which she quotes with eulogium, Les Guerres des Dieux, (or, as we believe it is called, 'La Guerre des Dieux,') is the most dreadful tissue of obscenity and profaneness that the devil ever inspired to the depraved heart of man; and that, while we write this, we still tremble with horror at the guilt of having read unwittingly even so much of the work as enables us to pronouce this character of it! We will be fair with Lady Morgan. We do not believe it is possible that she could have seen or known what she was talking about; - and we therefore rather set it down amongst the proofs of her flippant and arrogant ignorance than impiety. - Lady Morgan, however, is better read in the virtues of Buonaparte; and, determined that none of them shall be lost to her countrymen, she adds, in a tone of triumph over the wretched taste and parsimony of the Bourbons, 'PARNY was protected and pensioned by Napoleon!' JACOBINISM. - Lady Morgan, though a knight's Lady, is, we are afraid, somewhat of a democrat, and we strongly suspect that her present rank does not sit naturally upon her; she certainly takes all the opportunities she can find, and liberally makes them when she cannot find them, to sneer at and depreciate the legitimate government, the royal family, and nobility of France, and to extol the enemies of France, of her own country and of the civilized world. - 'The horrors of the revolution' are, it seems, 'bug-bears dressed to frighten children,' (i. 91.) and, what is still more surprizing, the legitimate monarchy of France, and not the revolution, is answerable for all those enormities, because 'the generation which perpetrated these atrocities were the legitimate subjects of legitimate monarchs, and were stamped with the character of the government which produced them, and the Marats, Dantons, Robsepierres belong equally to the order of things which preceded the revolution, and to that which filled up its most frightful epochs.' - i. 92. If this, which we take to be the greatest discovery of modern times, be true; if the monarchy be really guilty of the crimes of the republic; if Louis and not Marat, if Maleherbes and not Danton; if the Princesse de Lamballe and not Theroigne de Mericourt are the real perpetrators of the regicide and the massacres of September because the regicides and massacreurs were born under the legitimate monarchy, we appeal to Lady Morgan's impartiality whether the same rule must not be further extended, and whether all the glories in arms and arts, all the private virtues and public bounties of her idol Napoleon ought not to be attributed to the ancient government, under which he was not only born but carefully educated both in arts and arms? Our readers smile at this argument, and at the virtues of Napoleon. We assure them that there is hardly any virtue, and no kind of merit which Lady Morgan's blind devotion does not attribute to 'the child and champion of jacobinism.' In addition to being 'the greatest captin of the age,' (i. 97.) (she does not except the greater who conquered him,) Lady Morgan assures us that 'his manners were kind and gracious,' and 'his feelings generous' (ii. 181.) - that he was 'popular for many little acts of generosity and bonhommie,' (i. 97.) and that 'his personal bravery' rendered him 'worthy the devotion of his soldiers.' (i. 151.) 'His policy,' she acquaints us, 'was merciful,' (i. 106.) and 'during the first period of his reign' (in which Palm, Wright, and D'Enghien were murdered) 'his popularity was unsullied,' (i. 98.) his public deportment put the exhibition of vice out of fashion, (i. 102.) as a sovereign he was 'grand' (i. 102.) in his conceptions; forgiving in his temper, even to his personal enemies, (i. 106.) and munificent and discriminating in his bounty, (i. 98.) In private life, he was a sincere and ardent friend, (i. 165.) and 'even his enemies acquit him of ever forgetting a favour or neglecting a friend.' (i. 107.) Such are a few of the topics of Lady Morgan's loyal and judicious admiration of Buonaparte; we trust them, without a comment, to the execration of every lover of truth. - In the same way she heaps her jacobinical admiration upon every person and thing which belongs to the revolution, and vilifies and libels all that is connected with the legitimate government. 'How true Frenchwomen can be in feeling and sympathy to their husbands has been painfully evinced during the horrors of the revolution, the struggles of twenty-five years of emigration, and above all, during the political vicissitudes and conflicts in France which have occurred since the return of the Bourbons.' - i. 179. Thus Lady Morgan asserts that the trials to which domestic feeling has been subjected have been more numerous and more cruel since the restoration, than during the revolution; - a restoration which has exhibited the execution of two traitors taken with arms in their hands, and convicted in due course of law; and a revolution in which (to omit the noyades and fasillades which tainted the rivers, and drenched the soil of France with innocent blood) 5000 persons were massacred, in the streets of Paris alone, within six and thirty hours, and fifty or sixty a day sent to the guillotine, without the forms of a trial, for ten or twelve successive months. For the devoted wives of the royalists she has only a cold and general phrase; for the heroic attachment of the injured queen to all the duties of a wife and mother, she has not a word; for the sorrows and sufferings of the orphan of the Temple, no feeling, no tears - nothing but clumsy ridicule, envenomed calumny, and jacobinical rancour - while the griefs of the Buonapartists, victims of the restoration, are recited in a catalogue (a short one indeed, but as large as she could make it) of their names, and in bursts of Lady Morgan's finest and tenderest style of sorrow. 'The young and unfortunate Madame La Bedoyere, dying of a broken heart for him, whom her tears and supplications could not save; - the struggles, the exertions, the almost manly efforts, made by Madame Ney, are cited even by their enemies, as incomparable. The ready self-immolation of Madame La Valette, who knew not, and feared not, the results of the task she had undertaken; and the sacrifices of Madame Bertrand, who so willingly gave up a world, where she still reigned supreme in the unproscribable influence of fashion and beauty, to follow her brave husband into a voluntary and dreary exile; these are splendid instances of conjugal virtue.' - i. 179-181. Ney, indeed, is a particular object of her lamentation; because, we presume, he was the greatest and most infamous traitor of the Hundred Days. He is with her 'the gallant Ney, the theme of every soldier's praise,' - p/ 237. and his death is one of 'those views of human conduct, one of those scenes of human suffering which sicken the heart and wither up its powers. Here civilized society seems to lose its splendour, and the developement of the human faculties seems but to multiply the power of doing evil.' - p. 238. - But the murder of the Duke d'Enghien, her ladyship coolly palliates by an observation 'on the fatal policy which may, or may not have necessitated his death.' - p. 239. The sentence itself is nonesense, but the meaning is tolerably plain and sufficiently atrocious; she sometimes, however, speaks out, and does not leave us to infer her sentiments. The royalists she calls 'a long-forgotten faction,' (i. 113); and when she overhears a lady observing at court, comme Madame d'Angoulême est embellie ce soir! et sa Majesté, qu'il a l'air d'un père de famille!' she sets it all down with indignant contempt, as the 'jargon of loyalty.' i. 20. She lavishes upon Brissot the most enthusiastic praises for bold and fearless eloquence, and for public spirit, good sense, genius and patriotism. Brissot (as every one knows) was a spy, a libeller, a jacobin, a murderer, and a regicide, who had neither talents nor courage. For Monge, the bloodiest satelitte of Robespierre and the meanest slave of Buonaparte, who signed the death warrant of Louis and voted a crown to Napoleon - for him she cannot find a lower epithet than 'the illustrious!' But the chief gods of her idolatry (our readers will see by-and-bye that this is hardly a figurative expression) are the vain, feeble, doting coxcomb Lafayette, who, after indulging his vanity by insulting his king and overturning the throne, fled basely from the storm which he had raised, and only returned to public life to take a seat in Buonaparte's Champ-de-Mai; and Gregoire, the ex-bishop of Blois, one of the first of the clergy who in 1789 abandoned his duty, his order, and his sovereign - who proposed in the infernal Convention the abolition of royalty; who asserted that 'kings were in moral life what monsters were in nature,' and who crowned his infamy by volunteering (for he was absent on a mission at the time of the king's trial) a letter to the Convention, in which, with a hypocritical cant more disgusting than the naked cruelty of Sieyes, he says that 'his holy profession (his holy profession!) forbids him to pronounce the penalty of death on any criminal, but that as a greater punishment he condemned him to live;' - such was the 'virtuous,' 'venerable,' 'religious,' 'enlightened,' 'beneficent,' 'humane and philosophical' friend of Lady Morgan. We need not quote any more of her personal panygyrics; they are all upon persons of the same stamp, men of blood, whose only celebrity is that they belonged to the worst times of the revolution. We shall conclude this chapter, which we could easily make as long as a volume, with stating that Lady Morgan gives at full length, and as excellent productions, several infamous songs, in which the king, the royal family, &c. are grossly libelled. Our anxiety that Lady Morgan should stand convicted (as we have said) out of her own book induces us to conquer our reluctance to propagate slander by quoting a stanza from one of them as a specimen of its jacobinism, a word which includes disloyalty and impiety. 'Quand Berri, D'Artois, D'Angoulême FALSEHOOD. - Of Lady Morgan's offences in this way we have incidentally given several examples already, and we might quote more than half her book; - but we shall only select a few specimens. - In speaking of the profligacy of the court of Louis XIV. she expresses her high indignation at the unblushing fidelity in which the Memoir writers describe those details of depravity, and by way of having a hit at a duke and of course an aristocrat, whom she hates, though he has been nearly a century dead, she says, sneeringly, 'It is the illustrious St. Simon who attests the enormities he so gaily pictures.' - p. 39. Now our readers well know that the Duke de St. Simon is the most severe and merciless castigator of the scenes which he records; that his Memoirs are written in a style of misanthropism and indignation which resembles that of Juvenal; and that so far from his having given gay pictures of profligacy, his capital fault is that he saw every thing in the blackest colours, and wasted upon trifles, or suspected faults, too much of his gloomy castigation. But Lady Morgan slanders the living, and, à fortiori, has no respect for the dead, unless they have been shot for treachery. - Lady Morgan, whose conscience perhaps increased the ordinary delusions of her imagination, fancied on one occasion, that she was about to arrested. 'Bastilles, lettres de cachet, mysterious arrestations and solitary confinements started upon my scared imagination, and I had already classed myself with the Iron Mask and caged Mazarine, the Wilsons, Hutchinsons and Bruces.' - p. 136. This is the lie by implication. - Wilson, Hutchinson and Bruce had grievously violated the laws of France: - they were openly arrested, legally confined, publicly tried, leniently sentenced, and generously pardoned: and this is the case which this wretched woman chooses to associate with Bastilles, lettres de cachet, and iron cages. But the falsehood of falsehoods, is the old and impudent one which we have so often refuted, that England has been guilty of treachery and bad faith in her treatment of Buonaparte: we shall not condescend to enter into any discussion of subjects of this nature with such a person as Lady Morgan; but content ourselves with submitting to the indignation of our readers the whole passage, which is as false in fact as it is disgusting in principle and contemptible in style. 'Napoleon, always greater in adversity than in prosperity, chose to trust to the generosity of the English nation, and to seek safety and protection amidst what he deemed a great and a free people. This voluntary trust, so confidingly placed, so sacredly reposed, was a splendid event in the history of England's greatness - it was a bright reflection on the records of her virtues! It illuminated a page in her chronicles on which the eye of prosperity might have dwelt with transport! It placed her pre-eminent among contemporary nations! Her powerful enemy, against whom she had successfully armed and coalesced the civilized world, chose his place of refuge, in the hour of adversity, in her bosom, because he knew her brave, and believed her magnanimous! This is, perhaps, the proper place to notice a circumstance which has forcibly pressed upon us, from the first opening of Lady Morgan's book. ' -------------- Oh l'enneveux conteur! It would appear from her pages that nothing had taken place at Paris during her short residence there, in which she was not, in some way or other, personally concerned. To her every event in every party of politics or pleasure, occurred; and to her every remark was addressed. The eternal exordium to all her anecdotes is - La princesse de ------- said to me; la duchesse de ------- said to me; la marquise de -------, - for Lady Morgan realised the visionary gradeur of Malvolio, - la contesse de ------- said to me, &c. Now we will tke upon ourselves to dispute most of these dites à moi. That something like them was said, or rather told to Lady Morgan, we well believe; but not the persons represented. The French critics politely attribute this égoïstque perfidy to that invention, which (as they say) 'doit rarement abandonner Lady Morgan.' Invention, however, had little to do in the affair; as, perhaps, these gentlemen could have told us. The fact is, (as we have said,) that they were told to her, as good things; - and this, and this alone, accounts for that utter confusion of dates, names, and titles, with which she has repeated them in her book. Many of them took place before she was born; and we could point out not a few that were actually printed and published at Paris several years before it was honoured with her presence. Of all this Lady Morgan knew nothing. Jests and repartees, stale even to a French lacquey, appeared to her pure novelties; and she saw (in the simplicity of her ignorance) neither difficulty nor danger in appropriating them to conversations of her own, and taking the lion's share of their merit and importance to herself. LICENTIOUSNESS. - Lady Morgan quizzes (to borrow her own phraseology) with great taste, the respect which a catholic people pays to the Holy Virgin; but she grows particularly facetious, or, as they say in Ireland, roguish, in relating that, on a procession at Boulogne-sur-mer, in honour or the Mother of our Saviour, 'The priests, to their horror, could not find a single virgin in that maritime city, and were at last obliged to send to a neighbouring village to request the loan of a virgin - A virgin was at last procured; a little indeed the worse for the wear; but this was not a moment for fastidiousness, and the Madonna was paraded through the streets.' - i. p. 59. We say nothing of the staleness of this joke, borrowed from the loose tales of Boccacio and La Fontaine, nor of the ignorance that travesties a French Notre Dame into an Italian Madonna: we only request our readers to consider what manner of woman she must be that revives and displays such false and detestable grossness of which even a modern jest book would be ashamed. - In the same spirit, she slyly demoninates the priests who walked in company with some young women at a religious procession, 'STOUT young priestlings,' and she summarily dismisses all the rest of the persons who attended this pious ceremony as 'the corps dramatique.' - i. 57. - Some of our readers may have heard the title of a most profligate French novel called 'Les Liaisons Dangereuses.' We had hoped that no British female had ever seen this detestable book; it seems we were mistaken. Lady Morgan sneers at the Court of Louis XVIII. 'because all "Liaisons Dangereuses" are banished from it.' p. 132. And, lest her meaning should be mistaken, she distinguishes 'Liaisons Dangereuses' by marks of quotation, and goes on to say that when piety usurps their place, (i.e. the place of deliberate seduction and debauchery, or, as she delicately words it, of 'gallantry and the graces,') it is as if chimney sweepers were to usurp the place of Cupids, ibid. But even upon this subject she contrives to evince her ignorance, and attributes this work and the other abominable works of La Clos, to the respectable historian Duclos. But Lady Morgan appears equally well read in the loose volumes of Pigault Le Brun, and recommends the character of the prostitute in one of them, in the following terms: - 'The charge of coarseness made in France against the author, is too well founded to admit of defence; but the mind that originated the frail but fascinating character of Fanchette, in the Macédonie, one of the most amusing and philosophical of his tales, is surely capable of great elegance and refinement of conception. But for her, "Vertu de moins," there are few female writers, however delicate or celebrated, who would have disdained the creation of such a character, as the tender, generous and devoted Fanchette.' - ii. p. 227. This vertu de moins is a gay and civil mode of expressing one of the deadly sins, &c. and Lady Morgan quotes with great apparent delight an observation of one of her friends on this subject. 'Speaking on this subject to a very clever and very witty French woman, Mad. d'E***d, she observed respecting the decency, even of the women most notedly gallant, "Les Françaises sont les seuls femmes peut-étre à qui il soit permis d'avoir des torts; car elles seules s'attachent à leurs devoirs et à la décence, quand même elles ont une vertu de moins"!' - i. 190. But Lady Morgan appears to go beyond even the indulgence to crime which these words imply, for she says distintly in another place: - 'It is no uncommon thing in France, to see the most lasting attachment succeed to the most lively passion; and all that was faulty, in unlicensed love, become all that is respectable, in disinterested friendship.' - i. 163, 164. In no very delicate phrase, Lady Morgan violently reproaches D'Alembert that his connexion with Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse was too Platonic - she would have had it a little more substantial. 'The Academy was to D'Alembert another Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse. In his connexion with either, there was not a trace of energy of character, or of mental manhood. - All was feebleness and subjection. He carried the love letters of the one to his rivals, and he seconded the tyranny of the other in his discourses.' - ii. 151, 152. With these principles we are not surprized to find Lady Morgan applauding the farce of Figaro as one of the most amusing and philosophical which any language has produced. - ii. p. 46. 'The representation of which (she says) she could have attended every night it was played, while the inimitable Tartuffe inimitably acted, almost put her to sleep.' - ii. 118. In this philosophical farce the chief character is a young page who longs for every woman he sees, while all the others are employed in different ways in the same kind of pursuit; whereas in poor Molière, the lady, in whose character Mademoiselle Mars exhausted the patience of Lady Morgan, was a woman of virtue, and this tedious play ends in the discomfiture of the adulterer. - But the climax of Lady Morgan's laxity will be found in nine pages (169 to 177) of eulogy upon a Madame D'Houdetot, an avowed adultress, and, if we are to believe Lady Morgan's friendly account, a prostitute: we shall not sully our pages by more particular extracts, we shall only say that Lady Morgan, after telling us that this Madame D'Houdetot passed through the hands of Voltaire, St. Lambert, Rousseau, &c. and became, in old age, the mistress of a Monsieur S. concludes by 'lamenting that she arrived too late to have seen this interesting and extraordinary woman; but occasionally associating with those who once had the happiness to live with her, and delightedly tracked the prints of her steps in those elegant circles, over which she one presided.' - p. 176. Lady Morgan is so very figurative in her expressions that we apprehend, however blamebale the countenance given in this passage to vice may be, it would be uncandid and unjust to take her au pied de la lettre, and suppose that she would really have found delight in tracing the steps of Madame D'Houdetot. IMPIETY. - Madame de Maintenon declares that some of the gay men of the court were 'pleins de grandes impiétés, et de sentimens d'ingratitude envers le roi.' To us, who have been taught to 'fear God and honour the King,' this does not seem a very extraordinary, nor a very hazardous remark; but Lady Morgan is of a different mind, and parodies Scripture for the purpose of turning it into ridicule - 'It was the fashion of that pious day to confound the sovereign and the Deity, and to consider the king both "as the law and the prophets" within the purlieus of his own court.' - p. 47. - Lady Morgan is enamoured 'of the highly-prized petits soupers of Paris, the point de rassemblement of wit, pleasure, and fashion,' and these, in her impious jargon, she calls 'the PASSOVER of family re-union;' words which have really no meaning, and excite no idea but that of disgust and horror at the profanation on which this audacious worm seems to pride itself. - p. 225. In another place she alls the 'civic dinner' given under the tyranny of Robespierre, (the mere triumph of one bloody faction over another,) 'the passover of an emancipated people.' On the subject of a port-folio of water-colour drawings she says: 'These transcripts of the prima intenzione of superior genius always appear to me more precious and interesting, than the long-studied, long-laboured task, that time and judgement work into faultlessness. It is like the sublime command, "Let there be light; and there was light."' - ii. 64. 65. - When she would describe the streets of Paris, it is by a profane allusion - their narrowness is 'an original sin without redemption.' - On the occasion of the homage paid to the King, she takes the favourable opportunity of uttering another horror. She laments that he is obliged to hear so much flattery, because, 'as the Chevalier de Boufflers says, with more levity than becomes the subject, Il n'y a que DIEU qui ait un assez grand fond de gaité pour ne pas s'ennuyer de tons les hommages qu'on lui rend.' Levity! - 'more levity than becomes the occasion'! - and, with this gentle observation, she registers and disseminates a blasphemy which we dare not translate, and which, if any of our readers has patience to read a second time, he will find to be as silly as it is impious. The infamous Volney, - or, in Lady Morgan's opinion, 'the sublime Volney, withdraws his high-born genius from its devoted career, and descends to the cold and tame pursuit of chronological calculation. His Histoire de la Chronologie is undertaken in a very philosophical, and, from some passages which I heard cited, a very sceptical mood. He attempts to prove the history of Moses is a compilation of astronomical facts, that Abraham was a brilliant constellation, and Moses himself Bacchus, or the sun.' - p. 213. We shall not stop to notice the incredible ignorance even of her sublime and high-born genius's own works, which this mad woman shews, when she fancies that these 'dreams of the devil' are at all new. We shall merely add, that instead of the horror which our readers feel at this threadbare impiety, Lady Morgan treats it with great coolness as simply 'an attempt to disturb the genealogical line of patriarchical nobility.' Some of these expressions would have led us to suppose that this Lady Morgan was an atheist; she seems to intimate, however, towards the conclusion of her work, that she is only a deist, and that she has as much and the same kind of religion as the American savages. She says that at a certain fête made for her, the manuscripts of the atheist Voltaire were displayed, and the sublime ode of the atheist Chenier, in praise of the said Voltaire, was recited with an emotion on the part of the audience 'only to be felt and understood by this ardent people to whom genius is but another word for divinity, and who, next to the GREAT SPIRIT, venerate THOSE whom he has most informed with the rays of his own intelligence.' - p. 243. That is to say, Voltaire and Chenier are worshipped by Lady Morgan's ardent friends next to what she calls, in imitation of the Iroquois, the Great Spirit! and lest any one should mistake her distinct meaning, she distinguishes the words Great Spirit by a peculiar type. On the daring blasphemy of the concluding line, which represents the God of all purity as illuminating, with the brightest rays of his own intelligence, the minds of such monsters of vice and infidelity, we almost tremble to think again. Once more, and we have done. - If it be asked why, with the feelings which we have expressed, we proceed to notice such abominations, we answer, with a pious father of the church, LEGIMUS, NE LEGANTUR. 'Truth wants no ornament; religion is in itself an abstraction; "the evidence of things unseen." It is ever to be regretted that the first religious ceremony, mentioned in holy writ, caused the first murder, in the first and only family then upon the earth.' - i. p. 60. Our readers cannot have gone far in this work without being struck with the wonderful similarity of its sentiments and language to those of the Letters from Paris,* reviewed in a former Number. Both exhibit the same slavish awe when speaking of the usurper, the same impudent familiarity when noticing the lawful monarch; both profess the same admiration of all that was feeble, and treacherous, and bloody in France; the same hatred of all that was firm, and loyal, and virtuous: both evince the same proneness to profanation, the same audacious contempt of every thing savouring of religion and piety. Both mistake the whinings of the few obscure Jacobins for the general voice of the French people; and both, - more insane than the madman in Horace who kept his seat after the curtain had dropped, and heard miros tragædos in an empty theatre, - at a period when every moment brings fresh proof of the return of France to its characteristic loyalty and attachment to its ancient line of kings, can see nothing, can hear of nothing, but plots to overthrow the government, and bring back the golden age of their day-dreams, the reign of rebellion, plunder, and blood. [* The Substance of some Letters written from Paris, by John Hobhouse, Esq.] We shall not, of course, be accused of attributing to Mr. Hobhouse the portentious ignorance and folly of Lady Morgan. - Mr. Hobhouse, unfortunately for himself, is not ignorant of existing circumstances: - but Lady Morgan (and we record it to her praise) possesses one substantial advantage over him. She insults and vilifies the royal family of France, it is true, but she does not outrage humanity so far as to term them 'bone-grubbers,' because they piously sought to give the remains of their sovereign and father, a decent burial. We must now have done: - to confess the truth we have long since been weary of Lady Morgan, and shall not therefore offend our readers by any further exposure of the wickedness and folly of her book; of both of which we have given an idea less perfect, we readily admit, than we had materials for, but one which will, we hope, prevent, in some degree, the circulation of trash which under the name of a Lady author might otherwise find its way into the hands of young persons of both sexes, for whose perusal it is utterly, on the score both of morals and politics, unfit. The volume closes with four bulky 'Appendices on Politics, Finance, Law, and Physic, by Sir T. Charles Morgan, M. D.' thrown in, we presume, as a kind of makeweight to the literary cargo which his lady, as per contract, 'was bound to deliver between the months of November and March.' Three of them are on subjects of which the Doctor is utterly ignorant; and we therefore think that he has been prudently, as well as kindly, advised 'to confine his literary mania in furture to the ambition of being read by apothecaries.' We have just received a second edition of Lady Moran's France, in two volumes, octavo, preceded by a flourishing preface, in which she affects all the intoxication of literary triumph that the rapid success of her quarto should have necessitated a second edition. This is, we fear, of a piece with all the rest, or, in other words, a downright falsehood; we have compared the octavo edition with the quarto, and have no doubt that the former has been printed off from the same type which were set up for the latter, a species of manœuvre which enables a publisher to make two editions out of one; and what puts it beyond doubt that Lady Morgan's triumph is reducible to this trick, is the fact that in this second edition not one of the numerous errors of the first (of which both Lady Morgan and her printer had grievously complained) is corrected; nay, the very table of errata which accompanied the quarto is carefully reprinted in the octavo. So much for the glory of a rapid sale, and the triumph of a second edition! - And thus Lady Morgan concludes as she began. |