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    HENILY THE FOURTH AND THE LEAGUERS . LaLiyueetUmnrilV . By J . Michelet . Paris : Chameron . When a-wmter possesses a highl y characteristic style , it would be strange if all liis characteristics were merits . Merits they may be , indeed , in one sense , since they produce variety , and relieve us from literary lotus-eating j but , in point of art , of taste , of power , and beauty , a very peculiar book may always be expected to present some very peculiar contrasts . Of no Frenchman , is this more true than of Michelet . He is often grand , pure , lyrical , but C [ uite as often eccentric , wild , ungracefully familiar . His historical

    account of the sixteenth century abounds , more , perhaps , than any of his other-works , in diversities of substance , in inequalities of surface , in abrupt transitions of manner . . As Eniile Montegut says , Hear the sound of the epic trumpet sinking into the tiny pipings of a whistle . Far-sought analogies , dramatic figures of speech , vast transepts of digression , break the continuity of the narration , while , at times , the critic and chronicler seems to forget that he is preparing the inscription of a noble monument , and expresses himself as though he were scratching doggrcl on a gravestone . Thus , he describes Marie Stuart as " the common woman dragged by soldiers through the streets of Edinburgh ; " he refers to Mar « uer ! fe wife

    ot Henry IV ..,. as having " the provoking eyes of a wanton ; " he depicts the 'I hereditary muzzle" of the Medicis , and their countenances " very intelligent and bestial . " Still less scrupulously he alludes to the disgust conceived by Henry II . for his wife , by saying , " he abhorred her , as a woman that had been bred in an Italian sepulchre . " These are examples of a displeasing mannerism which have not escaped Michelet ' s French critics . But it would be injustice to note them without admitting that they are exceptional , and that , though Michelet is frivolously addicted to epi grams , to -flashes of rhetoric , to surprising turns of language , and precipitous descents from epic to colloquy , he is a master of style , a penetrating thinker , inmost respects a man of whom this generation of Frenchmen may well be proud . of Michelet

    A specimen ' s extraordinary manner is to be found at the end of the fourth volume of his work on "France in the Sixteenth Century . " " . Tins , " he says , "is not an impartial history . " It is "frankly and vigorously partial "—partial on the side where right and truth appeared to him to prevail . It is advocacy and attack , charged with invective , redolent of eulogy , unmeasured and unsparing . In his dissection of personal character especially , he treats the men and women of the pust as though they had destroyed his happiness . He reviles Catherine de Medicis as though she had poisoned his wife , Marie Stuart as though she had disgraced him . This clement of his _ book , this persecution of historical names , may add to the warmth and richness of the composition , but it destroys " that beautiful serene" which should reflect the shapes and colours of history .

    I he period of the League embraces the last quarter of the sixteenth centui'y—from the massacre of St . Bartholomew to the peace of Verviua . M . Michelet disposes the events of this memorable epoch in large groups , connected by their proper relations , and surrounded with sin artistic arrangement of accessories . The Cardinal of Lorraine , after the murder of Coligny , had set up in Home a golden tablet , inscribed with those words : " llcligion had withered and languished ; but this day we have seen an augury that she will revive and bloom once more . " But Protestantism , adds M . Michelet , though abased in France , " survived and shall survive , invincible in Holland , victorious in England , creative in America , " with another Protestantism in the rear—that of reason , science , and equity , " conquering the human mind through Itabelais , Shalcspeare , Bacon , and Descartes ; conquering in the right of Europe through the pence of "Westphalia ; conquering even to the stars through ICcplcr and Galileo . " The liyzantine casuists are discarded ; Cujas replies to them in a sentence ;

    Palissy turns from sophistry to nature ; the epoch wore the mask of the League ; but France and liurope were progressing—the genius of tho UJonaissance , the heroism of the Reformation , bore fruit in ICurope , in the East in tho Now World ; but , unhappily , in Franco , the peace of VervinB riveted the links of the old Catholicity ; and a melancholy reaction opened tho way to the Thirty Years' Wur . On the morrow of JSt . Bartholomew Charles tho Ninth stood triumphant ; intoxicated , yet apprchonsivo . His successor , Henry the Third , under the overpowering influence of Catherine , commenced a premature conilict , which resulted in his humiliation , and then the League arose . The clergy . said , on the , 1 th of March , 15 . 19 , " I (" necessary , the king must be killed . " "That , " says M . Michelet , " was the first utterance of the Leaguers . ' Their constitution , ori ginal and unique , was that of a federal religious body , acting by violence , intimidation , treason , and cruelty , upon the throne , the church , the nobles , and all tho representatives of authority . They were Catholics—the crusaders oi Catholicism ; and among their neophyte champions tho kinc was included in 1 . 17 ( 5 . The series of broad episodes in this history in admirably ordered in M . Michclot ' s Avorlc . It includes : the famous Jesuit campaign , tho asnasBination of the Prince of Orange , the conspiracy of Rheims , the execution of Marie Stuart , the compulsory Bcll-sacrilice of Henry the Third , the battle of Coutran , the Spanish insurrection in Paris , tho fitting-out and ruin of the

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    andgoods . Locomotives came into use in 1804 , th ough the machinery -was stfll very imperfect , and the ideas of engineers very crude . They were much improved in the course of the nest twenty years , and a speed of from four'to seven miles per hour was attained , with a prospect of greater . High-pressure engines required to be used ,. and there is something in the very name that has always frightened the ignorant ; the boilers had been formed of cast iron in some cases at first , and the results , as might have been expected , were unsatisfactory and alarming . The difficulty of arranging the parts of a high-pressure engine on a moveable carriage , ' and tlie apparent impossibility of furnishing enough , of steam to make the wheels turn at the rate of twenty or even ten

    by becoming unintelligible or unnatural . It is required of every builder that he should erect a house new and well-proportioned ; it is not required that he should , with his own hands , have baked every brick employed hi the edilice . The existing system of criticism , and the greatness and fulness of literature , are in many respects injurious to poetical writers . An author ' s first book is generally writteu con amove , and for himself ; critic and reader are forgotten in the heat and delight of the task ; but after he has . run the gauntlet of dailies , weeklies , monthlies , and quarterlies , he becomes more conscious and less single-hearted . He writes with one eye to his subject and the other to what the reviewers will say of him . He is more careful of tho expression than of the thought . He desires to dazzle and-astonish . Of Dr . George "Wilson's paper we have left ourselves no space to speak ) and must take an opportunity of recurring ; to it . Mr . Baynes ' s paper on " Sir William'Hamilton" will-also be read with interest by the admirers of that prodigy of ' learning ' and acuteness . Altogether , this volume of Edinburg fi Essays may be pronounced a brilliant commencement .

    miles an hour , retarded the . progress of the locomotive . If a wheel , four feet in diameter , turn 110 times in a minute , or travel at the rate of fifteen miles-an hour , each cylinder -will take from the boiler ' 220 . fills-of . steam per minute ; and it is not surprising , therefore , that many thoughtful people , whose opinions were entitled to respect , regarded a speed of fifteen or even , ten miles an hour as unattainable . " Where learning failed , however , natural genius triumphed . George Stephenson , once a locomotive stoker in the north of England , and afterwards one of the most disti ^ guished . engineers of modern times , invented the tubular boiler , and raised the speed of the eugine from seven to thirty miles an hour . And , he subsequently adds : —

    Almost every year since 1830 has ¦ witnessed an increase in their number and power . Stephenson ' s prize locomotive , the Rocket , -weighed four tons and a quarter , and ran on rails of thirty-five lbs . to the yard ; engines are constructed now weighing more than thirty . tons , and running along rails of eighty lbs . to the yard . To us the most interesting papers in the volume are Alexander Smith ' s essay on " Scottish Ballads , " and Dr . George Wilson ' s on " Chemical final ¦ causes . " The former is everyway a remarkable production , the prose of a poet , who can write prose , and think prose , with a felicity of expression , and steadiness of conception , which mere versifiers would find hopelessly impossible . We detect the poet in his love of concrete images , and in the cadences of rhythm , but even when the style is most elevated it is always prose-, as in the following , -which might have been signed by Ruskin : —

    None of these ballads can be looked upon as the work of a single autbor . Their present form is the work of generations . For centuries the floating legendary material was reshaped , added to and altered , by the changing spirit and emotion of man . Rude and formless , they are touching and venerable as some ruin on the waste , the names of whose builders are unknown ; whose towers and walls , although not erected in accordance with the lights of modern architecture , affect the spirit , and fire the imagination far more than nobler and more recent piles ; for its chambers , now roofless to the day , were ages ago tenanted by life and death , joy and sorrow , for its walls have been worn and rounded by time , its stones channelled and fretted by the fieTce tears of winter rains ; on broken arch and battlement every April for centuries has kindled a light of desert -flowers , and it stands muffled in ivy , bearded - with moss , and stained with lichens , crimson , golden , and green , by the suns of forgotten summers . We are told to imitate this , but who can rectal the strong arms and rude hearts that piled huge ston « on stone ? Who can simulate the hallowing-of time ? Who can create us a ruin to-day with the weather-wear and lichens of five centuries upon it ? Here is a fine bit of direct vivid writing : —

    The first thing which strikes the reader of the Ballads is their direct and impulsive life . " There is tiothing cloaked ot concealed . You look through the iron corslet of Che mommder , and see the fierce heart heave beneath . None of the heroes ever seem to feel that hesitancy and palsy of action . winch , arises from the clash of complex and opposing motives . At once the mailed hand executes the impulse of the hot heart . There seem to have been no dissimulators in . those days . If a man is a scoundrel , he speaks and acts as if he were perfectly aware of the fact , and aware , too , that the whole world knew it as well as himself . Itf . aman is wronged by another , he runs him throughthe body with his sword , or cleaves him to the chin with liis pole-axe , and then flees , pursued day and night , awake and asleep , in town and wilderness , by

    a bloody ghost . If two lovers meet in the greenwood , they forget church and holy priest , and in couTse of time the heron is startled from his solitary haunt , and shame and despair are at rest beneath tho long weeds of the pool , and a * ghost with dripping liair glides into the chamber , and with hand of ice awakes the horrified betrayer from his first sleep on his bridal night . And these men had their rude reverences and devotions , terrors cf the solitary mountain-top and the moonless waste , wandering fires of the morass , spirits of the swollen stream : Edom o' Gordon , who burned a mother and her children in their own tower with laughter and mockery as if agony were a jest , would ere night mutter an Avo to Alary Mother , and cross himself as devoutly as ever a saint in the calendar ; mid the moss-trooper who could impale an infant on his spear point , would shiver at an omen which a schoolboy laughs at .

    We fear that " Z" of the Athenecmn will find many words , and even phrases , in this essay , which other writers have used before ; and to all ' # V one may fancy a covert sarcasm conveyed in the following : —• The literary merit of many of these Ballads is great ; in the majority , the singer is in utter abeyance , and the subject is all In all . There is no straining and cflbrt , no artifices are employed to fillip the dulled spirit of tlie reader ; no impertinent ornaments distract the attention from the agony or the woe . Their authors were not literary men , and there was no cxistiny literature by which their efforts Avere measured . Originality was not expected of them , and they were consequently never tempted to call grass purple , to avoid tho imputation of plagiarism , some former writer

    having called it green . There were no critics to show up their failings and shortcomings , or to parade tlieir good things—perhaps a line and a half in length—in italics , as tho juanner of some is . It may fairly be doubted whether the present time is f avourable to tho production of poetry of a . high class ; not , a . s is commonly . sup posed , that there is anything necessarily unpoctical in tho artificial state of society , in the eternal struggle and roar of labour , in tho shifting of the points of interest from green fields and meadows , and the sweet goings on of pastoral life , to the joys , crimes , and'tragedies of men congregated in thousands beneath the smolcc of mighty towns , but mainly from the greatness of existing literature , the prevalence of criticism , and its immediate -application to literary productions . "We can only afford to quote one more passage , and it shall bo

    this;—It is this seeking a " new ontlot for ono ' s self , " which is the cause of nearly all the vices of contemporary literature—of poetry especially . On it may be chnrgnd' tho strain and glitter , tho forced and perverse originality , and the extraordinary innovations in rhythm and measure of which so much is hoard , both in the way of appluuiso and condemnation . Tlio primal emotion s of humanity have been bo fully Hung in Kagland during tho last two hundred yearn , that a pact of the present period , unk-s . ho ia swept away by tho torrent of feeling , or is bold enough—which ho i . s perfectly justified in being—to look upon every situation of life , whether expressed before or not , as merely pooticul material , and to us ( s it for hin own purposes , colour it by hin own mind , shape it by hia own emotion , — in tempted , when h « remembers in a former Writer some consummate expression of an idea , indispensable to the sequence und Stream of emotion , to diverge from the direct path , and to attest his originality

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    JFebrtoby 14 , 1857 . ] T 1 ELE LEADIEE . 133

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Feb. 14, 1857, page 163, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2180/page/19/