melodramatic tableau on which the curtain drops.

The piece, however, was not a melodrama, but a tragedy; or rather, no play of any kind, but a severe reality which may serve better than a tragedy to purify the soul by terror and pity.

(Michaud); M. Jules Simon's review of the "Esquisse," in Revue des deux Mondes, 1841; and M. Louis Binaud's articles on De Maistre and Lamennais in the same review, Aug. 15, 1860, and Feb. 1, 1861.

Since this essay was written, I have ascertained from an unpublished letter of Lamennais that his Irish Ancestor was named Rosse, and that he settled at Saint Malo in the time of James II.

EDGAR QUINET.

THERE are some men who, more than whatever else they may be, are part of the conscience of a nation. Their gladness and strength imply the purity and energy of a people's soul; their mournfulness and anger are witnesses to its moral declension or defeat. Its highest dreams of justice are their thoughts; in them its traditions of virtue are summed up; they are the guardians and chief heirs of what has been bequeathed to a nation by the most vivid moments in its past of fervour and of light. When it betrays its own better nature, they remain faithful, but isolated, and their voices are heard in grieved protesting; when it would finally quench the spirit by a deliberate act of the will, these men become its castaways, scattered abroad in exile.

Edgar Quinet was illustrious as poet, historian, political writer, exponent of literatures and religions, and he added to his titles of distinction that of theorist in physical science. In so many characters did the man appear; but the man himself was first and chiefly part of the conscience of France. Such was the permanent basis which underlay all apparent changes in the nature and direction of his activity; this it was which gave unity to the manifold labours of his life and the singleness of impression which his works, so various in their subjects, leave with the reader, results from the felt presence of a

nature always at one with itself and with the moral order of the world, and always communicating to others a share of its own wholesome warmth and pure light. And thus in days of much doubt and distraction, of half views and half beliefs, and the half action of studious compromise, in days of hesitating advances, followed by hasty and confused retreats, Edgar Quinet had the highest happiness possible in such a time-not glad oneness with a nation illuminated by just and clear ideas, animated by noble passions, and advancing irresistibly to great ends, for that was impossible in France of the present century, but union at least with himself, constant progress in his assigned path, and a spirit so attached to what is real and abiding as to be secure from illusions and their loss.

one.

"I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single No object on the earth has deceived me. Each of them has proved itself precisely what it promised to be. All, even the most paltry, have made good for me what they announced. Flowers, odours, the spring, youth, the happy life in the land of one's birth, good things desired and possessed, did they pledge themselves to be eternal? . . . And it has been the same with men. No friendship of those on which I counted. has failed me, and misfortune has given me some which I had no right to expect. No one has deceived me, no one betrayed me. I have found men as constant to themselves as things. Where is deception, if I am precisely in the place to which I always assigned myself? Where is illusion, if all that I feared has come to pass ? Where is the sting of death,

if I have so often felt it beforehand?

What I have

This confes

loved I have found each day more loveable. Each day justice has appeared to me more holy, liberty more fair, speech more sacred, art more real, reality more artistic, poetry more true, truth more poetical, nature more divine, and what is divine more natural." sion, not the least remarkable of our time, and unlike most others, was written after seven years of exile. The brightness and serenity of the words are yet of an autumnal kind. We feel the presence in them of a breath like that which makes bare the trees, and sets a limit to the pleasure of the year. We become aware by the very tone of their cheerfulness of the working of "kind, calm years exacting their accompt of pain,". which mature the mind.

In any sketch of the life of Edgar Quinet there will be inevitably a good deal of disproportion between its parts. He himself related, with minute and affectionate fidelity, the incidents of the first twenty years of his life, and the charm which belongs to such a narrative tempts one to linger too long among the idyllic scenes of his childhood, and the days, filled with loves and with learning, of his youth. A record of some years of a much more recent date is supplied by the "Mémoires d'Exil" of Madame Quinet, the enthusiastic partaker of her husband's political ideas and accepter of their consequences. But the long period intervening between 1823 and 1858, and again the period of life in Switzerland from 1860 to 1870, can be sketched at best in outline, and even the outline breaks here and there, and leaves a blank. It is not here intended to attempt a complete survey of his career.

Fortunately many of Quinet's works, although containing little that is directly personal, proceed obviously from the circumstances of his position, and supply a kind of undesigned autobiography.

Edgar Quinet was born February 17, 1803, at Bourg, in Ain, that department of France which borders part of the west of Switzerland. The household of which he was a member was made up of strange contrasts and resemblances, full of pleasant lights and shadows, with much of what may be named moral picturesqueness. The father, Jerome Quinet, a commissaire des guerres under the Republic and during the first years of the Empire, was an austere man, undemonstrative, somewhat exacting, impatient of contradiction, one who did not receive or give caresses, and who kept his children at a distance from him by his looks, and words, and bearing. The gaze of his large, blue eyes imposed restraint with silent authority. His mockery, the play of an intellect unsympathetic by resolve and upon principle, was freezing to a child, and the most distinct consciousness which his father's presence produced in the boy was the assurance that he, Edgar, was infallibly about to do something which would cause displeasure. A just, upright, and humane man, of a strong and penetrating intellect, passionately devoted to the study of science, and much occupied about a great work on the Magnetic and Atmospheric Variations of the Globe, of which only the preface ever came to be written and published. To a child such an austere personality is at least an impressive spectacle, though its meaning cannot be truly interpreted until later years.