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affections his ill-conduct could never estrange, deeply as she was grieved at his obduracy, thought only of sparing his feelings, and took care that he should never be left alone with the clergyman, whose arguments might disturb and harass, but could produce no good effect. Some months after, he died, and made no sign.' The public attention has been lately re-awakened by Mr. Croker's new edition of Boswell, to the Life of Johnson. It is remarkable how nearly the doctor and Diderot occupy the same period in the literary history of their respective countries. The former was born in 1709-the latter in 1713,-they both died in the same year, 1784. Both may be fairly called literary adventurers, a term, which if it is used to describe men who have forced their way by their own talents and against the most adverse circumstances to distinction, instead of being one of reproach, is one rather of the highest honour. Both were cast pennyless and friendless on a great metropolis, suffered the utmost privations, submitted to the lowest literary drudgery, were the bounden slaves of the booksellers; both emerged to fame, to comparatively easy circumstances, to cultivated society; if the one was courted by a foreign sovereign, Johnson received marks and expressions of respect from his own. The parallel may even be drawn somewhat closer,-each wrote with but moderate success for the stage-each, in his own way, was a novelist; and the great work of the English Dictionary may be placed, as to extent and labour, in competition with the Encyclopédie. But the moral contrast!-On one side, the deep, the conscientious, the morbid religion; the stern and uncompromising moral sense, which would not tamper for an instant with any right or decent feeling; the almost Stoic pride of virtue; the principles, petrified at times into prejudices; the reverence for all that was fixed, established, or venerable, bordering close on bigotry ;—on the other, the total want of any settled or definite creed or opinion, the perverse delight in calling into question, and submitting to a cold analysis, the most sacred principles, the most instinctive feelings, the common decencies of our nature. There was no virtue of which Diderot would not argue the possible error, no vice of which he would not scrutinize the conceivable advantage,-whatever was generally acknowledged or reverenced, was already half-condemned. Hence, while the biography of our countryman is suited to all ages, to each sex, and gives a picture of society at once most amusing and most instructive-the most shameless man will at times be inclined to close the other in disgust, and will pursue it to the end merely to trace, if possible, the formation of a character, which, with many kind, and generous, and humane feelings, presents, in one respect, we hope almost a singular phenomenon of depravity. As the genuine or apocryphal Memoirs of M. Fouché are curious from their exhibition of a mind in which the principle of political honesty seems to

be

be not merely in abeyance, but so utterly extinct as never to occur to the thoughts; so in Diderot the common sacred instinct of decency, that which distinguishes man from the lower animals, is absolutely and entirely eradicated.

But this contrast is not only remarkable as regards the two individuals, but as representing to a certain degree the state of society in each country. We mean not that in the Savages or Churchills of London, we might not have found a nearer resemblance to Diderot; and, unless much belied, the fraternity of the < Monks of Medenham,' (a beautiful retreat by the Thames, where Wilkes shone in all his brilliancy, and led the orgies,) might have entered into some rivalry with the philosophic coterie at Grandval; yet in one country it was the prevailing tone and character of the times, in the other it was an exception-it retired from the eye of day, it was spoken of with a general murmur of trembling disapprobation. We must not now embark on the ever-agitated and never perhaps clearly definable causes of the appalling crisis which closed the last century; neither on the destructive elements which united to explode the whole surface of French society with such volcanic fury; nor the conservative principles which were then able to save England from a like fate. We would only observe that one main difference was the comparative depravation of the public morals. Where men like Diderot were po pular writers, it is no wonder that men like Marat or Robespierre arose to deluge the capital with blood. But, on the other hand, the views of the republican writers, of the vigorous and able Mignet, for instance, are not, it must be confessed, without some truth and justice. The profligacy of the court, we would add the desecration of religion by too many of its ministers, led to that state of public feeling of which the Encyclopedists were but the organs and representatives. While the king was in the 'parc aux cerfs,' and the highest honours of religion were bestowed on a flagitious debauchee, who can wonder that Voltaire and Diderot reigned paramount over the tastes and opinions of on-lookers? What throne, of which the despotic authority was wielded in succession by the mistress-wife, the widow of Scarron, the queen in all but name-by the regent Orleans-and by De Pompadour and Du Barri, could long stand? what church, of which Dubois was a cardinal? If the philosophers were the immediate parents of the revolution, they were the lineal descendants of the corruptions and vices of the court, and of the higher orders. Whoever has read that most instructive as well as amusing work, the complete edition of St. Simon's Memoirs,' will scarcely wonder that the elements of such a society should be thrown, in but a few years, into the most appalling dissolution. The feeble and irresolute opposition which the court, and even the church offered to the philosophers,

philosophers, was a fearful indication of their own weakness, of their enemies' strength. It had all the bigotry of intolerance, without the religious sincerity; the malignity of persecution, without its terrors. Voltaire was alternately exiled and caressed; Diderot was thrown into prison, not because he lived by insulting the religion and corrupting the morals of the nation, but because he had risked a jest on a minister's mistress. In the church, no man of station or dignity vindicated the truth of religion; a few irregular and mostly very inferior skirmishers appeared, who were transfixed by Voltaire on the point of an epigram, or pursued, while no one appeared in their behalf, with incessant vollies of contemptuous satire. No Bossuet appeared to thunder-no Fenelon to win the hearts of men back to Christian love and humanity. The author of perhaps the best work against Voltaire, the Lettres de quelques Juifs,' the Abbé Guenée, at last obtained a poor canonry. Even of the parochial clergy, though we believe that many of them fully justified Burke's splendid panegyric, yet too many, we fear, submitted like the Curé who officiated at Grandval, to be the jest of the society. Mass was duly performed amidst all the indecencies and impieties of that house; the ladies used to assemble in the billiard-room, or in Diderot's chamber, which commanded a view of the chapel, and in their respect for the solemnity of the service, calculated to how great a distance the salutary effects of a mass would reach. But we are travelling too far from our record, and must conclude by expressing our satisfaction, that this life and correspondence of Diderot constitute a work almost as much out of character with the present predominant tone of French literature as with our own. It is the posthumous offspring, to borrow Dryden's nervous language, of a lubrique and adulterate age,' which we hope, if not gone by for ever, will never again corrupt at least the higher literature of a most cultivated and intellectual nation. That literature may yet Bear some tokens of the sable streams'

its most finished, most musical, most graceful lyrist may abuse the licence of an erotic poet; but in all the more dignified walks of letters the morals of the Encyclopedists appear, we rejoice to say, to be about as much exploded as their philosophy; and a Diderot, despite the filial blindness of a daughter, or the partiality of an editor, is likely to be judged in Paris as in London, according to that verdict, which we have extracted from one of the most accomplished of living writers-M. de Barante-whose spirited and picturesque history of the Dukes of Burgundy has more than fulfilled the promise of his elegant and philosophic essay on the literature of the eighteenth century.

ART.

ART. II.-1. The Birds of America, engraved from Drawings made in the United States. By John James Audubon, F. R. S., &c. Vol. I. Folio. London. 1831.

2. Ornithological Biography; or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America; interspersed with Delineations of American Scenery and Manners. By the same Author. Vol. I. 8vo. Edinburgh. 1831.

3. American Ornithology; of the United States. Lucien Buonaparte. F.R.S., &c. 4 vols. stable's Miscellany.)

or the Natural History of the Birds By Alexander Wilson and Charles Edited by Robert Jameson, Esq., Edinburgh. 1831. (Printed in Con

By

4. Fauna Boreali-Americana; or the Zoology of the Northern Parts of British America. Part Second.-The Birds. William Swainson, Esq., F.R.S., and John Richardson, M.D., F.R.S. 4to. London. 1831.

AN accurate knowledge of natural history is rarely advanced by

the publication of general systems, for there are few minds at once so laboriously persevering, and of such comprehensive power, as to be enabled to acquire, combine, and communicate the total results which lie scattered over the surface of so vast a field. But either the elucidation of a particular department of the science, viewed under all its known relations, or an exhibition of the science itself, considered in its universality only so far as regards a particular country, is a more attainable object, and one more likely, from the comparative ease of execution, to be attended by a successful issue. Still more judicious are those authors who prescribe limits, not only to the subject which they embrace, but to the localities with which that subject is connected,-and hence the higher value of works like those before us, compared with the more ambitious efforts of the system-maker: the one class is the result either of personal observation, where such has been possible, or of very careful and assiduous comparison of written records;-the other is too often a hasty and ill-concocted amalgamation of statements, generally erroneous in their first anouncement, and in no way rendered less fallacious by the lapse of time, or the frequency of repetition.

In no department of intellectual exertion is the propriety of the division of labour more necessary to be kept in remembrance than in that of natural history; and in none is the adherence to a clear and consistent system of arrangement so indispensable. A prejudice has no doubt arisen in the minds of many general readers against the systematic compendiums of modern naturalists, on account of the repulsive form in which their lucubrations

lucubrations are too often presented. In like manner, and with equal reason, the systematic student, who seeks for precise and distinct definitions, finds no satisfaction in those vague and misty declamations wherein the mirage of a lively imagination raises from their proper position, and magnifies into undue dimensions— (under the misused name of popular science)—a few facts, which are probably of no essential value even when seen under their natural aspect, and become worse than useless when gazed on through that deceptive medium. As well might a Sicilian mariner, while witnessing the delusive glories of the fata morgana, endeavour to secure a local habitation in that world of gorgeous cloudland,' as the student of natural history expect to obtain a knowledge of nature's works from those other equally unsubstantial, though printed, pageants. We can easily indeed imagine what conjuration and what mighty magic' would ensue from a combination of the higher powers of genius with those more exact and discriminating habits of observation which are essential to the naturalist,—and how beautifully the attributes of the poet might be blended with those of the philosopher,

'Recompensing well

The strength they borrow with the grace they lend.' As the appropriate business of poetry, according to Mr. Wordsworth, is to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear to be, not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to exist to the senses and the passions of mankind,-there might, no doubt, be some danger of a rather spurious offspring rising upon us, were any science of observation thus' married to immortal verse.' Still, however, we hope to see at least the dawning of that better day, when works of science shall be accurate and popular at one and the same time, when the rigid observer of facts shall not disdain to dress them in a pleasant and even ornamental garb,-when dull detail shall no longer be substituted for graphic description,and when, instead of the repulsive features of morose and jealous system-makers, we shall continually behold what Milton has beautifully called the bright countenance of truth shining amid the still air of delightful studies.'

We see indeed, with unfeigned regret, that those vain disputations, which we had fondly hoped would have found a sufficiently extended space in the soiled arena of politics, or through the tortuous and hollow ways of polemical discussion, are now spreading their baneful influence over the peaceful domains of science, where

More pellucid streams,

An ampler ether, a diviner air,
And fields invested with purpureal gleams,'
2 A

VOL. XLVII. NO, XCIV.

might

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