fall before their Reform Bill (its failure has hitherto kept them alive); they certainly would not survive its success a month. Where are their friends-their support-their allies? The rank-the property-the education-the intelligencethe literature-the commerce of the country?—No, no; these are all their inveterate enemies. Their friends are the populace and the press-the press and the populace-ring the changes as you will-this is the sum of their support. They have, as John Wilkes had before them, the press and the populace; they have, as Colonel Wardell had, the press and the populace; they have, as Queen Caroline had, the press and the populace; and, like Wilkes, and Wardell, and Caroline, the populace and the press will desert or forget them; good sense will resume its authority-deliberation will weigh experience against theory and certainty against chances, and the ministry is gone! Already the real opinion of the public begins to speak in a manner not to be misunderstood. What proof have the ministers that it is still in their favour? where are their facts? We appeal to the elections; will they instance the riots? When we produce the returns for Weymouth, and Grimsby, and Dublin, for Carmarthen, and Forfar, and Pembroke, and Dorsetshire,* will they venture to reply with the tumults of Nottingham, Coventry, and Derby -with Mr. Carpue's intrusive deputation -and Mr. Joseph Hume's window-breaking procession? The radicals are well aware of the real state of the public mind, and they are urging the ministers, their tools, to press on the bill -to strike while the iron is hot! and the ministers will probably obey. If they do, they will be met with a higher spirit of resistnace in both Houses of Parliament, and by an increasing opposition in the country. Common sense, common candour, common prudence warn us to take a breathing time; to allow heats to cool and passions to subside; to inquire into the facts of the case, and ascertain the sober wishes of the people. If the fact should turn out to be, that the King and the people are, and continue, unanimous for reform, what can prevent it?-and what possible evil can arise from living for a few weeks longer under a system which has made us great and happy for centuries? If, as we are so confidently told, a change is inevitable, at least let us be permitted to set about it with enlightened caution and prepense diligence; if amendments of the ancient system be necessary, let them, at least, be such as may, on inquiry and deliberation, prove to be expedient and promise to be safe-such as, while they conciliate existing feelings, may exhibit some respect for the institutions of our ancestors, and some regard for the welfare of our posterity. We might add Liverpool; for Lord Sandon, though a reformer, is a moderate one, and he beat the bill candidate hollow. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.-Mémoires de Madame la Duchesse d'Abrantes; ou Souvenirs historiques sur Napoléon, la Révolution, le Directoire, le Consulat, l'Empire, et la Restauration. 8vo. 4 vols. Paris, 1831. THE flood of memoirs which for ten years past has inundated France, and which, amidst the general withering of literary enterprise consequent on the weak blunders, mean crimes, and blind brutalities of July, 1830, still continues to swell, must be regarded as, in many points of view, worthy of our own attention. This unexampled outburst of anecdote cannot, in the first place, be considered, without forcing on every mind a lively notion of the slavery under which the French press must have groaned throughout the long series of years from the institution of the reign of terror to the restoration of Louis XVIII. Five-tenths, we venture to say, of whatever deserves to be called authentic in these thousands of pages, are occupied with new stories, which, had there existed anything like a free press under the government of the five Sires,' of the three consuls of the republic one and indivisible, or of his imperial and royal Majesty the founder of the fourth dynasty,' must have, in one shape or other, found their way to the public eye soon after the facts to which they refer took place; stories, in short, which, in a country like England, would infallibly have been told in every newspaper of the day. Probably three-fifths more are given to the contradiction, by eye and ear witnesses, silent perforce at the time, of such versions of stories that could not be entirely suppressed, as were put forth by the authority of the revolutionary governments. There remains a comparatively small space for such details, more or less malicious, of the interior of the ruling circles, as might have been unlikely, under any circumstances, to ooze out in contemporary publications; and we may add, a very considerable proportion of which would never, in all probability, have been even committed to writing, unless the fourth dynasty had been crushed at Waterloo. The narratives of that period can hardly, now that we have them, be perused without suggesting reflections of a yet graver order. Many, no doubt, will say with Shakspeare,— There is a history in these men's lives, As yet not come to life.' VOL. XLVI. NO. XCII. Y The The interest of the authentic materials of all sorts comprehended in these recent memoirs is, however, sorely diminished, in consequence of their notorious commixture with others of a far different description. It is no secret, indeed the fact stares every ordinarily intelligent reader in the face, that these works, with hardly an exception, have been got up for the press by professional book-makers, furnished, more or less plentifully as the case might be, with the oral information, MSS. memoranda, private letters, &c. &c. of the persons whose names appear in the titlepages. It is clear enough that even the volumes published under the name of M. de Bourrienne, a person of education and talents, and a practised penman, have undergone this kind of process, the bookseller, we presume, fancying it his interest to display ten diluted rather than five genuine octavos on his counter. At all events, on any other hypothesis, the veracity of the ex-secretary will admit of no defence. The Memoirs of Savary are at least as largely interpolated-those of Fouché much more so; to such an extent, indeed, that many have doubted whether the firm of rédacteurs had had, in that case, any authentic materials at all before them. The confidential Page' may be placed alongside of M. le Duc de Rovigo;' the Memoirs of S. M. l'Impératrice Josephine' even lower than those of 'M. le Duc d'Otranto.' We are inclined to consider the performance now before us as less adulterated-it is more amusing-than any other of the series. It is but too true that no modern memoirs of the French school can be regarded with the pure faith we have been used to bestow on the composition of those pieces which first won for this sort of writing a high rank in the national literature. They are at best imitations of the style and manner of authors long since canonized with European celebrity; their naïvetés are often artificial their very slovenlinesses elaborate; and the Parisian booksellers have been able to engage in their manufactory professed men of letters, so skilful in their trade, that they have contrived, by the cleverness of their lying, to throw suspicion even on the most apparently genuine traits of simplicity that occur in any new production of this order. Nevertheless we are disposed to pronounce this book substantially the work of Madame Junot. She may have been assisted-her language may have been corrected; but throughout the whole strain of the narrative we think no reader can help feeling he has before him one and the same mind. If it be otherwise-if the work be to any considerable extent a forgery, it does credit to the dramatic talent of the author. He has succeeded in sustaining the character of the nominal narrator throughout with happy effect. From beginning to end there does not occur a page which one one could fancy to have been written by any pen but that of a French woman, and a Frenchwoman exactly of this particular class and time-the vain, prying, tattling, and indelicate, but shrewd and clever flirt of the period of transition. Like most creatures of the Revolution, Madame Junot betrays wonderful anxiety to connect herself with those pomps and yanities which the Revolution overthrew. She spends whole chapters on the alleged descent of her mother from the imperial house of the Comneni-a story at which Napoleon always laughed, although these soi-disants Comneni of Corsica were very eager to have made out the Buonapartes to be a branch of their tree-but which certainly appears to have found favour with the heralds of Louis XVI., since this lady's uncle was, on the strength of its accuracy, admitted, in 1784, to the privilege of les carosses du roi. We know enough of heralds' colleges to put slender faith in any of their judgments at any time; but the proverbially unprincipled conduct of the French establishments of this kind during the reigns of Louis XV. and his successor, their open and shameless venality, might, if that were otherwise, serve as our apology for adopting on this particular occasion the Pyrrhonism of Napoleon. Leaving that weighty point, therefore, in dubio, until the proofs which Madame Junot talks of shall have been made public, or at least examined by some person of real learning and unimpeached character, we shall only observe, that granting all the Duchess says to be true, her high-born mother was the wife of a Sieur Permon, who made no pretension to any sort of noblesse; he was an adventurer, employed, at the time of his marriage, in the commissariat of the French troops in Ajaccio -served afterwards in a similar capacity in North America-and at length obtained some post in the Finance, which, as our authoress speaks of it, seems by no means to account for even the moderate style of expense in which the family are described as living when the Revolution broke out. M. Permon, in short, was a mere roturier; and whether his wife was or was not allied to the blood of the old emperors of Trebisond, would have signified but little in the opinion of those circles of Paris and Versailles among which his daughter would fain persuade us her natural position, in the absence of revolution, must have been. In fact, she in one passage lets out the truth as to this matter very distinctly the mother, she says, found herself so treated in society, in consequence of her marriage, that, in spite of all her imperial blood, she became a fervent revolutionist; while, oddly enough,' (we use the Duchess's own expression,) M. Permon himself remained a royalist. Whatever else may be odd enough,' Madame Junot should consider that her father, who appears to have been neither a bad nor a bright man, could not exactly have foreseen that the Y 2 storm storm about to ravage his country would, on its subsidence, exhibit the daughter of an obscure underling in one of the public offices of Paris as a Madame la Maréchale d'Abrantes, admiring the 'delicious little hands' of an Emperor of the French and King of Italy,' ces mains dont la plus coquette des femmes se serait enorgueillie, et dont la peau blanche et douce recouvrait des muscles d'acier, des os de diamant,'-yet which, peradventure, would have found fewer admirers, but for their connexion with unfigurative steel, and gems still more brilliant than those of rhetoric. Mademoiselle Permon was a mere child when the Revolution began; she was, however, a clever child, in a lively, talkative family, that suffered severely in consequence of the father's loyalty during the early part of the tempest; and her report not only of what she heard, but, young as she was, saw of its terrors, is full of interest. Perhaps, indeed, these little detached scenes and incidents, impressed on the imagination of an infant, give a clearer conception of the interior workings of the national poison, than could be gathered from the more systematic descriptions of many maturer observers. These, being more capable of understanding the influences in operation, and watching, consequently, their wider effects, have dwelt but little on those minutia which were all in all to her. They give broad sketches of horror-she deals in foregrounds, where every touch is sharp, every rueful detail in relief. 'Yes,' she says, 'I was very young in those days, and yet everything has graven itself ineffaceably on my memory. The solemn character of events on which the fate of a great nation depended, influenced, perhaps, the eyes with which I observed them. I think, indeed, that in this respect it was the same with all the females of my standing : we have had neither childhood nor youth. For me, I recall none of those joys of very early youth-that careless spring which strikes sorrow itself with lethargy-all that gives to that period of life a colour which, no doubt, soon vanishes no more to reappear, but never without leaving imperishable impressions behind. Scarcely had my young intelligence awoke, ere I had to learn the lesson of watching habitually a word, a gesture. Even in our games, that second life of childhood, this feeling was with us: I shall never forget that a domiciliary visit took place in the house to which we had retreated at Toulouse-that my father was all but arrested, because in playing at La Tour, prend garde! I had said to an infant of five years, "Toi, tu seras Monsieur le Dauphin."'-vol. i. p. 6. Among other incidents of a like kind we may quote her account of a domiciliary visit in their house at Paris. About the beginning of the revolution, a working-man, by name Thirion, had established himself in a little stall near them, where he carried on his business as a mender of carpets. He called one morning to ask M. Permon's |