written than the work of Lord Brougham, and we are also in a position to contend that its arrangement is in every respect preferable. Condorcet follows the succession and sequence of events in their natural order in point of time, whereas Lord Brougham jumps from 1718 to 1713, from 1713 to 1769;-from the Edipe to the case of Serven;-from Voltaire's Catiline to Livy, Cicero, Sallust, and Ben Jonson; from Homer and Aristophanes to Corneille, Racine, and special jurymen! This tenebrous fatras is not only ill-timed, but tedious and tiresome. It is against all rule, and against all precedent, and cannot be sufficiently reprobated. Our own language furnishes as many models for such kind of biography as an intellectual people desire. Had Lord Brougham followed the example of Johnson, or Scott, or Southey, and narrated events simply in their order, without any effort to make a parade of his learning, his book would have been readable, and probably might have been useful; but as it is now presented to the public, it must eventually go the way of the perishable.

Little or nothing of the personal history of Voltaire is related in these volumes, and some of the little condescended on, is incorrectly given. It is not stated, for instance, that Voltaire was exceedingly careful of his personal appearance, that he paid a minute attention to his health, and was foppish and somewhat finical in his dress. Let me beg of you' (says he in a letter to the Marchioness de Mimeure) to send me the little plaster you 'promised me for the pimple which is come above my eye. Do not 'imagine this is foppery; my eyes begin to be of no further im'portance to me but as they serve me to read with. Indeed, I no longer fear the eyes of any person.' The loss of his teeth, and the scurvy, also gave him great concern. His personal appearance was considerably altered, and his humour affected by these illnesses. Lord Brougham makes no allusion to this fact. But that which among all his maladies most affected Voltaire, was his being attacked, in his twenty-ninth year, by the smallpox-a disease which had the effect of materially altering the expression of his countenance. On this passage of his life, too, Lord Brougham is silent. This event-we mean the catching of the small-pox-occurred at the country-house of the President des Maisons; and Voltaire gives an account of the circumstances in an interesting letter in his correspondence, wherein he states that he was cured by eight emetics and 200 pints of lemonade. He had scarcely departed from the Château of the President, recovered from the disorder, when a fire broke out in the apartment he had just left, which consumed several of the adjoining rooms and others underneath, with all their valuable furniture. The

loss amounted to nearly 100,000 livres, above £4000 of our money.

The acrimony, irritability, and sensibility to attack of Voltaire at all periods of his life is not even once glanced at; and surely these are characteristic though discommendable features of a literary biography. Any hostile criticism excited in the highest degree Voltaire's nervous sensibility, and he never knew peace or rest till he had discovered the author. Jealous of fame, he became when attacked anxious and excitable, and did not recover his spirits for several days. In no respect are these feelings more shown than in his quarrel with J. B. Rousseau, in which he descended to offensive personalities, distinguished by a venom for which even the wit does not atone. What would be thought in our day of one literary man objecting to another, that his mother had been a menial, and his father a journeyman shoemaker?— yet such are the accusations that Voltaire brings against J. B. Rousseau.

On Voltaire's quarrels with the booksellers, Lord Brougham is altogether silent, yet a most amusing chapter might be made on that subject alone. On the order, economy, and prudence with which he managed his own affairs, his lordship says not a word; yet, Voltaire was the first writer who ever acquired a great fortune, without filling any of those posts which usually lead to wealth and honours. It is not stated that he inherited a patrimony of above £4000 with which he bought a life-annuity, thus nearly doubling his income; neither are we told that the subscriptions for the Henriade in London, produced him £6250, which he laid out in a lottery, in a company who realized by the speculation a million of livres. Neither is it stated, that he had a share in the contract for furnishing the army with provisions during the war in Italy, in 1733, which brought him 700,000 livres, nearly £30,000, and with which he likewise purchased annuities. We are not told that he had a share in a rich mercantile house at Cadiz, which was very successful-that he was connected with M. de Molin in the corn-trade-with the Abbé Moussinot in the sale of pictures that he enjoyed pensions from several sovereignsthat the King of Prussia, when he went to Berlin, gave him a pension of 23,000 livres, £950-and that when he left Berlin in 1753, he lodged above £20,000 in the hands of M. Fronchin, a Lyonnese banker, the fruits of his Majesty's generosity, and the profits he had made by his writings in Prussia, and elsewhere. Lord Brougham also omits to inform us, that his brother, who died in 1741, Treasurer of the Chamber of Accounts, left him the greater part of what he possessed: neither does it appear in this bald and meagre performance, that he kept, and perhaps was the only literary man who ever kept a regular ledger. In one of the letters of

that correspondence which Lord Brougham blames Condorcet for not having availed himself of, and which he has not at all referred to himself, he says, 'I am become overseer of the workmen I write their names every day in a large account book.' A good accountant was, in Voltaire's idea, a superior person, and there is, through all his works, a leaning to financiers. Thus, in Babouc, speaking of the tribe, he says, "They are inflated clouds, which return in rain the dew they have sucked from the bosom of 'the earth.' On these details, Lord Brougham is silent-we were about to say ignorant, but that it is well known the ex-chancellor is ignorant of nothing.

Lord Brougham in speaking of the family of Voltaire, states that his mother (Madlle. D'Aumart) was of a noble family of Poitou; but this nowhere appears authentically. It is said, in the memoirs of the time, that one René d'Aumart obtained the character in that province, of being a clever man and an agreeable poet; but no mention is made of the family as noble, in Lainé's Dictionnaire des Maisons Nobles. One of the grossest errors in these volumes is the statement of Lord Brougham, that, during the representation of Edipe, Madame la Maréchale de Villars asked who the young man was who was trying to have the play condemned; and that upon being told it was the author himself, she was so much struck with the originality, that she desired to have him presented to her- Becoming one of her circle,' says Lord Brougham, 'he 'conceived for her the first, and probably the only passion which he ' ever seriously felt.' Here are two of the gravest mistakes: it was not the only passion he ever felt, and Madame la Maréchale was not the person for whom he so felt at all. In a letter to M. d'Aigueberre, in the correspondence (which Lord B. charges Condorcet with not having read, but of which it is clear he knows little himself) he says: The enthusiasm of the pit was so extravagant 'that they demanded to see me, in the most clamorous manner. I was carried forcibly into the box belonging to the lady of 'Maréchal Villars, who was there with her daughter-in-law. The 'audience were frantic, they called out for the Duchess de Villars 'to kiss me, and made so much noise she was obliged to comply 'by order of her mother-in-law. I was kissed in public as Alain Chartier was by the Princess Margaret of Scotland.' It was for the lady who kissed him, the Duchess, and not the Maréchale, that Voltaire felt the passion ascribed to him.

The following criticism is the most judicious in the work, and the least faulty in point of composition. The reader, however, will observe that there is a great stiffness in the periods-that they do not flow on fully and harmoniously.

It is certain that the tragedies of Voltaire, are the works of an extraordinary genius, and that only a great poet could have produced

them; but it is equally certain that they are deficient for the most part in that which makes the drama powerful over the feelingsreal pathos, real passion, whether of tenderness, of terror, or of horror. The plots of some are admirably contrived; the diction of all is pure and animated; in most passages it is pointed, and in many it is striking, grand, impressive; the characters are frequently well imagined and portrayed, though without sufficient discrimination; and thus often running one into another, from the uniformity of the language, terse, epigrammatic, powerful, which all alike speak. Nor are there wanting situations of great effect, and single passages of thrilling force; but, after all, the heart is not there; the deep feeling, which is the parent of all true eloquence as well as of all true poetry, didactic and satirical excepted, is rarely perceived; it is rather rhetoric than eloquence, or, at least, rather eloquence than poetry. It is declamation of a high order in rhyme; no blank verse, indeed, can be borne on the French stage, or even in the French tongue; it is not fine dramatic composition; the periods roll from the mouth, they do not spring from the breast; there is more light than heat; the head rather than the heart is at work. It seems that if there be any exception to this remark, we must look for it in the Zaire,' his most perfect piece, although, marvellous to tell, it was written in two and twenty days. In my humble opinion, it is certainly obnoxious to the same general objection, though less than any of his other pieces; yet it is truly a noble performance, and it unites many of the great requisites of dramatic excellence. The plot, which, he tells us, was the work of a single day, is one of the most admirable ever contrived for the stage, and it is a pure creation of fancy. Nothing can be conceived more full of interest and life and spiritnothing more striking than the combinations and the positions to which it gives rise, while at the same time it is quite natural, quite easy to conceive-in no particular violating probability. Nor can anything be more happy or more judicious than the manner in which we are, at the very first, brought into the middle of the story, and yet soon find it unravelled and presented before our eyes without long and loaded narrative retrospects. Then the characters are truly drawn with a master's hand, and sustained perfectly and throughout both in word and in deed. Orosman, uniting the humanized feelings of an amiable European with the unvoidable remains of the Oriental nature-ambitious, and breathing war, more than becomes our character, yet generous and simple-minded; to men imperious, but as it were by starts, when the Tartar predominates; to women delicate and tender, as if the Goth or the Celt prevailed in the harem; unable to eradicate the jealousy of the East, yet, like the European, too proud not to be ashamed of it as a degradation, and thus subduing it in all instances but one, when he his hurried away by the Asiatic temperament and strikes the fatal blow, which cannot lessen our admiration, nor even wholly destroy our esteem. The generous nature of Nourestan and Lusignan excites our regard, and perhaps, alone of all the perfect characters in epic or in dramatic poetry, they are no way tiresome or flat. But

Zaire herself, unlike other heroines, is, if not the first, at least equal to the first, of the personages in touching the reader and engaging his affections. Nothing can be conceived more tender; and the conflict between her passion for the Sultan and her affection for her family, between her acquired duty, to the crescent and her hereditary inclination to the cross, is most beautifully managed.'

There is much in these observations that is true. Here, however, we must be permitted to enter a department of criticism which may not be familiar to some of our readers, but of which every man must have contrived to form a just idea who would be competent to judge of the merits of that extraordinary class of writers-the French dramatists, men whose works hold a wide and conspicuous place in the history of general literature, and furnish a most vivid picture of French society during the last century. It must be remembered, then, in criticising Voltaire's tragedies, that these productions, like the speeches of certain orators, (Lord Brougham among the number,) were made to be spoken, not to be read-to be acted not criticised. To theatrical effect, to the illusion of the scene,-to the physical impression of the moment, to the prejudices, in a word, of a Parisian Parterre, -Voltaire sacrificed nearly everything. His only end and object was to be applauded by the pit of his day, and he fully succeeded. It may be said, that there has been no great dramatic poet who did not consult these prejudices, and that the French poet who is most read-Racine-most consulted them. But there is this difference between Voltaire and Racine, that the latter fairly subdued the Parterre, while the former succumbed to it. Racine never pandered to the reigning perjudices; he openly avowed that he would prefer being hissed for having written Phèdre in his own fashion, than he would be applauded for having written it after the manner of Pradon. He consulted his own taste, rather than the popular will; whereas Voltaire, who had become a tragic poet to amuse himself, and from caprice surrendered his own judgment and better taste, and, in order to please, promptly and electrically consulted only the passions and prejudices of the habitués and claqueurs. Hence it is, that so much is left, in his tragedies and theatrical pieces, to the imagination,-to the effects of the machinist,-to coups de theâtre,-to scenery and decorations.

Hence it is, also, that in the characters, however generally well developed and well drawn, we find more pains bestowed on the declamation on the exaggeration of passion-on the pomp, circumstance, and exterior show of the scene and situation, than on those deep and durable emotions of the heart, in painting which, our own Shakespeare was so consummate a master. No