and candid mind of Machiavelli shows itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language. The style of Montesquieu, on the other hand, indicates in every page a lively and ingenious, but an unsound mind. Every trick of expression, from the mysterious conciseness of an oracle to the flippancy of a Parisian coxcomb, is employed to disguise the fallacy of some positions, and the triteness of others. Absurdities are brightened into epigrams;— truisms are darkened into enigmas. It is with difficulty that the strongest eye can sustain the glare with which some parts are illuminated, or penetrate the shade in which others are concealed.

The political works of Machiavelli derive a peculiar interest from the mournful earnestness which he manifests whenever he touches on topics connected with the calamities of his native land. It is difficult to conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man, condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic language of the prophet, he was "mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw"-disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened and flourishing people given over to the ferocity of ignorant savages. Though his opinions had not escaped the contagion of that political immorality which was common among his countrymen, his natural disposition seems to have been rather stern and impetuous than pliant and artful. When the misery and degradation of Florence, and the foul outrage which he had himself sustained, raised his mind, the smooth craft of his profession and his nation is exchanged for the honest bitterness of scorn and anger. He speaks like one sick of the calamitous times and abject people among whom his lot is cast. He pines for the strength and glory of ancient Rome, for the fasces of Brutus and the sword of Scipio, the gravity of the curule chair, and the bloody pomp of the triumphal sacrifice. He seems to be transported back to the days when eight hundred thousand Italian warriors sprung to arms at the rumour of a Gallic invasion. He breathes all the spirit of those intrepid and haughty patricians, who forgot the dearest ties of nature in the claims of public duty, who looked with disdain on the elephants and on the gold of Pyrrhus, and listened with unaltered composure to the tremendous tidings of Cannæ. Like an ancient temple deformed by the barbarous architecture of a later age, his character acquires au interest from the very circumstances which debase it. The original proportions are rendered more striking by the contrast which they present to the mean and incongruous additions.

The influence of the sentiments which we have described, was not apparent in his writings alone. His enthusiasm, barred from the career which it would have selected for itself, seems to have found a vent in desperate levity. He enjoyed a vindictive pleasure in outraging the opinions of a society which he despised. He became careless of those decencies which were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and political world. The sarcastic bitterness of his conversation disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of

the wise.

The historical works of Machiavelli still remain to be considered. The life of Castruccio Castracani will occupy us for a very short time, and would scarcely have demanded our notice, had it not attracted a much greater share of public attention than it deserves. Few books, indeed, could be more interesting than a careful and judicious account, from such a pen, of the illustrious Prince of Lucca, the most eminent of those Italian chiefs, who, like Pisistratus and Gelon, acquired a power felt rather than seen, and resting, not on law or on prescription, but on the public favour and on their great personal qualities. Such a work would exhibit to us the real nature of that species of sovereignty, so singular, and so often misunderstood, which the Greeks denominated tyranny, and which, modified in some degree by the feudal system, re-appeared in the commonwealths of Lombardy and Tuscany. But this little composition of Machiavelli is in no sense a history. It has no pretensions to fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a very successful trifle. It is scarcely more authentic than the novel of Belphegor, and is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the History of his native city. It was written by the command of the Pope, who, as chief of the house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters of Cosmo, of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated with a freedom and impartiality equally honourable to the wrier and to the patron. The =miseries and humiliations of dependence, the read which is more bitter than every other food, the stairs which are more painful than every other ascent,* had not broken the spirit of Machiavelli. The most corrupting post in a corrupting profession, had not deprived the generous heart of Clement.

The History does not appear to be the fruit o much industry or research. It is unquestionably inaccurate. But it is elegant, lively, and picturesque, beyond any other in the Italian language. The reader, we believe, carries away from it a more vivid and a more faithful impression of the national character and manners than from more corret accounts. The truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient than to modern literature. It is in the style, not of Davila and Clarendon, but of Herodotus and Tacitus: and the classical histories may almost be calld romances founded in fact. The relation is, no doubt, in all its principal oints, strictly true. But the numerous little incidents which heighten the inerest, the words, the gestures, the looks, are evidently furnished by the imagination of the author. The fashion of later times is different. A more eact narrative is given by the writer. It may be doubted whether more eact notions are conveyed to the reader. The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not aware, that thebest histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but auch is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great caracteristic features are imprinted on the mind for ever.

The History terminates with the death Lorenzo de' Medici. Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue it to a later period. But his death prevented the execution of his design and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy evolved on Guicciardini. Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last

• Dante. Paradiso, Caro xvii.

struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death, monarchy was finally established,-not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the constitution and feelings of his countrymen, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble, bigotted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in strict accordance with their own daily practice, afforded a pretext for blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned, misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the church, abused with all the rancour of simulated virtue, by the minions of a base despotism, and the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy. For more than two hundred years his bones lay undistinguished. At length, an English nobleman paid the last honours to the greatest statesman of Florence. In the church of Santa Croce, a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated with reverence by all who can distinguish the vrtues of a great mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age;—and which will be approached with still deeper homage when the object to which his public life was devoted shall be attained,— when the foreign yoke shal be broken, when a second Proccita shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the street: of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient war-cry-Popolo; popolo; muoiano i tiranni!*

JEFFERSON.+

Jefferson's understanding and character were of a plain, bold, and practical cast-full of activity and strength. But neither in his politics, science or literature, do we see anysign of genius or depth. His speculations are chiefly interesting from our uriosity to learn the opinions of so celebrated a person. There is scarce atincture visible from first to last, among all his multifarious disquisitions, o real philosophical sagacity, inventive observation, or refinement of tast. Independent and incorruptible himself, he was proud of the virtue of the party with which he acted, and confident in his belief that the popular wll, whilst unvitiated by the perverse laws and corrupt habits of communitis where commerce and distinction of orders had prevailed, might be trustd as the sole principle of government. This personal uprightness, and the confiding reliance in the trustworthiness of human nature, under such cicumstances, at least, as the population of the United States is placed in, ar in singular contrast with the boundless suspicions he is always broodingover in the case of his federal opponents, and

* The character of Machiavelli is bautifully and graphically delineated in the Review of the first part of Dugald Stewart's Introducion to the Encyclopædia Britannica. The article displays great and various erudition, contains seeral masterly sketches of our most distinguished philosophers, and is written with power, dignit, and elegance. It was contributed by Sir James Mackintosh. See Vol. xxvii. page 209.

Jefferson's Memoirs and Corresponence. Now first published from the Original Manuscripts, edited by Thomas Jefferson Randolph. 4 Vols. 8vo. London, 1829.-Vol. li. page 496. July,

the sweeping denunciations which he promulgates against the privileged classes of Europe.

We have seen that he was constantly pining after what he felt to be his true vocation. The interest which attends the literary pursuits and opinions of men eminent in the practical part of life, has led us to look attentively for the traces of them scattered up and down these volumes. They show him to have been so plainly destined for an enterprising scholar, rather than a master, that we cannot count him as one of the sacrifices which, in free countries, the sciences are always offering up at the altar of patriotism or ambition. The Notes on Virginia (his only professed work) were originally written as answers to some questions put to him by a foreigner. A French translation of some private copies having appeared, their publication in 1787 became scarcely a matter of choice. They contain a great deal of useful knowledge, told very agreeably. But the most striking thing about them, is the evidence which they give of some secret force of character behind, by producing an effect out of all proportion either with the real importance of the subject, or any apparent superiority in the author. There is a weightiness, certainly, always in good sense, when it is at once earnest and unpretending. But sincerity and moral courage are imposing auxiliaries; and these great characteristics of his mind were not more strongly exhibited in after-life, than in the directness with which he here tells the Virginians what he thinks the truth, on such irritable questions as slavery and their own defective constitution, however unpalatable the truths might be.

Jefferson, as the friend of La Fayette, and the representative of a country whose revolutionary precedent was regarded as so perfect a model, that its authority was "treated like that of the Bible, open to explanation, but not to question," had extraordinary opportunities, whilst at Paris, of ascertaining the course which the French Revolution was about to take. His opinions, however, rose and fell with the events of the day; and though he made all proper allowances for "three ages without national morality," and thought that the generation of Frenchmen who began that bold experiment were not sufficiently virtuous and enlightened themselves to reap the fruits of it, yet he left France, satisfied that all would end happily in a year. His criticisms in philosophy frequently evince as little foresight and comprehensiveness as his most sanguine political anticipations. He informs us of an Abbé at Paris, in 1788, who had shaken, if not destroyed, the received theory for explaining the phenomenon of the rainbow. He considers the merit of Herschel to be confined to that of being a good optician only. He had not the prejudice of Buffon to speak of chemistry as a kind of cookery, and to put the laboratory on a footing with the kitchen; but he censures Lavoisière's attempt at introducing a systematic nomenclature, as probably an age too soon, and as calculated to retard the progress of science by a jargon, in which the reformation of this year must be again reformed the next. Not being fond of merely abstract reading, it is not singular that he should, apparently, have had no fixed opinions on the metaphysics of morals since they are important only as a matter of abstract reasoning; for nature, fortunately, has taken care that a difference in our premises here makes no difference in our conclusion. In one place it is said, that “morals are too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain combinations of the head. She laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in science. For one man of science, there are thousands who

are not. What would have become of them? The moral sense is as much a part of a man as his leg or arm. State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor," etc. Afterwards, thanking Dr. Price for a copy of his book, he agrees, we may well admit morality to be the child of the understanding, rather than of the senses, when we observe that it becomes dear to us as the latter weaken, and as the former grows stronger by time and experience, till the hour arrives in which all other objects lose their value." At a later period, he returns to the belief, that a moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as the sense of seeing. Our English moralists will be more surprised at the standard work on this subject which, when writing to his ward, he puts at the head of the good books that are to encourage and direct his feelings: "The writings of Sterne, particularly, form the best course of morality that ever was written."

Jefferson was American to the back-bone. A boiling temperament would make him naturally "a good hater;" but a love of his country, and what he supposed to be her interests, steadily guided him in choosing the objects of his antipathy. His general thirst for knowledge was under the influence of the same passion, and mainly directed to those sources which were likely to satisfy not only his curiosity, but his patriotic feelings. His investigations into Climate conclude with a preference of that of America (principally on account of its greater clearness) over that of the parts of Europe with which he was acquainted. His reasonable denial of the theory, by which Raynal supposes that Europeans migrating to America must degenerate, leads him to question also the fact, as copied by De Paw and Robertson from Ulloa, of the inferiority of the native Indians; and to doubt as an unwarrantable assumption, the excess of moisture, to which Buffon had attributed this result. Jefferson had collected, at one time, fifty vocabularies of the aboriginal tribes within his reach, extending to about two hundred and fifty words. Of these about seventy-three words were common to the Asiatic lists of one hundred and thirty words, as formed by Pallas. A comparison of languages seems the only chance of furnishing something like a key among the hundred theories concerning the origin of the Indian tribes. But there was also a stimulating encouragement in the suspicion Jefferson entertained, that farther investigation would show a greater number of radical languages among the nations of America, than among those of the other hemisphere. It will be poor consideration to the melancholy remnants, gradually driven towards the western side of the Missisippi, to learn that they come, if of a poor family, yet of an ancient house. On another question, the right of the Anglo-Americans to invent new words toward recruiting the English language, we readily admit their title to be quite equal to our own. As yet, however, no proof of their "process of sound eulogisation" has reached us, by which we can recognise that any progress has been made towards furnishing, after the Ionians, a second example of a colonial dialect improving on its primitive." The following burst of philological admiration represents so little our own opinion of the two languages which it compares, that we must look elsewhere for a judge on the successfulness of any such experiment. "What a language has the French become since the date of their Revolution, by the free introduction of new words! The most copious and eloquent in the living world, and equal to the Greek, had not that been regularly modifiable almost ad infinitum." In case the malignant saying, that their Adam and Eve came out of Newgate, should be assumed by any body as a fact explanatory of any supposed peculiarity