CHATEAUBRIAND. No. I.-ITINERAIRE. IT is one of the worst effects of the vehemence of faction, which has recently agitated the nation, that it tends to withdraw the attention altogether from works of permanent literary merit, and by presenting nothing to the mind but a constant succession of party discussions, both to disqualify it for enjoying the sober pleasure of rational information, and render the great works which are calculated to delight and improve the species, known only to a limited class of readers. The conceit and prejudice of a large portion of the public, increase just in proportion to the diminution of their real information. By incessantly studying journals where the advantage of the spread of knowledge is sedulously inculcated, they imagine that they have attained that knowledge, because they have read these journals, and by constantly abusing those who oppose themselves to the light of truth, they come to forget that none oppose it so effectually as those who substitute for its steady ray the lurid flame of democratic flattery. We have always maintained the contrary doctrine; we assert that the diffusion of useful knowledge, of all that can dispel prejudice, elevate the understanding, and purify the heart, is not in the ratio, but the inverse ratio, of the reading of newspapers; that party politics are to men what novels are to women, and ardent spirits to the labouring classes; that they agitate the mind with passion, without storing it with information; and call millions to the decision of questions which neither nature has given them faculties to understand, nor study the means of competently judging. We maintain that prejudice is so common, passion so general, information so scanty, in this generation, not because they do not, but because they do, read to such an exclusive degree the public journals; and that the acrimonious style in which they are written, the hasty conclusions which they contain, and the partial view of human affairs which they exhibit, are of all other circumstances those which are most adverse to the developement or diffusion of truth. VOL. XXXI, NO. CXCII. It is, therefore, with sincere and heartfelt joy, that we turn from the turbid and impassioned stream of political discussion, to the pure fountains of literary genius; from the vehemence of party strife to the calmness of philosophic investigation; from works of ephemeral celebrity to the productions of immortal genius. When we consider the vast number of these which have issued from the European press during the last fifteen years, and the small extent to which they are as yet known to the British public, we are struck with astonishment; and confirmed in the opinion, that those who are loudest in praise of the spread of information, are generally those who possess least of it for any useful purpose. It has long been a settled opinion in France, that the seams of English literature are wrought out; that while we imagine we are advancing, we are in fact only moving round in a circle, and that it is in vain to expect any thing new on human affairs from a writer under the English constitution. This they ascribe to the want of the bouleversement of ideas, and the extrication of original thought, which a revolution produces; and they coolly calculate on the catastrophe which is to overturn the English government, as likely to open new veins of thought among its inhabitants, and pour new streams of eloquence into its writers. Without acquiescing in the justice of this observation in all its parts, and strenuously asserting for the age of Scott and Byron a decided superiority over any other in British history since the days of Shakspeare and Milton in poetry and romance, we must admit that the observation, in many departments of literature, is but too well founded. No one will accuse us of undue partiality for the French Revolution, a convulsion whose principles we have so long and so vigorously opposed, and whose horrors we have endeavoured, sedulously, though inadequately, to impress upon our readers. It is therefore with a firm conviction of impartiality, and a consciousness of yielding only to the tone of truth, that we are 2 N obliged to confess, that in historical and political compositions the French of our age are greatly superior to the writers of this country. We are not insensible to the merits of our modern English historians. We fully appreciate the learned research of Turner, the acute and valuable narrative of Lingard, the elegant language and antiquarian industry of Tytler, the vigour and originality of M'Crie, and the philosophic wisdom of Mackintosh and if we can find room for it amidst the whirl of politics, we shall endeavour to do justice to their labours in this Miscellany. But still we feel the justice of the French observation, that there is something English" in all their ideas. Their thoughts seem formed on the even tenor of political events prior to 1789: and in reading their works we can hardly persuade ourselves that they have been ushered into the world since the French Revolution advanced a thousand years the materials of political investigation. Chateaubriand is universally allowed by the French, of all parties, to be their first writer. His merits, however, are but little understood in this country. He is known as once a minister of Louis XVIII., and ambassador of that monarch in London, as the writer of many celebrated political pamphlets, and the victim, since the Revolution of 1830, of his noble and ill-requited devotion to that unfortunate family. Few are aware that he is, without one single exception, the most eloquent writer of the present age; that independent of politics, he has produced many works on morals, religion, and history, destined for immortal endurance; that his writings combine the strongest love of rational freedom, with the warmest inspiration of Christian devotion; that he is, as it were, the link between the feudal and the revolutionary ages; retaining from the former its generous and elevated feeling, and inhaling from the latter its acute and fearless investigation. The last pilgrim, with devout feelings, to the holy sepulchre, he was the first supporter of constitutional freedom in France; discarding thus from former times their bigoted fury, and from modern, their infidel spirit, blending all that was noble in the ardour of the Crusades, with all that is generous in the enthusiasm of freedom, a The greatest work of this writer is his "Genie du Christianisme,” work of consummate ability and splendid eloquence, in which he has enlisted in the cause of religion all the treasures of knowledge and all the experience of ages, and sought to captivate the infidel generation in which he wrote, not only by the force of argument, but the grace of imagination. To us who live in a comparatively religious atmosphere, and who have not yet witnessed the subversion of the altar, by the storms which overthrew the throne, it is difficult to estimate the importance of a work of this description, which insinuated itself into the mind of the most obdurate infidels by the charms of literary composition, and subdųed thousands inaccessible to any other species of influence by the sway it acquired over the fancy. Cosi all egro fanciul' porgiamo aspersi, Di soave licor gli orsi del vaso ; Succhi amarià ingannato intanto ei beve, Et dall inganno suo vita riceve. It is not however to this immortal work that we are now to direct the attention of our readers: that will form the subject of another article in a succeeding Number. We intend at present to confine our attention to his "Itineraire de Paris à Jerusalem,” being an account of the author's journey in 1806, from Paris to Greece, Constantinople, Palestine, Egypt and Carthage. This work is not so much a book of travels as memoirs of the feelings and impressions of the author during a journey over the shores of the Mediterranean; the cradle, as Dr Johnson observed, of all that dignifies and has blest human nature, of our laws, our religion, and our civilisation. It may readily be anticipated that the observations of such a man, in such scenes, must contain much that is interesting and delightful: our readers may prepare themselves for a high gratification; it is seldom that they have such an intellectual feast laid before them. We have translated the passages, both because there is no English version with which we are acquainted of this work, and because the translations which usually appear of French authors are executed in so slovenly a style. Of his first night amidst the ruins of Sparta, our author gives the following interesting account: "After supper Joseph brought me my saddle, which usually served for my pillow. I wrapped myself in my cloak, and slept on the banks of the Eurotas under a laurel. The night was so clear and serene, that the milky way formed a resplendent arch, reflected in the waters of the river, and by the light of which I could read. I slept with my eyes turned towards the heavens, and with the constellation of the Swan of Leda directly above my head. Even at this distance of time I recollect the pleasure I experienced in sleeping thus in the woods of America, and still more in awakening in the middle of the night. I there heard the sound of the wind rustling through those profound solitudes, the cry of the stag and the deer, the fall of a distant cataract, while the fire at my feet, half extinguished, reddened from below the foliage of the forest. I even experienced a pleasure from the voice of the Iroquois, when he uttered his cry in the midst of the untrodden woods, and by the light of the stars, amidst the silence of nature, proclaimed his unfettered freedom. Emotions such as these please at twenty years of age, because life is then so full of vigour, that it suffices as it were for itself, and because there is something in early youth which incessantly urges towards the mysterious and the unknown: ipsi sibi somnia fingent; but in a more mature age the mind reverts to more imperishable emotions: it inclines, most of all, to the recollections and the examples of history. I would still sleep willingly on the banks of the Eurotas and the Jordan, if the shades of the three hundred Spartans, or of the twelve sons of Jacob, were to visit my dreams; but I would no longer set out to visit lands which have never been explored by the plough. I now feel the desire for those old deserts which shroud the walls of Babylon or the legions of Pharsalia: fields of which the furrows are engraven on human thought, and where I may find man as I am, the blood, the tears, and the labours of man."-I. 86, 87. From Laconia our author directed his steps by the isthmus of Corinth to Athens. Of his first feelings in the ancient cradle of taste and genius he gives the following beautiful description : "Overwhelmed with fatigue, I slept for some time without interruption, when I was at length awakened by the sound of Turkish music, proceeding from the summits of the Propyleum. At the same time a Mussulman priest from one of the mosques called the faithful to pray in the city of Minerva. I cannot describe what I felt at the sound; that Iman had no need to remind one of the lapse of time: his voice alone in these scenes announced the revolution of ages. "This fluctuation in human affairs is the more remarkable from the contrast which it affords to the unchangeableness of nature. As if to insult the instability of human affairs, the animals and the birds experience no change in their empires, nor alterations in their habits. I saw, when sitting on the hill of the Muses, the storks form themselves into a wedge, and wing their flight towards the shores of Africa. For two thousand years they have made the same voyage-they have remained free and happy in the city of Solon, as in that of the chief of the black eunuchs. From the height of their nests, which the revolutions below have not been able to reach, they have seen the races of men disappear: while impious generations have arisen on the tombs of their religious parents, the young stork has never ceased to nourish its aged parent. I involuntarily fell into these reflections, for the stork is the friend of the traveller: it knows the seasons of heaven.' These birds were frequently my companions in the solitudes of America: I have often seen them perched on the wigwams of the savage; and when I saw them rise from another species of desert, from the ruins of the Parthenon, I could not avoid feeling a companion in the desolation of empires. "The first thing which strikes a traveller in the monuments of Athens, is their lovely colour. In our climate, where the heavens are charged with smoke and rain, the whitest stone soon becomes tinged with black and green. It is not thus with the atmosphere of Athens. The clear sky and brilliant sun of Greece have shed over the marble of Paros and Pentilicus a golden hue, comparable only to the finest and most fleeting tints of autumn. "Before I saw these splendid remains I had fallen into the ordinary error concerning them. I conceived they were perfect in their details, but that they wanted grandeur. But the first glance at the originals is sufficient to shew that the genius of the architects has supplied in the magnitude of proportion what was wanting in size; and Athens is accordingly filled with stupendous edifices. The Athenians, a people far from rich, few in number, have succeeded in moving gigantic masses; the blocks of stone in the Pnyx and the Propyleum are literally quarters of rock. The slabs which stretch from pillar to pillar are of enormous dimensions: the columns of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius are above sixty feet in height, and the walls of Athens, including those which stretched to the Piræus, extended over nine leagues, and were so broad that two chariots could drive on them abreast. The Romans never erected more extensive fortifications. By what strange fatality has it happened that the chefs d'œuvre of antiquity, which the moderns go so far to admire, have owed their destruction chiefly to the moderns themselves? The Parthenon was entire in 1687; the Christians at first converted it into a church, and the Turks into a mosque. The Venetians, in the middle of the light of the seventeenth century, bombarded the Acropolis with red-hot shot; a shell fell on the Parthenon, pierced the roof, blew up a few barrels of powder, and blew into the air great part of the edifice, which did less honour to the gods of antiquity than the genius of man. No sooner was the town captured, than Morosini, in the design of embellishing Venice with its spoils, took down the statues from the front of the Parthenon; and another modern has completed, from love for the arts, that which the Venetian had begun. The invention of fire-arms has been fatal to the monuments of antiquity. Had the barbarians been acquainted with the use of gunpowder, not a Greek or Roman edifice would have survived their invasion; they would have blown up even the pyramids in the search for hidden treasures. One year of war among the moderns will destroy more than a century of combats among the ancients. Every thing among the moderns seems opposed to the perfection of art; their country, their manners, their dress; even their discoveries."-I. 136145. These observations are perfectly well-founded. No one can have visited the Grecian monuments on the shores of the Mediterranean, without perceiving that they were thoroughly masters of an element of grandeur, hitherto but little understood among the moderns, that arising from gigantic masses of stone. The feeling of sublimity which they produce is indescribable: it equals that of Gothic edifices of a thousand times the size. Every one must have felt this upon looking at the immense masses which rise in solitary magnificence on the plains at Stonehenge. The great block in the tomb of Agamemnon at Argos; those in the Cyclopian Walls of Volterra, and in the ruins of Agrigentum in Sicily, strike the beholder with a degree of astonishment bordering on awe. To have moved such enormous masses seems the work of a race of mortals superior in thought and power to this degenerate age; it is impossible, in visiting them, to avoid the feeling that you are beholding the work of giants. It is to this cause, we are persuaded, that the extraordinary impression produced by the pyramids, and all the works of the Cyclopian age in architecture, is to be ascribed; and as it is an element of sublimity within the reach of all who have considerable funds at their command, it is earnestly to be hoped that it will not be overlooked by our architects. Strange that so powerful an ingredient in the sublime should have been lost sight of in proportion to the ability of the age to produce it, and that the monuments raised in the infancy of the mechanical art, should still be those in which alone it is to be seen to perfection! We willingly translate the description of the unrivalled scene viewed from the Acropolis by the same poetical hand: a description so glowing, and yet so true, that it almost recalls, after the lapse of years, the fading tints of the original on the memory. "To understand the view from the Acropolis, you must figure to yourself all the plain at its foot; bare and clothed in a dusky heath, intersected here and there by woods of olives, squares of barley, and ridges of vines; you must conceive the heads of columns, and the ends of ancient ruins, emerging from the midst of that cultivation; Albanian women washing their clothes at the fountain or the scanty streams; peasants leading their asses, laden with provisions, into the modern city: those ruins so celebrated, those isles, those seas, whose names are engraven on the memory, illumined by a resplendent light. I have seen from the rock of the Acropolis the sun rise between the two summits of Mount Hymettus: the ravens, which nestle round the citadel, but never fly over its summit, floating in the air beneath, their glossy wings reflecting the rosy tints of the morn ing: columns of light smoke ascending from the villages on the sides of the neighbouring mountains marked the colonies of bees on the farfamed Hymettus; and the ruins of the Parthenon were illuminated by the finest tints of pink and violet. The sculptures of Phidias, struck by a horizontal ray of gold, seemed to start from their marbled bed by the depth and mobility of their shadows: in the distance, the sea and the Piræus were resplendent with light, while on the verge of the western horizon, the citadel of Corinth, glittering in the rays of the rising sun, shone like a rock of purple and fire." -I. 149. These are the colours of poetry; but beside this brilliant passage of French description, we willingly place the equally correct and still more thrilling lines of our own poet. "Slow sinks more beauteous ere his race be run, Not as in northern clime obscurely bright, O'er the hushed deep the yellow beams he throws, Their azure arches through the long expanse, The columns of the temple of Jupiter Olympius produced the same effects on the enthusiastic mind of Chateaubriand as they do on every traveller-But he has added some reflections highly descriptive of the peculiar turn of his mind. "At length we came to the great isolated columns placed in the quarter which is called the city of Adrian. On a portion of the architrave which unites two of the columns, is to be seen a piece of masonry, once the abode of a hermit. It is impossible to conceive how that building, which is still entire, could have been erect ed on the summit of one of these prodigious columns, whose height is above sixty feet. Thus this vast temple, at which the Athenians toiled for seven cen turies, which all the kings of Asia laboured to finish, which Adrian, the ruler of the world, had first the glory to complete, has sunk under the hand of Time, and the cell of a hermit has remained undecayed on its ruins. A miserable cabin is borne aloft on two columns of marble, as if Fortune had wished to exhibit on that magnificent pedestal, a monument of its triumph and its caprice. "These columns, though twenty feet higher than those of the Parthenon, are far from possessing their beauty. The degeneracy of taste is apparent in their construction; but isolated and dispersed as they are on a naked and desert plain, their effect is imposing in the highest degree. I stopped at their feet to hear the wind whistle through the Co |