I.-Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages inédites de Diderot. 301 II.-1. The Birds of America, engraved from Drawings made in the United States. By John James Audubon, F.R.S., 2. Ornithological Biography; or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America; inter- spersed with Delineations of American Scenery and Manners. By the same Author. Vol. I. 3. American Ornithology; or the Natural History of the Birds of the United States. By Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucien Buonaparte. Edited by Robert Jameson, 4. Fauna Boreali-Americana; or the Zoology of the Northern Parts of British America. Part Second.— IV. The Catechism of Health; or, Plain and Simple Rules for the Preservation of Health, and the Attainment of a ART. 3. An Historical Inquiry into the Production and Con- 4. What has the Currency to do with the present Dis- 5. A Plain Statement of the Causes of, and Remedies for, 6. Letter on the Currency, to Lord Althorp. By H. Lam- 7. Historical Sketch of the Bank of England; with an VI.-1. Some Memorials of John Hampden, his Party, and his 2. Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the 3. Eliot, Hampden, and Pym, or a Reply of the Author 4. The Trials of Charles I., and of some of the Regicides: VII. History of the War of the Succession in Spain. By Page 407 457 519 VIII.-1. Mechanism of the Heavens. By Mrs. Somerville. IX.-1. A Letter to a Noble Lord who voted for the Second 2. Prospects of England (June, 1832.) 3. Address to all Classes and Conditions of Englishmen. - 537 559 THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I. Mémoires, Correspondance, et Ouvrages inédits de Diderot. Tomes 4. Paris. 1830, 1831. THE voluminous correspondence, which passes under the name of Grimm, with the episodical volumes of the fair votaries, the Espinasses and D'Epinays, who encouraged with their smiles, and rewarded with unscrupulous prodigality the labours of the French philosophers in enlightening mankind, long ago introduced us to an intimate acquaintance with the social state of Paris during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The noctes cœnaeque-we must not add Deúm; the ease, the pleasantry, the cleverness, the genuine wit, the conversational eloquence; the coarseness and indelicacy, the petty jealousy and intrigue; the cool heartlessness, (not, indeed, that kind and even generous feelings were altogether wanting, or that some of them would not have made any sacrifice for a friend, except that of their own personal vanity; they would have spent their last livre one day for a companion, whose reputation they would have slain with an epigram, or with whose mistress they would have intrigued the next :) -into all this, to say nothing of many circumstances utterly revolting to every well-regulated mind, we had been freely admitted; all the mysteries had been laid open before us with such truth, and life, and reality, that personal familiarity scarcely seemed wanting to complete our knowledge of the whole fraternity, from the patriarch of Ferney to the humblest contributor to the collective wisdom of the Encyclopédie. However free and unrestrained the tone of society, however slight the disguise which individual character would wear in the small circle of intimate friends, who formed these separate coteries, in comparison with the stiff and artificial full-dress, which is so often put on in more general and formal intercourse with the world, we have now seen most of these remarkable men in a more complete state of nature still; we have more than once been admitted into yet closer intimacy with them than in their convivial meetings and most select petits soupers; we have found our way behind the scenes of this brilliant comedy, and become acquainted with the actors, when entirely careless of stage effect, with their minds and their manners in perfect dishabille, and not even condescending to wear the very thin mask, which is commonly assumed even among the most domesticated acquaintance among every-day familiars. VOL. XLVII. NO. XCIV. Y The The result has not been altogether favourable to the authors of the new code of human virtue and happiness. Man is no more a philosopher than a hero to his valet de chambre. The Bourriennes and Madame Junots who have disclosed the privacy of the great despot of French literature during the last century, have been as little friendly to his fame, as they who performed the same treacherous office to the master of the imperial throne. Both have alike paid the penalty of greatness; their meannesses, their small jealousies, the coarse, and low, and vulgar parts of their characters have obtained equal notoriety with their better and nobler qualities. The hands which raised the veil and laid open the most intimate secrets of Voltaire's philosophic retirement in the country-seat of Madame du Châtelet, not merely displayed a connexion offensive to severer moralists, whose condemnation Voltaire himself would have treated with indifference ;-they have lowered him in the estimation of less scrupulous persons, by the display of so many miserable acts of domestic baseness and tyranny, such as those who might have endeavoured, for a time at least, to forget the author of the Pucelle, and the bitter foe of religion, in the poet of Zaire and Tancrede, and in the defender of the family of Calas, could not but read with shame and sorrow. Whatever palliation for his irreligion might be suggested by the calmer survey of the state and opinions of his age, nothing can soften or excuse this total want of dignity of character, this inveterate selfishness, this condescension to the basest means of gratifying his spleen or feeding his insatiate vanity. The humane and charitable spirit of Christianity, which Voltaire professed to admire, was as entirely obliterated from his heart, as the belief in the doctrines, which he openly despised, from his understanding. Even his own party shrunk aghast at the moral suicide committed by Rousseau in his Confessions.' Others had sacrificed on the altar of personal vanity (that universal household god to which each individual in the whole circle paid, either in public or more secretly, his unbounded homage) not merely all moral and religious, but even almost all the generous and lofty sentiments of our nature; as a last holocaust Jean Jacques boldly threw himself. This autobiography is the most painful book in the whole range of literature; the contrast between the cold, the serious, the laboured obscenity of parts, (for there were sentences in the earlier editions too gross even for the unfastidious eyes of his own age and country,) and the glowing, the impassioned diction of others--the base treachery and ingratitude by which the favours of his earliest benefactors are repaid-and the appra of women, which, whatever their weaknesses and vices, ought to have been sacred at least to him, all unblushingly laid open to the public gaze, these abandon the man to universal disgust and detestation; while, at the same time, we have a disagreeable consciousness, that we are not yet disenchanted from the spell of his inimitable style. No other book generates in the same degree that painful mistrust of genius; that chilling sense of the insincerity, the falsehood of all the fire, and energy, and passion of language, to the contagion of which we have at once surrendered ourselves; the withering suspicion, that the noblest bursts of poetry come not from the heart of the poet; that all the vehemence, the moral indignation of the orator may be but factitious and mechanical. In Rousseau, there is not even that comic and playful turn, which, in the worst parts of Voltaire and in Don Juan, in some degree prepares us for the jar upon our high-wrought feelings; with them, the jest which breaks in upon us during an exquisite description or a burst of deep passion, is unwelcome and ill-timed, but still it is a jest; and, though grieved and revolted, we make some allowance for the temptation, and admit the plea of wayward humour in the poet, and his uncontrollable disposition to see things in a ludicrous light, as some, however poor and imperfect, extenuation. But in Rousseau all is alike serious, earnest, intense; that which is mean, and profligate, and obscene seems to come from the very depths of his heart as much as the most intense sentiment; or rather, the imagination has so completely brought itself to speak the language of the feelings, that, even when our eyes are opened, we can scarcely persuade ourselves that all those eloquent dreams of unattainable virtue, those wild and distempered, but still eager yearnings after what is great and ennobling, are the mere creations of an ardent fancy, without any real kindred or communion with the moral being of the man. The autobiography of Rousseau was a deed of deliberate selfmurder; the Life of Diderot, which at present lies before us, we might almost describe as an act of unintentional parricide. We can scarcely believe that some parts of these volumes have seen the light under female auspices; that the daughter of Diderot is answerable for more than the Mémoire,'-either for the larger and more important correspondence with an unmarried mistress, at the perpetual indelicacy and grossness of which, it will be impossible for us to do more than to hint; or for one paper particularly, at the close of the work, which we should have hoped that even the least scrupulous part of the Parisian press would have hesitated to publish. We would not, indeed, bring too heavy a charge against Madame de Vandeul, but we must confess that, in this yet imperfectly enlightened country, we could scarcely conceive a daughter exposing to the world even those questionable passages of his private life, which are contained in this lady's brief memoir of her father; his ingratitude and unkindness to her Y 2 mother, |