Lamartine has published the first volume of The History of the Restoration of the Monarchy in France. It is intended as a sequel to his History of the Girondins, and this initial volume comprises the closing days of the Empire, the last great struggle of Napoleon with the combined armies in 1814, and the abdication at Fontainbleau. The tone throughout is derived from the partizan feelings of the present time. Its characteristic is an elaborate and determined depreciation of the emperor. The author's apparent ambition is to be striking, and he sometimes is successful: to be just or wise is scarcely in his nature. For ourselves, we are so well acquainted with the life of Napoleon—with the workings of that most powerful practical intelligence that God has yet suffered to exist among mankind—that we are not in any way affected by these efforts of a hungry rhetorician to disparage him. In his new book, as in his Girondins, M. Lamartine has not chosen to give us any authorities. What he says as to facts may be true, but we have only his word for it; and long ago, before M. Lamartine became a great man in affairs, we learned from his Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, that his word is of very little value. We confess an admiration for parts of his Elvire and for some of his minor poems, but it is the youthful poet we admire, not the author of the sickly sentimentalism in his recent romantic memoirs, far less the historian, who to get himself out of difficulties induced by early extravagancies can play marketable tricks with the most awful shade that moves in the twilight of men's memories about the world.
Michelet, driven from his chair in the University, is publishing in the Evénement his new work, Légendes de la Démocratie. The preface is remarkable for its naïveté. "This book," he says, "is the true Légendes d'Or (golden legend)—free from all alloy, and in it will be found nothing but the truth.—Nay more, every one who reads it will become a wiser and a better man." A happy author, to have such faith in his book!
M. Guizot's History of the Representative Form of Government, is prepared from a course of lectures delivered by the author in the reign of Louis the Eighteenth. The preface contains frequent allusions to the politics of the day, and the eminent author refers in it to his attempts to reconcile authority with liberty. M. Guizot's style is clear, but destitute of warmth or ornament, and his works have reputation chiefly for their judicial carefulness and honesty—qualities not so common in France as to be reasonably neglected there.
M. Proudhon, the socialist "philosopher," has written, in the prison, in which it has been deemed necessary to shut him up, a new work, entitled General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Among the topics of which it treats are the Reaction of Revolutions, the Sufficient Reason of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, the Principle of Association, the Principle of Authority, Organization of Economical Forces, and Dissolution of Government under an Economical Organization. The elements of every revolutionary history, according to Proudhon, are the previous régime which the revolution seeks to abolish, and which, by the instinct of self-preservation, may become a counter-revolution; the parties which, according to their different prejudices and interests, endeavor to turn it to their own advantage; and the revolution itself.
Dr. Bushnan, of Edinburgh, under the title of Miss Martineau and her Master, has published a temperate but conclusive refutation of the Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, by Miss Martineau and Mr. George Atkinson. The shallow performance in which these persons displayed their atheism was treated by the learned with contempt. Douglass Jerrold said the sum of their doctrine was contained in the formula, "There is no God, and Miss Martineau is his prophet," and those who considered the Letters more seriously, for the most part expressed surprise and pity—never any one an apprehension that such wretched stuff could unsettle a conviction of the feeblest, or confirm a doubt of the most skeptical.