It must be some six or seven lustres since we met: Heaven be praised for it, for God alone knows, if we came to embracing, what kind of figure we should cut in each other's eyes!
Sweet, patriarchal, innocent, creditable family friendship, your age is past! We no longer cling to the soil by a multitude of blossoms, sprouts and roots; we are born and die singly nowadays. The living are in haste to fling the deceased to Eternity, and to be rid of his corpse. Of his friends, some go and await the coffin at the church, grumbling the while at being put out and disturbed in their habits; others carry their devotion so far as to follow the funeral to the cemetery: the grave once filled up, all recollection is obliterated. You will never return, O days of religion and affection, in which the son died in the same house, in the same arm-chair, by the same fireside where died his father and his grandfather before him, surrounded, as they had been, by weeping children and grandchildren, upon whom fell the last paternal blessing!
Farewell, my beloved uncle! Farewell, family of my mother, which are disappearing like the other portion of my family! Farewell, my cousin of days long past, who love me still as you loved me when we listened together to our kind aunt de Boistelleul's ballad of the Sparrow-hawk, or when you assisted at my release from my nurse's vow at the Abbey of Nazareth! If you survive me, accept the share of gratitude and affection which I here bequeath to you. Attach no belief to the false smile outlined on my lips in speaking of you: my eyes, I assure you, are full of tears.
*
My studies correlative to the Génie du Christianisme had gradually, as I have said, led me to make a more thorough examination of English literature. When I took refuge in England in 1793, it became necessary for me to redress most of the judgments which I had drawn from the criticisms. As regards the historians, Hume[253] was reputed a Tory and reactionary writer: he was accused, as was Gibbon, of over-loading the English language with gallicisms; people preferred his continuer, Smollett[254]. Gibbon[255], a philosopher during his lifetime, became a Christian on his death-bed, and in that capacity was duly convicted of being a sorry individual. Robertson[256] was still spoken of, because he was dry.
English literature.
Where the poets were concerned, the "elegant extracts" served as a place of banishment for a few pieces by Dryden[257]; people refused to forgive Pope[258] for his verse, although they visited his house at Twickenham and cut chips from the weeping-willow planted by him and withered like his fame.
Blair[259] was looked upon as a tedious critic with a French style; he was placed far below Johnson[260]. As to the old Spectator[261], it was relegated to the lumber-room.
English political works have little interest for us. The economic treatises are less stinted in their scope: their calculations on the wealth of nations, the employment of capital, the balance of trade, are applicable in part to the different European societies. Burke[262] emerged from the national political individuality: by declaring himself opposed to the French Revolution, he dragged his country into the long road of hostilities which ended in the plains of Waterloo.
However, great figures remained. One met with Milton and Shakespeare on every hand. Did Montmorency[263], Byron[264], Sully[265], by turns French Ambassadors to the Courts of Elizabeth[266] and James I.[267], ever hear speak of a merry-andrew who acted in his own and other writers' farces? Did they ever pronounce the name, so outlandish in French, of Shakespeare? Did they suspect that there was here a glory before which their honours, pomps and ranks would become as nothing? Well, the comedian who undertook the part of the Ghost in Hamlet was the great spectre, the shade of the Middle Ages which rose over the world like the evening star, at the moment when the Middle Ages were at last descending among the dead: giant centuries which Dante[268] opened and Shakespeare closed.