Cæsars by will, in whom we readily detect the Brummagem (plaqué).' This article, of course, never saw the light. It was in part provoked by an unky slip of the Emperor (rarely guilty of such slips), who, three years after Sainte-Beuve had quitted the Moniteur' for the 'Constitutionnel,' said to him, 'I read you with interest in the "Moniteur."

6

Although his 'Letters to the Princess' will hardly be cited as models of the epistolary style, they contain some curious passages; as when he is impatient at imperial hesitation: Let there be an end of this; let there be a thunderclap that shall set all the world to rights.' Or when he explodes against the Church :

'Oh, when will the Emperor and France purge themselves of this clerical leprosy! . . . Let the Emperor be thoroughly persuaded of this these men in black are odious to the generous mind of France. It is compromising to the future to let it be believed that one is leagued with them. They are messengers of evil, and counsellors of disaster.'

The delay and manner of his elevation seem to have emancipated him in his own eyes from all obligation to the Tuileries. I belong,' he said, 'to the small party of the Left of the Empire.' It was a very small party, boasting, when he joined it, only a single representative, Prince Napoleon, in the Senate; and he sat quiet until March 25, 1867, when M. de Ségur d'Aguesseau attacked the Minister of Public Instruction for favouring atheism and materialism by a recent nomination to a professorship. Although naming no one, he was understood to point at Renan; and Sainte-Beuve instantly rose to protest, in a tone seldom heard in that assembly, against injurious reflections on a man whom he was proud to call his friend, and whose doctrines he was prepared to defend in the name of liberty of thought. He was called to order, and a stormy scene ensued. It is the first time,' was shouted out, 'that atheism has found a defender in the Senate.' But he held his ground, and thus established a position which he seized the first occasion to improve. A petition having been presented by the principal inhabitants of Saint-Etienne against the admission of (what they deemed) irreligious and immoral works into the public library of their town, Sainte-Beuve demanded an adjournment of the debate until June 29, 1867, when he read a carefully-prepared speech, in which he undertook the defence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Proudhon, Georges Sand, &c., and stood forth the apostle of free thought and free inquiry. Twice again, in the course of the year following (May 4 and 19, 1868), his voice was raised in advocacy of the same cause, and the insults heaped upon him within the walls of the Luxembourg

were

were amply compensated by accumulated marks of adhesion from without. I have my public' was his retort, and he proceeded to describe that public as a diocese which counted parishioners even in those of my lords the bishops.' The day following it was christened the diocese of good sense.' Two hundred students came in a body to thank him for defending their professors and their school; and he exclaimed exultingly to M. Gaston Boissier (his successor at the Ecole Normale), 'They applaud me now!' He refused to write for the new official journal, and broke with the Moniteur,' even after the title and privileges of an official organ had been withdrawn from it, on account of an article, in which, referring to the vehement opposition of the episcopate to the establishment of a course of instruction for young girls at the Sorbonne, he wrote, 'The bishops have uttered cries (cries of eagles), as if it were a question of saving the Capitol.' He refused to suppress the passage which, pointed by the parenthesis, was thought too strong; and exclaiming, Au diable les fanatiques,' he sent the article to the Temps,' a Liberal organ hostile to the empire, which inserted it as it stood. This was a rash step for the new senator, and showed an inexcusable want of consideration for the Princess, who had made sundry vows and promises in his name. She showed her sense of his conduct by refusing to receive or communicate with him ; and adhered to this refusal till within a few hours of his death. Although it had been his evil destiny to incur the distrust of successive sets of friends, he wielded a formidable power: he was the chief distributor of fame: the celebrities of the new generation courted his acquaintance: he became the centre of a society in which the most heterogeneous elements of the literary world were attractively combined; the graver intellects being represented by MM. Renan and Taine; the lighter, by MM. Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, and Nestor Roqueplan. His dinners were in great request, and not merely for the sake of the company, of which, prior to the coolness, the Princess and her brother occasionally formed part. He had studied gastronomy, and took as much pains with the composition of a menu as with that of a Lundi. One of his dinners (April 16th, 1868) assumed the importance of a political event, supplied a topic to the newspapers for some days, and was formally brought to his notice by the President of the Senate as an objection to his being heard in that assembly. It grew famous as Le Dîner du Vendredi-Saint, and was compared to the Débauche de Roissy by which Bussy-Rabutin and his boon companions scandalised the pious Court of Louis XIV. The explanation was easy. The party consisted of MM. Taine, About, Renan, Vol. 141.-No. 281. Flaubert,

Р

Flaubert, Robin (of the Academy of Sciences), and Prince Napoleon; for whose convenience the day, Good Friday, had been carelessly fixed. The dinner went off quietly enough, and bore not the slightest resemblance to an orgy; in proof of which the author of 'Souvenirs' has printed the bill of fare.*

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Sainte-Beuve continued his contributions to the Temps' till within a few weeks of his death, which took place October 13th, 1869. He died of a painful disease for which he had recently undergone an operation. The attendance at the funeral (October 16th) was a tribute to his talents and reputation which it was impossible to misunderstand. The students came en masse : the democrats were largely represented: and hardly a literary celebrity stayed away. Madame Georges Sand, who appeared leaning on the arm of Alexandre Dumas the younger, was loudly applauded by the crowd.

The general conclusion to which we are brought by the study of Sainte-Beuve's Life and Writings' is of a mixed indefinite character; neither favourable nor unfavourable on the whole. Its colour and complexion will mainly depend on whether we follow or reject his own system: whether we judge his works by the man or the man by his works. There is no denying the high intellectual claims of one who has lighted up such a variety of subjects, who has interpreted so many minds, who has extracted and hived up the essence of so many masterpieces of learning and invention, who instinctively separates the golden ore of literature from the dross and intuitively fixes on the best specimens of the true, the beautiful, the gooddu vrai, du beau, du bien. It is more in conduct than in writingor rather in the kind of writing which amounts to conductthat the moral tone is found wanting, that Sainte-Beuve is open to the reproach implied in M. Cousin's invidious comparison with Mérimée.

'It is in the feeling of the chivalrous, and even of much less than the chivalrous,' remarks M. d'Haussonville in reference to the scene with Lamartine, that Sainte-Beuve has always failed. In the ordinary train of life this inferiority of nature manages to pass unnoticed; but let any extraordinary circumstance arise, and he, who ought to conceal it, will parade it before all eyes with perverted ingenuity.' It was his misfortune to be frequently placed in such circumstances. He was not

Potage au tapioca: Truite saumonée: Filet au vin de Madère: Faisan truffé: Pointes d'Asperges: Salade: Parfait de Café: Dessert; not forgetting the inevitable Buisson d'écrevisses. Wines: Château-Margaux: Nuits: Musigny : Château-Yquem: Champagne'-( p. 212, note). Here, surely, were ample materials for any amount of conviviality.

chivalrous:

chivalrous: he was scarcely loyal: he was vain and versatile: he did not carry anger as the flint bears fire: he did not easily forgive or forget a wrong; but he never acted from mean or interested motives; he was never provoked into coarseness: he never stooped to encounter antagonists, like M. Veuillot, with their own weapons; his thrusts were made with the small sword according to the received rules of fence: he firmly upheld the honour of his calling, and in the exercise of it was uniformly fearless, independent, and incorrupt. This is no common praise. Let, then, his merits be fairly set against his demerits, his virtues against his faults; and no material deduction need be made from the high reputation of the writer by reason of the errors or weaknesses of the man.

ART. VII.-1. Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia. Scritta da Michele Amari. 3 voll. Firenze, 1854-72.

2. Storia di Sicilia sotto Guglielmo il buono. Scritta da Isidoro Lalumia. Firenze, 1867.

3. Considerazioni sulla storia di Sicilia. Da Rosario Gregorio. 5 voll. Palermo, 1805-10.

THE

HE completion of Signor Amari's History of the Musulmans in Sicily is a matter of congratulation, not only to the historical student, but to the learned world of Europe. It is not too much to say that it will take rank with the very first literary works of the century. Signor Amari adds another name to that distinguished list of Italian exiles who have devoted their banishment to the study of the past with a view to the illustration of the present. And he shows his pre-eminent qualifications for the task by selecting that period of his country's history (Signor Amari, we believe, is a Sicilian) which to the superficial eye may appear to be a break in its continual development. His book is a vindication of the continuity of Sicilian life and history. Not that he gives any support to the old notions of a Sicilian nationality with an existence ever since the time of the Siculi. Rather he does for Sicily the work which M. de Tocqueville has done for modern France in the Ancien Régime.' He shows that much of what it has been customary to attribute to Greek, Norman, and Aragonese origin or influence has often really been the creation of the infidel rulers of the land. What at present, however, we desire to call attention to is the subject of Signor Amari's last volume: the Norman conquest of Sicily and Southern Italy, and the Norman kingdom. Putting aside its connection with European politics, Papal and Imperial

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Imperiala subject comparatively well known- we would rather illustrate the remarkable union in that state of the diverse elements of civilisation which Sicily then possessed-Greek, Arabic, Italian, and Norman. Signor Amari will himself be our principal authority, but we shall make use also of the old work of Gregorio a work by no means superseded—and of that distinguished series of contemporary chroniclers, the most cultivated and most readable of mediæval historians, Malaterra, Falcandus, the Monk of Telesia, and others.

First of all, therefore, we shall endeavour to estimate the character of the conquerors and the nature of their conquest. We shall then proceed to illustrate the mingling of diverse civilisations and races in the state, and show what really was the condition of these subject nationalities.

The Norman conquest of Southern Italy and Sicily occupies a mean position between a barbarian inroad of Vandals in Africa or Saxons in England and a modern political conquest of Schleswig or Alsace. We cannot help comparing it with another and almost contemporary Norman conquest, that of England by William. Both were exploits of the same race, and started from the same soil. And yet in their circumstances and results there is an equally great resemblance and diversity. The armament that sailed from St. Valéry was a national enterprise commanded by the national chief. The Normans of the South were knights-errant, owing allegiance to no recognised head. William before he started for the conquest of his islandkingdom had by dint of his own energy and perseverance acquired for himself a political and military superiority in his dominions that no man dared to gainsay. Amongst soldiers of fortune, on the other hand, one man is the equal of another, and it was after the supremacy of the race had been established that the House of Hauteville had to win its hardest victory, over its own fellow-conquerors. On the field of Hastings England met Normandy, Harold met William; Harold was defeated and slain, England was conquered once for all. In the South it was far otherwise. There were divers races to contend with and to vanquish in detail. The first attempt to expel the Greeks ends in discomfiture; thirty years elapse between the settlement at Aversa and the assumption of the ducal title by Guiscard; thirty years are necessary for the conquest of Sicily. But when the work is done the results are similar. Norman impress on the subject peoples forms firm and united nations. The conquerors adapt themselves to the conquered and become their champions. The existence of the Mediterranean kingdom was brilliant, but short-lived. It had shot forth into its brightest

bloom