representing in itself the glory of past ages, and yet constantly recruited by new infusions of popular talent, wealth, and virtue -lastly, a democracy, active, intelligent, free-spirited, devoted to the Church, attached to royalty, respecting the aristocracy, yet bold in the assertion of its own rights, at once regulated in its movements, and secured in its independence by well-organized municipal corporations: such constitute the object of the desires and efforts of the politicians we allude to. The most distinguished chiefs of this school, are, F. Schlegel, Görres, Stolberg, and Adam Müller; and when we were in Germany, we found these political principles generally advocated by the most zealous and enlightened Catholics of that country. On the other hand, the monarchical absolutism of Richelieu and Louis XIV, which found so many servile copyists among the continental sovereigns of the eighteenth century (however that system might often be ennobled by a paternal mildness of administration, and adorned with all the refinements of courtesy, and the elegances of literature), we find these honest Germans generally condemn and repudiate, as one injurious to the Church, fatal to liberty, and ultimately destructive to royalty itself. These political principles are adopted also by many enlightened Protestants, especially those who are versed in the history of the Middle Age, who have a strong leaning towards Catholicism, like John von Müller and our author himself. If the reader will be pleased to bear in mind the foregoing observations, he will then, perhaps, more easily perceive the drift of the following passages, which otherwise might appear obscure.

"The time will come ere long, when men will feel generally convinced, that no king can exist without a republic, and no republic without a king: that both are inseparable, like body and soul, and that a king without a republic, and a republic without a king, are words without meaning. Hence, with a genuine republic a king ever arose, and with a genuine king a republic."-p. 172.

"The republic and the monarchy should be bound together by an act of union. There are several intermediate forms of government, which must necessarily be included in that union."-p. 172.

"The state has ever been instinctively constituted according to the relative views and knowledge of human nature. The state has ever been a macroanthropos, or great man: the guilds were the members, or particular functions, of the body politic; the estates of the realm were its faculties. The nobility was the moral, and the priesthood the religious, faculties; while the literati constituted the intelligence, and the king the will, of the state. So that every state has ever formed an allegorical man."-p. 174.

We shall conclude our extracts with the following passage, which is not more beautiful than it is true.

"A throne overturned is like a falling mountain, which incrushes the plains, and leaves ruins and a dead sea behind, where once were fruitful fields and joyous habitations."-p. 173.

In conclusion, we do not think we can form a better estimate of the character and genius of Novalis, than by comparing him with his illustrious friend and associate, Frederick Schlegel. Both had received from nature a vigour of imagination, and a depth and originality of understanding, rarely equalled; and these natural qualities were in both strengthened and matured by all the resources of learning. Both were endowed with the same amiable sensibility-with hearts open to every noble and generous impression; and both were distinguished for an earnestness of religious feeling, which in one was crowned with the possession of that truth, so long and so ardently sought after. Yet in these two spirits, so similar, so homogeneous, that they would seem as if cast by nature from the same mould, a difference is discernible. Novalis was more remarkable for subtility of perception; - Schlegel for solidity of judgment. Both possessed perhaps the same wonderful versatility of genius; yet we very much doubt, whether, had the life of Novalis been spared, he would ever have attained that power of controlling and concentrating his forces on a subject-in other words, that mental harmony, which was Schlegel's most striking characteristic. In the mode and direction of their studies, there are also points of divergence. Novalis, with an impatient avidity, grasps at every branch of the tree of science; strives to embrace at once metaphysics, poetry, history, physiology, and mechanics, till his intemperate study, added to his bitter disappointment in love, undermines his naturally feeble constitution, and consigns him to an early tomb. Schlegel, on the contrary, devotes his youth to an almost exclusive study of philology, criticism, and art, never venturing on metaphysical speculations, till he has made himself well acquainted with preceding systems of philosophy, and, above all, become deeply imbued with the spirit of Plato. By this well-regulated application, he successively masters many departments of literature and science, and lays in stores of the most various learning, such as few men have ever possessed.

In respect to style, we shall not find in Novalis that beautiful clearness and elegance, that classical purity and dignity of language, which characterizes even the earliest writings of his friend, and for which he was probably indebted to his careful study of the Greek models. The style of Novalis is remarkable for poetical richness, variety, and a peculiar felicity of verbal combination; yet it is not unfrequently, especially in the didactic

pieces, disfigured by a technical obscurity of phraseology, or a too colloquial familiarity of expression. But these are defects, which, in his maturer years, he would in all probability have corrected.

In the life of these two distinguished friends, there was the same singular contrast. Schlegel threads his way carefully between the by-paths of Rationalism on the one side, and the fearful abysses of Pantheism on the other, till he at last gains the lofty mount, on which the temple of eternal truth is built. His less fortunate friend has hardly set his foot in the porch of the Catholic Church-he has caught but a distant glimpse of the glories which radiate from her sanctuary, and but indistinctly heard the celestial harmonies that resound within her walls, when he is snatched away by the pitiless hand of death. But we have every reason to hope, that that spirit so pure, so earnest in its inquiries after truth, has elsewhere attained the reward which was denied to it here; and that those mists of error, from which while on earth it had not wholly disengaged itself, have long disappeared before the glorious visions of eternity!

ART II.-Deux Chanceliers d'Angleterre.

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Bacon de Vérulam

et S. Thomas de Canterbéry. Par A. F. Ozanam. 1836.

Paris.

OR three centuries," says M. le Comte de Maistre, "history has been only one grand conspiracy against truth." There are few, at this day, even among our own fellowcountrymen, that will not subscribe, in part at least, to this sentiment. The bitterness of polemics, which wasted Christendom from the beginning of the schism that disfigures the annals of the sixteenth century, could have afforded but little encouragement to the culture of true historic philosophy, even though it had not exercised itself in corrupting those sources from which alone such philosophy derives its nutriment. In truth, by far the greater number of modern historians, writing in those countries where the Reformation succeeded best in gaining an establishment, seem to have regarded this noble province of the human intellect in no other estimation, than as affording a convenient arena whereon to bait the suppressed remnant haply still clinging to the ancient faith of their common ancestors. For a while, too, the game was a safe one. To have vanquished his antagonist would have little served the Catholic, conversing as of

yore in the pressed arena, while from the multitude on every side around him was raised the shout, "Christianos ad leones ! Hence every undertaker of history, from David Hume up to Fox, the pseudo-martyrologist, had in his turn his fling at the proscribed undisturbed save by the savage rejoicing of those for whose prejudices he wrote. The Catholics, on the other hand, were as dormant in this field of distinction as their enemies were active. While the latter sowed tares among the wheat, the former slept; and not till the fearful scenes of the last century, and the bloody triumphs of a superficial philosophism had intervened, were they warned of the inconceivable error which they had committed, in abandoning to the undisputed dominion of their foemen, among other domains of science, the very battlefield on which their claims upon the human race might have been vindicated with the least opposition, and the victory most honourably won. From time to time, beyond a doubt, there did appear a Catholic history of past or contemporaneous events; and now and then might be gathered from these works much that redeemed the historic character of the age, or gave presage of a better one to come; but the incubus of the Reformation, and the writers whom it had produced, lay heavy upon the literature of even the Catholic countries, and while many of their philosophers worshipped Locke, their historians seem to have paid court to Clarendon. And thus, despite the weighty folios and voluminous quartos which daily issued from the shelves of her booksellers, Europe saw herself without one single historian; and though she heard in every variety of style the chronicled narration of the various passages of her history, she found not in her sons that philosophy which alone could instruct her in the truths of which they were only so many examples. The body was there without the soul to animate it.

But these things are of the past. The supineness of Catholic talent was at length aroused to life and energy by the terrible encroachments of a new foe-the antichristian school of the eighteenth century. By a mysterious alchemy, the providence of God fails not to extract from the most hostile of elements the materials of good, and to transmute, into the means of usefulness, the measures which may have been intended by human presumption for the purpose of His detriment. And, even so, the thirst of research and advancement was indeed at first excited by the preaching of Encyclopædists, because it promised to conduct to the downfall of Christianity; but when that thirst had tasted of the stores which these supplied it, and had known their gall and scantiness, refusing to imbibe more of that instruction, it sought out the well-springs from which our first fathers drank, now

gushing forth again with the renewed vigor of a long pent flood; for thence only was it able to derive a stream of science which should more than satisfy the craving. It is not our purpose to enumerate the illustrious members of the galaxy of Catholic glory which now irradiates the realms of history, or of science in general, in the countries of the Continent. The names of a Le Maistre, a Bonald, a Chateaubriand, a Schlegel, and a Müller, are doubtless not the only names which are familiar to the reader of modern history. They form distinguished units of a phalanx which has wrested the empire of narrative from the hands of our foes, and has put to the rout the anti-Catholic misstatements and interpretations of the past, which, till now, had formed the chief safeguards of error and fanaticism.

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It is with grateful feelings, too, that we are bound to add the circumstance, that this restoration of truth to the department of history is by no means the exclusive work of Catholic hands. The spirit of philosophic justice has animated some among the greatest of those minds, which, unhappily, walk not in religious unison with our own, to the noble labour of reparation to the ages of faith," and of resistance to modern misrepresentation. For, besides M. Guizot in France, whose enlightened views upon the middle ages-that fertile topic of anti-Catholic declamation—are beginning, we are glad to perceive, to attract the attention of even our own reading public*,-there are other Protestant philosophers of history, such as Voigt, the able historian of S. Gregory the Seventh, and Hürter, the triumphant defender of Innocent the Third, who have nobly played their parts in the great historical atonement which we behold in progress. And though England cannot as yet boast of a single historic philosopher, properly so called, and has therefore been reduced to rely for the demonstration of the word, which is the key to her own annals, upon the labours of some of the great Continental leaders of the science-the masterly history+ which Dr. Lingard produced-has won many to think at least more charitably of their own forefathers, and has persuaded into the field a host of historical treatises of all dimensions, more or less favourable to the cause which he himself was the first to vindicate with system and precision. Why should it not be so? The most touching memorials of the prowess of God's Church in every domain of merely human intelligence, throughout the ages of barbarism or feudality, are those which Catholic England A translation of M. Guizot's Lectures on the Civilization of Europe is now being published by Mr. Macrone.

We hail with pleasure the appearance of a new edition of this excellent work, revised and augmented, in monthly volumes, with illustrations. When the publication shall be complete, we hope to have the pleasure of inserting a notice of it.