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the last new peace; and now and then on great days-the fall of some minister;-such a life was unworthy the dignity of manhood; and that period of existence, in which a man is fit for any thing, and that in which he is fit for nothing, were employed alike!

Now, the nobler occupations which filled up the time of a Roman, and which open so large a career in England, will also exist for us; we shall no longer throw away the middle and the end of our days: when we cease to be boys, we shall begin to be men. We shall console ourselves for the pleasures of our youth, by the solid honours of our mattrity. Time will have little effect upon those who see in their duties the road to immortality.

Such are the considerations which should be presented to those honest and virtuous minds, which-disgusted with your ingratitude and your false and revolutionary principles-view with suspicion our new institutions and sigh after the good old times. Let us hasten to reconcile these men with our present condition. Such efforts have been made to gain over the revolutiopists, that we may hope some will be made to rally round the King and the Charter, the faithful friends of the monarchy.

It is to such men that belongs, as of right, the direction of affairs. Every thing will flourish in their hands, while the others taint whatever they touch. Let men of honour be no longer made dependent on knaves; but employ the good as examples to and checks upon the wicked. Such is the natural order of morality and justice.'-pp. 237,

238.

In the following passages M. de Chateaubriand recapitulates his doctrines and propositions, and with them we shall conclude

our extracts.

"Our ministers must be above suspicion, and distant from all par ticipation in the morals of the Revolution; they should persecute nobody, nor permit any one else to persecute; they should be kind, indulgent, tolerant, humane. They should firmly declare that they will permit no re-action. They should frankly and affectionately embrace the Charter, and scrupulously respect our rights and liberty.

But they should at the same time distinguish between good men and bad; they should give a preference to virtue over vice; their impartiality should not be evinced, by putting an honest man at one desk, and a rogue at the next; they should support boldly and highly our holy faith; they should be devoted to the King and his Familyaye-even to death, if it should be necessary; and then, we shall see France arise from her ruins.

As for these able men whose minds the Revolution has debauched, and those others who would deny to the Throne the support of the altar, the graces of ancient manners, and the reverence of old traditions let them go cultivate their farms; they may be recalled when their talents, weary of inaction, may have reconciled themselves to God and the King.

As for the herd of subordinate agents, it would be absurd to treat

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them with equal rigour; place over them proper chiefs, vigilant, and trust-worthy guardians, and you will have nothing to fear from them: besides, the time for epurations is gone by with regard to them.

In the choice of measures, consult the temper and genius of the nation. Your administration should be economical, but not penurious; it should be, above all, firm, vigilant, and active.'—pp. 239, 240.

This then is the work which the constitutional ministers, the libéraux, have put into the forbidden catalogue! and this is the man whose name has been stricken from that Council of State where that of Fouché's may, for aught we know, yet remain, and where that of the ci-devant Secrétaire des Commandemens de Madame Mère de S. M. l'Empereur et Roi* certainly does!

So much has been said upon this work, and M. de Chateaubriand has been so promiscuously called quack, and slave, and demagogue, and bigot, that we have made more copious extracts than we ordinarily feel authorized to do, in order that this admirable writer and excellent statesman should, as it were, be heard in his own defence, and permitted to convey to us his opinion of the state of his country, with which the peace, the happiness, and even the glory of ours, and of Europe, are so intimately connected.

We are far from wishing to interfere in questions of internal French policy; we care nothing who the ministers may be, or which party be in power, provided only it be a royalist and constitutional party; but we see, neither for France nor for Europe, any hopes of tranquillity except under the Charter and guidance of men alike removed from the folly of sighing for the ancient régime, and from the crime of wishing to recall the days of the revolution, of men who in their past conduct have given earnest of their future fidelity, and who are equally undefiled by any share in the Terrorism of Robespierre, or the Hundred Days of Bonaparte.

ART. VIII.-Researches concerning the Institutions and Monuments of the ancient Inhabitants of America; with Descriptions and Views of some of the most striking Scenes in the Cordilleras. Written in French, by Alexander Humboldt, and translated into English by Helen Maria Williams. 2 vols. Lon:don. 1814.

IT may be doubted whether the method of publication adopted by M. de Humboldt is that in which either his interest or his reputation has best been consulted. We know of no two travellers, ancient or modern, who have traversed so many leagues of foolscap as Doctor Clarke and the Baron de Humboldt :-we mean

* Vide Almanach Impérial de France for the years 1813 and 1814,

not, however, to insinuate any further comparison between themM. de Humboldt, unquestionably, possesses talents of the first order; he has a vivid imagination, zeal bordering on enthusiasin, and perseverance that seems never to tire: but we suspect that having no settled principles of philosophy or physiology, he easily yields to every new suggestion which crosses him, provided it wears but the semblance of plausibility. The two volumes now before us constitute, if we mistake not, the eighth separate work on which he has been engaged, in the greater part of which we are entertained with the same objects differently described, more or less extended, differently dressed up, and placed in somewhat different points of view; but immediately recognizable as the same: finally (if it be final) comes the 'Personal Narrative,' which, like Aaron's rod, is intended to swallow up the rest; to exhibit, in extenso, and in one connected narrative, all that has already been said in his preceding publications-this, in our opinion, both for his own and his readers' sake, ought to have been his first and only work.

The 'Researches' are only a re-publication, under a new name, of a former work, entitled Views of the Cordilleras and Monuments of the indigenous Nations of the New Continent,' with a selection from the sixty-nine plates, which accompanied that work, of nineteen to illustrate this; so that we have now in the 'Researches,' references to plates that have no existence, or exist only in another book. This, we repeat, is bad management-but it is less our concern than the author's.

The principal objects in these 'Researches' are fully explained in the Introduction' to the Personal Narrative of Travels.'

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This work is meant to display a few of the great scenes of nature in the lofty chain of the Andes, and at the same time to throw some light on the ancient civilization of the Americans, from the study of their monuments of architecture, their hieroglyphics, their religious rites, and their astrological reveries. I have given in this work descriptions of the Teocalli, or Mexican Pyramids, compared with that of the temple of Belus, the arabesques which cover the ruins of Mitla, idols in basalt, ornamented with the calantica of the heads of Isis; and a considerable number of symbolical paintings, representing the serpent woman, who is the Mexican Eve; the Deluge of Coxcox, and the first migrations of the natives of the Azteck race. I have endeavoured to prove the analogies which exist between the calendar of the Tolteck and the catasterisms of their zodiac, and the division of time of the people of Tartary and Thibet; as well as the Mexican traditions of the four regenerations of the globe, the pralayas of the Hindoos, and the four Ages of Hesiod. I have also included in this work, in addition to the hieroglyphical paintings I brought back to Europe, fragments of all the Azteck manuscripts which are found at Rome, Veletri, Vienna, and Dresden; and of which the last reminds us, by its lineary symbols,

of the Kouas of the Chinese. Together with the rude monuments of the natives of America, the same volume contains picturesque views of the mountainous countries which these people have inhabited; such as of those of the Cataract of Tequendama, of Chimborazo, of the Volcano of Jorullo, and of Cayambe, the pyramidal summit of which, covered with perennial ice, is situate directly under the equinoctial line.'

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This is a faithful abstract of the contents of the Researches," two-thirds of which might just as well have been composed by one who never crossed the barriers of Paris, as by him who has traversed the Cordilleras of the Andes: and M. de Humboldt has here unwittingly added to the number of those who have shown that, to write Researches,' it is by no means necessary to travel : Pauw, for instance, composed his 'Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains,' as the Abbé Grozier says he did his 'Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois,' while seated in his easy chair in Berlin. We prefer, however, the descriptions and delineations of one who has clambered up the sides of Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, to the deepest researches of him who has mounted no higher than the upper step of the library ladder, inasmuch as we prefer plain matters of fact, collected by the senses, the most splendid theory and ingenious speculations collected out of books.

It is in vain for M. de Humboldt to endeavour to exonerate himself from the charge of being a theorist, while every page of his book, that is not purely descriptive, teems with theory; it is surprising, indeed, that he should not perceive how high he stands in the ranks of those learned men who, allured by splendid hypotheses, bu It on very unstable foundations, have drawn general consequences from a small number of solitary facts;' and that he is constantly offending against his own rule, that- in attempting to generalize ideas, we should learn to stop at the point where precise data are wanting.' It is true he does not appear to have any preference for a particular theory, but indulges in all; sailing with every wind, and swimming with every stream; he grounds an argument and draws his conclusion from suspicious and unauthenticated data, with the same confidence as from established facts; he sees resemblances and finds analogies between objects the most discordant and heterogeneous, if they possess but one single point of agreement, real or imaginary: can we wonder then to find him so frequently drawn into inconsistencies and contradictions? These two volumes abundantly attest this uncontrollable propensity of an exuberant imagination, a propensity encouraged and increased by an unwearied, but indiscriminate, research for printed authorities. All the institutions and religious notions, the monuments, the lart

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guages, the traditions, of the American savages, are at one time traced to the Chinese, Moguls, Hindoos, Tungooses, and other Asiatic nations; and, at another, to the bearded Ainos of the isles of Jesso and Sachalien'—And why to the Ainos, of all the people in the world?-for no other reason, at least no other is assigned by M. de Humboldt, than that three men with beards, and with clearer complexions than the natives of Anahuac, Cundinanamarca, and the elevated plain of Couzco, whose names were Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, and Manco-Capac, make their appearance on the new continent without any indication of the place of their birth.'—(Introduction.) The three fanciful figures, with long beards, flowing robes, and fine Grecian faces, which are given in the Atlas to the voyage of the unfortunate La Peyrouse, as portraits of the inhabitants of Sachalien, must have been fresh in the memory of M. de Humboldt when he wrote this paragraphportraits of men, we venture to say, who never existed but in the painter's imagination.

If, instead of a new continent, in the literal sense of the expression, America had been considered only as a newly-discovered continent, many a learned disputation might have been spared on the peopling of this supposed new world; for though there can be no manner of doubt that the people who inhabit the American and Asiatic shores of Behring's Strait have had, and still have, a mutual intercourse, and consequently all difficulty of accounting for the event is at once removed, yet it by no means follows as a necessary consequence, that the people of America originally passed from the continent of Asia. We are not to conclude that, because the people of an adjacent continent are less civilized than those of its neighbour, the former must have sprung from the latter. The Egyptians, who inhabit the most barbarous continent of the old world, were at one time probably the most civilized of nations; and, for aught we know to the contrary, the stupid negroes may be the most ancient race of mankind. We agree, therefore, entirely, with M. de Humboldt, that there is no proof whatever that the existence of man is much more recent in America than on the other continent; yet it is from the contrary assumption that all those discussions have originated. Those, who held them, proceeded on the notion that the new continent emerged from the waters at a later period than the old, and that it was more philosophical to account for the peopling of the former from the latter, than to interpose the hand of Divine Power to form a new creation of man! It is quite true that in the great family of the human race dispersed over the globe, once so difficult, but now so easy to be traversed in every direction, there is but one species, or, as M. de Humboldt expresses it, 'one single organic type,' modified by circumstances into a mul

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