give them their wish, they will be the first to exclaim, Pol! me occidistis, amici!

We can assure our readers that we have discussed this great question-which is, in truth, though under a new disguise, no less a one than that of the severance or non-severance of Church and State-without any apprehension about the pecuniary loss the church would sustain by the relinquishment of church-rates. Indeed, our bias lies quite another way. As Englishmen we may grieve to see society, which has so long been tolerably harmonious, split into parts; but as churchmen we are rather tempted to hail than to proscribe any measure by which the members of our own communion may be made to stand confessed as such, and the Church of England be gathered up again. By a desire to meet the dissenter on neutral ground-(how vain a desire, if conciliation was the object, events have shown!)-we have for some time sunk the sin of schism by mutual consent, as if there was not a word about it in all Scripture; and given occasion to many to surmise that those who sign the Articles do so rather because they hold livings than hold them. The present process of legislation is applying a succession of tests to churchmen by which they will be eventually sifted clean. The new Municipal Corporation Bill has done much for this; the new Marriage and Registration Bills will do more; but the abolition of church-rates would do most of all. Every man will soon have to take up his ground; and the Church of England will have at length to know herself again; to feel that she has nothing to do with other men's opinions, but must be true to her own; that in all her proceedings she must keep within the compass of her own constitution, and abate no jot of that; that her immortal founders 'set her feet in a large room,' expressly that her members might be under no temptation to stray out of it; that they contemplated her in their construction of her, as the single accredited agent through which all religious operations at home and abroad were to be conducted, so that the household was to be visited, the congregation to be taught, the colony to be quickened, the heathen to be converted, but still through her-through her, a noble instrument for the work if effectually wielded, and made to develope the resources that are in her:-That those her founders imagined they had left ample scope for the exercise of zeal the most intense, for the promulgation of doctrines the most evangelical, for the application of labours the most abundant and the most devoted, strictly within the confines of the church they marked out; and that they never contemplated, as they never would have allowed, a compromise, direct or indirect, of the great principles it involved for any object however however plausible :-That if this be bigotry (which will be said), it is bigotry to be of the Church of England at all, and the charge can effectually be removed in no other way than by withdrawing from her altogether, for that the twenty-third Article is quite incompatible with the lax church notions of modern times; and still more, Cranmer's sermon 'Of the Authoritie of the Kayes,' which may be regarded as a comment from head-quarters upon that Article.

This sermon will be found in Cranmer's Catechism, which, with several other works admirably calculated to throw light upon the nature and construction of the church as our Reformers conceived it, has been lately re-published at the Clarendon Press. And with a strong recommendation to our younger clergy to peruse it, as an authentic record of that great man's views, we shall close this short paper. High time it is to plumb our building again, and apply a correction by a reference to these original documents, which will demonstrate that, liberal as were Cranmer's notions, so liberal indeed that his first impression was to draw up articles that should serve for Christendom, and not for England merely, he was so little of a latitudinarian that in these days he would assuredly come under the name of a very high churchman. Meaning, however, by that word not one who reposes upon the dignity of his order; talks largely about the church, and leaves others to labour in it; seeks personal distinction, and praises pastoral retirement; thinks he is orthodox because he is dogmatical; is so fearful of being extravagant himself that he is dull; and chills all around him lest he should make them fanatics;-but one who holds that he has a special commission, yet never relaxes in the practical duties which flow from it; finding, on the contrary, a call to exertion in every provision his Church has made in her services for hallowing every crisis of the life of her members and baptizing it to God; one who feels that in playing the zealot indeed he would be untrue to her, but that in every word she causes him to utter, and every act she causes him to do, she counts upon his zeal being awaked; one who readily admits, to be sure, that she most properly insists on all things pertaining to the worship of God being done decently and in order, but only as the platform for high and holy objects to rest upon; and one who regards her most truly as the uncompromising advocate of the strictest morals, but beholds her, in every aspect she presents, bearing the Cross for her crest, and hoc signo vinces for her motto.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Mémoires de Lucien Bonaparte, Prince de Canino. Ecrits par lui-même. Tome i. 8vo. pp. 485. London. 1836. 2. Memoirs of Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino. Written by himself. Translated from the original manuscript under the immediate superintendence of the author. Vol. i. 8vo., pp496. London. 1836.

M. LUCIEN Buonaparte has been hitherto considered a man,

• if not of talent, at least of some tact and shrewdness; but what possible object he can have hoped to gain by publishing these Memoirs, it seems at first sight very difficult to imagine.

That he has a strong and unrequited passion for literary fame has been proved by some ponderous quartos of what he calls poems, which rival in bulk, though they do not quite equal either in spirit or popularity, the similar epics of old Chapelain and our own Blackmore of Dunciad memory.

But though the author of Charlemagne and the Cirnéide * may have mistaken for verse an unreadable mass of measured prose, he must surely have too much knowledge of the world to expect any literary fame from a meagre recapitulation of forgotten speeches and abortive intrigues, compiled, for the greater part, from the Moniteur and the Bulletins des Débats.

Still less should we have thought that he could have any eye to pecuniary profit,-yet it would seem as if something of that sort had entered into his imagination-(into his bookseller's pocket it assuredly never will)-for we find prefixed to the volume one of those monitory denunciations of legal vengeance against piracy, of which, though common in France, we do not recollect to have before seen an instance in a book published in England -and we certainly have seldom seen a book published in England where the precaution seemed less necessary; for we really believe that, protected by its own intrinsic inanity, the boldest speculator would hardly venture to reprint it.

We are, therefore, convinced that the prospect of either fame or profit can have had a very subordinate share in this publication, which must rather be attributed to the hope of producing some political effect, though it is certainly not very easy to guess

* The fame of this poem is so very limited that we have never seen it, nor even heard it mentioned, except by the author himself in these Memoirs. Our judgment of Lucien's poetical talent is formed from the Charlemagne, published some twentyfive years ago in two huge quartos. We presume that the Cirnéide is a poem in praise of Corsica, and that it is so called from its Greek name Cyrnus, though why the learned author has thought proper to spell it Cirnéide we cannot tell. The Buonaparte swarm have shown no great personal attachment to their native hive'Sic tua Cyrneas fugiunt examina taxos.'-VIRG. Ecl. ix. 30.

of

of what precise nature that political effect was meant to be. Two or three objeets are pointed at distinctly enough: one is the repeal of the law which exiles the Buonaparte family; a second is a proposition that Louis Philippe's royalty should be legitimized by an appeal to the universal suffrages of the French people; a third is a kind of obscure retractation of Lucien's former radical principles of government, and the announcement of his matured opinion that a republican monarchy, with one hereditary and one elective chamber, after the fashion of England, is the best of all possible constitutions. But he had already advanced these propositions in a pamphlet which he published last year, under the pretence of replying to some observations of the late General Lamarque. Perhaps the little notice taken of that pamphlet may have piqued the author into a reproduction of his ideas in a more imposing form; perhaps, after all, he may have had no settled object beyond that of keeping himself before the public, and of occupying a share of the attention of France in her present unsettled

state.

We are not now to learn that bold designs and crooked counsels' are the character of the whole Buonaparte school, and that whenever any of that tribe announces a design, it is safe to conclude that he has something else in view. It is therefore very possible that M. Lucien may have some other ulterior object which has escaped our sagacity; all we can say is, that the book appears to us inconceivably trivial and intolerably dull. We were not so unreasonable as to expect much solid information or historical truth from French modesty grafted on Corsican sincerity; but we really hoped for at least some personal anecdotes-some occasional touches of character-some passing gleams of light on the history of the times-or, in short, a little information and a larger portion of amusement. We have been wofully disappointed. Except a few of the earlier pages, nothing can be more meagre. We rise from the perusal wearied to death, and without having acquired the slightest addition to our previous knowledge either of events or men, or even of Lucien Buonaparte himself, unless indeed it may appear something of a novelty to have at once such undisputable evidence and such a striking example of what blockheads a revolution may raise to eminence. It is certainly the greatest of revolutionary miracles, that such a set of boobies as this whole tribe have always shown themselves whenever they were beyond the immediate influence of Napoleon, should have been actually ministers, ambassadors, princes, kings-what not?and it now appears that Lucien is little better than the rest of the puppets.

The first pages of the book are, as we have hinted, infinitely

the

the least uninteresting, because they contain something, though but a little, of the personal history of the family. It will not exceed our limits to extract all that he says on that subject-all, indeed, in the book that is worth extracting:

When the revolution opened in 1789, the grand era of political reform, I had entered my fifteenth year. After having been for some time at the College of Autun, and at the military school of Brienne, lastly at the seminary of Aix in Provence, I returned to Corsica. My mother, a widow in the prime of her life, devoted herself to the care of her numerous family. Joseph, the eldest of her children, was twenty-two years of age, and seconded her attentions to us with ardour, and with paternal affection. Napoléon, two years younger than Joseph, was just returned from France with our sister, Marianne-Eliza, from the Ecole Royale of St. Cyr. Louis, Jerome, Pauline, and Caroline, were all children. A brother of my father, the Archdeacon Lucien, was become the head of our family, and though gouty and bedridden for some time past, he watched incessantly over our interests. brother, worthy of our mother, the Abbé Fesch, completed our family. 'Although holding one of the first ranks [?] in the island in every re spect, our fortune was not very brilliant. Several voyages of my father to France, where he was deputy of the noblesse to Louis XVI., and the expenses of our education, superior to his means, notwithstanding the benefits he derived from government, had much impoverished our fortune.

A

'The education of my two elder brothers upon the continent, mine, and the deputations of our father to Paris, had rendered us entirely French. Corsica had been declared, since the 30th of November, 1789, an integral part of the monarchy; and that declaration, which had satisfied the wishes of the islanders, had completely effaced from their minds the bitter remembrance of the conquest. The philosophical ideas and revolutionary agitation which prevailed upon the continent fermented also in our heads, and no one hailed with more ardour than we did the dawn of 1789. Joseph entered into the administration of the departments-Napoléon prepared by serious studies to march with giant steps in his career of prodigies and the third brother, a mere boy, ran to throw himself into the popular societies with the lively enthusiasm of a youthful and ardent head, filled with the remembrances of college and the great names of Rome and Greece.'-pp. 1-3.

Our readers will see that this is a very vague and meagre account of matters that belong essentially to the style of writing which M. L. Buonaparte has chosen to adopt; yet it is the whole of what he gives us on these domestic subjects. He adds indeed

'I think it right to suppress all details that are foreign to public affairs: of what avail would they be?'-p. 3.

And in a Reply which he has made in the newspapers to some criticisms on his work, he defends his omission of all personal anecdotes, and adds, after quoting the foregoing passage of his proemium,