as to that critique, I receive with gratitude the sentiment which dictated it. But it is forgotten that during the time comprised in my first volume, Napoléon, being in the East, could not figure in the discussions of Paris.' Times, Oct. 29.

For ourselves we have to observe, that M. Lucien Buonaparte owes us at least no gratitude for wishing for more anecdotes about his brother. It is not, as M. Lucien may choose to suppose, from any admiration of, or affectionate curiosity about him, that we make the observation, but simply because Napoleon is, or rather ought to be, the real hero of these Memoirs. To him it is owing that Lucien was ever heard of-if he had not been elevated as one of the bobs in the tail of that great kite, where and what would he have been now? Under what pretence does he intrude himself and his book on the public but as the brother of the man whose name is hardly mentioned? This is really acting Hamlet with the omission of the Prince of Denmark. But the second part of this excuse is still more surprising. 'Napoleon is omitted because, during the period comprised in my first volume, he was in the East! What can M. Lucien mean by such an assertion, so notoriously absurd? The first volume comprizes all that portion of Napoleon Buonaparte's life about which students of history feel the greatest curiosity, and must naturally have expected some satisfaction from his brother. For instance, we should have liked to hear something of his military habits and studies while a subaltern ;-by what means he was first promoted ;-what he was doing at Paris in the summer of 1792, where Bourrienne found him in great indigence, though Lucien's account would lead one to suppose he was still in Corsica;-whether he had any and what share in the 10th August, 1792, at which Ræderer reports that he said he was present as an amateur;'-how he came to be so prominently employed at Toulon ;-what he actually did at Toulon;-by what acts of Terrorism the brothers had distinguished themselves to such a degree, that after the 9th Thermidor Napoleon was dismissed the military service, and both he and Lucien sent to jail? What was the real nature and extent of his connexion with the Robespierres? What was he about, and how did he exist on the pavé of Paris, between Thermidor 1794 and Vindémiaire 1795? When and how did he become acquainted with Madame de Beauharnais? What was the channel of influence which recommended him to Barras? Was there any other connexion besides identity of time between his marriage and his appointment to the army of Italy? What were his private and extra-official habits and occupations during these periods? What was the amount of his private fortune when he joined that army in 1796? And what was it after the peace of Campo Formio, in 1797? These are a few of the thousand questions belonging to the time comprized in M. Lucien's first volume,

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volume, which no one as yet, that we are aware of, has answered in any clear detail or with any personal authority. Madame d'Abrantes and Bourrienne (a much better witness) have given a few anecdotes of times and circumstances approaching to those we have mentioned, and the St. Helena volumes contain some manifest falsifications and some very suspicious assertions on certain of these topics-but no one can deny that this important and most curious part of Buonaparte's personal history remains in great obscurity, and it is well known that during his fourteen years of omnipotence he used every effort to obliterate all the traces of his early lifewhether from a silly or a well-founded reluctance to have the whole truth known, we cannot decide. M. Lucien promises us (in the same Reply), that after Napoleon's return from Egypt he intends to say a little more about him. We humbly thank him. He will give us corn in harvest; we had rather that his bounty had shown itself when and where there was a real dearth.

But, indeed, Lucien does not tell us much more of himself. In most men's memoirs, their marriage would be an event worth mentioning; in Lucien's life his marriages were peculiarly important. We suppose that we shall, in due time, hear of his second marriage, because the spirit with which he vindicated his domestic independence against the upstart vanity and injustice of his brother does him honour; but the period of his first marriage with Mile. Boyer, sister of an innkeeper at St. Maximin, falls within the limits of the present volume, and Monsieur le Prince does not so much as allude to it.

When the victory of Vindémiaire-before the gaining of which Napoleon was so little known that the official account of it now before us calls him 'Le Général Buona Porté-enabled Barras to name him to the command of Paris, -Lucien, who was still a storekeeper of victuals somewhere in the south, was, through his brother's influence, promoted in the Commissariat. After remaining a month in Paris, he was ordered to join the army of Moreau, but he left Paris with regret, having begun to feel the first pricks of ambition :

'I assisted frequently at the sittings of the councils, which made me take a disgust to the functions that I had hitherto been happy to obtain. I would willingly have renounced them all not to have been distant from the public tribunes; but I was obliged to depart for Munich, Brussels, and Holland, where I went in turn during the course of the year 1796, to execute, ill or well, an employment in which I occupied myself with less ardour than in reading the political journals and pamphlets. I became a very decided partizan of the two chambers, and the directorial government.'-р. 62.

In the meantime Napoleon obtained the command in Italy, and was already in his first gallop of victories. Here Lucien joined

him, but was presently dispatched on a mission to Corsica, of what kind he does not tell, but the real object seems to have been to prepare the way for his future election as deputy. We think it worth while to extract his testimony as to the style in which the French carried on this war :

'I had obtained permission to quit the north to go to Milan, where our army had made its entry. Napoléon was no longer at Milan. The revolt of Pavia had just broken out: and it was said that the general was gone to the banks of the Adige, to chastise the guilty city. I hastened to Pavia: upon the road my eyes were struck with the distant reflection of a vast fire.

It was the village of Binasco delivered up to the flames to expiate the assassination of several of our straggling soldiers. I traversed the burning ruins. Pavia presented me in a few moments after with a spectacle even more deplorable. That great city had been delivered up to pillage in the morning: the traces of blood had not been effaced: the bodies of the peasants, who had refused to surrender, were not carried away: people were occupied by funeral rites within the gate by which I entered. The streets and places were transformed into a perfect fair, where the conquerors were selling, to hideous speculators, the spoils of the vanquished! What miseries, even in the most just of wars, in the most necessary of victories!'-pp. 74, 75.

The picture itself is frightful enough; but what shall we say of the feeling which calls the massacre of poor people who rise against a plundering invader the most just of wars-the most necessary of victories'?

Here ends all the interest, small as it is, of these Memoirs. Napoleon is dispatched in a line or two to Egypt-Lucien is elected, contrary to law, into the Council of Five Hundred-and the rest-that is, above four-fifths of the whole volume-is occupied by the proceedings of the Council, and the speeches of Lucien on several now-forgotten topics, which might be read with equal profit and pleasure in the pages of the Moniteur' as in the Memoirs of Prince Prettyman de Canino.

The legal difficulty, however, about his election is worth noticing, as an additional instance of the way in which these Buonapartes, who were and are always prating about legality and so forth, broke through all laws when it suited their purpose. All the biographies state the objection to have been, that Lucien was but twentyfour years of age, whereas the law required the candidate to be twenty-five. It is, we suppose, for some reason connected with this affair, that Lucien studiously omits to name the month or even the year of his birth, but as he says that he was about fourteen in 1789, he was probably born, as the biographers assert, in 1775, in which case he would have been at the time of his election, April, 1798, but twenty-three, and, of course, not for two years more

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of the eligible age. The Appendix to these Memoirs, however, alleges that the difficulty was that the department (Liamone, in Corsica) for which he was chosen, had no right of election-which it certainly had not. We believe that both the objections were well founded-but we find in the Moniteur no mention of the first, and as to the second, the Council suspended the law in favour of Napoleon's brother, and he took his seat.

And now, having laid before our readers every line of the book that has any air of novelty or interest, and having indicated the character of the rest, we revert to the question of what possible object M. Lucien Buonaparte could have proposed to himself by such a publication? which we can only answer by our original supposition, that he may have three chief objects. First, he probably wishes to keep himself before the public eye, and at the same time to make a profession of political faith calculated-as he, in his long-sighted ambition and short-sighted judgment, fancies to conciliate the acquiescence of various parties in his accession to the empire of France. The very idea seems as preposterous as the mode by which it is attempted is ridiculous; but preposterous and ridiculous as they may be, we can, with our best diligence, discover no more rational motive. When he complains, with the most patriotic sensibility, of the hardships of the exile of the Buonapartes from their beloved France, it is not assuredly with any great hope of persuading Louis Philippe to invite such a swarm of hornets into his hive, already uneasy enough; no, it is merely to flatter the national vanity, and to get over the original difficulty of his Corsican origin, by the affectation of being peculiarly and most sentimentally French. But this affectation partakes a little of effrontery, when we recollect that his original exile, when he escaped from the benignant rule of his illustrious brother, first to Rome, and subsequently to England, was his own choice. If exile from France be indeed so grievous to M. Lucien, he certainly is, and has been the greater part of his life, a most unfortunate gentleman; for we do not believe that there is another sexagenarian in the world, pretending to the name of a Frenchman, who has spent so small a portion of his existence in France. He was born in Corsica, at time when, he admits (p. 3), Corsica was not France; how long he was at school in France he does not tellindeed he tells nothing precisely-but at the age of seventeen he came to reside there, which he continued to do (not interruptedly) for a dozen years and he has spent the last thirty years of his life in this protracted exile-though we beg pardon-in the ordinary use of the term, the dozen years which he really did pass in France seem rather to partake of the nature of exile.

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The next object we can suppose him to have is to shake the throne of Louis Philippe, just so far as to throw him out of it, without overturning the seat itself, which Lucien no doubt thinks he could himself at once fill and steady. This design is scarcely, we think, veiled in the following passages :

'At this moment the French throne is yet between the quasi legitimacy of divine right, and the quasi legitimacy of the popular right. Its power has not been consecrated either by the elevation upon the shield, which was the universal suffrage of the ancient Franks; nor by the hereditary coronation, the legitimacy of past times; nor by the national vote, the legitimacy of new times.

'If, immediately after the 30th of July, government shrank from universal voting, this may be explained by reasons that our contemporaries know, and which are useless to mention. But at this time, after five years of exterior peace and material amelioration, now that factions are vanquished or rendered powerless, what is there to fear in legitimatising? Is France descended so low that it is possible to dispense with her vote? If the new government of our fine country would at length submit itself to the popular voting, it would confirm and strengthen itself; and all parties would then surround with conviction the elect of the people. If, on the contrary, it refuses to render homage to that sovereign whom in our age it is in vain to disown.... I wish to deceive myself; but the abyss of a revolution is inevitably about to open before us; and the counsellors of the crown, who do not endeavour to engage it to bend before that popular sovereignty, draw upon their own heads all the responsibility of the struggles which threaten every government that is ill seated. To persist in not consulting France, would be shewing that that they do not regard the 30th of July as a revolution, but as a personal catastrophe.'-pp. 260-261.

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The same idea is repeated in another place; but did any man out of Bedlam ever seriously imagine such a preposterous proceeding, or advance it on such unfounded data? What!-factions vanquished and innocuous in France?-Witness the Cloître St. Mery-the Rue Transnonain-the Rue de l'Oursine-the assassination plots of the Pont Royal, of Neuilly, of Fieschi, and of Alibaud -and finally the insurrections of Strasbourg and Vendóme! But again; Lucien must believe that the votes would be either for or against Louis Philippe; if they were for him, what would be gained beyond what he possesses in the acquiescence of the people in the votes of their representatives?-and if Lucien believes, as we have no doubt he does, that the votes would be against Louis Philippe, what is the advice but the old revolutionary mandate'óte-toi que je m'y mette? It is not easy to say what, if it were possible to refer the question to universal suffrage-unbiassed by bribery or intimidation-the result might be. Our own belief is, that the principle of Louis Philippe's government-the monarchy of the Hôtel de Ville-would not obtain one single suffrage; but