no further official part in political affairs during the rest of his
life. In his latter days he was much with the celebrated Madame
Recamier, and completed his affectedly-named but admirable _Memoires
d'Outre Tombe_,--an autobiography which, though marred by some of his
peculiarities, contains much of his most brilliant writing. Of the works
not hitherto noticed, _Rene_, _Le Dernier Abencerage_, _Les Natchez_,
and some sketches of travels and of French history, are the most
remarkable.

For some thirty years, from 1810 to 1840, Chateaubriand was
unquestionably the greatest man of letters of France in the estimation
of his contemporaries. His fame has since then diminished considerably,
and much has been written to account for the change. It is not, however,
very difficult to understand it. Chateaubriand is one of the chief
representatives in literature of the working of two conditions, which,
while they lend for the time much adventitious importance to the man who
takes full advantage of them, invariably lead to rapidly-diminished
estimates of him when they have ceased to work. He was a representative
at once of transition and reaction--of transition from the hard and
fast classical standards of the eighteenth century to the principles of
the romantic and eclectic schools, of reaction against the _philosophe_
era. He was one of the earliest and most influential exponents of the
so-called _maladie du siecle_, of what, from his most illustrious pupil,
is generally called Byronism. His immediate literary teachers were
Rousseau and Ossian. He was not a thoroughly well-educated man, and he
was exceptionally deficient in the purely logical and analytic faculty
as distinguished from the rhetorical and synthetic. What he could do and
did, was to glorify Christianity and monarchism in a series of
brilliantly-coloured pictures, which had an immense effect on an age
accustomed to the grey tints and monotonous argument of the opposite
school, but which, to a posterity which is placed at a different point
of view, seem to lack accuracy of detail and sincerity of emotion.
Nevertheless Chateaubriand, if not a very great man, was a very great
man of letters. His best passages are not easily to be surpassed in
brilliancy of style and vividness of colouring. If the sentiment of his
_Rene_ seems hollow now-a-days, it must be remembered that this is
almost entirely a matter of fashion and of novelty. The _Genie du
Christianisme_, despite