olutism, since he was
moderate, conciliatory, and disposed to unite all parties under a
constitutional government. No man in France was more respected than
he,--adored by his family, modest, virtuous, disinterested, and
patriotic. As an administrator in the service of Russia during the
ascendency of Napoleon, he had greatly distinguished himself. He was a
favorite of Alexander, and through his influence with the Czar France
was in no slight degree indebted for the favorable terms which she
received on the restoration of the monarchy, when Prussia exacted a
cruel indemnity. He wished to unite all parties in loyal submission to
the constitution, rather than secure the ascendency of any. While able
and highly respected, Richelieu was not pre-eminently great. Nor was
Villele, who succeeded him as prime minister, and who retained his power
for six or eight years, nearly to the close of the reign of Charles X.,
a great historical figure.

The man under the restored monarchy who represented with the most
ability reactionary movements of all kinds, and devotion to the cause of
absolute monarchy, I think was Francois Auguste, Vicomte de
Chateaubriand. Certainly he was the most illustrious character of that
period. Poet, orator, diplomatist, minister, he was a man of genius, who
stands out as a great figure in history; not so great as Talleyrand in
the single department of diplomacy, but an infinitely more respectable
and many-sided man. He had an immense _eclat_ in the early part of this
century as writer and poet, although his literary fame has now greatly
declined. Lamartine, in his sentimental and rhetorical exaggeration,
speaks of him as "the Ossian of France,--an aeolian harp, producing
sounds which ravish the ear and agitate the heart, but which the mind
cannot define; the poet of instincts rather than of ideas, who gained an
immortal empire, not over the reason but over the imagination of
the age."

Chateaubriand was born in Brittany, of a noble but not illustrious
family, in 1769, entered the army in 1786, and during the Reign of
Terror emigrated to America. He returned to France in 1799, after the
18th Brumaire, and became a contributor to the "Mercure de France." In
1802 he published the "Genie du Christianisme," which made him
enthusiastically admired as a literary man,--the only man of the time
who could compete with the fame of Madame de Stael. This book astonished
a country that had been led astray by an infidel