n literature. He measures
everything as it agrees or disagrees with Legitimacy and Ultramontanism.
His works are a continual defence of the Bourbons and the Pope. Modern
democracy he cannot pardon. Without seeking to deny the excesses and
shortcomings of his own party, he finds an explanation for all in the
levelling tendencies of the age. He cannot be too severe on the first
French Revolution and its results. "In letters," he tells us, "it has
led to materialism and anarchy, while the Bourbons personify for France
peace, glory," etc.

[Footnote B: _Les Semaines Litteraires_. Troisieme Serie des Causeries
Litteraires. Par Armand de Pontmartin. Paris: Michel Levy Freres. 12mo.
pp. 364.]

Pontmartin is an able representative of the side he has taken. He
believes in and ably defends those heroes of literature so well
characterized as "Prophets of the Past," Chateaubriand, De Bonald,
and J. de Maistre. His special objects of antipathy are writers
like Michelet and Quinet, pamphleteers like About, and critics like
Sainte-Beuve.

The last he cannot pardon for his work on Chateaubriand,[C] published in
the early part of the year 1861. The time is past for giving a fuller
account of this remarkable production of the historian of Port-Royal.
Suffice it to say, that, though it deals in very small criticism indeed,
though its author seems to have made it his task to sum up all the
weaknesses of one the prestige of whose name fills, in France at least,
the first half of this century, yet there exists no more valuable
contribution to the history of literature under the first Empire. It has
been called "a work no one would wish to have written, yet which is read
by all with exquisite pleasure." Nothing could be truer.

[Footnote C: _Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire sous l'Empire_.
Cours professe a Liege en 1848-1849, par C.A. Sainte-Beuve, de
l'Academie Francaise. Paris: Garnier Freres. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 410, 457.]

"Chateaubriand and his Literary Group under the Empire" is a course
of twenty-one lectures delivered by Sainte-Beuve at Liege, whither he
repaired soon after the Revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris. Fragments
of the work appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," among others the
paper on Chenedolle, which forms the most interesting portion of the
second division. In this are to be found several original letters, now
published for the first time, casting much new light on the life of that
unfortunate poet.

O