Engraved by J. Sartain_
Lamartine Engraved Expressly for Graham's Magazine]

DE LAMARTINE,

MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE.

BY FRANCIS J. GRUND.

[SEE ENGRAVING.]

Alphonse de Lamartine, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs of the
Republic of France, was born in 1792, at Saint Pont, near Macon, in
the Department of the Saone and Loire. His true family name is De
Prat; but he took the name of De Lamartine from his uncle, whose
fortune he inherited in 1820. His father and uncle were both
royalists, and suffered severely from the Jacobins during the
revolution. Had they lived in Paris their heads might have fallen from
the block, but even in the province they did not escape persecution--a
circumstance which, from the earliest youth of Lamartine, made a deep
and indelible impression on his mind. His early education he received
at the College of Belley, from which he returned in 1809, at the age
of 18 years.

The splendor of the empire under Napoleon had no attractions for him.
Though, at that period, Napoleon was extremely desirous to reconcile
some of the old noble families, and for that purpose employed
confidential ladies and gentlemen to correspond with the exiles and to
represent to them the nobility of sentiment, and the magnanimity of
the emperor; Lamartine refused to enter the service of his country
under the new _regime_. So far from taking an interest in the great
events of that period, he devoted himself entirely to literary
studies, and improved his time by perambulating Italy. The fall of
Napoleon did not affect him, for he was no friend of the first
revolution, (whose last representative Napoleon still continued to be,
though he had tamed it;) and when, in 1814, the elder line of Bourbons
was restored, Lamartine returned from Naples, and entered, the service
of Louis XVIII., as an officer of the _garde-du-corps_. With the
return of Napoleon from Elba he left the military service forever.

A contemporary of Chateaubriand, Delavigne and Beranger, he now
devoted himself to that species of lyric and romantic poetry which at
first exasperated the French critics, but, in a very short time, won
for him the European appellation of "the French Schiller." His first
poems, "Meditations Poetiques," which appeared in Paris in 1820, were
received with ten times the bitter criticism that was poured out on
Byron by the Scotch reviewers, but with a simila