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ART. VII.-History of France under the Bourbons. By C. D. YONGE. London: Tinsley, Brothers. 1866. Vols. I.—IV.

A MORE Complete and definite subject than that treated of in these portly volumes cannot be found in the whole domain of historical research. It presents a drama that appears constructed in obedience to the severest laws of antiquity. Eschylus might have found in it a trilogy ready shaped for arrangement; the sublime humanity of Sophocles, or the passion of Euripides, might have adapted it. We are not insensible to the fact that we justly expose ourselves to the censure of reviewing, as a whole, an unfinished work: for Professor Yonge is yet a debtor to the public to the amount of two volumes. This, however, is one of the points on which our author seems to us to have betrayed a want of judgment, and a failure of historical instinct. We are not in the least degree hinting that the France under the Bourbons' is too voluminous-that the projected six might have been concluded in four tomes. We neither hint nor think this; but we hold, that with the young Martyr of the Temple, the dynasty of the Bourbons, properly speaking, determined; that the Constitutionalists of the Restoration, who had been in the day of agony the betrayers, as far as in them lay, of the throne, through their own revolting selfishness, were but Bourbons by accident. They neither embodied the traditions nor represented the principles of France or of Henry IV.; and therefore they might have been well left unnoticed in a work treating, not of the French under the Restoration, but of France under the Bourbons.

Professor Yonge has not made in the present work his first literary venture: he has already given to the world 'The History of the British Navy,' which has been well received, and enjoys an honourable repute. He writes in a calm and unimpassioned style; and his page breathes more of Stanhope than of Macaulay. Our author thus creditably fulfils one of his professional duties, for he is Regius Professor of History in the Queen's College of Belfast. But he is also Regius Professor of English Literature, and we heartily wish we could say that his sentences were as easy and grammatical as his sentiments are philosophical and deliberate. A professor of English literature ought, by all 'the branches of learning,' to write good English. In saying this, we hope we are not adding to the wrongs of Ireland: anything that will justify some new form of Fenianism, or lead to some

fearful quotations from the Psalms. Sentences whose clauses are coupled together by and which,' are not positively ungrammatical, but they are next door to it. The following may be Queen's College English, but, be Canterbury's Dean the witness, it is not Queen's:

'He was known by sight to the deputations from the most distant provinces, for he had reviewed them in a body the day before, when several had been separately presented to him, towards whom for once he had discarded his habitual reserve, assuring them of his fatherly regard for his subjects, not only with condescension, but with cordiality.'— Vol. iv. p. 236.

Or again:

'By the side of Descartes, Mirabeau was now laid with a pomp which was not, in the eyes of his countrymen, more extraordinary in that the grief which had dictated it was for the time real, than because it was the first instance of honours being conferred on a man whose acts had been those of peace, which had previously been reserved for the heroes of the sword.'-Vol. iv. p. 264.

Perhaps something might be made out of these lines if tried diagonally. Or again :

'Louis, who had refused to let them die for him, having only given their death the additional sting that it had been no service to him.'Vol. iv. p. 425.

Is this a sentence?

The only reduction of expenditure which the minister could devise being one which he made the Assembly demand of him, as such, the demolition of those fortresses which were not required for the defence of the frontier, the real inducement to this measure being the degree in which it would weaken the governors of the central provinces, and prevent them from hereafter becoming formidable to the crown.'—Vol. i. p. 273.

Sentences which consist of absolute clauses loosely strung together are the worst possible specimens of English composition, and the very last to be expected from a professorial desk. We have taken at random but a few out of very many like instances which we noted as we read on; but these are enough to justify the judgment we have formed. Nor would Professor Yonge misapply his time by giving some attention to the pruning of his sentences. He knows, no doubt, better than we do, that the law applies to prose as well as verse, which demands us to clear our sentences of the verba lassantia aures. Yet we prefer withal Mr. Yonge's negligence to the affected and ambitious style so common in our day.

There is one omission of our author's which we must point out, and at the same time endeavour to supply. A history of France under the House of Bourbon might have been fittingly introduced by a sketch of the history of that family. It was the oldest sovereign dynasty in the world, except one case. It

has given to Europe more than one hundred sovereigns. As itself a reigning family in France from the accession of Henry IV. to the commencement of the Revolution, it maintained its position for two hundred years. Here is one of the many points of resemblance between the Bourbon and Stuart Houses. It is easy to trace out more fully the historical parallel. We shall only add here, that the founder of each House died a bloody death, and both families were driven into exile. Historical research has not yet settled the question as to the origin of the race; whether the first known Count of Paris, the Butcher1 Capet, was an illegitimate descendant of Charlemagne, or of the Lombard kings. The House of Capet, which takes rank as the third dynasty of France, reckons fourteen kings who reigned during the 336 years from 987 to 1323, when Charles IV. was succeeded by the first king of the House of Valois, Philip VI. The real founder of that House was Philip I. or the Fair, who by consequence was also founder of the first House of Orleans. This Philip was fourth in the succession of the House of Capet. The ieghth in that succession and 160 years later than Philip, was Saint Louis. Robert, Earl of Clermont, was his sixth son. This Robert married Beatrice of Burgundy. The son of Robert and Beatrice was Louis I., the immediate founder of the House of Bourbon. Louis had two sons. The line of Peter, the elder, became extinct in the celebrated Constable Bourbon, who was killed at Rome in 1527. Of the younger line the eighth descendant was Henry IV. the first king of the Bourbons. Henry's brother, Louis, the younger son of Antoine de Bourbon and Jean d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, was the founder of the Houses of Condé and Conti, whose members styled themselves also De Bourbon and D'Enghien. The House of Bourbon is the fifth dynasty of France, and to Louis XVII. inclusive reckons six kings. In the six generations from Louis XIV. not one Dauphin became king. We readily arrange that period of 200 years into three divisions, marking the rise of the House of Bourbon under Henry IV. and Louis XIII, its noontide glory under Louis XIV, and its decline and political extinction under Louis XV. XVI. and XVII. The fatal House of Orleans has a like history. The third king of the House of Valois, and by a singular coincidence the first Dauphin, was Charles the Wise, whose great grandfather had been first Count of Valois. This Charles V, or Le Sage, had two sons. The elder, Charles VI, continued the royal line to Charles VIII, the last of the race, from whose invasion of Naples Hallam reckons the commencement of Modern History. Charles V. had a second son, Louis, who was the

! Dante, 'Purgat.' c. xx.

founder of the FIRST House of Orleans, Orleans of Valois and Angoulême. Louis again had two sons: Charles, second Duke of Orleans, whose son Louis XII. (husband of our Henry VIII.'s sister) was the only King of France of this branch of the House of Orleans. Louis XII. had a daughter, Claude; the first duke's second son was John, Count of Angoulême, who was father of a Charles, Count of Angoulême, who again was father of Francis I. This Francis I. married his third cousin, Claude. The grandson of this union, and the last king of the House of Valois, was Henry III, on whose assassination, Henry of Navarre became king. The House of Orleans thus extinguished, the title was revived in favour of Jean Baptiste Gaston, the elder of the sons of Henry IV. by Gabrielle, his favourite mistress: the title did not survive him. But his daughter, the 'grande Mademoiselle,' bequeathed her own title and immense possessions of Montpensier to the founder of the THIRD and last House of Orleans, who was Philip, second son of Louis XIII, and younger brother of Louis XIV. Of this third House there are six generations; the second prince was the celebrated Regent, who on the death of his uncle Louis XIV, for eight years, as guardian of the great king's grandson, was virtually King of France; and whatever his own character might be, very far from being its worst king. The last three princes of this third House of Orleans were the pious Louis Philippe I, who retired into a monastery; his son Louis Philippe Joseph, who, in the subsequent extinction of all titles, more from necessity than affectation, adopted that designation of Egalité under which he has achieved an immortality of infamy; and lastly, the son and indefatigable accomplice of Egalité in every conspiracy against the throne and life of his kinsman, that Louis Philippe III. D'Orleans, the French citizen king, whose ignominious expulsion from a basely-usurped throne we have had the great privilege of witnessing. If ever there was an instance where a prince might have pleaded the sorrow and the shame of the past as a bar to his acceptance of any throne, it was this case. But in this dark romance and tragedy of family hate and disaster, it would be unjust to ascribe to the House of Orleans the sole pre-eminence in baseness. Let it never be forgotten that Monsieur-afterwards Louis XVIII.—was the earliest as he was the most inveterate enemy of Marie Antoinette; of her who, alone among the Bourbon queens-and, to the greater condemnation of that House, the women were almost invariably pure and womanly-was blessed with a husband wholly loyal to her; of her who, above all the women of her time, by the

1 He married, the daughter of the Duke de Penthièvre, whose elder and reprobate offspring, Prince Lamballe, dying early, left behind his widow, the celebrated Princess Lamballe, of Savoy.

baptism and the cup was brought into the most intimate fellowship of the sufferings of her God.'

The assassination of Henry III, the last prince of the House of Valois, opened the way for the accession to the throne of Henry of Navarre. The moment was critical in the extreme. The known attachment of Henry to the Reformed religion was calculated to intensify rather than abate the troubles which France had been so long suffering from-troubles whose origin is exclusively ascribed to differences in religion. The most prominent person of the day was in fact the Queen-mother, who, during the reigns of her two sons, Charles IX. and Henry II, during the childhood of the one, and the absence of the other in his Polish kingdom, under the name of Regent had virtually been sovereign. There can be little doubt that Catherine de Medici was a very able woman: if posterity has magnified her wickedness this cannot be a matter of surprise, when we have the authority of Louis XIII. for the statement that she is chargeable with procuring the death of Charles IX. Most probably we have exaggerated her ability and her wickedness. She did not care for France; she cared for power and for political intrigue; and it was owing to the indulgence of this passion of hers that her favourite son was driven from his capital, and forced to make peace on the terms offered by his subjects. From personal intrigue she seems to have been quite free; and though she was atrociously careless about wasting human life, she must be acquitted of the guilt of originating the S. Bartholomew massacre. The idiosyncrasies of the Italian character led her to cultivate craft rather than force, and to calculate in her treatment of the religious factions of the time, not what would promote the interests of truth, or her own convictions, but what would most surely establish her own authority: indeed the massacre of S. Bartholomew must not be regarded as an isolated fact in the history of the French nation. From the days of the Armagnacs to those of the July Barricades, if we may not indicate a still later event, assassinations on a grand scale and an organized system have been the invariable concomitants of every political change in France, of every coup d'état. Long before there could have been any hope or prospect of Henry abandoning the Calvinism in which he had been bred up, it is indisputable that his own life and that of his mother was saved

1 We may perhaps remind our readers that the last surviving child of Louis and Mary Antoinette, was the Filia Dolorosa of the Temple. She, at last set free from her prison wholly destitute, eventually married her cousin, the Duke d'Angoulême, the eldest son of her uncle, Louis XVIII. This Duke abdicated all his rights in favour of his nephew, the Duke of Berri, who was assassinated. The eldest son of the Duke of Berri is the Count de Chambord, soi-disant Henry V.