the convent, animated by "delicious chats"; and for the solitary repasts in which Fortunatus, whilst eating his utmost, regretted having only one pleasure at a time, and not having his eyes and ears charmed as well. Finally, there were some on the sad and happy days which every year brought round: such as the anniversary of Agnes's birth; and the first day of Lent, when Radegonda, in obedience to a vow, shut herself up in a cell to pass there the time of that long fast. "Where is my light hidden? Wherefore does she conceal herself from my eyes?" the poet then exclaimed, in a passionate accent which might have been thought profane; and when Easter-day and the end of this long absence arrived, he then, mingling the smiles of a madrigal with the grave reflections of the Christian faith, said to Radegonda: "Thou hast robbed me of my happiness: now it returns to me with thee; thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival."

To the delights of a tranquillity unique in that century, the Italian emigrant added that of a glory which was no less so; and he was even able to deceive himself as to the duration of the expiring literature of which he was the last and most frivolous representative. The barbarians admired him, and did their best. to delight in his witticisms; his slightest works, such as notes written whilst the bearer was waiting, simple distichs improvised at table, spread from hand to hand, were read, copied, and learned by heart; his religious poems and verses addressed to the kings were objects of public expectation. On his arrival in Gaul, he had celebrated the marriage of Sighebert and Brunehilda in the heathen style, and the conversion of the Arian Brunehilda to the Catholic faith in the Christian style. The warlike character of Sighebert, the conqueror of nations beyond the Rhine, was the first theme of his poetical flatteries; later, when settled at Poitiers in the kingdom of Haribert, he wrote the praise of a pacific king in honor of that unwarlike prince. Haribert died in the year 567, and the precarious situation of the town of Poitiers, alternately taken by the kings of Neustria and Austrasia, obliged the poet to observe a prudent silence for a long while; and his tongue became unloosed only on the day on which the city he inhabited appeared to him to have definitely fallen into the power of King Hilperik. He then composed for that king. his first panegyric and elegiac verses: this was the piece mentioned above, and the sending of which to Braine gave rise to this long episode.

ADOLPHE THIERS

(1797-1877)

BY ADOLPHE COHN

HIERS (Louis Adolphe, usually mentioned simply as Adolphe Thiers),-born April 15th, 1797, died September 3d, 1877,belongs to a class of writers which was comparatively large in France during the first half of the nineteenth century; who owed to literary success an entrance to political life, and distinguished themselves as public men no less than as men of letters. Of these no one reached such eminence as the little

Marseilles laborer's son, who at the age of seventy-four was elected the first President of the French Republic.

ADOLPHE THIERS

The Thiers family, though one of the humblest of the large city of Marseilles, managed to give to its brightest child as good an education as was at the disposal of French children at the beginning of the century. Adolphe Thiers was given a government scholarship in the lycée or college of his native city; and after winning distinction in his classes, studied law in the neighboring city of Aix, which possessed one of the government law schools. There he met a young student one year his senior,- François Mignet; with whom, owing partly to the many tastes they had in common, he formed a friendship which was dissolved only by death more than sixty years later. Neither of these two law students cared much for the law, both of them longed for a literary career; and both of them therefore soon moved to Paris, the centre of the intellectual life of the nation. Thiers made his mark with incredible rapidity, and before long was a regular member of the staff of one of the most important liberal papers, the Constitutionnel; he even became a part owner of the paper, through the liberality of the German publisher, Cotta. There he wrote on all sorts of subjects, his best articles being on the annual exhibition of paintings known as the Salon.

A proposal that came from a sort of literary hack, Félix Bodin, made him determine to write a history of the French Revolution;

the first two volumes of which, bearing Bodin's name by the side of Thiers's, appeared in 1823. This was the beginning of the first exhaustive history of the French Revolution written by one who had not been an eye-witness of the event; and it presented therefore greater guarantees of impartiality than anything before published on the same subject. The young writer moreover possessed to a very high degree the gift of telling an interesting story, and of presenting in a clear and simple way that which seemed at first obscure and complicated. He could also work fast, so as not to allow the reader to lose his interest in the narrative. The last of the ten volumes of Thiers's History of the French Revolution' appeared in 1827, hardly four years after the first volumes had been issued.

The success of the work at once placed its author in the front rank of historical writers, at a time when France was extraordinarily rich in literary talent, and when the desire to know as accurately as possible the events of the revolutionary period was general in Europe. Thiers, who was destined to be a great parliamentarian, had also a special gift for financial explanation and military narrative; so that he possessed almost every one of the requisites for composing the history of a crisis which was financial in its causes and military in its development, no less than social and political in its nature.

It is to be noted as a curious coincidence that while Thiers was publishing this exhaustive work on the Revolution, his friend Mignet was writing another and shorter narrative of the same period. These two works were the first that manifested a reaction against the anti-revolutionary sentiments which had been dominant in France, at least in appearance, since the restoration of the Bourbons. Liberal opinion was gathering strength and boldness. The accession to the throne of Charles X., the last of the surviving brothers of Louis XVI., made every one feel that a great effort would be made by the court to place the ultra-royalist and Catholic party in full control of affairs. Thiers's History of the French Revolution' called attention to the means by which in the past the people had triumphed over an antipatriotic cabal, and powerfully served the Liberal party in its preparations for what may be termed aggressive resistance.

On January 1st, 1830, when the fight was at its hottest, Thiers for the first time assumed a prominent rank among the combatants. In connection with his friends François Mignet and Armand Carrel he established a daily political paper, Le National, which was at once recognized as the boldest of the opposition newspapers. The leader in which the policy of the paper was explained stated that, determined to possess political liberty, France was willing to find a model for her institutions across the Channel; but that should she fail in the attempt, she would not hesitate to look for another model across the Atlantic. The article had been written by Adolphe Thiers,

who was destined to be before long a minister of a constitutional sovereign, and more than forty years later the President of a democratic republic.

In the months that followed, many of the most striking political articles of the National were printed over the initials A. T.; and when on July 25th, 1830, Charles X. determined, by his famous Ordonnances, to challenge the Chamber of Deputies and the Liberal press to a mortal combat, it was Adolphe Thiers that wrote the strong-worded protest by which the Parisian journalists proclaimed their refusal to obey the illegal dictates of the infatuated monarch.

The success of the revolution of 1830 made Thiers one of the most influential men in the kingdom. His literary productions at that time comprised, in addition to his History of the French Revolution' and to his articles in the Constitutionnel and in the National, a volume on 'Law and his System of Finance' (1826), reprinted in 1858 under a new title, 'History of Law'; and an 'Essay on Vauvenargues,' quite an early production, written by him while still in Aix, and rewarded by a prize of the Aix Academy of Letters and Sciences under rather curious circumstances. That Academy had offered a Eulogy of Vauvenargues as a subject for a competitive essay. Young Thiers, in his eagerness to secure the prize, sent in two essays composed on two different plans,—so that the judges could not, until the name of the author was disclosed, imagine that they came from only one source; and he secured both first and second prize, over all his competitors. For nearly fifteen years after the accession of Louis Philippe there was an interruption in his labors as a man of letters. He then played an important political part, being several times a cabinet minister and twice prime minister; the last time from March to November 1840, when he strongly supported against all Europe the celebrated ruler of Egypt, Mehemet-Ali. His rival at that time was another celebrated man of letters, the historian Guizot, who succeeded him as prime minister. Both were considered the most brilliant political orators France possessed at that time, with Berryer and Lamartine. In 1834 Thiers was elected a member of the French Academy. His speech on being received in that illustrious body is one of his most successful efforts.

The opinions he represented in Parliament during the reign of Louis Philippe were those of a moderate Liberal, and especially of one who placed the authority of Parliament far above the King. That much he set forth in the famous formula: "The King reigns and does not govern." Soon after his retirement from power, in 1840, he realized that both King and Parliament were, and were likely to remain for a long time, hostile to his ideas, and that his chances of regaining power were very slight indeed. He therefore again turned

to literature, to historical writing. In his 'History of the French Revolution he had conducted his narrative to the Eighteenth Brumaire of the eighth year of the French Republic (November 9th, 1799), -the date of the military revolution by which General Napoleon Bonaparte was made supreme in the State. He determined now to write the history of Napoleon himself from his accession to power to his death. The times were ripe for such an undertaking: the admiration for Napoleon was one of the strongest feelings of the generation to which Thiers belonged. When last prime minister, he had prevailed upon England to give up the remains of the great captain, and to allow them to be transported to France. Paris had known in the succeeding quarter of a century no such enthusiasm as was manifested on December 15th, 1840; when, in the midst of the most impressive military pomp, Napoleon's coffin was laid at rest in the crypt of the Hôtel des Invalides. Thiers devoted no less than twenty years of his life to the composition of his 'History of the Consulate and the Empire'; the first five volumes of which were published in 1845, and the twentieth and last in 1862.

During that period France passed through strange vicissitudes. The throne of Louis Philippe was in February 1848 swept away by a revolution, which the King at the last moment vainly tried to stave off by calling Thiers to power. A republic was established, which soon intrusted its destiny to a nephew of Napoleon. Thiers, after supporting the candidacy of Louis Napoleon to the presidency of the republic, soon discovered his mistake, and became a determined opponent of the "Prince-President"; and so, when Louis Napoleon broke his oath of office and destroyed the republic, Thiers was not surprised at being informed that he was banished from France. He was, however, soon allowed to return and to peacefully complete his great historical undertaking. In the mean time he had written a short but important work on 'Property,' destined to check the growth of socialistic feeling.

The History of Napoleon' is Thiers's greatest claim to distinction as a literary man. It possesses in a high degree the merits of clearness and order; it never fails to be interesting. It may be lacking in moral power: Napoleon is too uniformly praised and admired, his opponents are too uniformly found fault with. But the author's enthusiasm for his hero is felt to be genuine; and Thiers, moreover, does not seem to speak simply in his own name, but in the name of the millions for whom Napoleon was the image of everything that was great and striking. Whether this fulsome approval of Napoleon's doings very well agreed with the liberal doctrines he defended in the political arena, does not seem to have troubled Thiers very much; and as soon as he had completed his history he re-entered public