bis face was coloured by the contact with the rouged cheeks of Fanny de Beauharnais. Having remedied this disorder, or rather excess, of toilet, he causes himself to be announced to the emperor, of whom he asks permission to give a pension of 1200 francs to a valet of his majesty's, who, by a timely hint, saved him from a ridicule which could not have failed to attach to him; the primate then related what had happened at the house of the empress's relation. The emperor and the company laughed heartily; but he to whom the affair was the most agreeable and advantageous was the valet, who they say did not blush to accept the primate's bounty."-vol. iv. p. 325, 326.

We must however make room for one reminiscence of Talleyrand-.

"The members of the imperial family might have expected all sort of chicanery from him. It is stated that the animosity of this diplomatist against all that related to the emperor, arose from a misadventure he had bad in consequence of the return from the island of Elba. He was then at Bern as French minister, and gave a brilliant evening party, at which several amateurs performed a comedy; he himself took the character of a miller, and in order to be more correct in his costume, he covered himself with flour from head to foot; he was white all over, clothes, hands, and face. As he was about to come upon the stage, and promised himself much applause, a secretary of embassy approached, and delivered him a packet. What did it announce? The disembarkation of the emperor in the gulf of Juan. This was a thunderbolt for the ambassador. Without taking time to change his clothes, he dismissed the party, and, with his secretaries, occupied himself all night in expediting despatches to his court, as well as to the different cabinets of Germany. This engaged him till day-break; presently, some one knocked violently at the door of the house; it is opened; and in comes Monsieur * * ambassador from one of the German courts, who, absent from Bern since the day before, had returned in haste, and presented himself to his colleague to ask him the details of an event which was in every body's mouth. What was the astonishment of his German excellence, on entering Monsieur de Talleyrand's closet, to see him dressed as a miller. As the carnival had long been over, he thought that this disguise was the effect of a too early apprehension.

This anecdote ran through the whole city, and since that time Monsieur de Talleyrand was never designated by any other title than of the ambassador-miller."--vol. iv. p. 96.

The style of these volumes is slight, and they are serviceable chiefly, as already observed by us, in displaying the general amiability of Madame Hortense, and the system of scandal so active and widely ramified through French society, where every report, however obviously impossible, obtains ample belief throughout its day. The details we have quoted assist our impressions, and give fair, though slight and incidental lights into characters for whom once all the world was a stage.

ART. III. A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, by Peter L. Du Ponceau, LL. D.: to which are subjoined, a Vocabulary of the Cochinchinese Language, by Father Joseph Morrone, Roman Catholic Missionary at Saigon; with References to Plates, and Notes showing the Affinity of the Chinese and Cochinchinese Languages, &c., by M. de la Palun: and, a Cochinchinese and Latin Dictionary, in use among the Roman Catholic Missions in Cochinchina. 8vo. Philadelphia, 1838.

THE short existence of the United States of North America as an independent nation, and the fact of that existence having been engendered in a high state of civilization, has naturally led, on the part of the American nation itself, as on that of its contemporaries in Europe, to a considerable degree of invidious comparison. The newly-formed people, conscious of individual intellect and civilization on the one hand, and of collective energy on the other, has been but too prone to forget that the first aim and business of nations, as of individuals, must be to assure the means of existence by internal exertion and increase of the necessaries of life; and thus progressively to concentrate such a mass of provision and its resources, of wealth, and of numbers, at home, as to render its commercial, and next, its political relations with other powers, an object of national interest abroad. The rapid progression of domestic colonization and agriculture, the ceaseless development of manufacturing and trading activity, and the eager spirit of enterprise and speculation thus generated and borne with avidity into foreign lands, have secured for America a broad basis of stability at home, and a weight and consideration amongst the ancient states of the eastern hemisphere totally unparalleled in the history of the world. But, comparing with honest and rational pride her actual growth and extraordinary development of resources, the American nation appears in some measure to have overlooked the fact that growth and maturity were necessarily successive; and that in the physical as well as political world the activity of the limbs impedes to a certain degree, though it cannot altogether prevent, the loftier efforts of the mind; and therefore, that the highest class of intellectual exertion, requiring the absorption and concentration of all the mental faculties for its own object and purposes, though likely to need an occasional stimulus from physical motion, was yet incompatible with a general system of moveWhile foreign nations therefore, and England in particular, supplied the staple of American literature, the latter claiming,

ment.

and with justice, the earlier triumphs of British achievements as, equally with ours, her just inheritance of fame, yearned also for intellectual distinctions of her own; and felt and resented with a national and pardonable prejudice the apparent injustice when her writers in a common language were not admitted to the full participation of modern British literary glories.

On the other hand the rapid and eager development in America of energies and resources already alluded to as unparalleled in the pages of history, created in the older world, and most of all in Great Britain, a feeling of jealousy on some points, and a tendency to disparagement on all. England could not behold the successful rivalry in commerce of her own political offspring without an indefinite sense of doubt for the future and of mortification at the remembrance of a portion of the past. She was therefore no way disposed to grant to her forward child a single concession that could be fairly withheld from her; and to the claim for literary distinctions she replied, as Leonidas to the Persians' demand for arms-"Come and take them." Equally in either case the first assumptions of an untried power could expect no other answer.

But with nations as with individuals, a state of mutual distrust and irritation is less often the result of malevolence than of mutual ignorance. A freer inter-communication is re-knitting the ties which war and jealousies had broken asunder; and perhaps in the political as in the human frame, the union of the severed parts, if not carried on through precisely the same channels as before, may yet be confirmed and maintained by an increase of vessels at each point, multiplying simultaneously on both sides, and sympathetically and instinctively seeking and uniting with each other. The name and fame of Washington Irving in Great Britain were tangible evidences to the United States that no mean jealousy of her literary powers depreciated the merit of her writers amongst the English. The author in question, it is true, won golden opinions from ourselves by his eager and almost sacred veneration of this his ancestral land; but in all cases of irritation a generous concession on one side produces corresponding concession on the other; and our "nation of shopkeepers" rendered the truth mathematically demonstrable to their brethren of "the stores" by the irrefragable evidence of hospitality and money. The heads of houses vied with each other in their welcome to the stranger: the peers opened to him their doors; the booksellers their purses; and all was triumph and gratulation, from Melbourn to Murray.

If of all literature the wings of imagination were foremost in crossing the broad Atlantic, the praise which has since attended

the names of Bryant, and Percival, Brown, Cooper, and Willis, has had its consequently due effect in the west. The theological labours of Dwight and Channing, the science of Silliman and a host of fellow-labourers, following in the same train of distinction, have strengthened the cordialities of brotherhood in birth and pursuits; and the learned labours of Doctor Du Ponceau evince how frank and honest is the literary feeling subsisting between the two countries. Every page of the volume before us bears evidence for the author of the sympathy he entertains, and justly expects from us in return, for all that refers to the advancement of knowledge. Were there no other, this in itself would be the proudest of triumphs for literature; that by acting on the common springs of feeling, and searching out the common sources of our best emotions, it has produced union where only discord existed, lulled the clash of arms by the deep breathings of the lyre, converted hostile rivalry into generous emulation, soothed jarring interests into consentaneous intercourse, brought countries that the ocean separated to rejoice and hail openly a facilitated communion, and even led the sterling sense of the great American nation to reprobate the wild outbreak of their borderers against their peaceful sister. To the just and impartial tone so nobly assumed by the best periodicals of America in the late unfortunate events, a tone in which her literature prescribed and echoed abroad the real honesty, honour, and interest of the nation, we may firmly attribute the discouragement shown by the government at Washington to lawless outrage, and the continuance of peace, so jeopardized by those acts." The weapons of war, we will trust, have perished," and Jonathan must claim from us henceforth the remembered "pleasantness" of a brother.

It is with these feelings we open the volume before us, in a spirit of frank and friendly criticism: the more so as being the first work of this nature which it has fallen to our lot to review, and the candid and moderate tone of the writer invite us to a discussion, for the purpose of ultimate union rather than difference. Though we must confess ourselves to differ widely from the author on many points, and more particularly on the first of his two propositions, we trust to be able to express, with our dissent, our high opinion of that independence of judgment, which spurns following a tract merely because it is usual, and assumes for itself a course of inquiry which is certainly open to all. In England, we are aware, it is but too much the fashion to hold certain opinions on oriental language and history as so many articles of faith, and the more so when all known facts militate the most strongly against them. Herein, it is true, con

sists the merit of such faith, but the credo quia impossibile est, is the favourite dogma of the philological Catholic; and all who gainsay that doctrine, upon whatever grounds, are guilty of the sin that shall not be forgiven unto men.

Doctor Du Ponceau's work is put forward to maintain these two propositions:

1. That the Chinese characters primarily represent words; and not ideas, as is generally asserted.

And he deduces from this as an absolute corollary-so at least we consider his argument

2dly. That other nations cannot, as is asserted, employ or understand the Chinese character, independent of the Chinese language, for a system of pasigraphy, or universal writing.

To the first of these propositions we must distinctly demur. To the second we reply that it is a question of fact, not of argument; requiring, as the learned author renders evident, very distinct proofs to maintain it.

But we hold that, whichever way the fact may lie, the second proposition has no connection with the first.

The station held by Doctor Du Ponceau as President of the American Philosophical Society, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and of the Philadelphian Athenæum, &c., entitle his opinions to careful consideration. But in our quality of Reviewers, looking less at persons than things, we are bound to say, that the arrangement of his book appears to us defective; that there is a want of the first principle of logic, definition; that assertion, however frequently made and dextrously managed, requires the aid of argument and proof; and that from the vocabularies, furnished by the volume, the author ought to have drawn particular illustrations of his argument.

In the course of our inquiry we shall come to the remainder of the objections; and therefore only the first needs notice here. The question is opened and discussed in an Introduction of thirty-two pages, which, it appears, was written last; then follows the body of the work, consisting of 102 pages, and going over, of course, the same line of argument which appears for the third time as A. in the Appendix, and is condensed there into a letter of fourteen pages addressed to Captain Basil Hall. These successive discharges may be extremely serviceable in the way of platoon firing; but we doubt whether any American tactician would make this his main battle against so formidably trained a host as the Chinese scholars whom the Doctor so gallantly assails: he should bear in mind that this is not a mere question of bush-fighting at Saratoga, but that his adversaries are the learned of all Europe and China itself, whom he attacks upon their own ground, confessing himself ignorant of the locality.