her celebrity. These circumstances combined, fully entitle Mad. de Genlis, the Doyenne of all female writers now, or lately living, to some pages in a work especially dedicated to the entertainment and instruction of the sex of which she was certainly an ornament, though as certainly not the brightest. mamma. Mad. de Genlis has been infinitely too much cried both up and down; that is to say, if we are to take her own word for the unbounded admiration that has pursued her through life, for the innumerable impassioned friendships, and yet more impassioned loves that she has inspired; these last even since she has borne the somewhat anti-amorous title of grandmamma, if not of great-grandShe was not a model of all male and female virtues, talents, and accomplishments; but neither was she a revolutionary enragée, an apostle of vice, murder, and blasphemy. She was beyond all question, a woman of extraordinary abilities; possessing a lively imagination, the power of original thought, and great industry, as well in using that power, as in gathering materials upon which to use it. But there was a something, or rather there were two things, that counteracted, that almost neutralized those goodly gifts. The first of these, like her endowments, came "by nature;" and this was vanity. A vanity so entire as to leave the possessor perfectly unconscious, unsuspicious even, of its existence; and which, therefore, appears unveiled throughout her Memoires, in great things and in small, with a naïveté so amusing, as almost to take away its ordinary offensiveness. Of this frank vanity we shall take, at random, a few specimens. certainement pas d'arguments qui` puissent qu'elle (herself) obtient si constamment.” *** Finally, for we begin to tire of the subject, of a letter which she wrote to Napoleon, upon his return from Elba, urging him to spare the Bourbons, she says: "Je ne me flatte pas que cette lettre seule ait decidé sa conduite, mais j'ose croire qu'elle contribua à l'affermir dans cette idée." Such vanity must surely have been indigenous; for what exotic could thus have flourished in an uncongenial soil and atmosphere? It must be confessed, however, that Mad. de Genlis seems to have been favoured with a mother whose genius for fostering and forcing that tawdry plant, must have secured the prize in any vanity-cultural society under the sun. A mother, who educated her without an idea beyond exhibiting her tiny self, and as tiny acquirements en spectacle to flattering audiences. The young actress had such succès in a part of Cupid, that she wore the costume for months, if not years, actually going to church in it, with merely the addition of a cloak, and the subtraction of the wings, "Tous convinrent que c'est la seule his- which the cloak would probably have toire (hers) complète de Henri IV., crumpled. et que tous les portraits qui s'y trouvent sont bien faits."***"Il fallait la patience dont je suis capable pour entreprendre ce prodigieux ouvrage.” * * *" Mad. de Stael avait fort peu d'instruction realle." *** "J'ai regretté sincèrement qu'elle n'eut pas été ma fille ou mon élève; je lui aurais donné de bons principes litéraires, des idées justes, et "Je jouais de la harpe d'une manière étonnante et unique jusqu'alors." ** "J'ai poussé ce talent aussi loin qu'il peut aller."***"Comme auteur j'ai eu a me plaindre de tout le monde excepté du public." (that is to say, all professional critics cut her up).***" Il n'y a du naturel." ** The second thing injurious to Mad. de Genlis's intrinsic merit, was the "gift of Fortune," being neither more nor less than the calamitous accident of having been born a Frenchwoman of Quality, under the ancien régime; that is to say, a creature essentially factitious-factitious in principle, factitious even in feeling. Educated, as we have seen, Mad. de Genlis grew up during the reign of the Encyclopédiste philosophers. She was presented at the court of Louis XV. simultaneously with Mad. du Barri, the most infamous of the whole infamous class of Favorites en titre; and, according to the now obsolete Chronique Scandaleuse of those days, the young co-debutante of the exulting courtesan followed the fashion, as strictly in morals, as in dress and manners. Nevertheless, she was endowed with an intellect too powerful to be wholly perverted by the fallacies and vices surrounding her, or blinded even by her own frailties. She saw what was wrong, if not what was right; the conflict between her situation and her opinions tinged her strain of thoughts; and in the anomaly of what is termed in modern French une fausse position, united to her vanity, we find a key to the extravagances that disfigure the best of her multitudinous works, and render the worst a mere farrago of absurdities. Bearing this key in mind, let us now consider Mad. de Genlis as a woman and an author. At seventeen she married the Comte de Genlis, and by his high connexions, yet more than by her own, was lancée into the tourbillon du monde. We beg pardon for so many French expressions. We have no taste for the prevalent polyglot style of writing; but really it is difficult to speak of so thorough a French woman in plain English. She was, as we have said, presented together with the courtesan-mistress, and she was chaperoned by her husband's relation, Mad. de Puisieux, an unobjectionable person, we believe, and by her own aunt, Mad. de Montesson, a lady of a very different character, who ended temporarily, at least, a course of dissipation and profligacy, by entrapping the Duke of Orleans into a generally-known secret marriage, through a series of tricks, that could not, we should have imagined, have deceived the silliest old dotard, father, or guardian, ever brought upon the stage for the express purpose of being duped; but which, nevertheless, Mad. de Genlis alone, of the whole societé, had the wit to see through. Mad. de Genlis afterwards gladly married her daughter to her aunt's new favourite, M. de Valence, to whom, in consideration of the marriage, Mad. de Montesson left her large fortune. Either the progress of the first matrimonial intrigue, or the mere splendour of her harp-playing, which she represents as the wonder and envy of all Paris, brought Mad. de Genlis into intimacy with the son of her aunt's husband, the then Duke de Chartres, afterwards the notorious Duke of Orleans, and yet more odiously notorious M. Egalité. Their connexion she terms friendship, but judiciously abstains from saying much about the matter, observing, that memoir-writers are not bound to reveal such of their faults as have no historical results. As to the real nature of the attachment, no doubts were entertained we believe, in the contemporary great world; and the well-known Pamela, afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald, whom she produced as an English child, purchased to assist in teaching the young princes English, was understood to be its fruit. The affair took, in the first instance, the ordinary course of such amours. The noble mistress was appointed to a post in the princely wife's household; but the next step was less commonplace. Mad. de Genlis became, as she assures us, the prime favourite of the Duchess de Chartres; and so completely so, that with her full approbation, she, the mistress, was intrusted with the entire education of the whole Orleans family, princes and princesses. To conduct this education the more uninterruptedly, she retired to a convent with her pupils, her own daughters, and her mother. But this mode of retiring to a convent did not prevent her receiving the visits of friends, including the Comte de Genlis, and the Duc de Chartres. The duchess appears subsequently to have repented of her concurrence, and violent quarrels ensued. But her objections to the governess were, we are told, altogether political, and of course erroneous. That a mother should think more of the politics, than of the morals of her daughter's governess, seems to our bourgeois English notions, somewhat perplexing. To be sure, if the story we have heard of the governess, or rather ladygovernor, taking, or impelling the young princes to witness the execution of their Under the ancien régime spinsters were not admitted into society, and young married women were the persons who required chaperons, an office usually held by elderly female relations. unfortunate kinsman and sovereign, Louis XVI. be true, we could not much wonder at the mother's dislike of such politics. This, however, must be a mistake, since we know from Mad. de Genlis herself, that she never interfered with politics; a piece of information confirmed by another piece of information, given us in one of her other works, that politics are peculiarly detrimental to the complexion. But whatever were the princess's motives for committing her children to Mad. de Genlis's care, or for wishing to take them away again, the governess proved more worthy than could have been anticipated of the trust reposed in her. She discharged her duties better than, we are pretty sure, any other person, of either sex, likely to have been named in her stead, would have done; and her residence at Bellechasse, the convent to which she retired, is the most useful and honourable portion of this remarkable woman's life. It was then and there that she directed the education of Louis Philippe, late Duke of Orleans, now king of the French; and if we cannot quite adopt the assertion of M. Lemaire, senior of the Faculty of Letters, in his funereal panegyric upon Mad. de Genlis, "that her most beautiful eulogium is upon the throne of France," it is chiefly because that eulogium is, as we would fain hope, rather prospective than present, whilst there is a past moment of her royal pupil's life which appears to reflect yet more credit upon his preceptress, if indeed it be to her lessons that he owes his virtuous independence of spirit. We, ourselves, not appertaining to the pedagogic confraternity, are apt to think quite as much of nature as of education. We allude to the time when, in exile and indigence, the present king honourably earned his bread, as teacher of mathematics, at a Swiss school, instead of languishing in helpless idleness upon public or private British alms, like so many of his fellowsufferers, his inferiors, or his equals. During the remainder of her life the governess is to be considered only as an authoress-the character in which she is most generally known, and in which alone we conceive, she was allowed to correspond with Napoleon, to whom she wrote upon religion, morals, education, and literature. As an authoress, we will now speak of her. To enumerate Mad. de Genlis's works were a task for a modern Hercules; and we, who pretend not to compete with the son of Jupiter, shall content ourselves with attempting, by classification, to facilitate a general notice of them. They seem to fall readily enough under three heads: 1st, the Pedagogic, comprising those written avowedly for purposes of education : 2d, the Romantic, or may we be permitted to say, the Novelistic, in order to obviate the danger of exposing, by any misapprehension, such a staunch anti-Romanticist to a possible momentary suspicion of Romanticism. For the 3d class, we can find no better denomination than the miscellaneous, since it must include Mémoires, Souvenirs, Dictionnaires d'Etiquettes, Diners du Baron d'Holbach, Soupers de la Maréchale de Luxembourg, and the thousand and one others, of which we cannot recollect, if ever we knew, the titles. Of the first, first: in Mad. de Genlis's youth, some sixty or seventy years ago, female authors were neither numerous nor respected, as at the present day. The lady accordingly began her literary career under salutary restraint, with the fear of ridicule before her eyes; and she was successful. Her earliest publications were for the use of children. They were nearly, if not actually, the first of the species combining amusement with instruction, and were long decidedly the best things of their kind. Nay, we feel strongly inclined to say, that many of them are still unsurpassed. The imagination, that afterwards ran wild, gave, whilst yet under control, a delightful animation to the Théâtre d'Education, the Veillées du Château, &c.; happily and sufficiently disguising the pedagoguish purposes of admonition and instruction, at a later period so arrogantly predominant even in her novels. Mad. de Genlis then advanced a step higher in the scale of pedagogism, undertaking to teach the teachers of youth. Her Adèle et Théodore is a scheme of education wrought into a novel, in emulation of Rosseau's Emile, which, by the way, she holds in supreme contempt, in regard as well of composition as of principle. Of Adèle et Théodore, we may briefly say, the whole lives of the Papa and Mamma, including their domestic, and even their visiting arrangements, are a sort of continuous drama of the Thé útre d'Education, in which the juvenile actors perform their parts unconsciously. Timidity was now no more; and Mad. de Genlis, allowing her imagination to expatiate freely in the realms of possibility, proceeded to works of the second class. As a novelist, we have already intimated that she has, or once had, a high reputation. Her earlier novels seized upon our attention and sympathy with an intensity hardly enduring interruption by the ordinary avocations of life. This was their merit; but even these were tainted with our authoress's all-pervading fault, factitiousness in sentiment and feeling. We must illustrate our meaning by an instance or two. In the Vaur Téméraires, one among the very few of Mad. de Genlis's novels wherein the interest turns upon a virtuous passion, the story arises out of an unnatural exaggeration of sentimentality. The excellent widow of a very bad husband, instead of blessing her stars that she had passed through the fiery ordeal unscathed, is at the trouble of going to the churchyard, and carving upon his tombstone a vow of perpetual widowhood. Why or wherefore we cannot guess, unless to provide a good and sufficient obstacle to the love which she forthwith conceives for a very amiable and suitable lover, whom, but for her vow, she might have married as soon as the lawyers and dressmakers had completed their preparations. The Meres Rivales, though, as we recollect, a most fascinating tale, is at least equally factitious, having been written for the express purpose of putting down the passion of love, to which Mad. de Genlis had a mortal antipathy, even in its most legitimate form. A young couple married par convenance, are portrayed as perfectly happy, so long as they entertain for each other no sentiments beyond esteem and friendship. The husband becomes unfaithful (whether this be an essential part of connubial felicity we know not); circumstances make the wife appear so; esteem and friendship are no more; whereupon the husband falls madly in love with his wife, becomes madly jealous; and the enamoured pair are as miserable as any novel hero and heroine need to be. We forget whether the discovery of the lady's innocence cures the gentleman's love, and thus restores them to happiness, or whether a "consummation so devoutly to be wished," is reserved for the less splendid but pretty sure achievement of old age. But this is moderate nonsense compared with a later novel, La Tendresse maternelle, ou l'Education sensitive, which the authoress herself says, was "un tour de force, qui, de l'avis de tout le monde, me reussit," and contains" une idée très neuve sur l'éducation." This new idea is a mode of guarding against the dangers resulting from the association of feelings, or impressions, rather than of ideas; and the remedy and the danger, as here depicted, being equally original and fantastical. A lady, otherwise a paragon of virtue, is unfortunately very much in love with her husband, who, as unfortunately, wore a bouquet of heliotrope upon their wedding-day. During his absence, a dexterous gallant visits her, adorned with that identical flower. The association proves irresistible, and the lady's nuptial fidelity is overpowered by the treacherous perfume. A daughter is the consequence of this fatal nosegay, whom the penitent mother resolves to secure against such beguiling associations. Her purpose is much facilitated by her being shut up in the vaults of a castle, where she is supplied with every thing she asks for, except fresh air. She accordingly contrives many admirable associations; amongst others, teaching the little girl to say her prayers when she smells roses. Never was plan more successful. The young lady, emerging from her subterranean school-room, is wooed with dishonourable intentions. In a snug, well-lighted drawing-room, the designing lover makes such fearful progress, that the reader begins to tremble lest the daughter should prove frail as the mother; but luckily the seducer, thinking to improve his advantage "under the mellow lights of eve," amidst the balmy fragrance of violets blue, And fresh blown roses washed in dew, draws his intended victim forth into the garden, and leads her to a bower of roses; when, as much to his surprise and discomfiture, as to the relief of the anxious reader, down she pops upon her knees, falls to her prayers, and all present danger is of course at an end. We have paused to consider how to despatch the miscellaneous class collect ively in few words, and begin to suspect that we have erred in separating it from the others, since the Autobiography, Souvenirs, &c. may with perfect propriety be ranked under the novelistic head; and the Dinners, Suppers, Dictionaries, &c. &c. under the pedagogic; simply observing, that they are meant to pedagogue grown ladies and gentlemen. In these last the ex-concubine of Citoyen-Egalité, assumes the lofty character of champion of religion, legitimacy, classicism, and the manners of the ancien régime, against the Encyclopédie, the Liberals, the Romanticists, the male innovators upon politeness and propriety, who talk politics in company, and insist upon speaking to the mistress of a house at both their entrance and their exit, and their female coadjutors, who put their feet upon ottomans. Against romanticism, and new fashions, we fear the pedagoguess-general has not effected much, at least so her friend my Lady Morgan reports, and Madame de Genlis herself speaks but vaguely of her triumphs over those enemies. We trust she found consolation for such failure in the glory of her success in her more important warfare. The Encyclopédie is overthrown; it was she, we believe, who determined Buonaparte to re-establish popery; and certainly, for she herself says so, it was she who brought Louis XIV. into fashion again, and prepared the way for the restoration (with which the allies had mighty little to do) by the dauntless heroism of publishing Madame de la Valliere, and her other historical novels, under the empire. Rather a shabby return, by the by, for the pension, and apartments at the arsenal, that the emperor gave her. We would not be misunderstood in what we have said touching Mad. de Genlis's doing battle in behalf of religion and morality. Far be it from us to sneer at those who, by such means as they possess, great or small, labour to uphold the highest of human interests. It is the bounden duty of all so to do; but all need not write books for that purpose; still less need all agreeable novelists fill their pages with twaddling polemics. We humbly conceive they contribute their proper quota to that great end by painting virtue and vice in their true colours. But this modest task could not satisfy the ambition of Mad. de Genlis; and really when we see a reformed demirep scribbling controversy, boasting of ratiocinative victories over the Voltaires, Diderots, &c. whom, by picking detached passages out of their works, she sets up like so many ninepins to be bowled down again with a bottom of brown thread, asserting that her antagonists cannot forgive her, "d'avoir toujours raison," and are therefore incessantly plotting her assassination, why then the reverence of gray hairs, and even the sanctity of the grave lose their restraining power, and our indignation is only checked by our laughter. THE MEETING. And do we really meet again I see that Time has shed a tint And on thy cheek there is a print Which tells that tears were there.I heed not this-for while thine eyes Their tale of truth impart, A train of old, fond memories, |