the bitter memory which they still retain of the utter defeat of their child and champion, the violent rancour of all their passions, and the desperate nature of the agents which they employ, would soon lead to a repetition of the atrocities which before marked their career at home, and a renewal of ceaseless wars from abroad. Europe would not again commit the mistake of suffering to grow into power a faction devoted to the upsetting of all the cherished institutions of European society, and pledged to the demolition, or at least the insult of every existing government; and France ought to know, that its success must end in her enslavement, even if it chanced again to be victorious. With great pleasure, therefore, we see an almost new party arising in France, a party which can look upon Buonaparte as he deserves, as a great though finally unsuccessful general, but as a selfish and egotistical tyrant, to whom the very name of liberty was a jest,-a party in whose eyes not even Austerlitz or Jena can atone for legislative bodies trampled upon, freedom of speech put down, the press gagged into the most servile silence, and courts of law dictated to; not a hundred victories can compensate for military executions, arbitrary taxations, grinding conscriptions, for the audacious attempt of investing a new dynasty, thrust upon reluctant Europe, with attributes and privileges scarcely demanded for the old claimants by divine right. In a word, we rejoice that a rational knowledge of the rights of free men is diffusing in a country, where our neighbours must pardon us for saying it never existed before.

Whether the Jesuits will be able to stem this knowledge remains. to be seen; we think that, in spite of all their intrigues, they will not. It is, at all events, a question well worthy of the most profound attention of the Bourbons and their friends: for if they cling to this congregation of plotters against freedom of conscience, and freedom of institutions; if they take the side of these consecrated enemies of God and man, the road from France may be opened to them again, and if they leave their thrones in such a quarrel, their cause is hopeless-they part, like Ajut, NEVER TO

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ART,

ART. IV.—1. Lebens-Abriss Friedrich Ludwig Zacharias Werners. V. dem Herausgeber v. Hoffmanns Leben und Nachlass, (Sketch of the Life of Frederick Ludwig Zacharias Werner. By the Editor of Hoffmann's Life and Remains.') Berl. 1823. 2. Die Söhne des Thals, (The Sons of the Valley.) A Dramatic Poem. Part I. Die Templer auf Cypern, (The Templars in Cyprus.) Part II. Die Kreuzesbrüder. (The Brethren of the Cross.) Berlin. 1801, 1802.

3. Das Kreuz an der Ostsee. (The Cross on the Baltic.) A Tragedy. Berlin. 1806.

4. Martin Luther, oder Die Weihe der Kraft, (Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Strength.) A Tragedy. Berlin. 1807. 5. Die Mutter der Makkabäer, (The Mother of the Maccabees.) A Tragedy. Vienna. 1820.

F the charm of fame consisted, as Horace has mistakenly declared, in being pointed at with the finger, and having it said, This is he!' few writers of the present age could boast of more fame than Werner. It has been the unhappy fortune of this man to stand for a long period incessantly before the world, in a far stronger light than naturally belonged to him, or could exhibit him to advantage. Twenty years ago he was a man of considerable note, which has ever since been degenerating into notoriety. The mystic dramatist, the sceptical enthusiast, was known and partly esteemed by all students of poetry; Madame de Staël, we recollect, allows him an entire chapter in her 'Allemagne.' It was a much coarser curiosity, and in a much wider circle, which the dissipated man, by successive indecorums, occasioned; till at last the convert to Popery, the preaching zealot, came to figure in all newspapers; and some picture of him was required for all heads that would not sit blank and mute in the topic of every coffeehouse and aesthetic tea. In dim heads, that is, in the great majority, the picture was, of course, perverted into a strange bugbear, and the original decisively enough condemned; but even the few who might see him in his true shape, felt too well that nothing loud could be said in his behalf; that, with so many mournful blemishes, if extenuation could not avail, no complete defence was to be attempted.

At the same time, it is not the history of a mere literary profligate that we have here to do with. Of men whom fine talents cannot teach the humblest prudence, whose high feeling, unexpressed in noble action, must lie smouldering with baser admixtures in their own bosom, till their existence, assaulted from without and from within, becomes a burnt and blackened ruin, to be sighed over by the few, and stared at, or trampled on, by

the

the many, there is unhappily no want in any country; nor can the unnatural union of genius with depravity and degradation have such charms for our readers, that we should go abroad in quest of it, or in any case to dwell on it, otherwise than with reluctance. Werner is something more than this: a gifted spirit, struggling earnestly amid the new, complex, tumultuous influences of his time and country, but without force to body himself forth from amongst them; a keen adventurous swimmer, aiming towards high and distant landmarks, but too weakly in so rough a sea, for the currents drive him far astray, and he sinks at last in the waves, attaining little for himself, and leaving little, save the memory of his failure, to others. A glance over his history may not be unprofitable; if the man himself can less interest us, the ocean of German, of European Opinion still rolls in wild eddies to and fro; and with its movements and refluxes, indicated in the history of such men, every one of us is concerned.

Our materials for this survey are deficient, not so much in quantity as quality. The Life,' now known to be by Hitzig of Berlin, seems a very honest, unpresuming performance; but on the other hand, it is much too fragmentary and discursive for our wants; the features of the man are nowhere united into a portrait, but left for the reader to unite as he may; a task which, to most readers, will be hard enough for the work, short in compass, is more than proportionally short in details of facts; and Werner's history, much as an intimate friend must have known of it, still lies before us in great part dark and unintelligible. For what he has done we should doubtless thank our Author; yet it seems a pity that, in this instance, he had not done more and better. A singular chance made him, at the same time, companion of both Hoffmann and Werner, perhaps the two most showy, heterogeneous, and misinterpretable writers of his day; nor shall we deny that, in performing a friend's duty to their memory, he has done truth also a service. His Life of Hoffmann,' pretending to no artfulness of arrangement, is redundant, rather than defective, in minuteness; but, there, at least, the means of a correct judgment are brought within our reach, and the work, as usual with Hitzig, bears marks of the utmost fairness; and of an accuracy which we might almost call professional: for the author, it would seem, is a legal functionary of long standing, and now of respectable rank; and he examines and records, with a certain notarial strictness too rare in compilations of this sort. So far as Hoffman is concerned, therefore, we have reason to be satisfied. In regard to Werner, however, we cannot say so much: here we should certainly have wished for more facts, though it had been with fewer consequences drawn from them; were these

somewhat

somewhat chaotic expositions of Werner's character exchanged for simple particulars of his walk and conversation, the result would be much surer, and, especially to foreigners, much more complete and luminous. As it is, from repeated perusals of this biography, we have failed to gather any very clear notion of the man; nor with, perhaps, more study of his writings than, on other grounds, they might have merited, does his manner of existence still stand out to us with that distinct cohesion which puts an end to doubt. Our view of him the reader will accept as an approximation, and be content to wonder with us, and charitably pause where we cannot altogether interpret.

Werner was born at Königsberg, in East Prussia, on the 18th of November, 1768. His father was Professor of History and Eloquence in the University there; and further, in virtue of this office, Dramatic Censor, which latter circumstance procured young Werner almost daily opportunity of visiting the theatre, and so gave him, as he says, a greater acquaintance with the mechanism of the stage than even most players are possessed of. A strong taste for the drama it probably enough gave him; but this skill in stage mechanism may be questioned, for often in his own plays no such skill, but rather the want of it, is evinced.

The Professor and Censor, of whom we hear nothing in blame or praise, died in the fourteenth year of his son, and the boy now fell to the sole charge of his mother, a woman whom he seems to have loved warmly, but whose guardianship could scarcely be the best for him. Werner himself speaks of her in earnest commendation, as of a pure, high-minded, and heavilyafflicted being. Hoffmann, however, adds, that she was hypochondriacal, and generally quite delirious, imagining herself to be the Virgin Mary, and her son to be the promised Shiloh ! Hoffmann had opportunity enough of knowing; for it is a curious fact that these two singular persons were brought up under the same roof, though at this time, by reason of their difference of age, Werner being eight years older, they had little or no acquaintance. What a nervous and melancholic parent was, Hoffmann, by another unhappy coincidence, had also full occasion to know his own mother, parted from her husband, lay helpless and broken-hearted for the last seventeen years of her life, and the first seventeen of his; a source of painful influences, which he used to trace through the whole of his own character; as to the like cause he imputed the primary perversion of Werner's. How far his views on this point were accurate or exaggerated, we have no means of judging.

Of Werner's early years the biographer says little or nothing. We learn only that, about the usual age, he matriculated in the Königsberg

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Königsberg University, intending to qualify himself for the business of a lawyer; and with his professional studies, united, or attempted to unite, the study of philosophy under Kant. His college-life is characterized by a single, but too expressive word: It is said,' observes Hitzig, 'to have been very dissolute.' His progress in metaphysics, as in all branches of learning, might thus be expected to be small; indeed, at no period of his life can he, even in the language of panegyric, be called a man of culture or solid information on any subject. Nevertheless, he contrived, in his twenty-first year, to publish a little volume of Poems,' apparently in very tolerable magazine metre, and after some roamings' over Germany, having loitered for a while at Berlin, and longer at Dresden, he betook himself to more serious business, applied for admittance and promotion as a Prussian man of law; the employment which young jurists look for in that country being chiefly in the hands of Government; consisting, indeed, of appointments in the various judicial or administrative Boards by which the Provinces are managed. In 1793, Werner accordingly was made Kammersecretair (Exchequer Secretary); a subaltern office, which he held successively in several stations, and last and longest in Warsaw, where Hitzig, a young man following the same profession, first became acquainted with him in 1799.

What the purport or result of Werner's 'roamings' may have been, or how he had demeaned himself in office or out of it, we are nowhere informed; but it is an ominous circumstance that, even at this period, in his thirtieth year, he had divorced two wives, the last at least by mutual consent, and was looking out for a third! Hitzig, with whom he seems to have formed a prompt and close intimacy, gives us no full picture of him under any of his aspects; yet we can see, that his life, as naturally it might, already wore somewhat of a shattered appearance in his own eyes, that he was broken in character, in spirit, perhaps in bodily constitution; and, contenting himself with the transient gratifications of so gay a city, and so tolerable an appointment, had renounced all steady and rational hope either of being happy, or of deserving to be so. Of unsteady and irrational hopes, however, he had still abundance. The fine enthusiasm of his nature, undestroyed by so many external perplexities, nay to which, perhaps, these very perplexities had given fresh and undue excitement, glowed forth in strange many-coloured brightness, from amid the wreck of his fortunes, and led him into wild worlds of speculation, the more vehemently, that the real world of action and duty had become so unmanageable in his hands. Werner's early publication had sunk, after a brief provincial