Ir was on the 22nd of March of last year, 1842, that Henri Beyle died suddenly in Paris, at fifty-nine years of age. Author of some of the best works extant on Italy and the arts, a clever novelist, and shrewd observer, he leaves a reputation high among men of letters, which we believe will not die, but is unlikely to attain a wider range, from the very nature of his talent, and from the pains he took to confer on each fresh appearing volume a different paternity. Saving in literary circles, his death was scarcely noticed at the time it occurred. A feuilleton of the National singly protested against the careless silence of the public towards the man who, having amused and instructed, bade them this abrupt farewell.

Giving the word its high and true signification, there is little real criticism (written criticism) in France. It is to be found, keen and polished, in the conversation of a Parisian salon; the reviews afford none which may bear comparison with that which made the fame of the Edinburgh and Quarterly, whose contributors chose this department because competent to fill the rest. In their pages devoted to this branch we have found, with few exceptions, either that an over-friendly feeling, fearing to damn an author with faint praise, smothered him in a treacle bath; or that party spirit and perhaps personal dislike, had placed a rod in the hands of some small unknown, who, fancying it a club, dealt blows at those who stood above his reach, believing he could knock them down withal.

Beyle may lay to his own charge that, notwithstanding his merit, and the value set on him by competent judges, and his having contributed to the literature of both France and England, his name has no farther echo. In his pictures of Italian character, he has not been equalled. His personages are not French ladies and gentlemen, distinguished by names which terminate in i or o, but Italians under their

own sky and sun, excluded from public affairs, and their discussion, with their passions strengthened by lack of vent, and energies which desolate in private, because debarred from being of public utility- to attain happiness in this world, satisfying these passions as far as possible, and to whatever they may tend; to be saved in the next fulfilling the outward forms of religion. It is almost impossible for a foreigner to pierce the invisible wall which surrounds Italian society. If the stranger enter, the inmates change, and a casual comer may leave his entertainers ignorant of them as he arrived. The state of the police, the fear of committing themselves in presence of one unknown to them-the absorbing effects of some love or vengeanceruling passion of the time - undistracted by outward events, in which they have no share, and must show no interest, may well cause this reserve; but Beyle, residing at Milan, had peculiar advantages; his intimate friends were Italians, who could and would draw the curtain. We have heard them say no foreigner ever knew Italy so well. He forces his readers to thought a penalty some dislike to pay, his works may require a previous education of the mind a demand many cannot grant: by the contemptuous dislike with which he speaks of his own countrymen, he has indisposed them for an audience; he wants connexion of ideas, and is most fatiguing to the reader from the bounds he must make mentally to follow from sentence to sentence; he has no charm of style ; his sentences, never empty, take a sharp and abrupt tone from his horror of a feeble idea expressed by a sounding word; dissecting character with what he believes precision, he sometimes oversteps the truth and fails to solve the whole mystery of the human being, because he will imagine nothing, and believes that laying bare the nerve, he can touch the life. He is abrupt, from his often expressed love of the unfore

seen and unprepared; as he calls it, the Imprevu; like a boy in a forest, untired while exploring, but growing weary in the straight avenue, with its shorn grass and cold statues. An admirer of Italian enthusiasm, opposed to what he calls the cold vanity, the passionless mockery, the cowardly susceptibility of his countrymen, his own susceptibility is never asleep, his own irony is always in action; he places the iron mask of the latter before his strong feeling, because he fears to yield to its expression too long; and deprecates the dread of ridicule, because, most of all, he suffers from it. He seldom paints a character so lofty, that the succeeding chapters do not lay it in the dust; his fault lies in an apparent denial to humanity of her nobler attributes. With the young, whom he would disappoint, and the old, whom he would not console, Beyle is not likely to be popular; he is better fitted for the meridian of life, when men have been taught analysis, and while they can still bear it; and he will have admirers rather than the enthusiasts who are as captives chained to the car of the conqueror.

His first work, published in 1817, "Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio," signed Bombet, (a name he adopted, among others, Stendhal, Lagenevais, Visconte, &c.) was favourably reviewed by the "Quarterly." It is not our intention to recommence what has been ably performed, or in this instance to do more than remark on the eccentricity of the author. The whole of the portion concerning Haydn was translated from the work of an Italian, of the name of Carpani, a fact to which Beyle made no allusion on his titlepage. Assuredly no man needed less to defraud another; and Carpani, being alive, and entering his protest against this appropriation, nothing could be so vain as its defence, which, however, Beyle chose to execute in the " Journal des Debats." His more important works, "l'Histoire de la Peinture en Italie," "Rome, Naples, et Florence," "Promenades dans Rome," "La Vie de Rossini," "L'Abbesse de Castro," "La Chartreuse de Parme," with tales and chronicles inserted in the reviews, have, we believe, remained unnoticed in our own country. His biography is so interwoven with his works, in most of which it is his pleasure to appear

often through a softening medium, that it will be interesting to recall some of its circumstances. There exists here no reason for silence, his career is closed. His family was respectablehis grandfather a physician. He was born at Grenoble, in 1783, and carefully educated at the central school of the department of the Isère, where he bore away suffrages and prizes, as a boy. As, about this time all youthful heads were turned by the Lieutenant of Artillery become first Consul, Beyle was a candidate, but an unsuccessful one, to enter the Polytechnic School. Count Daru, his distant relation, obtained for him a cornet's commission in a dragoon regiment, and his first campaign was made in Italy; but that he was present at Marengo, which he allowed to be believed, is more than doubtful. was even reminded by an early friend that at that particular date of time, they were certainly together, and elsewhere, to which he replied "Humph, humph, you mistake-c'est un beau debut dans le monde que Marengo." Become aide-de camp to General Michaud, and soon weary of a military career, he sent in his resignation, when during the short peace of 1803 he could do so honorably; turning from it to what was the serious folly of his whole life-for he fell in love.

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object of this passion was an actress, whom he followed to Marseilles, becoming, for her sake, clerk in a mercantile house; it was however of brief duration-and, recalled to the service by Count Daru, he was named adjoint commissaire de guerre; in 1806, he went to Prussia, and was named at Brunswick Intendant des domaines de l'Empereur. He pretended to great talents for administration, they being feeble in reality; but he proved good feeling and probity, for, having received eight millions from a transaction expected to produce but four, he did not with the overplus make his own fortune. The campaign of 1809 came to lure him from Brunswick; he followed the Wagram army attached to the Intendance generale, under Count Daru, and was thus really present at the funeral of poor Haydn, to whose feeble old age the sound of the invading cannon had been a knell.

It was during this campaign that, left behind with the sick and provision stores, in a little town whose garrison

was judged more necessary elsewhere, Beyle's courage and presence of mind saved both. That part of the country was ill-affected towards the French, and waited but an opportunity to make its disposition felt. The garrison had scarcely quitted the town when the tocsin sounded, and the population rose to massacre the sick and burn the stores. The officers, unsupported by troops, knew not what part to act. The avenues of the hospital were crowded, and cries of death rang from them, when Beyle, at the peril of his life, made his way through these streets, and penetrated into the building. Sick and wounded - all who could stand upright, he made rise from their beds, and arm. Such as could not stir, he placed in ambuscade at the windows; of the rest formed a platoon, opened the doors, and led a sortie; at the first discharge the mob fled. After the campaign of Prussia and Poland, he was named Auditeur au conseil d'etat and Inspecteur du Garde Meuble de la Couronne. In 1812, he made the Russian campaign, surviving the retreat from Moscow. Arriving before the troops at Kiemberg, he was so famished and weary that to

obtain sufficient food and rest seemed impossible. "I ate an omelette, and slept an hour," said Beyle, talking over his return," I ate another, and slept an hour more, waking to eat again, and following my meal by another hour of rest, and so on through eight and forty." Crossing the river, and having nearly reached the shore, the ice cracked and yielded beneath the sledge, but for a vigorous effort of his horse, he would have perished. The disasters of this retreat so impressed themselves on his imagination, that he said long afterwards, the sight of the Swiss mountains awoke in him a feeling of pain; since the campaign of Russia, he had quarrelled with snow, not from the memory of his own perils, but the spectacle of horrible suffering which excited no pity. This was not surprising from a man who had seen at Wilna, holes in the hospital walls stuffed with frozen portions of human bodies. It was in Prussia, during the campaign of 1813, that the famous Gall cured him, with some iron pills, of an obstinate fever which had preyed on him for six months. The phrenologist felt his scull, and said to him-" You

have faith in nothing, not even in Friday. At the commencement of the year 1814, he was sent to Grenoble to calm the public effervesence, in company with the Senator St. Vallier. His vanity inclining him to a noble ancestry, he wrote de before his name, and the wits of the town addressed to him letters, "à Monsieur de Beyle, fils de Monsieur Beyle." Returned to Paris after the invasion of the allies, weary of political changes, with eighteen thousand francs in his pocketbook, he thought his treasure unbounded. He went to Milan, and remained there three years, having fallen in love with Madame and seriously submitted during this long period to an amusing tyranny she seriously practised; at one time affecting a fear of being compromised, the lady commanded him to imprison himself in his own house for a space of three months-an order he strictly obeyed, producing his "Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio;" at others she exiled him to Venice, Turin, &c., always for stated periods. His "Rome, Naples, and Florence" was composed during these absences; it proves that his thoughts were most in Milan. In his confidence and its requital he reminds us of Alfieri. To forget this faithless lady, Beyle fled to Paris, but succeeded so ill as to feel remaining there impossible. He returned to Milan, but the intimacy was not renewed. From 1818 to 1821, travelling over Italy, he mingled in all the carbonari societies, though never of the first rank. His indiscretion and loquacity were too well known. He was still so far suspected as to leave Milan on the invitation of the police, after the events of '21, which thus brought him to settle in Paris, and occasioned his visits to France and England. His father died. He had expected to inherit an income of fifteen thousand francs, and seven francs, expenses paid, formed the bulk of his capital. Obliged to work, and applying for places never obtained, because his applications were never properly followed up, he entered into an arrangement with Mr. Colburn, the bookseller, and for some time furnished him with monthly articles for his magazine, for the most part bearing on French literature and the gossip of the day, and inspired in the Delecluze circle, which,

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revolution of July brought joy with it to Beyle. "That ball," said he, pointing where a shop-front was struck by one" that ball sends me to Italy;" and in truth he was named consul to Trieste; and the Exequator refused by Metternich, on account of his attacks on Austria; his destination changed to Civita Vecchia, whither he went very little, taking up his abode in Rome. In 1836, having granted himself leave of absence, he came to Paris. night at the Tuileries, Louis Philippe said to him, "Apropos, Monsieur Beyle, remember you are consul at Civita Vecchia." Tired of his consulship, he determined on becoming a journalist, but abandoned this idea and returned to Rome in 1838. One day he was seized with sudden sadness, but which lasted long- he had remembered he was fifty-six years old, that four years would bring sixty. This melancholy took strange hold of him-perhaps he foresaw his coming end. In 1840, he was first attacked with apoplexy; in 1842, he returned on leave to Paris. His speech was affected, and his mind had received a shock, for his last works are flat and stale.

He did not attain the dreaded age of sixty, for his third fit of apoplexy seized him in April, 1842, and he died at fifty-nine. As a man, his picture is a curious one, for he was made up of contradictions. All his life seriously in love, he affected the levity of a flippant personage—a bonnes fortunes; ever praising Italian sim

plicity, as contrasted with the vanity of France, he was vain himself, as a marquis of the eighteenth century; pretending republicanism and love of equality, he wrote de before his name, which he called 'flinging dust in fools' eyes; adoring Buonaparte, he was an ultra-liberal; printing in his works that a monument would one day be raised on the spot where the great man disembarked from Elba, himself an officer of the imperial household, failed to return to his post in 1815, bound as he was at Milan in other chains. If he prosecuted his trade of author, it was as an amateur, since for the writer who was nothing beside, he expressed a contempt worthy the noble of former days. He chose to write, and write well, but not too well, since he might thus have been confounded with people of the profession, academicians, &c., with whom he had no sympathies. Affecting displeasure when his works were mentioned, he smiled to hear them criticized; perhaps some of the smile might have signified contempt, and part of the annoyance have been real. He had said that each writer setting down what seemed to him true, and giving his neighbour the lie, he saw in the books of his day only so many lottery tickets, having really no more value; posterity forgetting some and reprinting others, would show the winning numbers. A votary of gaiety, and advocate for an independent life, his wit was at times original and acute; at others, gross and libertine-recalling his dragoon life. Gentle and indulgent, biting and caustic, according to thewhim of the hour, he had no stability of purpose or consistency of action. He hated the word duty, and apropos of this word, aimed at England some of those epigrams which very much resemble praise, such as-"In England this terrible duty appears, in the course of one hundred and fifty actions, perhaps one hundred and twenty times." He died the death he would have chosen as happiest, since prompt and unexpected. His vanity, which was extreme, turned not on the advantages he really possessed, but on his talents for administration, which were null, and on his successes with the fair sex, which were problematic. His appearance and manner were not such as persuade, for he was of coarse, and almost com