fame, he resolved, instead of seeking his subject in savage life, to take it out of that state of society, and from that period in the history of the world, in which he could naturally and fairly bring the institutions and poetical machinery of the Christian religion into direct conflict with those of the religion of Homer and Hesiod, and the religion of the German tribes of the north. At Rome, then, in 1802, only a few months after his Génie du Chris tianisme had been published, he began his Martyrs, a religious epic, whose scene, placed at the end of the third century, during the persecutions of Dioclesian, would naturally and almost inevitably embrace the conflict between Christianity and Paganism, and bring into fair opposition the different religions prevailing through the wide borders of the Roman Empire, with whatever was poetical in their respective institutions, sacrifices, and worship.

To this work, then, he devoted the most strenuous exertions; and, on its success, openly hazarded his chief hopes of literary fame. But, after four years of labour, he found his action stretching through so many interesting countries, little known or described, that, before he could venture to finish what he had undertaken, he must visit the principal scenes of his poem, and endeavour to catch their local colouring on the spot. From the same motive, therefore, that brought him to America in 1791, he visited Greece, Asia Minor, and Africa, in 1806; and having made the entire circuit of the Mediterranean, returned home in 1811, and published an account of what he had seen, under the title of "Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem to Paris, going by the way of Greece, and returning through Egypt, Barbary, and Spain." It excited not a little attention as soon as it appeared, and is certainly a curious and interesting book; not, indeed, because it is a book of travels to be much trusted or consulted for the accuracy of its details and descriptions; but because it appeals successfully from known facts to the imagination and feelings, and awakens strong and unwonted associations with objects, which, under other relations, were so familiar to us, as to have grown, in a great degree, commonplace. Thus, at the very opening of the book, we are told that he is going to Palestine, in order to fulfil a religious vow; and, while such a piece of devotion, in a Western Christian, carries back our imaginations to the twelfth century, and the manners of the crusades, we are instantly brought home again by being reminded of his main poetical purpose, which is never for a moment forgotten during the whole of his pious pilgrimage. Then again, when we land with him in the Morea, and find him alternately visiting ruins, archbishops, and agas, with apparently similar devotion; reading a Greek translation of his own Atala, surrounded by the scenery of the republic of Lycurgus; standing amidst

the churches founded by St. Paul at Corinth, and looking backward at the mountains of Argolis, and forward to the glittering summits of Parnassus; translating Thucydides in the shadow of a Turkish minaret; and listening to the Imam, who tells the hour of the night, in Arabic, to Christian Greeks, from the walls of the Parthenon ;-it is not easy to define what we feel, and perhaps, there is something fantastic and false in it; but certainly a confusion of poetical fancies and associations is awakened by these and other similar descriptions and hints of M. de Chateaubriand, which are not excited by the reports of any of the other travellers who have told us of this extraordinary and devoted country. Just so it is, when we go with him to Palestine. Every thing there, too, is presented in a new point of view; with new colours; through a new medium. Hebrew antiquity is interpreted to us, as it were in the spirit of the crusades, and with the sympathies of modern poetry; and we hear of Abraham and Godfrey de Boulogne, of Joshua and Richard the lion-hearted, with much the same feelings; and listen, as if they were cotemporary, to citations from Isaiah and Tasso, David and Homer, St. Paul, Milton, and Racine; while we hasten with him, surrounded by Turks, Arabs, and Monks, through the plains of Judea; while we bow with him before the ruins of the temple of Solomon, and the traditions of the Holy Sepulchre; while we rest on the consecrated banks of the Jordan; while we linger by the murmuring of that "brook which flowed fast by the oracle of God."

In the same spirit, we are led through Egypt, and through the ruins of Carthage, and the remains of Moorish splendour and glory in Spain; so that, when we reach Paris again, under M. de Chateaubriand's guidance, we do not feel that we have collected much of the sure and substantial information we might reasonably have expected from three considerable volumes of travels. For, after all, we have heard little about the antiquities of Greece, or the crumbling institutions of Turkey, or the picturesque manners of Egypt and Barbary. We do not seem, indeed, to have lived much with Greeks or Mahometans, Ishmaelites or Mamelukes. But instead of all-this, we have seen what we knew before, under different colours. We have considered things in their poetical relation to the past; not in their present character, condition, and circumstances. We have travelled and sojourned, not on the shores of the Mediterranean, but rather in the countries of Agamemnon, of Godfrey de Boulogne, of the Ptolemies, of Solomon, of Hannibal; and the glimpses we have caught of their greatness, have come reflected to us from the remains of their ancient monuments, illustrated and interpreted by the spirit of that poetry, which belongs to all ages, and is of kindred to all people.

But such feelings, associations, and fancies, however unsuita

ble they may have been as materials for a book of grave travels, were just what Mons. de Chateaubriand had gone so far, and endured so much, to obtain, as materials for his poem; and he, no doubt, felt himself fully compensated by them, when he found that his romantic expedition had consumed the whole of his little fortune. On his return, therefore, he went to his work with increased diligence, and in two years more, making in all seven from the time when he began it at Rome, it was published at Paris, under the name of Les Martyrs, ou le Triomphe de la Religion Chrétienne. It is, in form, what is claimed to be a regular prose epic, like the Télémaque; and, like that, it is divided into the recognised number of twenty-four books, in which the rules that have been applied to the construction of such works are rigidly observed. The subject, however, is something entirely new, and marks not a little boldness in its author's talent. The Christians of the third century, he supposes, had so far fallen off from the purity of their religion, that a second atonement for them was become necessary; and this atonement was to be made by two mortals, one of whom, chosen from among the Idolaters, and the other from among the Christians, were to become the expiatory sacrifices both of the faithful and the Gentiles. These two victims, therefore, Eudorus, a Christian, descended from Philopomen, the last of the Greeks, and himself an orator and soldier of no mean name, and Cymodocee, descended from Homer, and daughter of a priest of the Muses, are the hero and heroine of the poem, the martyrs in the persecutions of Dioclesian, and the unconscious subjects of the strange glory Chateaubriand has imputed to them, that of being vicarious sufferers to complete an atonement for which the blood of the first sufferer had not proved sufficient. This is the point on which the whole of the Christian machinery of the poem rests; and on which the indispensable connexion between the human and superhuman portions, between those parts of the action that pass on earth, in heaven, in purgatory, and in hell, is established. With this thread then for his guide, Mons. de Chateaubriand gives us, either in episodes or the main story of the poem, the entire lives of Eudorus and Cymodocee, whether passed in the beautiful valleys of Messenia, in the mountains of Arcadia, in the intrigues of Rome, or the luxury of Naples; in the sufferings of a campaign in Gaul, or of a pilgrimage through Egypt; while, at the same time, the history of other inferior personages in the poem, carries it through the East, through Africa, Germany, and Britain, thus opening to the reader the condition and almost the history of what was then known of the world. The whole ends with the public martyrdom of the hero and heroine, in the Coliseum at Rome-an event which, we are warned by a miracle, is to be immediately followed by the establishment of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.

From this sketch of the singular imagination on which the poem is founded, and the extraordinary story which constitutes its action, it will not seem surprising that it has a marked character both in its defects and beauties; though certainly it seems to us that the first are the most prominent and obtrusive.

To begin, then, with its defects;-its most striking, though. not, perhaps, its deepest and most serious fault, is, that it is neither poetry nor prose in its style, but a kind of eloquent and exaggerated declamation, far removed from the simplicity and grace of Fenelon's Telemachus, and rendered still more unpleasant by a great number of imitations and translations from other poets, especially Homer and Milton, which are sometimes perceptible for pages together, and awaken the most discordant associations. The second considerable fault of the Martyrs is, we think, that it is written on a system; that it is an attempt to support and carry through a theory. The consequence of this is, that Mons. de Chateaubriand is continually making an effort to bring the machinery of Christianity into successful opposition with that of the Greek, Roman, and Druidical superstitions; and, therefore, instead of giving himself up to the free and unhesitating influence of poetry, and thus drawing us after him by an enthusiasm we cannot refuse to share, we are continually involved in the conflicts of saints and demigods, until we sometimes hardly know whether we are not reading alternately passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Traditions of the Church.

Perhaps, however, after all, the chief fault of the Martyrs is, that it is too much encumbered with history. Chateaubriand, indeed, tells us plainly that it was an essential part of his plan to give a complete sketch of Christianity, as it existed in the time of Dioclesian; so that, before we get through, besides being made familiar with all the martyrs the Acta Sanctorum could afford him, and all the miracles and traditions he could gather from the obscure annals of the Church's sufferings in Africa, Italy, and the East, we have five books, which give us what he ventures himself to call a complete history of the Franks and Gauls; and we know not how many more, filled with accounts of the monks, confessors, and fathers, who crowd the unprofitable lists of the saints that illustrated the churches of Carthage, Egypt, and Palestine. We are completely wearied as we are dragged through this wandering series of unimportant events and forgotten personages, who can interest us no more than the list of the Greek ships in Homer; so that, when we have finished the whole work, we come away, perhaps, with stronger impressions of it as a romance, containing a collection of sketches of manners in the third century, and of the early history of Christian martyrs, than as an epic of the full length and the most exact proportions, founded on the strange doctrine of a second vicarious atonement,

But though the faults of the Martyrs are prominent and obtrusive, we are far from thinking it is without beauties. Several of the characters are finely drawn and supported, especially that of Velleda, the Druidess, which is, in some respects, taken from Virgil's Dido; that of Demodocus, the priest of the Muses, who seems to be imbued with the very spirit of their worship, and to be a worthy descendant of Homer, by whose inspiration he lives; and that of Cymodocee, the heroine, who, though perhaps too romantic for the age in which she is placed, and the work she is destined to illustrate, is a delightful union of the characters of the ancient mythology, in which she was educated, and the purer religion to which she had been converted; often confounding the language and worship of both, but never mistaking the heavenly spirit of that to which she freely offers up her life.

Besides the characters, however, there is often a high degree of eloquence in the Martyrs. It is true, the transparent and unpretending simplicity, which alone can give a classical value to works of this doubtful species, is wanting; but whenever a fair opportunity is afforded, for that style of powerful and striking declamation, in which no small part of M. de Chateaubriand's force resides, he is, we think, eminently successful. Take, for instance, such passages as the song of Cymodocee, in the second book, the harangue of Eudorus before the Roman Senate, in the sixteenth, and many of the formal speeches throughout the work: -it seems to us they show a high degree of power; and of a power too, which, at the bar or in the pulpit, would have placed M. de Chateaubriand among the distinguished orators of his country.

After all, however, though we may allow, and ought to allow, a good deal to such characters as Demodocus and Cymodocee, and to such declamations as those of Eudorus and the hermit of Vesuvius, yet, we suppose, it will be generally admitted, that the principal attraction of the work, or, at any rate, its principal poetical merit, is to be sought in its descriptions of natural scenery. For there is a freshness, a fidelity, a warmth here, that do not permit us to doubt whence they come. We do not, therefore, need to be told, that his exquisite descriptions of the mild luxuriance of the Grecian evenings, and of the seducing softness of the climate of Baia and Naples, were written on the very spots to which they are devoted: nor do we wonder that the scenes at the tomb of Scipio, at Sparta, at Athens, in the port of Alexandria, and on the banks of the Jordan, come before us so like a living panorama of what we read; for we have only to go back to his Itinerary, and we shall then tread all these conseerated paths with him in his own pilgrimage, and see that every colour and shading he has chosen, were carefully selected in the