From Fraser's Magazine. GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, ESQ. Here we have the sketcher sketched; and, as is fit, he is sketched sketching. Here is George Cruikshank, the George Cruikshank, seated upon the head of a barrel, catching inspiration from the scenes presented to him in a pot-house, and consigning the ideas of the moment to immortality on the crown of his hat. We wish that he would send us the results of his easy labours. Of George Cruikshank the history is short. He stands too often and too well before the eyes of the public, to render it necessary that we should say much about him; and we confess, that of his earlier annals we know little or nothing. This, it must be allowed, is but small reason for a "regular magazine hand" to decline writing a long article about them, according to the usual and much-honoured practice of the well-trained contributors of our worshipful contemporaries. But as we profess to have a conscience, we must not comply with the usage; honestly stating, on the contrary, that the first of Cruikshank's works known to us are his caricatures of George IV. and his friends. Tories as we were and are, and as we trust we still shall be, these comic picturings haunt our imagination. The poor old king in every attitude of ludicrous distress (the "Fat in the Fire" was perfection); Copley (sketched as we have been assured, merely from description, and yet a great likeness); Castlereagh (but even the professed caricaturist could not destroy the gentlemanly grace of that noble face and figure); the "Waterloo-man," with his sword dropping into the scale against the pen; the various parsons, jailers, jockeys, lawyers, and the rest, were first-rate. As Cruikshank himself says of Gilray, "He that did these things was a great man, sira very great man, sir!" To Cruikshank, however, they were productive of nothing but the fame of their cleverness and the odium of their politics; as Hone, for whom and his blockhead' authors George's talents floated the dire rubbish of the House that Jack built, and other witless productions, never paid him for what he had done. In all these stupid productions there were loud puffs of the power of the press-George never knew any thing of it when in their hands but as a screw. However, what he did gave him fame and name. We Tory folk were horribly angry at the time, but we soon confessed that the caricaturist was a clever fellow. The trade came to the same conclusion, and work flowed in apace. We rather think he quitted ere long the shabby crew who wished to make him their property, and has settled down, if not into the genuine faith of a Tory, at least into that approach to orthodoxy which consists in the detestation of a Whig. At all events, he does not appear any longer as a political caricaturist; and yet, was there ever a time when there was such an opportunity? Just think of a speech from the woolsack by Lord Brougham, at eleven o'clock at night, or an opening of a budget, or other financial matter, by Lord Althorp, at any hour of the twenty-four. We wish that Cruikshank would wake a little, and show H. B. that, clever as he is, he is not to be allowed a monopoly VOL. XXVI. FEB. 1835-16 of depicting the humours or stupidities of Whiggism. Of course George is, like all other men of undoubted genius, a most ill-used gentleman. As Mathews laments that the general obtuseness of the public will not recognise his talents for tragedy -as Liston mourns over the delusion which applauds him in Sam Swipes and Paul Pry, and does not permit him to appear as the Damon or Strephon of a sighing opera-so Cruikshank is shocked at the evil fate which consigns him to drawing sketches and caricatures, instead of letting him loose in his natural domain of epic or historical picture. Let him content himself; he can draw what will be held in honoured remembrance when ninety-nine out of every hundred of the great "masters" of our schools," and a still larger proportion of all the R.A.'s and A. R.A.'s that ever existed, or ever are doomed to exist, will be forgotten. The historical which he should cultivate is such as that which appears in his recently published Sketch-Book, where, for example, the life of Bonaparte, whether as eagle soaring over the Alps, or eagle chained to a perch, is depicted in all its stages, from artillery lad on watch, through triumph, splendour, and flight, to the little cocked-hatted and round-paunched exile of St. Helena. And so we conclude our thirty ninth article of this series; and he who refuses to subscribe to its truth is a dissenter worse than a pagan. From Blackwood's Magazine. MEMOIRS OF M. DE CHATEAUBRIAND.* NO. IV. We are now able to fulfil the engagement we entered into with our readers, of presenting them with a fourth article on the subject of these memoirs. We are proud to be able to state, that we have received the passages we have now to communicate direct from Monsieur de Chateaubriand himself. He has done us this honour, and has besides expressed his lively satisfaction on perusing the previous articles we have devoted to his works. We must acknowledge this distinction he has conferred upon us warmly and reverently. When the finest genius, and one of the most illustrious public characters of Europe, thus condescendingly communicates with a foreign periodical, having no impulse or motive thereto but what is furnished by the singular amiability of his disposition, which makes it the continual feast of his life to oblige and gratify all who approach him when we know that such acts of kindness flow spontaneously from him as water from a spring, and that he possesses-which is proved by the almost adoration with which he is regarded by all parties indiscriminately in France-all those private virtues and winning qualities which soften the splendour of glory, and render it still more lovely than it is dazzling, we feel that we should fail in our duty of rendering honour where honour is due, and still more in doing justice to our own sentiments, if we did not proclaim our sense *Continued from MUSEUM, Vol. 25. p. 438. F not so much of the honour done us, though of that we are duly sensible-as of the habitual kindness and cordiality towards all men which characterises Monsieur de Chateaubriand, and which we have no doubt would have led him, independent of any other motive-warmly as we are convinced he sympathises with the great cause we espouse-to favour us as he has done. it loses the propriety it has in its proper place in the narrative, and retains only its puerility. If I extract a portrait, or a political fragment, without that which precedes or follows them, the circumstances which justify and introduce them are not perceived. One book of my Memoirs may be a voyage; such another rises to poetry; general history; a fifth is an intimate correspondence, a third narrates a private adventure; a fourth belongs to the detail of a congress, an account of an affair of state, a picture of manners, a sketch of a club, of a drawing room, or of a court, &c. &c. &c. All is not then addressed to the same readers, and in this variety one subject makes another pass off. "You desire particularly to have the passage upon Venice; but, as it is very long, I cannot give the whole of it. You would see then neither the rencontres I met other tender recollections of our native heaths-of those As to the idea that Monsieur de Chateaubriand craves our praise, it is absurd. For the last six months he has been absolutely breathing an atmosphere of incense. Almost every writer of distinction in France has felt himself honoured by lavishing the most enthusiastic adulation, we may say, on this freely elected monarch of French literature. Without exaggeration, we may assert with in that city, nor my enquiries about J. J. Rousseau that Roman emperors, grands monarques, and and Lord Byron; the souvenirs of my first visit to all the patrons of letters from Mæcenas down-Venice in 1806, and my last reveries at Lido in 1833, wards, have never been regaled with such a full would be no longer mingled with the beauty and chorus of eulogistic harmony, as has been Mon- there is in the world an author less infatuated with his melancholy of that wondrous dying city. I do not believe sieur de Chateaubriand, since the first sound of works than I am, or who holds them more cheaply; his memoirs issued from the Abbaye aux Bois, nevertheless, there are some mutilations which cannot be and was taken up and repeated in a thousand demanded even of the least exacting vanity. echoes by the whole press of France. In fact, "But now, sir, that I have spoken to you with sinthe adulation of which he has been the object cerity, I must prove to you that a Breton can never looks like the effect of electricity. Brilliant as is absolutely refuse a Breton. If I cannot place at your his genius, honourable and illustrious as has been disposition my views delle fabbriche di Venezia, I send his life, they do not account for it; nor can we you a description of the spring in our dear Armorican attribute the spontaneous burst of admiring and country; you will be a competent judge of the truth of affectionate applause and enthusiasm, in which the picture. I must only tell you, that you have not he walks continuously as in a perfumed cloud-there all my Brittany. There are in the memoirs many like the gods of old when they visited the earth -to any thing but the thrilling emotions, which the genius of the heart communicates to all who are permitted to come within its magic circle. After the steam of rich distilled perfumes, therefore, which Monsieur de Chateaubriand has been inhaling for so many months, we feel convinced that any thing we could add would appear vapid and insipid. We can only sincerely admire and applaud, and that in measured terms; but by his own countrymen Monsieur de Chateaubriand has been glorified. Nevertheless, when we read such odorous and begemmed passages as the first which we shall lay before our readers, we do feel inclined to indulge in an aeronautic flight of praise beyond what is suitable to our northern gravity and phlegm. This passage is preceded by a letter to the gentleman to whom it was communicated, which, as it is in itself very eloquent-for what can its author write that is not so-and shows the value of the favour it confers, we shall previously transcribe. The letter is addressed to M. Ed. Mennechet, and is as follows: "I have been much moved, sir, by the letter you did me the honour to write me; nevertheless, I experience some embarrassment in replying to it. Permit me to speak to you with frankness." 66 heaths where our Duguesclin desired that his feats of We now give the passage alluded to, entitled a "Spring in Brittany.' "The spring in Brittany is milder than in the environs of Paris, and commences three weeks earlier. The five birds which announce it, the swallow, the loriot, the cuckoo, the quail, and the nightingale, arrive with the tepid breezes which harbour in the gulfs of the Armorihearts-ease, jonquils, butter-cups, hyacinths, ranunculus, can peninsula. The earth is then flecked with daisies, and blue-bells, like those abandoned spaces which environ St. John of Lateran, and the Holy Cross of Jerusalem at Rome. The wood glades are variegated with lofty and graceful fern; the fields are stained with flowers, which might be taken for golden butterflies, settling upon green aud azure shrubs. The hedges, along which raspberries and strawberries and the violet abound, are decorated with the eglantine, the white and red hawthorn, the honeysuckle, the convolvulus, the box, the ivy, and scarlet berries, and briers whose brown and crooked branches bear magnificent leaves and fruit. The air is alive with bees and birds; swarms and nests arrest children at every step. The myrtle and the laurel grow in the open air, and the fig ripens as in Provence. Every apple-tree, with its carmine roses, resembles the great bouquet of a village bride. Many persons have already asked for fragments of my Memoirs. I do not merit this flattering ardour; "The aspect of the country, intersected with ditches, but even when I wish to yield to the lively sentiment of is that of a continual forest, and puts one in mind of gratitude it occasions, I find myself prevented by con- England. The low and narrow valleys, where, among siderations of some weight. My Memoirs are not des- hemp-fields and willow-trees, trickle little unnavigable tined to appear till after my death; if I make them, rivers, present the most smiling and solitary perspective. therefore, too much known during my life, I abandon The massive forests terminating the heath plains, inhabitmy design. I weaken the effect of a diversified and ex-ed by sabotiers, (makers of wooden shoes,) coal-heavers, tended work, of which a very false idea must be formed from detached and broken passages. If, for example, I detach one scene of childhood from its successive scenes, and glassmakers, having something of the gentleman, the trader, and the savage. The naked lands, the shaven platforms, and the fields red with buck-wheat, which separate these valleys from each other, make their | humanity, and a juster and more elevated sentiment of freshness and delight the greater. Along the coast, the dignity of our nature, have urged us beyond the light-houses, watch-towers, bell-turrets, Roman works, contracted limits of a society of convention-when, druidical monuments, and the ruins of chateaux, succeed each other; and the sea bounds the whole prospect. "Between the land and sea extend sandy plains, an indecisive frontier between the two elements; the field and sea-lark fly there together; the plough and the bark, at a stone-throw distance from each other, furrow the earth and the waters. Sands of different colours, and banks varied by shells and sea-weed, and fringes of silvery foam, mark with white and green the ridges of the wheat-fields. I have seen, in the island of Ceos, an ancient bas-relief which represented sea-nymphs attaching festoons to the bottom of the robe of Ceres. thanks be to heaven, education and enlightenment have restored equality, and have caused the individual to resume all his value. But I have been forced to descend to the puerility of these details to describe the character and ruling passion of my father. For the rest, I neither complain of the old nor of the new society. If in the first I was the Viscount de Chateaubriand, I am François de Chateaubriand in the second; and I have the arrogance or the humility to prefer my Christian name to my title." We must make a few observations on the pasIn the interior landscapes of the continent, the sage we have just cited. We confess we can see nothing puerile in recording one's ancestral digheavens and the earth behold each other with a motion-nity. The pride of birth is not mere vanity. It less aspect; but in maritime prospects, the rolling azure of the waves is enclosed under the fixed azure of the is a moral feeling, and one of that elevated and firmament. Hence results a striking contrast. The generous order which constitute the wine of life. winter, contemplated from the height of the steep shores, presents a picture of two opposed colours: the snow which whitens the earth blackens the sea. "To enjoy this rare spectacle, one must see in Brittany the sun, and especially the moon, rise over the forests, and set upon the ocean. "Established by God, as the sovereign of the abyss, the moon has her clouds, her vapours, her long rays of light, and her shadows, like the sun; but she does not, like it, retire alone; a train of stars accompany her, in proportion as she descends towards the brim of the ocean; she increases her silence, and communicates it to the sea. Soon does she touch the horizon, intersects it, shows only the half of her face, dims, sinks, and disappears, in the soft swellings of a bed of waves. The stars which stand near about their queen, before plunging after her into the bosom of the ocean, hover a moment suspended over the billows and the rocks: eternal beacons of an unknown land. The moon has no sooner set, than an air springing up effaces the image of the constellations, as torches are extinguished after a solemnity." It is a mistake to imagine that this sentiment arises from the worldly advantages with which it is usually accompanied. On the contrary, these form its alloy. It is a spiritual affection. It is the same feeling as that which makes us love to contemplate an ancient edifice, or an old ruin. It is one of those fine and subtle affections which shun the touch of gross utilitarian philosophy. This philosophy takes all such for illusions which its zeal is to destroy, and does not perceive that they betray the residence of a hidden fire, compounded with our mortal clay, and are like the spontaneous flame which rises from the burning springs of Dauphiné, which, if quenched for a moment, kindles again of itself, and gives alone interest and radiance to the slaty and rocky soil which generates it. Nobility—or the same thing deteriorated-a class of men of another kind above their fellows, will ever exist. Wofully, therefore, mistaken is the nation which strives to The above is certainly one of the passages of extinguish the only sentiment which can dignify, the memoirs which, as Monsieur de Chateaubriand and, as it were, spiritualise the qualities of the says himself, rise to poetry. We must now give highest rank in the order of social precedence. a few more most interesting fragments. Mon-Monsieur de Chateaubriand, however, in apolosieur de Chateaubriand is speaking in the follow-gising, or something like it, for making mention ing one of the friends of his younger days, who have disappeared, one after another, from the earth, "only two or three mummies of past times remaining behind.” "I have seen death close one door upon me after another, which have opened no more. There is no one but myself in the world who preserves in his memory the trace of that society which has for ever disappeared. Twenty times since this epoch I have made the same observation. The impossibility of duration and of length in our human friendships-the profound oblivion which follows us the invincible silence which takes possession of our tomb, and spreads over our house, remind me continually of the necessity of isolation. Any hand will serve to give us the glass of water we may need in the fever of death. Ah! may it not be one too dear; for how abandon without despair a hand which we have covered with kisses, and would wish to hold eternally on our hearts." We find the following passage at the conclusion of a detailed account of the ancestors of Monsieur de Chateaubriand. "Here," he continues, " are many vanities, at an epoch when the past is merely the double infancy of the commencement and the close of life-when a larger view of of his ancestors, is probably only acquiescing in "Coming from St. Malo, we perceived first a little collections which rise in my memory overwhelm me with their force and their multitude; but I must not interrupt my narrative. To every suffering its order and its place. 46 of trees. "A plentiful meal taken in the guard-room, where I ate without constraint, terminated the first happy day of my life. True happiness costs little. When it is dear it is not of the right sort. 66 Hardly was I awake the next morning when I went to visit the outside views of the chateau, and to celebrate my accession to solitude. The flight of entrance-steps looked to the north and to the west. Seated on it, the green court was in front, and beyond it a kitchen-garden lay between two woods; the one to the right (the quincunx by which we had arrived) was called the little wall, the other to the left, the great wall. This last was a wood of oak, beech, sycamore, elm, and chestnut trees. Madame de Sévigné boasted, in her time, of these ancient shades. Since then a hundred and forty years had been added to their beauty. Having descended the hill, we forded a rivulet, and after advancing half an hour, we quitted the high road; the carriage rolled along a quincunx, into an alley of elm-trees, whose branches formed an arch over our heads. I have still present the impression which I felt, the frightened joy I experienced, at the moment I entered under the shade of these trees. Issuing from the obscurity of the wood, we traversed a court planted with walnut trees, reaching to the garden and the house of the overseer; from thence we passed by a folding gate into a grass court, called the green court. To the right were a long range of stables, and a chestnut grove; to the left another. At the bottom of the court, which sloped in- "On the other side, towards the south and east, the sensibly upwards, stood the chateau, between two clumps landscape offered a very different view. From the winIts severe and sombre façade presented a cur-dows of the great hall were seen the houses of Combourg tain, bearing a covered gallery indented with embrasures. huddled confusedly together, a basin, the high-road to This curtain united two towers, unequal in age, in mate- Rennes which passed by it, a water mill, a meadow in rials, in height, and thickness, which were terminated which cows were pasturing, and, separated from the by battlements, surmounted by a pointed roof, like a basin by the road, along the meadow, was a little village, bonnet placed upon a Gothic crown. A few grated depending on a priory founded in 1140 by Ravillon, windows in the Moorish taste, appeared here and there Lord of Combourg, in which was seen his effigy, armed on the nudity of the walls. A large flight of steps, as a knight, and couched on its back. From the basin twenty-nine in number, steep and straight, without rail- the ground rose gradually, and formed an amphitheatre ings, replaced the ancient drawbridge over the fosses. of trees, out of which rose the steeples of the village, and This reached the gate of the chateau, which was pierced the turrets of gentlemen's villas. From another point of in the middle of the curtain; above this gate were the view between the east and north, were seen the heights arms of the lords of Combourg, cut in the stone, and the of Becherel; a terrace, bordered with great clipped boxloop-holes, through which, in former times, the chains of trees, surrounded the foot of the chateau, passed behind the drawbridge had passed. the stables, and, after making many turns, joined the bath garden, which communicated with the great wall. "The carriage stopped at the foot of the steps. My father came to meet us. The meeting of the family in the place of his choice so softened his temper, for the moment, that he received us most graciously. We ascended the steps, passed into the vaulted echoing hall, and from this hall into a little interior court. This court was formed by an entrance lodge, and by another lodge parallel to it, which joined together two towers smaller than the first, and, by two other curtains, united the great thick tower to the two little ones. The whole chateau had the figure of a car on four wheels. "In the little court was a well of immense depth, and opposite to it a turret which contained a spiral granite stair. "From the interior court, passing into the building which joined the two small towers, we came into a gallery formerly called the guard-room. There was a window at each extremity, and two others in the lateral direction. To widen these four windows it was found necessary to excavate the walls, from eight to ten feet of thickness. Two slanting corridors, like the corridor of the great pyramid, commenced from the two exterior angles of the hall, and led to the two little towers; a stair, winding into one of these towers, established a communication between the guard-room and the upper story. Such was this first lodge. "If after this sketch a painter should take his pencil, would he produce a picture resembling the old chateau. I do not believe he would. Nevertheless, my memory sees the object as if it were before my eyes. Such is, in material things, the impotency of words, and the power of memory. In speaking of Combourg, I sing the first couplets of a complaint, which will charm only myself, and in which nothing will be forgotten or omitted. Ask the Tyrolese goatherd, what charms him in the three or four notes he repeats from morning to evening to his flock. Does he know? No. They are mountain notes, sent from echo to echo, to reverberate from rock to rock, and respond from one bank of a torrent to the other." We alluded in our last article, on the subject of these memoirs, to a romantic incident which occurred to Monsieur de Chateaubriand on his first sojourn in England, and of his subsequent after-meeting with the party concerned when he was ambassador in London. We do not know whether the following letter, published now, like this circumstance or to another. It shows Monour other extracts, for the first time, alludes to sieur de Chateaubriand in the most amiable and interesting light. It is addressed by the Baron Billing, Charge d'Affaires of France at Naples, to Monsieur Jules Janin, who first brought the memoirs to the notice of the public, and is as follows: 66 That of the façade of the great tower on the side of the green court was composed of a sort of dortoir, square and sombre rooms, which served for kitchen, hall, and chapel. Above these rooms extended the gallery of archives, or of armour, or of the knights, so called from the painted escutcheons which ornamented its ceiling. The embrasures of the narrow windows of this gallery were so deep, that they formed a kind of cabinets, with walls of granite. Add to all this, in the different parts of the edifice, secret doors and stairs; prisons and dungeons; a labyrinth of corridors, concealed or open; wall-you at present. It is not in the country of Tasso, and ed subterraneous passages, leading to unknown outlets; and all around, silence, obscurity, and the grim aspect of stone-and you have the Chateau of Combourg before you. 'Sir, you have given us, in the Revue de Paris, an admirable article on Monsieur de Chateaubriand; you promise us a second; and it is therefore that I address close to the tomb of Virgil, that one can be cold in the worship of genius; besides I will avow that from the day since Providence vouchsafed to bring me into relation with that illustrious man, I have been penetrated with |