DOES the reader ask what these two names have to do with each other? What possible connexion can subsist between the revolutionist, the democratic Prince, the republican brother of that great military usurper who turned a republic into an empire, and the loyalissimus Professor of History, &c., at the Berlin University? These are fair and reasonable questions, which we might be perplexed to answer satisfactorily, had we not, in the years of our youth, of our inquisitive idleness, attended some few courses of natural philosophy. From our recollection of the physical experiments we then witnessed, we derive the explanation of the obscure metaphysical impulse that induced the combination, which is this: We apprehend that the names or individualities in question, appear in conjunction, actuated by the same principle upon which bodies, in opposite states of electricity-positive and negative, vitreous and resinous, or whatever be the proper terms in these days of ever changing nomenclature irresistibly attract each other. If we keep clear of those commonplace contrasts, the idiot and the genius, the honest man and the knave, &c., where shall we find any more striking than that presented by Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, and Professor Von Raumer?

The Prince-for we, who are neitheir republicans nor equalitarians, whether the equality be that of licentious anarchy, or of slavery under despotism, must needs give precedency to the princely title, more especially when the precedency of talent accords with that of not birth, but created social station. The Prince, then, born a petty Corsican noble, was, as he himself has told us, a boyish democrat; and, although the horrors of the French Revolution speedily disgusted him with democracy, he remained-to us, who saw him indistinctly looming in the distance, through the bewildering mists of blood, a very prosopopoeia of Ja

cobinisn-he remained really a sturdy republican, through all the allurements of power tempting him during his brother's empire-which empire, despite his opposition thereto, he still affects to regard and justify as a mere temporary dictatorship, necessary to make an end of the Revolution and its woes-through, what might be harder to resist, a seemingly ardent love for that imperial brother's person, admiration of his genius, and proud delight in his triumphs; and his brother's fall having, naturally enough, generated no love of legitimacy, he remains a conscientious republican to the present day. Yet this republican Bonaparte frankly declares, both in his memoirs,* and in a pamphlet,† published last year, that, upon visiting, or rather residing in England, he discovered a constitutional monarchy to be nearly the best of republics. Not a constitutional monarchy after the fashion of that of the Barricades, where the antagonist principles of monarchy and democracy being placed in the lists for a combat à l'outrance, one or the other must gain a decided victory, but our English, old-fashioned, Magna Charta-constitutional monarchy, wherein a powerful hereditary peerage balances and controls alike the crown and an elective House of Commons; which Lucien Bonaparte considers to form the true and proper republican institutions, such as they must be, to encircle, temper, and support a kingly

crown.

Now, though our own original prepossessions were, we need hardly say, unfavourable to Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, to the brother of the ambitious conqueror and tyrannical enslaver of the Continent, to the republican who accepted the title of prince, let us frankly add that this is what we like,. -a boy passionately impelled by the passions and preju dices rife during his boyhood,-a ma thinking for himself right or wron -adhering to the opinions he ha

adopted through good report and evil report, through temptation and persecution, and preserving through the whole, even to an age but too often hard and cold, the feelings of human nature and of early family affection.

Turn we now, although we have not by any means done with his republican Imperial Highness, to his opposite pole, the Berlin Professor.

Friedrich Von Raumer is, we apprehend, best known in this country by those letters upon England, upon the social condition and political institutions of the English nation,* which Mrs Sarah Austin has translated for the benefit of such of her countrymen, as not knowing, need to be made acquainted with themselves. No small portion of the mass, we apprehend, therefore, will be entitled to claim her services, and we trust equally able and willing to remunerate them. But had these letters upon England been all Herr Von Raumer had written, had we known him only as a loyal Prussian legitimatist, queerly metamorphosed into an English Radical, of a surety we should never have devoted even these few lines to commemorate his mistakes and misrepresentations; nor, even had the contrast he offers to Lucien Bonaparte provoked a smile, as it occurred to us, should we have dreamed of placing his name side by side with that of the really able Prince. But Raumer is more than an observer of England through the spectacles or the eyes of Mrs Austin and the Whig Ministry. He is a diligent, lucid, and judicious historian, and, as such, necessarily attracts our attention, professing ourselves, as we do, zealous lovers of history.

Professor Raumer first became known to us as the diligent writer of a voluminous and valuable history of the Hohenstauffen or Swabian emperors. Upon the laborious research, the critical acumen, and the general historical talent displayed in this performance, it is needless for us to enlarge. It is a work of too great magnitude to be incidentally discussed; and its merits and defects have long

England im Jahre 1835.

since been made known to the British public by two elaborate critiques— written, as we have understood, by critics totally unconnected with each other; the first in the pages of the Foreign Quarterly Review, the other, some years later, in those of the Quarterly Review. The only point connected with this history that we, at present, feel ourselves called upon to notice, is the conservative, or rather legitimatist character which it every where discovers. The first of the two reviewers alluded to, has observed that Raumer is one of the very few modern historians who favour the Ghibellines; and he does this, not only with regard to Germany, where the question lay only between rival families, or, at most, between the empire and the Papal See; but with regard to Italy, where even we, who profess ourselves Ghibellines, must acknowledge that it bore the appearance of lying between liberty, or at least independence, and a foreign yoke. We say bore the appearance, because we think with the reviewer, that, inasmuch as the German Emperors were, or claimed to be Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, and were certainly the regular and lawful successors of Charlemagne, Italy was not only an integral, but the essential part of their empire, Germany being the accessary. Still, the fact being that those Emperors were Germans, who, with the exception of Frederick II., and, perhaps, of his father Henry VI., resided almost entirely in their native Germany, visiting Italy only in pomp, to receive the Imperial crown, or in arms to assert their authority, the feudal and federal connexion of the Peninsula with the empire bore, to superficial observers, the character of subjugation to a foreign yoke. The Guelph insurrection of the Lombard cities against Frederic Barbarossa was, in many respects, analagous to that of the Anglo-Americans against the distant mother country; it was the insurrection of conscious strength, deemed, in the case of the Lombards somewhat rashly, equal to the maintenance of independence against a remote sove

reign. As such remote sovereign must, in the nature of things, govern his more distant subjects less paternally, less judiciously than those immediately under his own eye-especially in early times of imperfect communication-the insurgents had plausible if not sufficient grounds to allege in their justification. And thus, although it be mere schoolboy declamation to revile the two Frederics as ambitious and usurping conquerors, it is very natural that enthusiastic lovers of liberty should passionately embrace the Guelph cause, the cause of fair and polished Italy, against barbarous Germans.

Raumer in his history, on the contrary, pleaded the cause of lawful sovereignty against insurgents for liberty and independence. Now, whatever such conduct might have implied in a politician, we viewed it only as the conduct of a man of letters, and as such it appeared to us, in the midst of the march of intellect, of schoolmasters abroad, of la jeune France, of das junge Deutschland, and what nct, as a remarkable instance of moral courage, and we enquired who this bold advocate of legitimate authority might be. We learned that Friedrich Ludwig George Von Raumer was a Prussian of noble family, who had been destined and trained for official life, for the career of a statesman, had early merited and obtained the good opinion of his superiors; had held various small posts; and was so favoured by Prince Hardenberg, that he received him into his family, as well as office, in order to fit him for the highest stations, and that his passion for historical studies had induced him to abandon these flattering prospects, and solicit, in lieu of a ministerial portfolio in reversion, and some under-secretaryship in possession, the appointment of professor of history at the University of Breslau, which university he has since quitted for that of Berlin. We likewise learned that the King of Prussia, with a truly royal patronage of learning, when Raumer's historical labours require that he should travel in search of information, not only gives him leave of absence from his professional duties,

bde.

but defrays the expense of his journey.

These details, at once so charac teristic of the enthusiasic Teutonic na ture, and so strikingly discrepant, as well from old German feudalism as from continental passion for office, certainly did not lessen our interest in the noble historian, and we looked with confident desire for more fruits of his diligence. Some few publications of his appeared, we believe, from time to time, which did not reach us, but the year 1831 gave birth to two works, which we eagerly sought. These were two sets of letters from Paris, the one relative to the dead, the other to the living."

The former of these sets of letters, which though last published-in fact written after the Professor's return to Berlin-we mention first, both because it was the first of the two that we saw, and because it constitutes a part of his historical labours, and is known to the English public, as translated by Lord Francis Egerton, under the title of "Illustrations of the History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." of these historical letters it will, therefore, suffice to observe generally, that they contain the fruits of Raumer's researches in the Parisian libraries, materials upon which to form, or by which to rectify historical opinions, but which, to our old-fashioned notions, would have been more fitly, though perhaps less lucratively, incorporated in the notes or appendix to Raumer's history, now in course of publication, for the sake of which he sought them, than in this independent form. In these Berlin letters, however, we still find, as far as the nature of the anomalous composition, or rather compilation, admits, the same ultraconservative disposition to defend all lawfully constituted authorities against insurrection and innovation, which first attracted our notice. Thus the historian has discovered and published documents justifying Philip II. of Spain from the accusation, under which he had long laboured, of having poisoned his eldest son and his third wife. This eldest son, begging pardon of all the poets who have sung