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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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£ 04
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MIRABEAU'S LETTERS , —DURING HfS RESIDENCE IN ENGLAND * .
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This is a very tempting title , but a very disappointing book . We know no distinguished person of late times , whose character was so likely to have been thoroughly displayed in his correspondence , as that of Mirabeau . All that was good , as well as all that was bad in him , was matter of impulse . Without either superstition
on the one hand , or reflection on the other , he was wanting in fixed principles of action . But with a strong , though vague , feeling of attachment to the cause of freedom ^ wrought almost into passion by reiterated attacks upon his own ; with acute perceptions , and a woman ' s talent of observation ,, we should have expected his really confidential correspondence to have been exceedingly curious and amusing . The translator of these two volumes of letters , tells us , that there exist some hundreds of
others of not inferior interest . We cannot but fancy that with respect to those here given any change would have been for the better . The * Notice of the Life , Character , Conduct , and Writings of the Author , ' prefixed to them , forms a sort of a ' scandalosum supplementum' to Duraont ' s amusing memoir . And surely the conservative spleen of the wickedest of Quarterly reviewers could not have made out a stronger case against a condemned radical author , than does , we suppose unconsciously ,
this pseudo- ' graphical delineator of poor much-abused and much-bepraised Mirabeau . The best part of the book is that which relates to the politics of the time . Mirabeau was an enthusiast of the measures and character of Chatham , whose opinions and those of his celebrated son were on many subjects the opposite of each other ; and on none did they differ more widely than on those of religious toleration and ecclesiastical property . The latter question was then beginning to be actively mooted in
an insignificant occurrence . —I happened one day to quote in her hearing a sentence from Kant ' s writings ;— " There are two objects , which the more I contemplate them , the more they fill my mind with astonishment , —the starry heaven above me , and the moral law within me . " "Ah I que cela eat beauy" she exclaimed , " » V faut
queje feoris /"—and she was instantly at her table ties * Some years afterwards I was amused by reading in Corinne— ' * Car comme unphilosophe Allemand a ires bien dit , pour ies ccBurs sensible * il y * a deux chosesj &c . Thus Kant , —one of the profoundest thinkers , but , at the same time , one of the coolest and most unimpassioned of men , on account of the expression of a thought wise but not recondite , which places in juxta-position the two greatest phenomena , the one of the natural , and the other
of the moral world , —becomes a tender heart ! No wonder that a person so incurably French should have some repulsive qualities in the eyes of such thorough Germans as Goethe and Schiller . On the other hand , old Wieland was quite fascinated by her . But then Wieland was more French in his tastes than any other eminent German in his day . One evening after a display of great eloquence on the part of our hostess , Wieland turned to me , and foldincr his hands and lookinir upwards , with
a sort of pious sentimentality , exclaimed , " Ach Gott I dass ich bis in roeinem vier und siebzigsten Jahr leberi sollte , um solch eln Geschdpf guschen . —Oh that I should live into my seventy-fourth year in order to see such a creature V * * London ; Bffingham Wilwm , 2 vola . 8 yo *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 604, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/28/
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