hich a public writer can engage. It is apt, also, to be confounded
with mere celebrity. Obscurity is not one of its accidents, but fame is;
and there is something like an irresistible tendency on the part of
mankind at large, to believe in the claims to distinction of the man who
has been _vulgatus per orbem_. Humility does very well for poets--your
Horaces and Grays, for instance--who can find Agamemnons and Hampdens on
every village green, to whom the opportunity only of acquiring renown
has been denied by envious fate; but the prose of life discards it as an
unsuitable and troublesome adjunct, and refuses to extend its reverence
to what is not appreciable. A famous man is, therefore, always presumed
to be a great man, and he may be so in so far as popular reputation is
concerned, though he need not be so otherwise. To which of these classes
did Talleyrand belong? That he was celebrated is beyond doubt. Was he
great? That is a different question, and could be answered
satisfactorily only by a much more elaborate inquiry into his history
than it is possible for us to institute. Forty years must elapse from
his death, which took place in 1838, before those memoirs, which he is
known to have compiled, shall be given to the world; and whoever tries
will find it to be no easy task to anticipate those revelations which
are reserved for the eyes and ears of the generation of 1878. Let us,
then, be contented with a humbler effort, and endeavor to make the most
of the materials which are accessible to us, scanty though they be.
There are spurious lives of Talleyrand by the dozen. He repudiated these
scandalous and gossiping chronicles in his life-time, and it is no part
of our business to resuscitate them. M. Colmache's volume is of another
stamp, however, and bears unexceptionable internal evidence of the
honesty of the writer, whether we agree in his conclusions or not. As
secretary to the prince he had superior facilities for acquiring a
knowledge of, at least, the domestic habits of the _man_, but beyond
this he has accomplished little; for though his work be well, and even
powerfully written, and though it contain numerous fragments of strong
dramatic interest which illustrate in a very remarkable manner
Talleyrand's moral idiosyncracy, as well as the usages of the age and
country in which he lived--it would be absurd to suppose that the most
reserved man in Europe, who had drilled his passions into a state of
repose, and d