pon whose bosom ships can
navigate; but which is useless to the country, because no stream issues
therefrom to fertilize the land."

M. Colmache professes to give two fragments of the _Memoirs_, but he
does not state how he came by them, and we doubt the fact of their being
genuine. They are gracefully written, however, and that on the death of
Mr. Fox particularly so. In his "Maxims" he speaks of women
disrespectfully--a consequence, no doubt, of his disregard for the
domestic virtues, and of the dissolute manners which prevailed in the
higher ranks of French society in his time--and of the priesthood
contemptuously. No hatred is so intense, or so durable, as that which is
begotten of apostasy; and a renegade clerk, or a renegade politician,
may be always expected to rail fiercely against his original creed. In
his personal habits, the Prince of the Empire would seem to have adhered
closely to the manners of the _ancien regime_, in the bosom of which he
had been nurtured. He was courtly, formal, and somewhat exclusive; but
his rigid temperance, and his regularity were proper to the man, and
neither to the past nor present age. Of his _bons mots_ we have a
sprinkling, and but a sprinkling, in this volume; but the celebrated one
about language is not there, though others of less piquancy are. Did M.
Colmache consider it of apocryphal authenticity? We suspect so.

To sum up, then, What was the character of M. de Talleyrand? Of his
extraordinary abilities there is no question, since men of every variety
of feeling and position have borne testimony to them; but, was he great,
great as we esteem any of the models of our own, or other countries? We
think not. Celebrated he might be, but great he was not. No intensely
selfish man like Talleyrand can ever become so. Where there is so much
individual concentration, there is no room left for that expansion of
the faculties of the soul upon which true renown rests, and out of which
it springs. The region in which the mind acts is, necessarily,
circumscribed by the constant pressure of a never-absent egotism; and
when this mental constitution happens to be united to timidity,
distrust, and temperamental coldness, greatness ceases to be a possible
achievement. Moreover, he wanted principle, which is the natural
foundation of public virtue; and he had no higher an idea of morality
than its conveniency. His sense of propriety, which, in some cases was
high, was merely a conventional