element of his education he
commemorates in a letter to his favourite daughter. 'Let your brother,'
he says, 'work hard at the French poets. Let him learn them by heart,
especially the incomparable Racine; never mind whether he understands
him yet or not. I didn't understand him when my mother used to come
repeating his verses by my bedside, and lulled me to sleep with her
fine voice to the sound of that inimitable music. I knew hundreds of
lines long before I knew how to read; and it is thus that my ears,
accustomed betimes to this ambrosia, have never since been able to
endure any sourer draught.'

After his law studies at the University of Turin, then highly renowned
for its jurisconsults, the young De Maistre went through the successive
stages of an official career, performing various duties in the public
administration, and possessing among other honours a seat in the Senate,
over which his father presided. He led a tranquil life at Chambery, then
as at all other times an ardent reader and student. Unaided he taught
himself five languages. English he mastered so perfectly, that though he
could not follow it when spoken, he could read a book in that tongue
with as much ease as if it had been in his own. To Greek and German he
did not apply himself until afterwards, and he never acquired the same
proficiency in them as in English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish.
To be ignorant of German then, it will be remembered, was not what it
would be now, to be without one of the literary senses.

Like nearly every other great soldier of reaction, he showed in his
early life a decided inclination for new ideas. The truth that the
wildest extravagances of youthful aspiration are a better omen of a
vigorous and enlightened manhood than the decorous and ignoble faith in
the perfection of existing arrangements, was not belied in the case of
De Maistre. His intelligence was of too hard and exact a kind to
inspire him with the exalted schemes that present themselves to those
more nobly imaginative minds who dream dreams and see visions. He
projected no Savoyard emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna or
Delaware, to found millennial societies and pantisocratic unions. These
generous madnesses belong to men of more poetic temper. But still, in
spite of the deadening influences of officialism and relations with a
court, De Maistre had far too vigorous and active a character to subside
without resistance into the unfruitful way