government, and obtained a promise that he should be reinstated
in his military rank. M. D'Arblay, however, insisted that he should
never be required to serve against the countrymen of his wife. The First
Consul, of course, would not hear of such a condition, and ordered the
general's commission to be instantly revoked.

Madame D'Arblay joined her husband at Paris, a short time before the war
of 1803 broke out, and remained in France ten years, cut off from almost
all intercourse with the land of her birth. At length, when Napoleon was
on his march to Moscow, she with great difficulty obtained from his
ministers permission to visit her own country, in company with her son,
who was a native of England. She returned in time to receive the last
blessing of her father, who died in his eighty-seventh year. In 1814 she
published her last novel, The Wanderer, a book which no judicious friend
to her memory will attempt to draw from the oblivion into which it has
justly fallen. In the same year her son Alexander was sent to Cambridge.
He obtained an honorable place among the wranglers of his year, and was
elected a fellow of Christ's College. But his reputation at the
University was higher than might be inferred from his success in
academical contests. His French education had not fitted him for the
examinations of the Senate House; but, in pure mathematics, we have been
assured by some of his competitors that he had very few equals. He went
into the church, and it was thought likely that he would attain high
eminence as a preacher; but he died before his mother. All that we have
heard of him leads us to believe that he was a son as such a mother
deserved to have. In 1832 Madame D'Arblay published the Memoirs of her
father; and on the sixth of January, 1840, she died in her eighty-eighth
year.

We now turn from the life of Madame D'Arblay to her writings. There can,
we apprehend, be little difference of opinion as to the nature of her
merit, whatever differences may exist as to its degree. She was
emphatically what Johnson called her, a character-monger. It was in the
exhibition of human passions and whims that her strength lay; and in
this department of art she had, we think, very distinguished skill.

But in order that we may, according to our duty as kings at arms versed
in the laws of literary precedence, marshal her to the exact seat to
which she is entitled, we must carry our examination somewhat further.

There is, in