pposition, he accepted the embassy to Rome in 1827,
under the Martignac administration, but resigned it at Prince Polignac's
accession to office. On the downfall of the elder branch of the
Bourbons, he made a brilliant but inevitably fruitless protest from the
tribune in defence of the principle of legitimacy. During the first half
of Louis Philippe's reign he was still politically active with his pen,
and published a _Memoire sur la captivite de madame la duchesse de
Berry_ (1833) and other pamphlets in which he made himself the champion
of the exiled dynasty; but as years increased upon him, and the prospect
of his again performing a conspicuous part diminished, he relapsed into
an attitude of complete discouragement. His _Congres de Verone_ (1838),
_Vie de Rance_ (1844), and his translation of Milton, _Le Paradis perdu
de Milton_ (1836), belong to the writings of these later days. He died
on the 4th of July 1848, wholly exhausted and thoroughly discontented
with himself and the world, but affectionately tended by his old friend
Madame Recamier, herself deprived of sight. For the last fifteen years
of his life he had been engaged on his _Memoires_, and his chief
distraction had been his daily visit to Madame Recamier, at whose house
he met the European celebrities. He was buried in the Grand Be, an islet
in the bay of St Malo. Shortly after his death his memory was revived,
and at the same time exposed to much adverse criticism, by the
publication, with sundry mutilations as has been suspected, of his
celebrated _Memoires d'outre-tombe_ (12 vols., 1849-1850). These memoirs
undoubtedly reveal his vanity, his egotism, the frequent hollowness of
his professed convictions, and his incapacity for sincere attachment,
except, perhaps, in the case of Madame Recamier. Though the book must be
read with the greatest caution, especially in regard to persons with
whom Chateaubriand came into collision, it is perhaps now the most read
of all his works.

Chateaubriand ranks rather as a great rhetorician than as a great poet.
Something of affectation or unreality commonly interferes with the
enjoyment of his finest works. The _Genie du christianisme_ is a
brilliant piece of special pleading; _Atala_ is marred by its
unfaithfulness to the truth of uncivilized human nature, _Rene_ by the
perversion of sentiment which solicits sympathy for a contemptible
character. Chateaubriand is chiefly significant as marking the
transition from the