31 JANUARY 1846, Page 15

SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

HISTORICAL MEMOIR,

History of the Captivity of Napoleon at St. Helena. By General Count Montholon, the Emperor's Companion in Exile, and Testamentary Executor. Volumes I. and

II Colbara.

STATISTICS,

The History of the French, Walloon, Dutch, and other Foreign Protestant Refugees settled in England, from the Reign of Henry VIII. to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes : with Notices of their Trade and Commerce, copious extracts from the Registers, Lists of the Early Settlers, Ministers, &c., &c:; and an Appendix, con- taining Copies of the Charter of Edward VI., &c. By John Soutberden Burn, Author of "The History of Pariah Registers," "The History of the Fleet Re. gisters," &c Longman and Co. MANNERS,

Western Clearings. By Mrs. C. IL Kirkland, Author of "A New Home, Who'll

Follow ?" Forest Life," &c Wsley and Putnam. MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE,

Sketches from Life, by the late Laman Blanchard: with a Memoir of the Author,

by Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, Bart. In three volumes Colburn COUNT MONTHOLON'S CAPTIVITY OF NAPOLEON. THIS work appears an age too late. The outcries of Napoleon about the violation of the law of nations in retaining him a prisoner—his various undignified and disingenuous tricks—the interminable squabbles between him and Sir Hudson Lowe upon his "rations" and his household affairs—with his vain and consequently ridiculous efforts to kick against the pricks—have long since ceased to have any interest in their expanded particulars. The present generation knows nothing personally, as it were, of Napoleon Bonaparte ; they have not daily encountered his name as a moving principle of life, and exulted or felt dismayed with every rumour of his whereabout and his deeds. He has taken something like an historical place ; and, Whig party purposes being no longer to be answered by fulsome panegyrics, the falsehood and unscrupulousness of his nature, and the theatrical glitter of his character, are beginning to be more distinctly recognized—his displays of bad breeding and thorough want of personal self-respect to be more appreciated. There is much in blood and training. As men and women, there seems to have been a moral fatality attending the Stuart race; but their bearing in mis- fortune was perfect as king or queen. The long imprisonments of Mary, with the execution hall of Fotheringay—the hardships of Charles after the fatal field of Naseby—the indignities he endured on his trial, and his composed submission on the scaffold—have thrown the halo of martyr- dom around characters in other respects very unworthy. To this calm and patient dignity, the littleness, the querulousness, the endless com- plaints about trifles, and the mock heroic assumption of a martyr's part, in the exile of St. Helena, form a sickening or ridiculous contrast.

Here is an example of both. Napoleon having thought fit to declare that he had no funds, ordered his plate to be broken up and sold, and china to be sent for; yet the man who for nearly thirty years of his life had dined off earthen-ware, wanted determination to carry out his own resolve, in a matter of the merest insignificance.

"The Emperor, on his side, required that I should persist in what I had said, namely, that his plate was his only resource at St,. Helena; and I received, for the third time, orders to have all the plate broken up, with the exception of twelve covers. Fresh remonstrances on my part would have been useless and unbecoming: I refrained from making any, and the Emperor believed himself obeyed.

"Four baskets of broken plate, weighing altogether 290 pounds 12 ounces, were conveyed from Longwood on the 25th December 1816; and dinner was served on bad china, brought by Cipriani from James Town.

"When Sir Hudson Lowe was made acquainted with this third and last des- patch, and the purchase of the china, he saw that he was conquered; came to ex- press to me Ins lively regret, and plainly showed how much afraid he was of blame from his Government: he told me that he only acted on the conviction that we had a great quantity of gold at Longwood; that be had been assured of this; and that lie would never have allowed a single piece of plate to be broken could he have supposed that matters would go so tar as to reduce General Bonaparte to eat off dishes like those of the lowest colonist in the island; that he would send immediately to the Cape of Good Hope, and procure a suitable service, until such time as he could receive one from England. "The Emperor was enchanted with the account which I gave him of this communication: but his joy was changed into perfect disgust when he sat down to his dinner served on the china brought by Cipriani. The physical effect upon him was such that be ate nothing; and said to me on leaving the dinner-table, It must be allowed, my son, that we are all greaechildren. Can you conceive that I could not conquer my disgust at this badly-served dinner?-1, who when I was young ate from black dishes! In truth, I am ashamed of myself today? "Let the shame be of short duration,' replied I, for tomorrow your Majesty will dine with appetite.' 'I hope so,' answered he, for this would be too foolish.' "His joy was mfantine, when next morning, Marchand brought to him in the bath his !loupe ills Reine, as usual, in the little silver-gilt bowl which he had been accustomed for many years to see."

Nor does Count Montholon tell us anything very new. The narra- tives of the naval officers, official documents, and debates in Parliament grounded on briefs transmitted to Holland House, with the publications of O'Meara, Las Cases, and others, have unfolded in detail a great deal more than every one now-a-days would care to know, from the embark- ation at Rochefort to the whole story of the captivity ; and if Count Montholon may give some correspondence that has not yet appeared, tell some new stories of squabbles, or set already-recorded disputes in another light, they are not needed. Enough and more than enough exists to enable any one to draw a conclusion upon the subject ; and neither the topics nor the manner of stating them excite interest. A considerable portion of the two volumes (nearly a half) consists of this kind of matter. The rest embraces a narrative of events from Napoleon's return from Waterloo to the embarkation at Rochefort, and the dictations upon various subjects connected with his history, which he was in the habit of making as a means of employment. Neither of these, however, contain information at all proportioned to their bulk ; and in themselves they have no value for their style, or any other literary quality. We are not enlightened by Count Montholon upon anything which took place from the arrival at Paris till the embarkation. The desertion of the courtiers and the military—the manner in which Napoleon lingered at Malmaison in hopes of something "turning up," till any chance of escape to itmerica was cut off—the determination of the

Jacobins and Republicans, who were powerful in the Assembly, to drive him from Paris and France, as well as the unceremonious way in which they set about it—are well known. Count Montholon is indeed full of hopes how this, that, and the other might have been done, had not Napoleon been unwilling to "shed the blood of Frenchmen" for his personal objects ! and we think be paints the disposition of the rabble and the rank and file as more favourably disposed towards him than others have done. The only point of consequence, however, which he develops, is Napoleon's apathy—that want of decision of mind and promptness of action which always seem to have attended him whenever he was checked in full career, except at Aspern.

The dictations were done in this wise.

"His first dictation was the expression of his recollections, uttered without re- flection or classification: and it was necessary carefully to avoid making him ob- serve its disorder or incoherence; for this produced on the flow of his thoughts the instantaneous effect of the breaking the principal spring in a watch.

"It was absolutely necessary to write as quick as he spoke, and never to make him repeat even the last word; and he generally dictated in this manner for several hours together his recollections of his campaigns, or of the principal events of his reign.

"The copy of his first dictation served him as notes for the second; and the copy of this second became the subject of his own personal work: he corrected it with his own hand; but, unfortunately, almost always in pencil, because he found it more convenient to write with a pencil; and because, besides, he did not in this case soil his fingers with ink, which he never failed to do when he used a pen."

Memorials composed under such circumstances can have no literary value, because all that dictation can ever do is to save the mechanical labour of writing. If the work is to be solid in substance, complete in structure, and tolerably close in style, the labour of preparation must be undergone just as much when we dictate as when we write ; and perhaps more, because we do not ponder so much over talking as we do at the desk. But the rapid haphazard talk of Napoleon must have been mere outpouring of what came uppermost; whose faulty structure no revision could remedy, and which depended for its interest altogether upon the accident of subject. When this related to personal feelings or personal character, which formed, so to speak, a part of the man himself, and would be pretty much the same let him speak when he would, the attraction is considerable. When we get to any great event or critical circumstance, it will possess an analogous kind of interest—provided it is one that can be dealt with critically ; for if Napoleon's character or in- terests are at all in question, he immediately gets into King Cambyses' vein, and what he states cannot be depended upon. There is not much of this larger kind of subject, and what there is we know already from previous publications: the old story that the English planned the conspir- acy to murder the Emperor Paul ; that Napoleon ought to have gained the battle of Waterloo; how Ile intended to have invaded England, and what he would have done when he got to London in overturn- ing the oligarchy; with his defence about the massacre of the Turks at Jaffa, and the poisoning his own troops. But the great bulk of the dictations is merely a tedious and detailed story of par- ticular incidents, (chiefly in the Italian war,) not a complete account, and so far as we see throwing no new light of consequence upon anything, though an historian might possibly pick out a new particular here and there • whilst there is so little of "secret history" that the dictations abound in proclamations and similar productions. Sometimes the topics are merely the results of Napoleon's reading. There is a sketch of Cor- sican history, curious as an effort of memory ; and another of the -constitution and later history of Holland, also showing his reading and memory, but nothing more than what hundreds of other men could do. It, however, leads into some family particulars about Louis Bona- parte, and lets us into an idea of what stranger potentates must have felt under his constant interference and exactions, when even his own brothers could not bear with him.

" ' As a king, Prince Louis always exhibited a truly paternal solicitude for the interests of his people, and sacrificed to them even all his patriotic feelings as a Frenchman; and no Dutchman could ever say that he was a more ardent lover of his country than the King. His abdication, after a reign of live years was the action of a morbid mind; but the consequence of the coarse of political conduct which he pursued, in direct contradiction to those principles which had placed the crown on his head. The error which my brothers committed consisted in not comprehending that they were not and could not be kings except as supporters of my policy; and that their kingdoms could never acquire prosperity except as satellites of France. The act of the King of Westphalia in quitting the Grand Army with his guard, in order not for a moment to be under the command of a French Marshal, and that of the King of Holland, in submitting as a question to his Privy Council, whether they should not, at the cannon's mouth, refuse entrance into Amsterdam to the corps of Marshal Oudinot, are things which common sense could scarcely believe, were it not that the testimony of credible witnesses of those moments of infatuation does not permit the facts to be doubted. " The first cause of coolness between the ICmg of Holland and my Cabinet was a question respecting commercial duties. The manufactures of Leyden and the linens of Overyssel and Haarlem suffered extremely from the protection granted to articles of the same description by the tariff of customs established in the Empire; and I constantly resisted all the importunities of the King to obtain some reduction or modification of these duties.

" Shortly afterwards, the military condition of Holland became also a subject of vexation and bitterness. I requited that its army should be maintained on a respectable footing; and on this promise I had consented to withdraw the 25,000 Frenchmen, whom the Dutch had hitherto been obliged to support, clothe, and pay, in compliance with the treaty of 1799. The Dutch army, -however, underwent most important reductions In its effective force; and secret orders from the King bad successively recalled into the ports of Holland, under pretence of repairs, but in fact to be disarmed, the vessels belonging to the flotilla of Boulogne. There was no longer left at Boulogne anything except a few Dutch sloops, out of a flo- tilla of above one hundred saiL' "

Joseph never had Spain sufficiently under regular rule to know what he might have done; but Lucien was restive like Louis: and all this was merely political, for on Napoleon's downfal his family rallied round him and proffered what they could.

The work of Count Montholon, or rather the Count himself; seems more trustworthy than some other authors among Napoleon's friends. He is indeed a partisan, and looks at everything with the glasses of party, and of course as a foreigner ; but he seems to state the truth so far as

his mind enables him to reach it. Here is his character of a once cele- brated man a common mark for Whig witlings.

"Sir Hudson Lowe had something prepossessing in his appearance. At that time he was a man between forty and fifty years of age, above the middle size, with the cold and gracious smile of a diplomatist; his-hair was beginning to turn gray, but still preserved the primitive tints of light brown, although his long and lowering eyebrows were of a deep red. His look was penetrating, but he never looked honestly in the face of the person whom he addressed. He was not in the habit of sitting down, but swayed about whilst speaking with hesitation, and in short rapid sentences. It was undoubtedly his eye, which had something trea- cherous in it, that made an impression upon the Emperor.

"Sir Hudson Lowe was a man of great ability, and had the extraordinary faculty of giving to all his actions such a colouring as suited the object which he proposed to effect. An excellent man of business, and of extreme probity. Amiable when he pleased, and knowing how to assume the most engaging form-

" He might have acquired our gratitude, but be preferred the disgraceful reprobation which has followed him to the tomb. He was said to be a good father and a good husband. I know nothing of him in any relation except in his connexion with Longwood; in which the whole of his conduct was marked with the stamp of an Insatiable hatred—outrages and vexations completely use- less as regarded the Emperor; and I sliould have said, with a profound conviction of its truth, that the death of the Emperor was his object, had he not said to me, on the 6th of May 1821, with all the accent of truth= His death is my ruin.'"

"The ruling vice of Sir Hudson Lowe's character was an unceasing want of confidence—a true monomania. He often rose in the middle of the night—leaped out of bed in haste from dreaming of the Emperor's flight—mounted his horse, and rode like a man demented to Longwood, to assure himself,. by interrogating the officer on duty, that he was labouring under the effects of nightmare and not of a providential instinct; and yet, notwithstanding this the impression on his mind was so lively that he could never decide on leaving Longwood till he received our word of honour that the Emperor was in his apartments. There was then almost an effusion of gratitude on his part, and he excused himself for having disturbed us in the middle of the night. "To relate this anecdote, is to give a complete character of Sir Hudson Lowe: it is to explain the whole bearing of his conduct during those years, in which he transformed the office of Governor of St. Helena into the functions of the gaoler, or, I might rather say, the executioner of Napoleon."

The work is to be continued ; and it may probably have more fresh- ness,- if not more interest, as it proceeds, since the present volumes relate to the first two years after the downfal, in which the accounts of O'Meara, Las Cases, and Gourgand have forestalled Montholon. In due time the Count will have it all to himself.