LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
"THE MEMOIRS" OF THE DUC DE ST. SIMON.
"We can hardly understand how any reader, learned or unlearned, can warm or puff himself into enthusiasm for the author or the man." —Quarterly Review for October, 1875; p. 327.
[To THIS EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1 SIR,—Learned or unlearned, my enthusiasm was neither warmed' nor puffed by any artificial means. Passing over the tedious chapters on Court etiquette, and speaking only of the narrative and delineations of character—which form the bulk of the twenty volumes—I was taken by surprise at finding that I had lived so long in ignorance of this surprising storehouse of amusement, in- struction, and edification. Out of Shakespeare, I have never met with such a succession of portraits, so numerous, so life-like, so complete. Of historical portraits, I never met the like, not in Clarendon, or Burnet, or Lord Hervey, nor yet in Thucydides nor Tacitus,—Louis XIV., Madame de Maintenon, Monseigneur, the Duke of Burgundy, the Duchess of Burgundy, Fenelon, Dubois, the Duke of Orleans, Vauban, and a hundred lesser personages. Nor can I admit any want of elevation. On the contrary, even the Duke of Vendome is described with such a splendid contempt and disgust, that even the account of him is like passing a dunghill on a fine, frosty morning. And what can excel the just severity with which he paints Louis XIV. or the Regent ! And in the few cases where, from the letters published since his time, we have better opportunities of knowing the personages than he had, how abso- lutely faithful he is in the touches he gives,—for example, of Madame de Sevign6 and the Princess Palatine !
Then for narrative, where is there anything in Tacitus or• Macaulay finer than the death of Monseigneur or of the Duke of Burgundy, where is there any creature known to us personally made so charming as the Duchess of Burgundy ?—where anything more dramatic than the conversation with the Regent in the opera-box on Calvinistic affairs, or than the degradation of the Bastard?
St. Simon had, no doubt, his prejudices and his weaknesses, but being what he was—a French Duke—and where he was—in the Court of Louis XIV.—these are far less to be wondered at, than that he should have held his head so high, and kept his heart so clean, in the midst of them all.
Farewell, St. Simon ! not, I trust for the last time, and may he long continue to say, "Hear, 0 ye kings ! and understand ; learn, ye that are judges of the ends of the earth !"—I am,
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