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year the roads were safer in the Papal territory than in any other part of Europe. Sixtus, by trivial concessions, conciliated the good will of his powerful neighbours, who had been alienated by the captious and unwise policy of Gregory. They had hitherto harboured the robbers of the Papal states. Tuscany, Venice, Spain, now vied with each other in surrendering them to the Pope's relentless justice. The King of Spain gave orders that the decrees of the Pope should be as much respected in Milan as in Rome. Sixtus laboured with as much zeal and success in the restoration of prosperity as of peace. The privileges of the towns were enlarged. Ancona, of which the commerce had been almost ruined by impolitic regulations, was especially favoured; agriculture and manufactures were fostered with the utmost care. Sixtus has enjoyed the credit of putting an end to the fatal effects of nepotism, by interdicting the alienation of ecclesiastical estates, This, however, was the act of Pius V. On his own nephews Sixtus bestowed,-on one the purple, on the other a marquisate; but he allowed no influence to any living being. He was the sole originator, depositary, and executor of his own counsels.

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In the Chigi palace there is an account-book belonging to Sixtus V., containing memoranda of all his personal property and expense while a monk. It contains a list of his books, whether in single volumes or bound together; in short, his whole household expenses. It relates how his brother-in-law bought twenty sheep, which young Peretti paid for by instalments; and how at length, from his rigid savings, to his astonishment he found himself master of two hundred florins. Sixtus the pope practised the same severe economy. His first ambition was to leave a treasure, which was only to be employed in times of the utmost emergency, and on objects of the highest spiritual importance: these objects he himself accurately defined. The temple of the Lord,' he said, was never without such treasure.' Mr. Ranke has, however, destroyed much of the blind admiration which, looking only to these outward circumstances, has considered the administration of Sixtus a model of financial wisdom. This treasure was collected by the old, ignorant, and extravagant expedients for raising money-the sale of offices, the creation of new monti or debts, the most minute and vexatious taxation on all the necessaries of life. Our author conceives that the amount of the treasure left by Sixtus V. was not more than equivalent to the produce of these new and oppressive burthens. It is intelligible, 'that an overplus of revenue should be collected and treasured up: it is the common course that loans should be made, to supply immediate exigencies; but that loans should be made and burthens imposed to shut up a treasure in a castle for future wants, this is indeed extraordinary.

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But it is precisely this which the world has admired so much in Sixtus V. The fact is, that the possession of a treasure was rare among the exhausted and impoverished kingdoms of Europe, that he who possessed one became an object of envy and wonder, without any inquiry at what cost it had been acquired.

SO

The concluding chapters of the present volume trace, with equal truth and ingenuity, the effects of this catholic religious revival on the poetry, the arts, and the manners of the Roman court. Tasso was the poet-the Bolognese school, the Caracci, with their Pietàs and Ecce Homos; Guido with his Virgins, Domenichino with his Saints, Guercino with his exquisite forms, but at times his too minutely and horribly real martyrdoms-were the painters of the age. Palestrina was the musician, in whose hands church-music became again full of deep feeling and religious passion. The study of the antique gave way to this new religious tone. Sixtus, in his magnificent embellishments of the city, looked on the monuments of heathen Rome with the soul of a Franciscan; he relentlessly destroyed whatever stood in his way, or offered valuable materials. All that remained he Christianized. The Trajan and Antonine pillars were surmounted with statues of St. Peter and St. Paul. At the same time the college of cardinals became a body of men no less distinguished by their irreproachable lives than by their skill and dexterity in worldly business. Men like Philippo Neri, with the simplicity of children, the kindness of real Christians, the sanctity of angels, gave the tone to religious feeling. Vast learning, but all deeply impressed with this ecclesiastical spirit, was acquired and displayed. The works of Bellarmine and Baronius show at once the labour and the tendency of the times. The court itself assumed its singular character of pomp and piety, intrigue and austerity; the centre of profound Catholic religious feeling became the theatre of insatiable spiritual ambition. When the son of a swineherd was Pope, who might not rise to any eminence? When that swineherd's son filled the Papal see with so much vigour and dignity, how easily might pride mistake its aspirations for those of zeal for the church! Every one, therefore, was on the look out for advancement; from all parts of Europe flowed in candidates for ecclesiastical distinction-and learning, and morals, and religion itself, became the means and the end of universal emulation. Thus concludes Professor Ranke

The newly-awakened spirit of Catholicism gave a new impulse to all the organs of literature and art, even to life itself. The Curia is equally devout and restless, spiritual and warlike-on one side full of dignity, pomp, and ceremony-on the other, unequalled for calculating prudence and unwearied ambition. Its piety and its ambitious spirit of enterprise, both resting on the notion of an exclusive faith, con

spired together to the same end. Thus Catholicism made another attempt to subjugate the world.'

We shall watch with anxious expectation for the appearance of Mr. Ranke's successive volumes, fully convinced that nothing can proceed from his pen which will not deserve the attention of the European public. From his age (he is, we believe, still a young man) we may look for large accessions to our historical knowledge, and the style of the present volume is a safe pledge that his future works will be as agreeable in manner as valuable in matter.

ART. II.-Chronique de Cinquante Jours-du 20 Juin au 10 Août 1792, redigée sur Pièces authentiques. Par P. L. Ræderer. Paris, 1832.

THIS work has been three years in print, but is not yet, we be

lieve, published. The copy before us was presented by the author to one of his friends, and we have not been able to procure another from the booksellers. The very name of Roederer excites a painful interest. In his long and useless life, there was one remarkable hour which confers upon him an eternal-and, if we are to believe himself, not dishonourable-celebrity. Pierre Louis Roederer, born about 1756, was, before the Revolution, a member of the Parliament of Metz, and elected in 1789 to the Constituent Assembly, where he became a violent Revolutionist. Being by the self-denying decree of non-election excluded from the second assembly, he-like Pétion, Robespierre, and other disinterested Constituants-took refuge in a good office, and became Procureur Syndic (legal adviser and leading member) of the Council General of the Department of Paris. It was in this character that, being stationed at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792, for the defence of the king's person and residence, he advised and almost forced the royal family to abandon the palace and to take refuge in the National Assembly; a step which, however expedient it might appear to M. Roederer at the moment, did ultimately lead the royal victims to the jail and the scaffold. It is therefore not surprising that he-almost the sole-surviving witness of these scenes and the individual most deeply responsible for the particular transaction-should be desirous of clearing away the doubts which have hitherto hung over his motives, and of showing that, whatever were the consequences of his advice, the advice itself was, under the circumstances, honest in its motive, and prudent in its object.

M. Roederer proposes to answer two contradictory charges which have been made against him—-the one by the Mountain, of

being a royalist, and having saved the King; the other, by the royalists, of having betrayed him, and he seems to think that the mere accusation of having betrayed both sides is a sufficient proof that he did neither. Now, so far from getting rid of these apparently contradictory charges, M. Roederer has the ill-luck to persuade us of the truth of both. He was a royalist in the sense in which the Mountain employed the term-that is, he had no objection to a constitutional king, but would have preferred Egalité to Louis XVI.; and in either case desired that his party should be viceroys over him.' The Girondins (to whom Roederer, in some degree, attached himself) had the baseness, as we had lately occasion to show, to adopt the whole 10th of August-though it is notorious (and M. Roederer himself admits) that the results were widely different from their intentions or objects-their design being originally no more than to frighten the King into the recall of the Girondin ministers. The Mountain was therefore right in calling M. Roederer a royalist-which he was just as much as his friend Vergniaud-who was a staunch monarchist at daybreak of the 10th of August-an equally staunch republican before midnight—a royalist one day-a regicide the next-and a renegade throughout! But it is not the charge of being a royalist, that most seriously offends his Excellency, Count Roederer-Peer of France-Councillor of State-Great Cross of the Legion of Honour-ExMinister of Finance to the King of Naples-Ex-Administrator of the Grand Duchy of Berg-Ex-Governor of Strasburg-ExCommissary at Lyons, and lately-(for he is a practical professor of the bathos-or art of sinking in public life)--author of a pamphlet against revolutionary agitation, and in support of the legitimate monarchy of King Louis Philippe ;-it is not, we say, against the charge of royalism, that his complaints are most seriously directed-no, his great effort is to refute the allegation that he betrayed Louis XVI. The shaft that rankles deepest and sorest in his heart is a sarcasm of forty years' standing-which, assuredly, nothing but conscience could have kept festering all this time :

A miserable mountebank,' says his Excellency Count Roederer, of the name of Richer Serizy, with his partner Pelletier [Peltier], another hireling pamphleteer of the civil list-thought it very pleasant to burlesque me [in the character of Judas], by putting into my mouth the words- Ego sum qui tradidi eum." [I am he who betrayed him.]'-p. 414.

These liberals are terribly illiberal in their attacks on others. Richer Serizy was no more a miserable mountebank than Roederer himself. M. Peltier was, in all circumstances, as respectable as Roederer could pretend to be, with a great deal more honesty and infinitely more talents; and it certainly little becomes M. Roederer

to

to call any man a hireling-he who was a notorious hireling of Buonaparte or to reproach a writer with being a pamphleteer -he who only the other day burst out from his long obscurity in a pamphlet in defence of the arbitrary measures of the new Court of the Tuileries. Nor do we understand why he should have waited till these days when no one is thinking about him, to make a defence which he did not attempt under the Directory-the Consulate the Empire-the Restoration when the charges against him were repeated, bitterly and forcibly, in fifty publications. Was he endeavouring to outlive contradiction?

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But passing over these personal contests, in which M. Roederer would certainly not have the best of it, we shall observe on the main question that the charge against Roederer of having betrayed the King rests on two grounds: first, on the admitted facts of his own conduct during the 9th and 10th August; and secondly, ou the statement which he published in a pamphlet, and re-published in the Moniteur' of the 24th August, 1792-in which, seeing the sudden and unexpected turn' which things had taken, he endeavours to exculpate himself from any share in the resistance to the mob, and especially from having ordered the Swiss guards to repel force by force. Unluckily, this defence contains, besides several confessedly false charges against the Swiss, many insinuations against the King, and particularly an avowal that Roederer's object was to secure the King as an HOSTAGE,' which were calculated to excite at the time an opinion that Roederer was rather an accomplice than an opponent of the attack on the palace, which he was bound to defend. In the present work he endeavours to explain away some of these unfortunate phrases-others he excuses on the score of the 'general error' of the moment, as to the treachery of the Swiss, and he labours to give a colour of probability to an impudent fable which we shall notice more particularly by-and-by, that there was a design on the part of the court to attack the National Assembly. As to the unlucky phrase about securing the King as an hostage,'-which is really the gist of the whole case-his defence is a strange one-he can neither deny the words nor explain them away, what then? he pleads that they were a falsehood—a mere invention and afterthought, which he uttered only to conciliate 'ce tribunal d'égorgeurs'-the revolutionary tribunal! Upon this we must observe, first, that M. Roederer seems to suppose that terror would be a sufficient excuse for any baseness-which is not our opinion; but, secondly-if it were-the terror of the revolutionary tribunal was not yet fully developed-it was still a young unblooded tiger, and had not tried a single person at the time when Roederer wrote his letter. Its first victim was condemned, we believe, the very day that letter was published, and the tribunal, afterwards so vigorous and rapid,

was,

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