and the greater Missouri may be regarded as the welldowered wife, for, though she loses her name, she retains her influence to the end, since no one, seeing the turgid river of the bayous, would suspect its ancestry in the limpid creek which, round Bemidji, keeps the fishermen busy at their nets.

In its historic and strategic aspect of political frontier the river is, for obvious reasons, most instructive in continental Europe, where different, nations hold the opposing banks of many rivers. The Danube, the one great waterway of Europe trending eastward, separates an amazing diversity of races and nations. The Rhone, in its beautiful course from the glaciers of the Oberland to the tideless Mediterranean, has ceased to be a frontier, but its historic interest is unrivalled, and its opaque waters rush past Arles and Avignon loaded with memories of Roman amphitheatres, of exiled popes, and of the unrequited passion of Petrarch for his glacial Laura.

6

The brimm'd unwrinkled Rhine' has figured more conspicuously in history than either, and the contrast between the beginning and ending of this wonderful river has been finely imaged by Victor Hugo* in lines which, if not his best prose, deserve quoting :

'Oui, mon ami, c'est un noble fleuve, féodal, républicain, impérial, digne d'être à la fois français et allemand. . . . Dans sa pente, dans son cours, dans les milieux qu'il traverse, il est, pour ainsi dire, l'image de la civilisation, qu'il a déjà tant servie et qu'il servira tant encore. Il descend de Constance à Rotterdam, du pays des aigles à la ville des harengs, de la cité des papes, des conciles et des empereurs au comptoir des marchands et des bourgeois, des Alpes à l'Océan, comme l'humanité elle-même est descendue des idées hautes, immuables, inaccessibles, sereines, resplendissantes, aux idées larges, mobiles, orageuses, sombres, utiles, navigables, dangereuses, insondables, qui se chargent de tout, qui portent tout, qui fécondent tout, qui engloutissent tout; de la théocratie à la démocratie, d'une grande chose à une autre grande chose.'

This castled Rhine is endowed with a beauty which haunts the memory of all who have looked upon its flood. To the jaded eye there may be some faint suggestion of stage effect about the villages which climb the steep

* 'Le Rhin.'

sides of its leafy banks, or about the 'chiefless castles' perched upon its guardian creeks. Yet this illusion is merely the pictorial form of that which deceived the old lady who liked Hamlet' because it was 'so full of quotations.' Born of the granite heights that bred the freest nation in all Europe, the Rhine offers, between the foaming falls at Schaffhausen and the creeping mud at Utrecht, every phase of river life. Its navigable waters are churned by a hundred steamers, but not all their smoke can obscure its wonderful legend, and the dreamer may still enjoy precious glimpses of the Lorelei combing her luxuriant tresses and singing susceptible men to their doom, and of the legions of Cæsar and the Old Guard of Napoleon crossing the fords to make and unmake history. Indeed the fatal attraction which the Rhine has ever had for France, luring the regiments of the Grand Monarque and the marshals of the Second Empire to new emprise beyond, has again and again been not only the undoing of France herself, but the curse of Europe, which has seen itself repeatedly embroiled in devastating wars as the result of these unholy ambitions.

Making history, influenced in its turn by the progress of mankind, the River winds its way, now roaring in the pride of flood, now lamb-like in time of drought, or silent and transfixed by the iron hand of winter, from unrecorded ages to the era of civilisation, playing its part in the story of the nations, carving and moulding the face of the earth on which it lives, at one time helping man to work out his curious destiny in new homes, at another offering the most formidable obstacles to all his efforts; now his only means of communication, anon an insurmountable barrier in his path. What wonder is it then that, loved, hated, or feared, it should, in all ages and in every land, have had its worshippers! For us, the engineer has robbed it of its terrors, but to the Ancients it stood for the boundary of this life, and they reached eternity across a Ferry.

F. G. AFLALO.

Art. 5. THE BEGINNING AND THE END OF THE SECOND EMPIRE.

1. L'Empire Libéral. By Émile Ollivier. Fourteen vols. Paris: Garnier, 1895-1909.

2. L'Évolution Constitutionnelle du Second Empire. By H. Berton. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1900.

3. The Rise of Louis Napoleon. By F. A. Simpson. London: Murray, 1909.

4. Les Trois Coups d'État de Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Vol. 1, Strasbourg et Boulogne. By A. Lebey. Paris: Perrin, 1906.

5. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte et la Révolution de 1848. By A. Lebey. Two vols. Paris: Felix Juven, 1907-8. 6. Napoléon III avant l'Empire. By H. Thirria. Two vols. Paris: Plon, 1899.

7. Rome et Napoléon III. By E. Bourgeois and E. Clermont. Paris: Armand Colin, 1907.

M. ÉMILE OLLIVIER has written an apology for his political career in fourteen volumes, eight thousand pages, and a million and a half words, and if the weight of an apology is to be measured in a grocer's scale his must be one of the weightiest apologies in literary history. It might perhaps be inferred from this that M. Ollivier was a party to transactions which it is impossible or at least embarrassing to defend, that his political course has been far from straight, and that his fame is so thickly obscured by clouds that only by gargantuan puffings and blowings can it be restored to its proper translucency. Such a conclusion would be hasty and erroneous. The writer of this prolix apology can afford to open his public career to the inspection of any jury of moralists without a twinge of misgiving. Whatever may have been his failures and his faults, nobody can say that they were the fruit of a mean, jealous, or double-dealing nature. M. Ollivier is the most diaphanous of men and the least malicious of memoir-writers. He has the full orator's allowance of vanity, but it is as the vanity of the sunflower, large, easy and expansive. He can admire Thiers, who eclipsed him, and find qualities to praise in Jules Simon, whom he regarded as an old ally sundered by treachery. He has been a hard but never a rancorous fighter, and has

preserved a sweet core of geniality through misfortunes which would have dropped acid into a less wholesome nature. Nobody can read these volumes without feeling attracted to their author. They have none of those subtle and delicate harmonies which are so enchanting in the best prose of all; they are neither witty nor humorous, and they are sadly lacking in restraint, plan, concision; but they move along at a high level of clear and masculine eloquence; they are never languid or feeble; and who can refrain from admiring the unconquerable youth and buoyancy of heart which has prompted a man, after his political career had been broken beyond retrieve, to plan at the age of seventy, and to execute between the ages of seventy and eighty-four, so gallant and extensive a vindication of the faith that was in him?

M. Ollivier's apology takes the form of a general history of the Second Empire and of its intellectual and political antecedents. He wishes to show that Liberalism was an essential part of the Imperial idea, and that he was fully justified in his belief that France could enjoy a wide measure of political liberty under an Emperor of the lineage of Napoleon. And this object is combined with a purpose which is still more directly relevant to M. Ollivier's political reputation. The Cabinet of which he was the nominal chief plunged France into the war of 1870; and not the least among the motives which have led to the composition of this elaborate book is the desire to recount the true causes of that plain and palpable catastrophe. The name Ollivier is associated with a great defeat. There was a time when no Frenchman could speak a good word for the Minister who, on July 15, 1870, announced from the tribune that he entered the Prussian war with a light heart.' Many were the imprecations heaped on that light heart' of M. Ollivier. No party would defend him. To the Royalists he was a demagogue, to the Republicans a renegade, to the Imperialists the quack doctor who had injured a sound constitution. When the first great defeats were announced, M. Ollivier was hurled from office and shot through descending levels of opprobrium and contempt into the oblivion from which an unresting spirit of selfassertion armed with an industrious and enduring pen has enabled him triumphantly to emerge.

The writer of these memoirs was born at Marseilles July 2, 1825, and first came into public notice in 1848 when Ledru-Rollin sent him and his father into the departments of the Bouches du Rhône and Var as joint commissioners of the newly-founded Republic. Educated in the Radical tradition of France, Émile Ollivier had been familiar from early youth with some of the leaders of Republican opinion. His father, Demosthenes Ollivier, was the friend of Armand Carrel, the RepublicanBonapartist, of Pierre Leroux, the Republican-Socialist, of Ledru-Rollin, the Republican pure and simple. Above our childish heads,' says the autobiographer quaintly, ' resounded the grand words, God, Humanity, Plato, Jesus.' We are left to infer that the atmosphere of the Ollivier household was compounded of that sentimental and comprehensive idealism which is the special feature of the Revolution of 1848 in its early and exuberant phases. In such a home the young Ollivier naturally grew up to be a Republican, but not, though perhaps this may be the result of temperament rather than of surroundings, a Republican of the most austere and exclusive sect. One key to the inner shrine of Jacobinism he never possessed. He was neither an atheist nor an anti-clerical. On the contrary, much as he deplored the development of ultramontane tendencies in the Church, he was as a youth, and has ever since remained, a loyal Catholic. He tells us how as a boy he found his favourite intellectual pasture in Bossuet and Pascal, and how during his progress as Republican commissioner he created something of a sensation by calling on a bishop. Such Liberalism was rare among Ledru-Rollin's commissioners, but the brief life of the Second Republic afforded little scope for its exercise. The triumph of Louis Bonaparte dealt a shattering blow to the Ollivier family. The father was sentenced to Cayenne, then exiled; and the avenues of public life seemed to be effectively closed against the son.

In the sudden and complete eclipse of public liberties Émile Ollivier found a refuge and eventually a reputation in the practice of the law. The bar has been a great school of political oratory in France. The leaders of the Gironde were barristers, Gambetta and Jules Favre won their first laurels at the bar, and M. Ollivier, who stands