to give the Ministerialists a majority. Their aim must be to mix several issues together. The electors will have to vote on the purely personal question whether they prefer Mr Asquith or Mr Balfour as Premier. They will have to decide whether they wish for or detest the policy of Home Rule. They will have at the same time to determine whether they prefer Free-trade or Protection. All these matters will be mixed and muddled up together. To add to the confusion, it will be necessary to determine the question whether votes are to be refused or granted to women; possibly also whether the country is to enjoy adequate naval protection or not. The oddity of the thing is that at the next General Election the electorate may be placed on the horns of a serious, though absurd, dilemma. It is in the highest degree probable that a majority of the electors are staunch Unionists. It is, to say the least, quite possible that a majority of the electors remain Free-traders. Yet it is more than likely that, under our electoral system, voter after voter will be forced to choose either the maintenance of the Union combined with the surrender of Free Trade, or the maintenance of Free Trade combined with the surrender of the Union. Nor is it at all impossible that the leaders of each party may have committed themselves to the revolution involved in the concession of woman suffrage, while the mass of the electors have no wish to try an electoral experiment of which no one can prophesy the issue.

This state of things is the outcome of a party system which leads men of character to think of politics as a game. It is a system which, as Mr Lowell shows, has its merits; but political art, however great, will never be able to transform party conflicts, however subtly conducted, into a device for making partisanship perform the functions of patriotism.

A. V. DICEY.

Art. 14.-THE MEMOIRS OF MADAME DE BOIGNE Récits d'une Tante. Mémoires de la Comtesse de Boigne, née d'Osmond, publiés d'après le manuscrit original By M. Charles Nicoullaud. Four vols. Paris: PlonNourrit, 1907-1908.

'IF my nephews' (says Mme de Boigne in her preface) chance to read what I am writing, they must expect to find, not a book, but the gossip of an old woman, such desultory talk & might pass in a salon. I attach no more importance to it than to a piece of embroidery. I have taken up my per when tired of my needle, and my needle when tired of my pen; and my manuscript will be left to my heirs instead & one more armchair. Since I have referred to no documents I have probably made many mistakes as to dates and places perhaps even as to facts; but I can truly affirm that I have written nothing that I did not honestly believe. Perfect impartiality may be impossible, but it is possible to be perfectly sincere.'

Mme de Boigne was not quite so free from literary pretension as she would have us believe. She was the author of several novels, two of which she entrusted to Mme Lenormand, the biographer and niece of Mme Récamier, for publication after her death. Such attention as these stories attracted at the time was due to the name of the author rather than to their merit. They are wanting in originality, ill-constructed and conventional in sentiment. The incidents have often no connexion with the development of either character or plot; and we miss the lightness of touch, the quick lively and accurate observations of men and mannes which delight us in the Tales of an Aunt.' No criti can deny that these have secured for their author distinguished place among the immortal band of French memoir-writers; but that they possess the one merit which she claims for them, veracity, appears to be less certain. She is prodigal of assurances of her good faith. She will only, she says, tell us what she has herself witnessed or has heard on unimpeachable authority. She had often sat up till after midnight listening to Count Bubna's stories about Napoleon, but could not remember

them with sufficient accuracy to repeat them in her reminiscences.

'My method has been,' she says, 'to tell what I have seen and what I believe, without attempting to make the facts agree with each other. . . . Truth is full of inconsistencies which can only be removed by invention.' Does she protest too much? Is one of her severest critics justified in saying that, heedless of truth, 'she went her way collecting good sayings and ugly stories'?* We think he is not. Yet it must be confessed that it is difficult to be quite impartial in judging an author who has given us so much pleasure, who is never dull or languid, whose inaccuracies are often due to the very qualities which make her so fascinating a companion, to the instinct which impels a born teller of stories to give to his tales the finish of a work of art. Many of her anecdotes, especially those in the earlier chapters, written long after the events described, have evidently been rounded off and polished in the process of frequent repetition, until, like stones rolled over and over by the waves, they have lost much of their original shape; so that, although what she tells us may in substance be the truth, it is the truth dramatised and with a point given to it which was wanting to the reality.

It is often interesting to compare in this respect Mme de Boigne's account of events with that given by the constant companion of her later years, the Chancellor Pasquier.

'She to the great "might-have-been" upsoaring, sublime and ideal,

He to the merest "it-was" restricting, diminishing, dwarfing.' What, for instance, could be more dramatic than her account of the debate in Talleyrand's house after the arrival of the Tsar in 1814? According to her, Alexander began by saying:

"Well, here we are in this famous Paris; and it is you, M. de Talleyrand, who have brought us here. We have now three alternatives before us: to treat with the Emperor Napoleon, to establish a regency, or to recall the Bourbons." Talleyrand replied: "The Emperor is mistaken. We have not the choice

* M. Costa de Beauregard, 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' June 15, 1908,

of three alternatives. There is only one course open to us and that is the one he mentioned last. Powerful though he be, he is not sufficiently so to be able to choose. For, if he were to hesitate, France, who expects this compensation for her sufferings and humiliations, would rise as one man against the invaders, and your Majesty knows that the finest armies melt away before a nation's wrath' (i, 332, 3).

Upon this the Tsar acquiesced. This is not how things really happened. In Pasquier's Memoirs (ii, 256) we learn how much more protracted, how comparatively tame, were the deliberations of the conquerors. Yet the essential truth, all that it really concerns us to know, is vividly told-that the Tsar hesitated, and that Talley. rand persuaded him that the restoration of the Bourbons was the only possible policy, because it was ardently desired by the French nation. Much of the most admired history has been written after the same fashion.

Mme de Boigne was indeed ready to make allowances, for, in her opinion, we are what circumstances make us; yet, perhaps for this very reason, she does not think it necessary to minimise the shortcomings of her friends. Why should she extenuate faults for which not they but the conditions under which they lived and acted were responsible? Besides, it was not her nature to be easily dazzled. She could see spots in the sun. I have found,' she says, that there is always some good to be said of the worst, and some evil of the best men.'

Her strongest feelings were negative. She disliked despotism, and dreaded democracy. She was irritated by intolerance, superstition, and folly. She chronicles, therefore, with a malicious zest, the absurdities and errors of despots and demagogues, and perhaps also of those whom her editor calls 'pious souls.' It is not surprising that critics should have complained that she is prone to dwell rather on what is amiss than on what is right in the world, to tell stories to the discredit rather than to the credit of the people she introduces to her readers. But might not the same be said of many of the writers whom we should most regret to lose? It is not to study the acts of the saints that we turn to the Cardinal de Retz, or Hamilton, or the Electress Palatine, or Saint-Simon, or Horace Walpole. Our neighbours' foibles and failings are more exhilarating matter of discourse than their

humdrum common-sense and their everyday virtues Instances of transcendent wisdom and heroic merit are, it is true, as interesting and more edifying, but they are rare. When she happens to meet them, Mme de Boigne pays them due homage. She had no liking for the Duke of Broglie; but she does not omit to tell, with a thrill of emotion, how, during the first awful epidemic of cholera, he and his duchess left Paris to set an example of devotion to their terrified servants and tenants by nursing and even performing the last services to the stricken. But, if she had confined herself to recording such deeds, a very thin volume might have contained all that she would have had to tell posterity. Perhaps she would appear more amiable if she were a little less reasonable. We should like her better if she were sometimes enthusiastic, even though for the wrong cause. It is characteristic of her that, unlike the great majority of her contemporaries, she never caught the Rousseau fever. This was the result partly of an unemotional temperament, partly of the circumstances of her early life.

Adelaide d'Osmond was born at Versailles in 1781; she was, as she says, brought up on the knees of the royal family. Her mother, a cousin of Arthur Dillon, the Archbishop of Narbonne, was lady-in-waiting to Mme Adelaide, the King's aunt. She seems to have been a beautiful and amiable nonentity, and to have had little influence on her daughter, who regarded her with tolerant affection. The Marquis of Osmond, her father, the head of a very ancient but impoverished Norman family, was a man of sense and character, enlightened after the fashion of a cultivated gentleman of the eighteenth century. During their exile he superintended his daughter's education, reading Adam Smith and philosophy with her, such philosophy of common-sense as may be found in Voltaire. M. d'Osmond, like his daughter, had no sympathy with the sentimentalities, political, social, or religious, of the followers of Rousseau. He desired reforms, but under a strong and orderly monarchy. He refused to be present at the opening of the States-General. Funeral ceremonies were not, he said, to his taste. Like Mirabeau and Malouet and other clear-sighted men, he saw that Louis XVI, by meeting the representatives of his people without any settled plan or measures to place