REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Private Memoirs, which, with the Work of M. Hue, and the Journal of Clery, complete the History of the Captivity of the Royal Family of France in the Temple. Translated from the French, with Notes by the Translator; 12mo, pp. 138. London, Murray; Edinburgh, Blackwood.
There is something interesting even in the title of this little publication. Sovereigns and princes are so far removed from the observation of the rest of mankind, that public curiosity has always been directed with peculiar eagerness to their private history. We feel a very natural desire to "enter within the vail," which ceremony interposes between them and their subjects; to see them lay aside the overpowering lustre, which prevented our near approach and our steady gaze; and to observe how far they, who never appeared to our imaginations but in the full meridian of felicity and of power, approach in their retirement the level of humanity, and are influenced by the common motives and feelings of men.
The memoirs of princes, therefore, are always read with avidity, even though there be nothing very extraordinary in their details.—We contemplate with interest any portrait, which exhibits the minds of such exaltated personages without the disguise of court costume: we have a secret pride in comparing them with ourselves; and in observing how completely their superiority vanishes, when they are viewed apart from those external advantages, which threw around them an adventitious glare.
The abatement of admiration, however, which such memoirs generally produce, is amply compensated by the better feelings which they excite.—We enter with full sympathy into the joys and sorrows to which we see royal hearts equally accessible with our own. The familiarity into which we seem admitted with them is repaid with a proportionate degree of amity.—Their faults, estimated by their temptations, are scanned with a very indulgent eye; and their virtues derive additional lustre, not only from the extent of their influence, but from the difficulty of maintaining them amidst the innumerable facilities afforded to vice, by the obsequiousness and flattery of servile dependants. Their happiness appears so far above all ordinary competition, that we view it without envy; and over their miseries, perpetually contrasted in our minds with the brighter aspect of their lot, we shed a tear of unmingled compassion.
Never have the best of these feelings been more powerfully awakened in our own breasts, than by the perusal of this journal. Nothing, indeed, can be conceived more interesting than the circumstances in which it has appeared. It is continued to the day of the dauphin's death, and of course contains much information which Clery and Hue, in their journals, could not give. It is composed from notes, either made by stealth at the moment, with pencils which the princess had found means to conceal from her persecutors, or added immediately after her release from prison, and has therefore an air of simplicity and nature, which the feeling of the moment alone could impress. It was written without any view to publication, and therefore represents, without disguise or concealment, the miseries and the conduct of the ill-fated captives. It is written by the Orphan of the Temple, whose restoration to her former dignity affords some compensation for her protracted sufferings; and who, by her virtues and her heroism, has commanded the admiration of the world, and proved how much she had profited in the school of affliction. This interesting little work is not accompanied by any name, but it is avowed at Paris; and it is impossible to read one page of it, without being convinced that it is the genuine production of the illustrious personage to whom it is ascribed.
The narrative commences from the 13th of August 1792, when the king and his family were committed to the Temple. They were accompanied to this melancholy abode by the Princess de Lamballe, of the house of Savoy, widow of Louis de Bourbon, Prince of
