The Quarterly Review (Volume 159 )

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1885. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... hold his own. The success of his great book on the Italian Republics, of which the first volume appeared in 1807, gave him confidence among his equals, and in the two journeys which he made with Madame de Stael to Italy and Vienna, his knowledge of men and things widened, and the strong outlines of the character softened a little. A new and more tractable Sismondi developed in him, and for a while it seemed as though he were to play much the same role in life as Bonstetten had now finally assumed--that of the talker, the litterateur, the looker-on. Under the conditions created by the French occupation of Geneva, it was impossible for him to take much share in political life; and during these years of intercourse with Coppet, broken by occasional visits to Paris, from which he would return excited by new impressions and surfeited with conversation, he must have felt the full attractiveness of that ideal of delicate and cultivated social enjoyment which enslaved Bonstetten from the beginning. But Sismondi's nature had deeper needs and more virile capacities than Bonstetten's, and the great years of 1814 and 1815 drew him heart and soul into the conflict which was convulsing Europe. During the greater part of 1814, indeed, he was an anxious spectator of the European drama from the solitudes of Pescia; but early in 1815 he went to Paris, and during the Hundred Days he played an interesting part, of which tolerably full records remain to us. Up to 1814, he had been a consistent opponent of Napoleon, on grounds of liberty; after the blunders of the Bourbon Restoration in that year, he went over to the Empire as the only bulwark against what seemed to him the danger of an overviolent reaction against the principles of the Revolution throughout Europe. He accepted Napol...