Duffy's Hibernian Magazine Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And the pure and raptarous vision Wraps thee in its clonds Elysian. Dread thou these ! for then is sweeping Sorrow o'er thy charmed sleeping. And there comes a f... more »earful waking, On that lovely slumber breaking, And no after dream is given Half so fair on this side Heaven! REVIEWS. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE. The story of Alexis de Tocqueville is unquestionably one which should have been told, and that, perhaps, at somewhat greater length than is conceded to it by his friend Gustavo de Beanmont; but with the memoirs of such a life, it was wholly uunecessary to collect a large mass of miscellaneous materials. No one acqnainted with French literature can fail to perceive that the writers of that country are characterized by two defects; one an irrepressible tendency to attach importance to trifles, which leads to extravagant expausion ; the other, that overweening vanity which leads to the ignoring of other literature, however superior to their own. No anthors are, accordingly, more difficult to deal with by a foreign critic than those of France. He finds them surrounded in their own country by a blaze of reputation which would elsewhere be accorded to none but minds of the first order, and, through the influence of this popular belief, he himself is liable to be betrayed into too high an estimate of their powers. It would startle, and perhaps irritate, our neighbours to be told that their literature, prolific and varied as it is, contaius not one writer of the first class, whether poet, historian, or philosopher, no one deserving to be ranked with Homer, Eschylus, Shakspeare, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Thncydides, Tacitus, Bacon, Gibbon, or Scott. Yet there are many French anthors of extraordinary ahility, remarkable masters of style, and for the skill with which they coordin...« less