THERE are some men who seem epitomes of their periods, of all the weaknesses, strengths, ideals and follies and wisdoms of their times. All the tangled skeins of different movements seem embroidered into the pattern of a face; and that face is theirs. We seek in them the years in which they lived, and are never disappointed. Sir Philip Sidney means the age of Elizabeth, Dr. Johnson the common-sense English eighteenth century, Rousseau the stirring of revolutionary France, Goethe the awakening of Germany. Of these men was Chateaubriand. He was born before the storm and died after it. He gathered up the best of the things that were before the revolution, and handed them on to the men who, when the revolution had left a new France, were to make that new country the centre of European literature. Rousseau and the Romantics meet in him. He wrote when France, her eyes still bright and wide after the sight of blood, was seeking in religion for one thing, at least, that might be covered by the tossing waves of revolution and yet survive. Christianity in his finest story is the rock on which his lovers break themselves. And Christianity was the first earthwork attacked before the revolution, and the first reoccupied afterwards. Chateaubriand stands curiously in the midst of the opposing elements. Like Byron he was a patrician and a fighter. He too would have died for freedom. But whereas Byron fought, contemptuously sometimes, for revolutionaries, Chateaubriand fought against them. When some of the ragged ones marched joyously down his street carrying the heads of two of their enemies bleeding on the ends of pikes, he cried at them, 'Brigands! Is this what you mean by Liberty?' and declared that if he had had a gun he would have shot them down like wolves. And if Chateaubriand had not been an aristocrat, he could never so well have represented his times. He would have fought and written as a revolutionist, instead of caring passionately for one party, and pinning to it the ideals of the other, so claiming both for his own. Everything that could make him one with his period and country was his. After a childhood of severe repression, he had seen the fall of the Bastille, and then sought liberty and the North-West Passage, coming back from America to find the revolution successful against himself. Could any man's life be so perfect an analogy of the meteor-like progress of France? France also sought liberty and a North-West Passage, quicker than all others; France also was to return and find the ground aquiver beneath her feet. [Illustration: JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU] [Jean-Jacques Rousseau.]