Chateaubriand was born at St. Malo in September, 1768, and died in Paris, after an active and most eventful career, on the fourth of July, 1848. The earlier portion of his life was passed in the quiet of his home at Combourg. At the termination of his collegiate training at Dole and Rennes, he entered the army, in which he soon gained promotion. At about the age of nineteen he was presented at court, became acquainted with the fashionable world, and was received and welcomed into the choicest literary circles of Paris, where he gained the friendship of La Harpe, Fontanes, Malesherbes, and others among the distinguished savants of that period. It was a troubled and stormy epoch in France. The social and political forces which culminated in the great Revolution were beginning to be seriously felt, and faction, turbulence and anarchy were already rife in Paris when Chateaubriand left his native shores for America, moved by a desire to discover the northwest passage, but also with an attendant purpose, long cherished, of observing the mode of life and studying the characteristics of the aborigines, for the purpose of embodying in his writings the impressions thus gained of man in a primitive condition. From this period to the time of his death his life was a singular series of vicissitudes--at one time the brilliant and revered statesman, at another the voluntary abdicator of all his rights and honors; and even, at one bitter passage of his existence, living in an unwarmed London garret and obtaining a precarious livelihood by giving lessons in his native tongue and translating for the booksellers. The utter upheaval of affairs in France brought the greatest distress upon himself, his family and his immediate friends, and, with the sensitive heart of genius, the blows which had fallen so keenly doubtless engendered the melancholy cast with which his writings are sometimes tinged. His first work, an idyllic poem, showed little of the genius so finely developed in after years; but his finest literary productions--“The Martyrs,” “The Last of the Abencerages” and “The Genius of Christianity,” to which “Atala” and “René” properly belong--remain a splendid monument to his powers and exhibit his earnest desire to be numbered among the benefactors and enlighteners of mankind. The present work, “Atala,” is the gathered fruit of his previous studies amid the wilds of America. It abounds in sparkling description, romantic incident and sentiments tender and heroic. It is pervaded by purity of tone and elevation of thought, qualities the more commendable and marked because produced in an age proverbially lax and frivolous.