its deadening influence upon the conscience, it implicated von Haller in the infamous perjury which, though committed under the sanction of a Romish bishop, led to his ignominious expulsion from the sovereign council at Berne. Chateaubriand has not escaped an infection from the same atmosphere. It taints his writings. In such a work as the _Génie du Christianisme_, denounced as it is by the Ultramontanists generally, there is much that is not wholesome. The eloquent champion of faith wields the glaive as stoutly for fables as for eternal verities. The poet makes beauty drag decay in her train, and ties a dead corpse to the wings of immortality. Truth itself, in his apology, though brought out in grand relief, is sculptured on a sepulchre full of dead men's bones; and, unhappily, while we draw near to examine the perfection of his ideal, we find ourselves repelled by a lurking scent of putrefaction. The career of de Maistre is, in epitome, that of his school. Disgusted with Jacobinism, and naturally delighting in paradox, it seemed to afford him relief to avow himself a papist, in an age of atheism. He was not only the author of the reactionary movement, but his character was itself the product of Reaction. Driven with his king to Sardinia, in 1792, by the invasion of Piedmont, his philosophical contempt for the revolutionists was exhibited in his _Considerations sur la France_, from which, in a former letter, I have made so long a quotation. In this work--in some respects his best--his Ultramontanism is far from extravagant: and not only his religious principles as they were then, but also the effect which everything English was then producing on his mind, is clearly seen in a comment upon the English Church, which, as it passed his review, and was printed again in 1817 with no retractation, must be regarded as somewhat extraordinary. "If ever Christians reunite," says he, "as all things make it their interest to do, it would seem that the movement must take rise in the Church of England. Calvinism was French work, and consequently an exaggerated production. We are pushed too far away by the sectarians of so unsubstantial a religion, and there is no mean by which they may comprehend us: but the Church of England, which touches us with one hand, touches with the other a class whom we cannot reach; and although, in a certain point of view, she may thus appear the butt of two parties, (as being herself rebellious, though preaching authority,) yet in other respects _she is most precious_, and may be considered as one of those chemical _intermèdes_, which are capable of producing a union between elements dissociable in themselves." He seldom shows such moderation; for the Greek and Anglican churches he specially hates. In 1804 he was sent ambassador to St Petersburg; and there he resided till 1817, fulfilling his diplomatic duties with that zeal for his master, and that devotion to conservative interests, which are the spirit of his writings.