overturned the throne of Louis Philippe in February 1848, and acquired lasting renown by the courage with which he combated the sanguinary spirit of the Red Republicans, when minister of foreign affairs. Both are chivalrous in heart and feeling, rather than opinions; and they thus exhibit curious and instructive instances of the fusions of the moving principle of the olden time with the ideas of the present, and of the manner in which the true spirit of nobility, _forgetfulness of self_, can accommodate itself to the varying circumstances of society, and float, from its buoyant tendency, on the surface of the most fetid stream of subsequent selfishness. In two works recently published by Lamartine, _Les Confidences_ and _Raphael_, certain passages in his autobiography are given. The first recounts the reminiscences of his infancy and childhood; the second, a love-story in his twentieth year. Both are distinguished by the peculiarities, in respect of excellences and defects, which appear in his other writings. On the one hand we have an ardent imagination, great beauty of language, a generous heart--the true spirit of poetry--and uncommon pictorial powers. On the other, an almost entire ignorance of human nature, extraordinary vanity, and that susceptibility of mind which is more nearly allied to the feminine, than the masculine character. Not but that Lamartine possesses great energy and courage: his conduct, during the revolution of 1848, demonstrates that he possesses these qualities in a very high degree; but that the ardour of his feelings leads him to act and think like women, from their impulse rather than the sober dictates of reason. He is a devout optimist, and firm believer in the innocence of human nature, and indefinite perfectibility of mankind, under the influence of republican institutions. Like all other fanatics, he is wholly inaccessible to the force of reason, and altogether beyond the reach of facts, how strong or convincing soever. Accordingly, he remains to this hour entirely convinced of the perfectibility of mankind, although he has recounted, with equal truth and force, that it was almost entirely owing to his own courage and energy that the revolution was prevented, in its very outset, from degenerating into bloodshed and massacre; and a thorough believer in the ultimate sway of pacific institutions, although he owns that, despite all his zeal and eloquence, the whole provisional government, with himself at its head, would on the 16th April have been guillotined or thrown into the Seine, but for the determination and fidelity of three battalions of the _Garde Mobile_, whom Changarnier volunteered to arrange in all the windows and avenues of the Hotel de Ville, when assailed by a column of thirty thousand furious revolutionists.