Soon after his return from Rome, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who continued to maintain as high a position as ever in the favor of Napoleon, was appointed plenipotentiary to the Valois. Just then a rumor, circulated beyond doubt by the partisans of the exiled dynasty, acquired some influence on the popular mind, many hoping and others fearing that the emperor was prepared to follow the example of Monk, and sought to replace the Bourbons on the throne of Saint Louis and Henri IV. Chateaubriand, perhaps more than any one else, under the influence of the chivalric ideas which always characterised him, flattered himself that this dream would soon be realised. At once, however, all Paris was amazed by the news that the Duke d’Enghien, the last of the Condés, had been shot at midnight, in the ditch of the castle of Vincennes. Thus Napoleon replied to the imprudent suggestions of the royalists. The reason of this terrible tragedy is even now unknown, the only man who possibly could have explained it, the emperor, having borne the secret with him to the grave. The whole party then known as the emigration, was however terrified, and under the influence of a generous indignation, on the very day that he heard the news Chateaubriand resigned his appointment. Independence was then a crime, but far from being offended, Napoleon conceived a yet more exalted esteem for Chateaubriand. Prayers, promises, every possible inducement were used in vain to retain him in the imperial service. Chateaubriand hurried the preparations for his pilgrimage and crossed the Alps. On his previous visit he had not studied closely enough the Italian, and after a careful tour the vicomte sailed for Greece. In the wilds of America, the poet had shaken himself free of all old-world ideas as he would from a burden which oppressed him, that his soul in vigor, and unrestrained, might hear every accent of the poetry of a young nature. In Greece, however, his conduct was precisely the reverse. He was in the holy land of poetry and art, and he sought to conjure up by the powerful magic of memory, the mighty dead who for almost twenty centuries have slumbered in unknown graves. Thrice, according to ancient usage, he made the echos of Thermopylæ resound with the name of Leonidas, and in his pious wanderings across the ruins of Athens, he would ascend some fallen tribune, from which perhaps the voice of Demosthenes might have been heard moving the popular mind as the wind agitates the sea, and calling forth a new generation of warriors by the magic of the names of “those who died at Marathon.” If ever a man was instinct with the feeling of universal love, if ever any one idolized nature it was Chateaubriand, the piety of whom, however, was too intense to permit him ever to mistake the apparent for the great first cause. In the words of one of our own writers “he was filled with devotion to God and sympathized with all humanity.” Those now desolate regions he soon left, and the enthusiast