Let us pause for a moment to consider the probable effects of such nurture and treatment on a nature like Talleyrand's. He was fifteen years of age; imperfectly educated for his station in life; lame, from the neglect of the guardians of his infancy; disinherited by those who should have watched with the most jealous care over his interests; cruelly punished for a physical defect chargeable to the carelessness of others; a stranger to hope, love, and fear; the victim of a domestic conspiracy; and the novitiate of a profession which he loathed, and to which, in his subsequent years, he did dishonor. His father he had never known, his mother he knew only as his tormentor and oppressor: no tie seems to have bound him to his brother, and up to this hour he had never yet slept one night under the paternal roof. These were no ordinary trials; and if the youth who was subjected to them became in after-life a cynic, is it to be wondered at? Indeed, a hasty view of this remarkable man's character might lead to the conclusion of M. Colmache, that the untoward accidents of his infancy and boyhood afforded an explanation of all his adult peculiarities; but we can not allow ourselves to accept this inference, natural as it would seem to be, for it appears to us, upon a closer inspection, that though these incidents might deepen the force of his mental inequalities, they could not have created them, and that the difference between the Bishop of Autun and the ancient noble, had he succeeded to his inheritance, would have amounted to little more than the difference between a proscribed ecclesiastic and a proscribed aristocrat. No doubt, if the generous affections expand and blossom under genial culture, they as certainly contract and wither under neglect and harshness; nor should we, in ordinary cases, have any hesitation in giving the benefit of this elementary rule to the subject of an ordinary biography: but Talleyrand's is not such. There is no evidence in this book or elsewhere, for instance, that the sensitive part of his nature was acute, or that he was easily moved by strong emotions of any kind; and it is exceedingly difficult for us to comprehend how so singular a moral and intellectual organization as he unquestionably possessed could have been the result of any imaginable series of occurrences in early life, of whatever description they might happen to be. The power of intense concentration by which he was so remarkably distinguished was, assuredly, a gift from Nature (whether good or bad we say not), and not a circumstantial accident; and it is all but incredible that a man of vivid sensibilities could have succeeded by a mere effort of the will in suppressing every manifestation of their existence during a life prolonged far beyond the ordinary term, and in the midst of the most terrible convulsions that had agitated the world since the establishment of society in Western Europe. The cause appears to us to be unequal to