International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 7, August 12, 1850Various
History
International Weekly Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science - Volume 1, No. 7, August 12, 1850
Various
Art -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
Ledru Rollin is now in his forty-fourth or forty-fifth year,
having been born in 1806 or 1807. He is the grandson of the famous
_Prestidigateur_, or Conjurer Comus, who, about four or five-and-forty
years ago, was in the acme of his fame. During the Consulate, and a
considerable portion of the Empire, Comus traveled from one department
of France to the other, and is even known to have extended his
journeys beyond the Rhine and the Moselle on one side, and beyond the
Rhône and Garonne on the other. Of all the conjurers of his day he was
the most famous and the most successful, always, of course, excepting
that Corsican conjurer who ruled for so many years the destinies
of France. From those who have seen that famous trickster, we
have learned that the Charleses, the Alexanders, even the Robert
Houdins, were children compared with the magical wonder-worker of
the past generation. The fame of Comus was enormous, and his gains
proportionate; and when he had shuffled off this mortal coil it
was found he had left to his descendants a very ample--indeed, for
France, a very large fortune. Of the descendants in a right line, his
grandson, Ledru Rollin, was his favorite, and to him the old man left
the bulk of his fortune, which, during the minority of Ledru Rollin,
grew to a sum amounting to nearly, if not fully, £4,000 per annum.
The scholastic education of the young man who was to inherit this
considerable fortune, was nearly completed during the reign of
Louis XVIII., and shortly after Charles X. ascended the throne _il
commençait à faire sur droit_, as they phrase it in the _pays Latin_.
Neither during the reign of Louis XVIII., nor indeed now, unless in
the exact and physical sciences, does Paris afford a very solid and
substantial education. Though the Roman poets and historians are
tolerably well studied and taught, yet little attention is paid to
Greek literature. The physical and exact sciences are unquestionably
admirably taught at the Polytechnique and other schools; but neither
at the College of St. Barbe, nor of Henry IV., can a pupil be so well
grounded in the rudiments and humanities as in our grammar and public
schools. A studious, pains-taking, and docile youth, will, no doubt,
learn a great deal, no matter where he has been placed in pupilage;
but we have heard from a contemporary of M. Rollin, that he was not
particularly distinguished either for his industry or his docility in
early life. The earliest days of the reign of Charles X. saw M. Ledru
Rollin an _étudiant en droit_ in Paris. Though the schools of law
had been re-established during the Consulate pretty much after the
fashion in which they existed in the time of Louis the XIV., yet the
application of the _alumni_ was fitful and desultory, and perhaps
there were no two classes in France, at the commencement of 1825. who
were more imbued with the Voltarian philosophy and the doctrines and
principles of Rousseau, than the _élèves_ of the schools of law and
medicine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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