Such was the end of her who, without the prestige of authorship, was regarded by her contemporaries as one of the most remarkable women of her time. We will not indulge in any exaggerated statement of her piety. Great numbers, no doubt, have attained to more interior perfection. Her ambition to please was undoubtedly a weakness. Religion did not make her what she was; yet she would never have been what she was without it. It was the ballast which steadied her when carrying crowded sail. It was the polar star that directed her course amid conflicting currents and adverse storms. It raised her standard of morality above that of many of her associates. It taught her how to be devout without dissimulation, a patroness of letters without pedantry, a patriot and a royalist without national disdain or political animosity. It made her charitable to the poor, kind to the aged and sorrowful, gracious and unassuming with all, at the very time that the proudest of emperors invited her presence at his court, and his brother Lucien made her the idol of his verse. Its golden thread guided her aright through the intricate mazes of social life--through a matrimonial position equally strange and unreal--an engagement to a royal prince who was the foe of France--through friendships with Bernadotte and Murat on their thrones, with the queens of Holland and of Naples when fallen, and with the third Napoleon when plotting to regain the sceptre of the first. It so lifted her above intrigue and cabals that she could give her right hand to the disaffected General Moreau and her left to the devoted Junot--could be made the confidante of all parties without betraying the secrets of any. It inclined her to be chary of giving advice, but to make it, when asked for, tell always on the side of virtue. It enabled her to exhort the sceptical with effect, and dispose the philosophic to accept the faith. [Footnote 19] [Footnote 19: See her letters to Ampère in the _Correspondant_, 1864.] Her autobiography has unfortunately been destroyed by her own direction, because blindness would not allow her to revise it and cancel its {102} defects. But many fragments of it have been preserved, and a thousand personal recollections, collected from those who knew her, have been wrought by her niece and other biographers into a lasting monument. -------- From The Fortnightly Review CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS. BY SIR JOHN BOWRING.