Note 195 — Chapter IV · DIDEROT AND THE FRENCH TRANSITION.

Chateaubriand’s Mélanges Littéraires contain in their later numbers some interesting reviews, especially that of February 1819 on the Annales Littéraires, which supplied almost the Défense et Illustration of the Romantic outburst. But I do not know that the early pieces on English literature dating from the last year of the eighteenth century, are not as important. In these the writer, either from policy (for though he had a friendly editor in Fontanes, he was writing under the eyes of Bonaparte’s police) or really imperfect conversion, approximates much more to the “dunghill-and-pearl” view of Shakspere than the innocent might think likely, and has not quite reached his future state (v. inf.) of illumination as to Ossian. He is very severe on Young, and has a very curious passage on the English view of the subject at the moment, which is probably not far from the truth, and at any rate helps us to understand the half-way-house attitude of men like Jeffrey and Campbell. The Queen Anne men, we are told, were at a discount—Richardson was little read, Hume and Gibbon were thought gallicisers, and so forth. But these things are at best useful sidelights on their author’s position in the Génie.