Volume 1 — From Once a Week. IMPERIAL AND ROYAL AUTHORS. BY S. BARING GOULD.

Is the present Emperor of the French aware that in publishing his Vie de César, he is treading a beaten path? that his predecessors on the French throne have, from a remote age, sought to unite the fame of authorship with the glory of regal position? and is he aware of the fact, that their efforts in this quarter have not unfrequently been accounted dead failures? Julius Caesar has already been handled by one of them, and with poor success, for Louis XIV., at the age of sixteen, produced a translation of the first book of the Commentaries of Caesar, under the title Guerre des Suisses, traduite dupremier livre des Commentaires de Jules César, par Louis XI V., Dieu-Donné, roi de France et de Navarre. This work, consisting of eighteen pages, was printed at the royal press in folio, 1651.

Louis XIV., however, was not the first French monarch to try his hand upon Julius Caesar; he had been preceded by Henry IV., who translated the whole work, and did not give it up after the first book. Will the present Vie de César reach a second volume? and, if it does, will it extend to a fourth? Those who know best the occupations of the imperial writer, say that it might be rash to feel sure beyond the first volume, or to calculate on more than a second. Let us see whether there is much novelty in the circumstance of a monarch becoming an author. We shall only look at the emperors of Rome and the kings of France. We know well enough that our own Alfred translated Boethius, Orosius, and Bede, and that Henry VIII. won the title of "Defender of the Faith" by his literary tilt with Luther; and that James I. wrote against tobacco; and we are not disposed to revive the dispute about the Eikon Basilike.

Let us then turn to the Roman emperors after Caesar, who was an author himself, or neither Henry IV., nor Louis XIV., nor Louis Napoleon, would have had much to say about him.

Augustus, we are told by Suetonius, composed several works, which he was wont to read to a circle of friends. Among these were, "Exhortations to the Study of Philosophy," which we have no doubt the select circle listened to with possible edification, and probable ennui. He wrote likewise his own memoirs in thirteen books, but he never finished them, or brought them beyond the Cantabrian war. His epigrams were written in his bath. He commenced a tragedy upon Ajax, but, little pleased with it, he destroyed it; and in answer to the select circle which asked, "What had become of Ajax?" "Ah! poor fellow!" replied the emperor, "he fell upon the sponge, and perished;" meaning that he had washed the composition off his papyrus.

Tiberius, says the same author, composed a lyric poem on the death of Julius Caesar, but his style was full of affectation and conceits.

Claudius suffered from the same passion for becoming an author, and composed several books of history, as well as memoirs of his own life, and these were read in public, for the friendly circle was too narrow for his ambition.

He also invented three letters, which he supposed were necessary for the perfection of the alphabet, and he wrote a pamphlet on the subject, before assuming the purple. {324} After having become emperor, he enforced their use. He wrote also, in Greek, twenty books of Tyrian, and eight of Carthaginian history, which were read publicly every year in Alexandria. Nero composed verses, Domitian a treatise on hair-dressing, Adrian his own life; Marcus Aurelius wrote his commentaries, which are lost, and his moral reflections, and letters to Fronto, which are still extant. Julian the Apostate was the author of a curious work, the "Misopogon, or Foe to the Beard," a clever and witty squib directed against the effeminate inhabitants of Antioch. A few passages from this work will not be out of place.

"I begin at my face, which is wanting in all that is agreeable, noble, and good; so I, morose and old, have tacked on to it this long beard, to punish it for its ugliness. In this dense beard perhaps little insects stroll, as do beasts in a forest; I leave them alone. This beard constrains me to eat and to drink with the utmost circumspection, or I should infallibly make a mess of it. As good luck will have it, I am not given to kissing, or to receiving kisses, for a beard like mine is inconvenient on that head, as it does not allow the contact of lips. …… You say that you could twine ropes out of my beard; try it, only take care that the roughness of the hair does not take the skin off your soft and delicate hands."

Valentinian I. is said to have emulated Ausonius in licentious poetry.

Of the later emperors some have obtained celebrity by their writings.

Leo VI., surnamed the Wise, was the author of a very interesting and precious treatise on the art of warfare. He also composed some prophecies, sufficiently obscure to make the Greeks in after ages find them apply to various events as they occurred. Constantine VI. was also an eminent contributor to literature. This prince had been early kept from public affairs by his uncle Alexander, and his mother Zoe, so that he had sought pleasure and employment in study. After having collected an enormous library, which he threw open to the public, he employed both himself and numerous scribes in making collections of extracts from the principal classic authors. The most important of these, and that to which he attached his own name, consisted of a mass of choice fragments, gathered into fifty-three books. This vast work is lost, together with many of the books cited, except only two parts: one treating of embassies, the other of virtues and vices. Constantine also wrote a curious geographical account of the provinces of the Greek empire, a treatise on the administration of government, and another on the ceremonies observed in the Byzantine Court; a life of the Emperor Basil, an account of the famous image of Edessa, and a few other trifles.

Let us now turn to the French monarchs, and we shall find that they began early to take the pen in hand; and, unfortunately, the very first royal literary work in France was a blunder. King Chilperic wrote a treatise on the Trinity, under the impression that he had a gift for theological definition, and he signalized his error by asserting that the word person should not be used in speaking of the three members of the Trinity. Having burned his fingers by touching theology, the semi-barbarian king attempted poetry with like success. But his pretensions did not end there. He added the Greek letter u to the Latin alphabet, and three characters of his own invention, so as to introduce into that language certain Teutonic sounds. "He sent orders," writes Gregory of Tours, "into every city of his kingdom, that all children should be taught in this manner, and that ancient written books should be effaced, and rewritten in the new style."

The great and wise Charlemagne, perceiving the glories of his native tongue, and the beauties of his national poetry, carefully collected the Teutonic national poems, and commenced a grammar of the language. Robert II. {325} was not only a scholar, but a musician; he composed some of the Latin hymns still in use in the Church, with their accompanying melodies. His queen, Constantia, seeing him engaged on his sacred poetry, one day, in joke, asked him to write something in memory of her. He at once composed the hymn, O constantia martyrum, which the queen, not understanding Latin, but hearing her name occurring in the first line, supposed to be a poem in her honor.

Louis XI. is supposed to have contributed to the Cent Nouvelles nouvelles, which collection, however much credit it may do him in a literary point of view, is inexcusably wanting in decency.

A volume of poems by Francis I. exists in MS. in the Imperial Library. It contains, among other interesting matter, a prose letter, and another in verse, written from his prison to one of his mistresses. The king was bad in his orthography, as may be judged from the following portion of a letter written by him to his mother at the raising of the siege of Mézieres:—

"Madame, tout asetheure (à cette heure), yn sy (ainsi) que je me vouloys mettre o lyt (au lit), est arycé (arrivé) Laval, lequel m'a aporté la serteneté (certitude) deu lèvemant du syège de Mésyères."

I presume a schoolboy would be whipped if he wrote as bad a letter as this king.

Louis XIII. had, says his epitaph, "a hundred virtues of a valet, not one of a master;" but he could write sonnets, and compose the music for them. The best, perhaps, is that composed on, or for, Madame de Hautefort,—

—set to music which is charming. But Louis XIII. was more of a barber, gardener, pastrycook, and farmer, than an author.

Louis XIV., beside his translation of Caesar's Commentaries, Book I., composed Memoires historiques, politiques, et militaires; but his writings were not remarkable, as his education had been so neglected by his mother and Mazarin, that, according to La Porte, his valet, he was not allowed to have the history of France read to him, even for the sake of sending him to sleep.

Louis XV. wrote a little treatise on the course of the rivers of Europe, and printed it with his own hands. It consisted of sixty-two pages, and contained nothing which was not perfectly well known before, as, for instance, that the Thames ran into the North Sea or German Ocean, and that the Rhone actually fell into the Mediterranean. In 1766 appeared a description of the forest of Compiègne, and guide to the forest, by Louis, afterward Louis XVI., composed by the unfortunate prince at the age of twelve.

Louis XVIII. wrote an account of a journey from Paris to Coblentz, which was published in 1823.

This work was full of inaccuracies and mistakes, so that it became the prey of critics.

Finally, Napoleon I. wrote much, but not in the way of bookmaking, though he began a history of Corsica, which remained in MS. His writings have been collected and published in five volumes, under the title, OEuvres de Napoléon Bonaparte. 8vo. 1821.

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