see; a forehead broad, and pregnant with ideas; blue eyes, spirit-speaking, and sparkling with intellect; a kingly nose; a full mouth, around which feeling, irony and voluptuousness sported in rivalry; a finelyrounded manly chin; combined to make this head almost an ideal. Armfelt is a genius, and unites all the virtues and the vices which are wont to mark the higher kinds of genius. Rich in thoughts, in wit, and in life, he overflows wildly, and wildly overleaps himself. He speaks and writes admirably; pens the most beautiful verses; sends forth, as often as he opens his mouth, unwearied lightnings of intellect and wit; understands the art of living with all sorts of men, and making himself agreeable to all; and-what is the highest quality of all-in whatever he does, great or small, good or bad, the man, the openhearted kindly man, breaks freely out. This it is wherein his great captivating power lies; this it is that secures him his ascendancy over other men. For amid this northern frost, and near this arctic circle, to stand on high ground, intellectually and socially, as Armfelt did, and preserve at the same time the warm, free-pulsing MAN, demands a large heart. Armfelt is enterprising and quick to seize; eager to attain but not obstinate to retain; light-hearted, not without levity; at one moment both laborious and dexterous at his labour, at another careless and thoughtless; always more fruitful to project than patient to execute. On Cupid's many-twinkling million-coloured arena of flowers this man was a terrible conqueror, a northern Don Juan, a thousand times more fiery than the Spaniard, a Cæsar, the son of Venus Genitrix, who could write VENI, VIDI, VICI, as a blazon on his shield, and ride through the lists of Love unchallenged. His adventures with women of all nations are famous, as are also his collections of the most lovely children, who could boast mostly princesses for their mothers, and whom he all educated gallantly as his own. In such matters of course one mentions no names. But this man, whose faults lie so open before all men, and whom any dry pedant may blame, possesses also a truthfulness of nature and a strength that are capable of rising up into the noblest flames of a high enthusiasm. A man of feeling may almost weep when he reflects, how men of this character, fitted by nature manifestly for the most heroic career, and for the most humanizing deeds, often fulfil only half their destiny, and with all their fulminating and coruscating qualities, often serve the rude multitude-which judges always by the issue and the result -only for a laugh. Armfelt, if Gustavus III. had lived longer,-Armfelt, born an Englishman or a Frenchman, instead of a Fin,-would have stood before the eyes of Europe as a star of a very different magnitude. He is one of those men whom it is impossible to see, and not to follow. In a free state, under a high-hearted king, in the van of a revolutionized people, he would have been a glorious citizen and a famous captain. But Armfelt, surrounded by confined and mechanical heads, pulling at one rope with lukewarm and narrow-chested men, will often appear a worse man than the worst: he will run at one time too quick, at another time two slow, now too hot, and now too cold. For never yet was genius gifted with the instinct of mediocrity, with the happy delusion to mistake a half for the whole, and patchwork for the woven web. For this reason also genius always commits absurdities and extravagances, wherever it is not allowed freely to work its own schemes and to shape its own course. Of such powerful portrait-painting Herr Arndt's book is full, and in this respect the most uncritical reader cannot but see how superior it is to much that passes current with the respectable name of history, both in this country and more especially in Germany, where a jealous state-supervisorship of the press puts a gag upon all bold personal utterances with regard to public men, and forces the pen of the modern historian to deal in measures only which are mere results, and not in men in whom the causes and the philosophy and the living colours of measures lie. We should like to see the man who at Bonn, or anywhere else in Germany, would dare to write such free personal sketches of the men of Berlin or Vienna, as Arndt has here done of the men of Stockholm. The fourth chapter of the work gives a hasty sketch of the regency of the Duke of Sudermania, which occupied the interval between the assassination of Gustavus III. in 1792, and the ascension of Gustavus IV. Adolphus, in 1796. The duke, as well in his then appearance on the stage of public life, as in the part he afterwards played under the title of Charles XIII., after the deposition of his nephew, Arndt describes as a good easy man, capable of doing little harm on the throne, and less good. That he was ambitious, or had any thing to do, as is so often asserted, either with the assassination of his brother, or the deposition of his nephew, Arndt considers as destitute of proof, and inconsistent with the easy and indifferent character of the man. But, without discussing secondary matters of this kind, we hasten on to that which is the main matter in Arndt's book, and for which it is indebted to its character as an important original contribution to European history: the reign of Gustavus IV. Adolphus. And in noticing shortly the bearing of our author's testimony on what we already know, we shall, omitting matters of internal government, and the unimportant operations in Germany in 1805 and 1807, confine ourselves to the two grand points of most general interest, and greatest European significancy. The first of these points is the strange abnormal character of the king; the second, the apparently (though not really) equally strange and peculiar character of the revolution (so called) of 1809. With regard to the very singular character of the king, three * This is taken mainly from the characteristic of Armfelt, p. 268-271. But compare also the sketch of his character at p. 171. shades of erroneous opinion seems principally deserving of notice. The first is that maintained by the chief actors in his deposition, the accusers at once and the judges of the royal culprit: viz., that he was a compound of incapacity, impracticability, pedantry, obstinacy, folly, ambition, insolence, tyranny, Quixotism and cowardice, such as never was seen upon a reasonable throne, and such as no free people was called upon to tolerate in any public capacity, much less in the situation of absolute master and lord. This is the view set forth in the well-known book-well-known, at least in our circulating libraries some thirty years ago-the manifesto of the revolutionary or French party in 1809, whose title is given below.* The Edinburgh whigs trumpeted this book valiantly as soon as it was published; and as the sources of information on this subject open to the British public were very scant, we are inclined to think it may have had considerable influence in forming the political opinion of this country, so far as there was any, with regard both to the merits of the revolution, and the demerits of the deposed king. It was not to be expected however that the anti-Gallican spirit, which was the ruling one in this country, would quietly allow the most chivalrous and consistent champion of legitimacy on the continent, to be publicly stigmatized as a heartless despot and an impracticable fool. There were, indeed, not a few strange traits of character, startling facts, and what in parliamentary phrase we call ' scenes, publicly reported of this royal Swede, the truth of which our own captains and diplomatic men were the first to testify: but on the other hand there were public proclamations, letters to George III. and other productions of the royal pen, equally patent to Europe, which breathed a spirit of high principle, worthy of a king, and carried with them a certain air of grandeur and decision that seemed to maintain the old character of the Wasa family worthily. Those writers therefore in this country, who wished to set forth the character of the knight errant royal of the Bourbons in the most favourable light, were strongly tempted to usher him upon the stage as a most magnanimous and high-minded, just and generous monarch: a little obstinate, perhaps, and headstrong in his temper, but whose main misfortune was that he was ill-supported by his neighbours, and that before he could bring his chivalrous drama to a conclusion, he became subject to fits, or even a permanent malady, not merely of monomania, but literally, and in the medical sense of the word, madness. * An Historical Sketch of the last Years of the Reign of Gustavus IV. Adolphus, late King of Sweden, including a Narrative of the Causes, Progress, and Termination of the late Revolution; translated from the Swedish. London. 1812. Gustavus IV. Adolphus. 49 This is the view taken by Mr. Crichton* and by Mr. Alison.† These two views are natural enough as coming from two opposite parties, whose views they were separately calculated to support; but now at the eleventh hour Mr. Laingt has come forth, a sturdy Scotch radical, as the decided champion and vindicator of the calumniated memory of the great champion of the Bourbons. This gentleman indeed allows that his royal client was "obdurate, foolish, narrow-minded, arbitrary, perhaps crazy as we say in private life; but there was reason in his madness. It was folly in so weak a potentate to think of coping with Napoleon; but so it was in Gustavus Wasa (in 1520) to think of coping with the King of Denmark. He was, moreover, sincere, consistent, steady, and, in the midst of a dissolute court, the only man of pure moral character and sincere religious impressions." For this and for other reasons Mr. Laing thinks that Gustavus Adolphus has not been fairly dealt with by his contemporaries. Mr. Laing in short gives the opinions not of the Scottish whigs or the Edinburgh Review' of 1812, but of the Swedish liberals of 1838. This view is the natural product of a reaction; the Swedes have now weighed the men of 1809 in the balance, and found them wanting. of high-minded patriots, they are now found to have been only a factious conspiracy: a faction who sold Finland to Russia, who sold his crown to his uncle Charles XIII., and the reversion of it to the present dynasty.' Oh, poor humanity, wilt thou never learn to sit steady on that unsanctified steed of thine! This reaction also overshoots the mark, as a man of Mr. Laing's calibre might have known; but it sounds so much more manful, and carries the reader away so sublimely, to deal in sweeping denunciations. We are like to get a much more thorough and impartial characteristic from M. Arndt than from any of these gentlemen. Here it is: something like the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as a man with half an eye may guess. We ought to have mentioned by the way before, that this as well as the other historical sketches we translate, were originally written in the years 1809-10, and have been kept so long in retentis from obvious motives of private feeling in the highest degree honourable to M. Arndt. Writers of books in these days are not generally so scrupulous. Instead "Gustavus Adolphus was a man of a slender straight figure, in every limb regularly moulded, somewhat above the middle stature, his head rather long, his forehead open and rising with an almost too steep ascent, his eyes blue, his hair light, his nose straight and noble, his mouth full and close shut, his chin round and manly, in short an Olden burg-Holstein family face, such as Charles XII. also had from his Oldenburg mother. One might say altogether his head and his whole figure had a cast of Charles XII., when we conceive this king in a state of rest; but the calm dignified earnestness, the dark-glowing eye, the grand energy and nobility that his contemporaries admired as something magical in this heroic person, are entirely wanting in his descendant. With his elegant agile body, Gustavus treads the ground more formally solemn than manfully energetic. In this peculiarity, and in some others, there was a great deal of the Spanish Bourbon in him. In his otherwise regular features, which had they been lighted up by the play of intellect, might even have been termed beautiful, and which in moments of gracious condescension could assume an extremely pleasing expression, there remained nevertheless, after he had passed the term of youth, a certain air of unreadiness, unripeness, almost boyishness: that defect which is often noticeable in the faces of old families fast waning to decay, that something of an inherited ghostly reminiscence of the past that lies like a painful burden on the present, the clog of all free action and the poisoner of all healthy enjoyment of existence. "The king's bearing was uniformly firm and Swedish, always coloured with a seriousness and solemnity, which seldom relaxed into a smile. Charles XII., tradition tells, was hardly ever seen to laugh, but the hero never grumbled, and was never fretful. Those who knew the king well knew also that this seriousness and solemnity was nothing affected or assumed-it was his nature. He had a sad want of warmth and docility; he was as stiff and stark as northern ice and iron; and whatever appeared obstinate, dogged, and crotchety, in his peculiar habits of thinking, of believing, or of acting, was merely the reiterated manifestation of this inherent stiffness and inflexibility of his nature. "But with all this unbending stiffness of disposition, this man was far from being incapable of training and culture. He had on the contrary enjoyed an excellent education, and made good use of his opportunities: so much so that in his early years his talents excited considerable attention, and seemed to afford fair grounds of bright hopes for the future. He was not one of the race of ignorant kings; but had studied the history and the constitutional law of his country thoroughly, and was pretty well versed besides in the general and special history of Europe, so as to be able to quote example and precedent aptly when occasion required. He was a good and subtle thinker and speaker, and was always ready to enter into any discussion in conversation with intelligent strangers, from whom he might hope to derive useful information. Few kings are able to do this. He was also no mean master of the pen, expressing himself with ease and elegance in French and in his native Swedish alike. Many of his state-papers were written by himself the body and substance of them at least, so that his minister had only to tag a head or a tail to them for the sake of form. He had moreover generally a very just judgment of the foreign relations of his times, and the mutual dependencies of the European states. I have seen |