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Rh R E N R E N finally damedu palais. Talleyrand was a particular admirer of hers, and she was generally recognized as a woman of great intellectual capacity as well as of much personal grace anl charm. After her death (1824) an Essai sur I'L 'ucation des Femmes was published and received an academic couronne. But it was not till 1879, when her grandson M. Paul de Re"musat published her memoirs, which have since been followed by some correspondence with her son, that justice could be generally done to her literary talent. The light thrown on the Napoleonic court by this remarkable book was great, and Madame de Remusat appeared as hardly the inferior of the best memoir and letter writers of the previous century. The same documents contained much information on the youth and education of her son Charles. He very early developed political views more decidedly Liberal than those of his parents, and, being bred to the bar, published in 1820 a short pamphlet on jury trial. He was also an active journalist, showing in philosophy and literature the special influence of Cousin. He was, however, at the same time a thorough man of the world, and is said to have furnished to no small extent the original of Balzac's brilliant egoist Henri de Marsay. He took no active part in politics till the revolution of July, when he signed the journalists' protest against the Ordinances, and in the following October was elected deputy for Toulouse. He then ranked himself with the "doctrinaires," and supported (being a speaker of no small power) most of those measures of restriction on popular liberty which rapidly made the July monarchy unpopular with French Radicals. In 1836 he became under-secretary of state for the interior, but did not hold the post lojig. He then became an ally of Thiers, and in 1840 held the ministry of the interior for a short time. In the same year he became an Academician. For the rest of Louis Philippe's reign he was in opposition till he joined Thiers in his brief and hopeless attempt at a ministry in the spring of 1848. During this time Ilemusat constantly spoke in the chamber, but was still more active in literature, especially on philosophical subjects, the most remarkable of his works being his book on Abelard (1845). In 1848 he was elected, and in 1849 re-elected, for the department of Haute Garonne and sat on the Conservative side. But he Avould not support Louis Napoleon, and had to leave France after the coup d'etat ; nor did he re-enter political life at all during the second empire, though his son M. Paul de Remusat stood for the Haute Garonne, and was very nearly elected, in 1869. Nor would he at first accept the advances made him after the establishment of the third republic. In 1871 he was appointed minister of foreign affairs and accepted the post. Although minister he was not a deputy, and on standing for Paris in September 1873 he was beaten by M. Barodet. f, A month later he was elected (having already resigned with Thiers) for the Haute Garonne by a very great majority. He died at Paris on the 6th April 1875. During his long abstention from political life Remusat continued to write on his favourite subjects of philosophical history and especially English philosophical history. Saint Ansclme de Cantor- b&ry appeai'ed in 1854; L' Anyleterre au XVIIIeme siecle in 1856 (2d ed. enlarged, 1865); Bacon, sa vie, son teirqis, <bc., in 1858; Channing, sa vie ct ses ceuvres, in 1862; John Wesley in 1870; Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1874 ; Histoire de la philosophic en Angldcrre dcpuis Bacon jusqu'a Locke, in 1875 ; besides other and minor works. The impression derived from these and from the political records of his life is that he was on the whole one of those men whose performances are unequal to their powers. He wrote well, was a forcible speaker, and an acute critic ; but his adoption of the indeterminate eclecticism of Cousin in philosophy and of the somewhat similarly indeterminate liberalism of Thiers in politics probably had a bad effect on him, though both no doubt accorded with his critical and uneuthusiastic turn of mind. EENAISSANCE )efinition T) ENAISSANCE is a term which has recently come into 7 03 JL) use to indicate a well-known but indefinite space ance and ^ ^ me an( l a certain phase in the development of the tevival European races. On the one hand it denotes the transi- f Learn- tion from that period of history which we call the Middle Ages to that which we call Modern. On the other hand it implies those changes in the intellectual and moral attitude of the Western nations by which the transition was characterized. If we insist upon the literal meaning of the word, the Renaissance was a re-birth ; and it is needful to inquire of what it was the re-birth. The metaphor of Renaissance may signify the entrance of the European nations upon a fresh stage of vital energy in general, implying a fuller consciousness and a freer exercise of faculties than had belonged to the mediaeval period. Or it may mean the resuscitation of simply intellectual activi- ties, stimulated by the revival of antique learning and its application to the arts and literatures of modern peoples. Upon our choice between these two interpretations of the word depend important differences in any treatment of the subject. The former has the disadvantage of making it difficult to separate the Renaissance from other historical phases the Reformation, for example with which it ought not to be confounded. The latter has the merit of assign- ing a specific name to a limited series of events and group of facts, which can be distinguished for the purpose of analysis from other events and facts with which they are intimately but not indissolubly connected. In other words, the one definition of Renaissance makes it denote the whole change which came over Europe at the close of the Middle Ages. The other confines it to what was known "by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning. Yet, when we concentrate attention on the recovery of antique culture, we become aware that this was only one pheno- menon or symptom of a far wider and more comprehen- sive alteration in the conditions of the European races. We find it needful to retain both terms, Renaissance and Revival of Learning, and to show the relations between the series of events and facts which they severally imply. The Revival of Learning must be regarded as a function of that vital energy, an organ of that mental evolution, which brought the modern world, with its new conceptions of philosophy and religion, its re-awakened arts and sciences, its firmer grasp on the realities of human nature and the world, its manifold inventions and discoveries, its altered political systems, its expansive and progressive forces, into being. Important as the Revival of Learning undoubtedly was, there are essential factors in the com- plex called the Renaissance with which it can but remotely be connected. When we analyse the whole group of pheno- mena which have to be considered, we perceive that some of the most essential have nothing or little to do with the recovery of the classics. These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those great fabrics, church and empire, which ruled the Middle Ages both as ideas and as realities ; the appearance of full-formed nationalities and languages ; the enfeeblement of the feudal system throughout Europe ; the invention and application of paper, the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean ; and the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. Europe in fact had been prepared for a thorough-going metamorphosis before that new ideal of human life and culture which the Revival of Learning brought to light had been mado