‘As for Ossian,’ he answered, ’he does not seem to have been ever popular in England.  But the frequent reference to the “Night Thoughts,” in the books and letters of the last century, shows that the poem was then in everybody’s memory.  Foreigners are in fact provincials.  They take up fashions of literature as country people do fashions of dress, when the capital has left them off.  When I was young you probably had ceased to be familiar with Richardson.  We knew him by heart.  We used to weep over the Lady Clementina, whom I dare say Miss Senior never heard of.

’During the first Empire, we of the old regime abandoned Paris, as we do now, and for the same reasons.  We used to live in our chateaux, where I remember as a boy hearing Sir Charles Grandison and Fielding read aloud.  A new novel was then an event.  Madame Cottin was much more celebrated than George Sand is now.  For all her books were read, and by everybody.  Notwithstanding the great merits of George Sand’s style, her plots and her characters are so exaggerated and so unnatural, and her morality is so perverted, that we have ceased to read her.’

We talked of Montalembert, and I mentioned his sortie the other day against the clergy.

‘I can guess pretty well,’ said Tocqueville, ’what he said to you, for it probably was a resume of his article in the “Correspondant.”  Like most men accustomed to public speaking, he repeats himself.  He is as honest perhaps as a man who is very passionne can be; but his oscillations are from one extreme to another.  Immediately after the coup d’etat, when he believed Louis Napoleon to be Ultramontane, he was as servile as his great enemy the “Univers” is now.  “Ce sont les nuances qui se querellent, non les couleurs;” and between him and the “Univers” there is only a nuance.  The Bishop of Agen has oscillated like him, but began at the other end.  The other day the Bishop made a most servile address to the Emperor.  He had formerly been a furious anti-Bonapartist.  “How is it possible,” said Montalembert, “that a man can rush so completely from one opinion to another?  On the 4th of December in 1851 this same Bishop denounced the coup d’etat with such violence that the President sent me to the Nuncio to request his interference.  Now he is on his knees before him.  Such changes can scarcely be honest.”  Montalembert does not see that the only difference between them is that they have trod in opposite directions the very same path.’

Thursday, May 5.—­Tocqueville and I dined with M. and Madame de Bourke, and met there General Dumas and Ary Scheffer.

We talked of Delaroche’s pictures, and Scheffer agreed with me in preferring the smaller ones.  He thought that Delaroche improved up to the time of his death, and preferred his Moses, and Drowned Martyr, painted in 1853 and 1855, to the other large ones, and his Girondins, finished in 1856, to the earlier small ones.