LIFE OF VOLNEY.

By Count Daru.

Constantine Francis Chassebeuf De Volney was born in 1757 at Craon, in that intermediate condition of life, which is of all the happiest, since it is deprived only of fortune’s too dangerous favors, and can aspire to the social and intellectual advantages reserved for a laudable ambition.

From his earliest youth, he devoted himself to the search after truth, without being disheartened by the serious studies which alone can initiate us into her secrets.  After having become acquainted with the ancient languages, the natural sciences and history, and being admitted into the society of the most eminent literary characters, he submitted, at the age of twenty, to an illustrious academy, the solution of one of the most difficult problems that the history of antiquity has left open for discussion.  This attempt received no encouragement from the learned men who were appointed his judges; and the author’s only appeal from their sentence was to his courage and his efforts.

Soon after, a small inheritance having fallen to his lot, the difficulty was how to spend it (these are his own words.) He resolved to employ it in acquiring, by a long voyage, a new fund of information, and determined to visit Egypt and Syria.  But these countries could not be explored to advantage without a knowledge of the language.  Our young traveller was not to be discouraged by this difficulty.  Instead of learning Arabic in Europe, he withdrew to a convent of Copts, until he had made himself master of an idiom that is spoken by so many nations of the East.  This resolution showed one of those undaunted spirits that remain unshaken amid the trials of life.

Although, like other travellers, he might have amused us with an account of his hardships and the perils surmounted by his courage, he overcame the temptation of interrupting his narrative by personal adventures.  He disdained the beaten track.  He does not tell us the road he took, the accidents he met with, or the impressions he received.  He carefully avoids appearing upon the stage; he is an inhabitant of the country, who has long and well observed it, and who describes its physical, political, and moral state.  The allusion would be entire if an old Arab could be supposed to possess all the erudition, all the European philosophy, which are found united and in their maturity in a traveller of twenty-five.

But though a master in all those artifices by which a narration is rendered interesting, the young man is not to be discerned in the pomp of labored descriptions.  Although possessed of a lively and brilliant imagination, he is never found unwarily explaining by conjectural systems the physical or moral phenomena he describes.  In his observations he unites prudence with science.  With these two guides he judges with circumspection, and sometimes confesses himself unable to account for the effects he has made known to us.