(Title: History of the Constituent Assembly. Translated fr...)
Title: History of the Constituent Assembly. Translated from the French. Publisher: British Library, Historical Print Editions The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. The HISTORICAL WORKS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. This collection contains works in both French and English highlighting the history of the Girondists and the Jacobins, the storming of the Bastille, the Napoleonic Wars, restorations of the monarchy, the spread of secularism, and the role of women. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de.; 1858. 4 vol. ; 8º. 9220.b.20.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1241511543/?tag=2022091-20
(Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)
Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past and can't be restored." Well, over recent years, The British Library, working with Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious programme to digitise its collection of 19th century books. There are now 65,000 titles available (that's an incredible 25 million pages) of material ranging from works by famous names such as Dickens, Trollope and Hardy as well as many forgotten literary gems , all of which can now be printed on demand and purchased right here on Amazon. Further information on The British Library and its digitisation programme can be found on The British Library website.
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( Title: Graziella: translated from the French of Lamarti...)
Title: Graziella: translated from the French of Lamartine by Bertha Norwood. Publisher: British Library, Historical Print Editions The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. It is one of the world's largest research libraries holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats: books, journals, newspapers, sound recordings, patents, maps, stamps, prints and much more. Its collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial additional collections of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 300 BC. The NOVELS OF THE 18th & 19th CENTURIES collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection includes major and minor works from a period which saw the development and triumph of the English novel. These classics were written for a range of audiences and will engage any reading enthusiast. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ British Library Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de; Norwood, Bertha; 1876. 177 p. ; 8º. 12638.c.8.
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Alphonse de Lamartine was born on Oct. 21, 1790, in Mâcon, France. He spent his childhood in the country at Milly, where the Abbé Dumont was his tutor.
Both Milly and the abbé would be idealized in his poetry.
His father was imprisoned during the Terror, and only released owing to the events of the 9th Thermidor.
Lamartine's early education was received from his mother.
He was sent to school at Lyons in 1805, but not being happy there was transferred to the care of the Peres de la Foi at Belley, a Jesuit school for a traditional, pious education, where he remained until 1809. In the same year he was elected to the Academy. His family having been steady royalists, he entered the Gardes du corps at the return of the Bourbons, and during the Hundred Days he sought refuge first in Switzerland and then at Aix-en-Savoie, where he fell in love, with abundant result's of the poetical kind.
The order of his surnames is a controversial matter, and they are sometimes reversed. He was interested in the works of the 18th-century philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Madame de Staël—all of which had been unavailable in his school.
He also started to write verse and plays and even thought of writing an epic poem.
During a trip to Italy in 1812 he became infatuated with a Neapolitan woman who was to become Graziella in his Confidences (1849). During the next few years Lamartine led a leisurely life first at Milly, then in Italy, and eventually in Paris. After Waterloo he returned to Paris.
In 1816 during a trip to Aix-les-Bains, where he had gone for treatment of a nervous ailment, Lamartine fell deeply in love with Julie Charles.
They were to meet again at Lake Bourget a year later, but her respiratory disease was more serious than his illness, and she was unable to leave Paris, where she died a few months later.
In 1818-1819 he revisited Switzerland, Savoy and Italy, the death of his beloved affording him new subjects for verse. Profoundly moved by this relationship, Lamartine wrote some of his best lyrical poetry and in 1820 published a collection of 24 poems entitled Méditations.
The anthology was an immediate success.
This collection is generally considered the first romantic poetic work in French.
He continued to publish various poems: a second collection of Méditationsin 1823; Le Dernier chant du pélerinage d'Harold (The Last Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage), in homage to Byron, in 1825; and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses in 1830.
In 1824 he was transferred to Florence, where he remained five years.
His Last Canto of Childe Harold appeared in 1825, and he had to fight a duel (in which he was wounded) with an Italian officer, Colonel Pepe, in consequence of a phrase in it.
The Harmonies poetiques et religieuses appeared in 1829, when he had left Florence.
Having refused an appointment in Paris under the Polignac ministry, he went on a special mission to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. Still the idea of creating a great epic haunted him.
His daughter Julia died at Beirut, and before long he received the news of his election by a constituency (Bergues) in the department of the Nord in 1833.
Thereafter he spoke constantly, and acquired considerable reputation as an orator, bringing out, moreover, many books in prose and verse.
His Eastern travels (Voyage en Orient) appeared in 1835, his Chute d'un ange and Jocelyn in 1837, and his Recueillements, the last remarkable volume of his poetry, in 1839.
He set about his greatest prose work, the Histoire des Girondists, which at first appeared periodically, and was published as a whole in 1847.
He was elected for the new constituent assembly in ten different departments, and was chosen one of the five members of the Executive Committee.
His inexperience in the routine work of government, the utterly unpractical nature of his colleagues, and the turbulence of the Parisian mob, proved fatal to his chances.
He gave some proofs of statesmanlike ability, and his eloquence was repeatedly called into requisition to pacify the Parisians.
So long as he held aloof from Ledru-Rollin and the more radical of his colleagues, the disunion resulting weakened the government; as soon as he effected an approximation to them the middle classes fell off from him.
The quelling of the insurrection of the 15th of May was his last successful act.
A month later the renewal of active disturbances brought on the fighting of June, and Lamartine's influence was extinguished in favour of Cavaignac.
He had been tried and found wanting, having neither the virtues nor the vices of his situation.
He brought out in the Presse (1849) a series of Confidences, and somewhat later a kind of autobiography, entitled Raphael.
In 1858 a subscription was opened for his benefit.
Two years afterwards, following the example of Chateaubriand, he supervised an elaborate edition of his own works in forty-one volumes.
His efforts had not succeeded in placing him in a position of independence; and at last, in 1867, the government of the Empire (from which he had perforce stood aloof, though he never considered it necessary to adopt the active protesting attitude of Edgar Quinet and Victor Hugo) came to his assistance, a vote of £20, 000 being proposed in April of that year for his benefit by Emile Ollivier.
But he was reproached for accepting it by the extreme republicans and irreconcilables.
He did not enjoy it long, dying on the 28th of February 1869.
But Lamartine could hardly have guided the ship of state safely even in much calmer weather.
Nor does it appear that he had any settled political ideas.
Lamartine had the advantage of coming at a time when the literary field, at least in the departments of belles lettres, was almost empty.
Madame de Stael was dead; Chateaubriand, though alive, was something of a classic, and had not effected a full revolution.
Lamartine did not himself go the complete length of the Romantic revival, but he went far in that direction.
He availed himself of the reviving interest in legitimism and Catholicism which was represented by Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, of the nature worship of Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint Pierre, of the sentimentalism of Madame de Stael, of the medievalism and the romance of Chateaubriand and Scott, of the maladie du siecle of Chateaubriand and Byron.
Perhaps if his matter be very closely analysed it will be found that he added hardly anything of his own.
But if the parts of the mixture were like other things the mixture itself was not.
They appeared when Lamartine was nearly thirty years old.
The verse is exquisitely harmonious, the sentiments conventional but refined and delicate, the imagery well chosen and gracefully expressed.
There is an unquestionable want of vigour, but to readers of that day the want of vigour was entirely compensated by the presence of freshness and grace.
Lamartine's chief misfortune in poetry was not only that his note was a somewhat weak one, but that he could strike but one.
The four volumes of the Meditations, the Harmonies and the Recueillements, which contained the prime of his verse, are perhaps the most monotonous reading to be found anywhere in work of equal bulk by a poet of equal talent.
They contain nothing but meditative lyrical pieces, almost any one of which is typical of the whole, though there is considerable variation of merit.
The two narrative poems which succeeded the early lyrics, Jocelyn and the Chute d'un ange, were, according to Lamartine's original plan, parts of a vast " Epic of the Ages, " some further fragments of which survive.
Jocelyn had at one time more popularity in England than most French verse.
La Chute d'un ange, in which the Byronic influence is more obvious than in any other of Lamartine's works, and in which some have also seen that of Alfred de Vigny, is more ambitious in theme, and less regulated by scrupulous conditions of delicacy in handling, than most of its author's poetry.
He is always and everywhere sentimental, though very frequently, as in his shorter prose tales (The Stone Mason of Saint-Point, Graziella, &c. ), he is graceful as well as sentimental.
In his histories the effect is worse.
It has been hinted that Lamartine's personal narratives are doubtfully trustworthy; with regard to his Eastern travels some of the episodes were stigmatized as mere inventions.
As an historian he belongs exclusively to the rhetorical school as distinguished from the philosophical on the one hand and the documentary on the other. It is not surprising when these characteristics of Lamartine's work are appreciated to find that his fame declined with singular rapidity in France.
As a poet he had lost his reputation many years before he died.
He could only carry the picturesque sentimentalism of Rousseau, Bernardin de Saint Pierre and Chateaubriand a little farther, and clothe it in language and verse a little less antiquated than that of Ch6nedolle and Millevoye.
He has been said to be a French Cowper, and the parallel holds good in respect of versification and of his relative position to the more daringly innovating school that followed, though not in respect of individual peculiarities.
Lamartine in short occupied a kind of half-way house between the 18th century and the Romantic movement, and he never got any farther.
The usual revolution of critical as of other taste, the oblivion of personal and political unpopularity, and above all the reaction against Hugo and the extreme Romantics, have been the main agents in this.
These oscillations of opinion are frequent, if not universal, and it is only after more than one or two swings that the pendulum remains at the perpendicular.
The above remarks are an attempt to correct extravagance in either direction.
But it is difficult to believe that Lamartine can ever permanently take rank among the first order of poets. The edition mentioned is the most complete one of Lamartine, but there are many issues of his separate works.
(Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)
( Title: Graziella: translated from the French of Lamarti...)
(Title: History of the Constituent Assembly. Translated fr...)
The priest is more a Voltairean rationalist than an orthodox Catholic; his innate goodness and sacrifice help him fulfill his spiritual destiny.
His liberalism was founded on a belief in property as a cornerstone of stability and legitimacy. He evolved slowly from the conservative, monarchist sympathies of his aristocratic background toward an increasingly vocal republicanism.
His Ode sur les révolutionspresents an image of the unceasing movement and progress of an ever-changing society and illustrates the role of the poet as interpreter and guide for history and society.
The personalism of the themes and his direct lyricism were new to French verse.
He was described as a tall young man with an intense, proud expression.
He was amiable and even estimable, the chief fault of his character being vanity and an incurable tendency towards theatrical effect, which makes his travels, memoirs and other personal records as well as his historical works radically untrustworthy.
Lamartine has been extolled as a pattern of combined passion and restraint, as a model of nobility of sentiment, and as a harmonizer of pure French classicism in taste and expression with much, if not all, the better part of Romanticism itself.
He had five younger sisters who later married but became dependent on his support.
The success, financial as well as literary, of the Méditations and an appointment to the embassy at Naples allowed Lamartine to marry Mary-Ann Birch, an English-woman, in June 1820.
A son was born but died in infancy, and in 1822 a daughter, Julia, was born. In 1832 he set out with his wife and daughter for Palestine, having been unsuccessful in his candidature for a seat in the chamber. In 1832 he undertook a trip to the Holy Land with his wife and daughter.
Julia died tragically during the course of the trip, and the despair caused by her death found expression in Géthsémani (1834).
His wife died in 1863 after a long and painful illness.
On his way to his post he married, in 1823, at Geneva a young English lady, Marianne Birch, who had both money and beauty, and in the same year his Nouvelles meditations poetiques appeared.
His wife and his niece Valentine de Cessiat were his only consolation.
