Excerpt from Essays, Vol. 3: Political, Historical, and Miscellaneous Chateaubriand is universally allowed by the French, of all parties, to be their first writer. His merits, however, are but little understood in this country. He is known as once a minister of Louis XVIII, and ambassador of that monarch in London; as the writer of many celebrated political pamphlets and the victim, since the Revolution of 1 830, of his noble and ill-requited devotion to the unfortunate family. Few are aware that he is, without one single exception, the most eloquent writer of the present age that, independent of politics, he has produced many works on morals, religion, and history, destined for lasting endurance; that his writings combine the strongest love of rational freedom with the warmest inspiration of Christian devotion that he is, as it were, the link between the feudal and the revolutionary ages - retaining from the former its generous and elevated feeling, and inhaling from the latter its acute and fearless investigation. The last pilgrim, with devout feelings, to the Holy Sepulchre, he was the first supporter of constitutional freedom in France discarding thus from former times their bigoted fury, and from modern, their infidel spirit blending all that was noble in the ardour of the Crusades, with all that is generous in the enthusiasm of freedom. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.