[Illustration: _Drawn by L. Nagel Engraved by J. Sartain_ Lamartine Engraved Expressly for Graham's Magazine]
MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE.
Alphonse de Lamartine, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of France, was born in 1792, at Saint Pont, near Mâcon, in the Department of the Saone and Loire. His true family name is De Prat; but he took the name of De Lamartine from his uncle, whose fortune he inherited in 1820. His father and uncle were both royalists, and suffered severely from the Jacobins during the revolution. Had they lived in Paris their heads might have fallen from the block, but even in the province they did not escape persecution--a circumstance which, from the earliest youth of Lamartine, made a deep and indelible impression on his mind. His early education he received at the College of Belley, from which he returned in 1809, at the age of 18 years.
The splendor of the empire under Napoleon had no attractions for him. Though, at that period, Napoleon was extremely desirous to reconcile some of the old noble families, and for that purpose employed confidential ladies and gentlemen to correspond with the exiles and to represent to them the nobility of sentiment, and the magnanimity of the emperor; Lamartine refused to enter the service of his country under the new _régime_. So far from taking an interest in the great events of that period, he devoted himself entirely to literary studies, and improved his time by perambulating Italy. The fall of Napoleon did not affect him, for he was no friend of the first revolution, (whose last representative Napoleon still continued to be, though he had tamed it;) and when, in 1814, the elder line of Bourbons was restored, Lamartine returned from Naples, and entered, the service of Louis XVIII., as an officer of the _garde-du-corps_. With the return of Napoleon from Elba he left the military service forever.
A contemporary of Chateaubriand, Delavigne and Beranger, he now devoted himself to that species of lyric and romantic poetry which at first exasperated the French critics, but, in a very short time, won for him the European appellation of "the French Schiller." His first poems, "Méditations Poétiques," which appeared in Paris in 1820, were received with ten times the bitter criticism that was poured out on Byron by the Scotch reviewers, but with a similar result; in less than two months a second edition was called for and published. The spirit of these poems is that of a deep but undefined religion, presentiments and fantastic dreams of another world, and the consecration of a noble and disinterested passion for the beau ideal of his youth, "Elvire," separated from him forever by the chilly hand of death. In the same year Lamartine became Secretary of the French Legation at Naples, and in 1822, Secretary of the Legation in London--Chateaubriand being at the time minister plenipotentiary.