CONSTANT DE REBECQUE, Henri Benjamin, an eminent French statesman and publicist, was born at Lausanne, 25th October 1757, and died at Paris 10th December 1830. His family was French, and had taken refuge in Switzerland during the religious persecutions. Till the age of thirteen he lived in his father’s house at Lausanne; he afterwards studied at Oxford, Erlangen, and Edinburgh successively. It was in these foreign studies that he made a beginning in the cosmopolitan culture which afterwards characterized him; in England especially he learned to admire constitutional government, and made the acquaintance of such men as Erskine and Mackintosh. Shortly before the Revolution he went to Paris, and became acquainted with some of the leading liberal spirits of that city, where, after further travels, he finally settled in 1795. He attached himself to the moderate republican party, and supported it through many changes of fortune, both in the Assemblies and by writing, under the Directory and the Consulate, till 1802, when he was expelled from the Tribunate by Napoleon. The circle to which he belonged again provoked the anger of the First Consul by its private opposition to the Government, whereupon Constant, with his celebrated friend Madame de Staël, found it advi⅛ able to retire from France. Thus arrested in his political career he turned to literature, and proceeded to Weimar, where he enjoyed the acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller, translated Wallenstein, and wrote the romance of Adolphe. He did not return to France till the overthrow of Napoleon in 1814. Attracted by the prospect of the restoration of constitutional government he supported the Bourbons; and, apparently for a similar reason, he adhered to Napoleon during the Hundred Days. After the violence of the ...