HISTORIC FANCIES. BY THE HOtf, GEORGE SYDNEY SMYTHE, M,P, ' Young reader, for most surely to the old These loo.se uneven thinking's will but seem Unreal, and unlil'e-like as a dream, O judge not thou that I hav been too bold." FABBR. SECOND EDITION. ILontion : HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 1844. WALTER SPIERS, PRINTER, 1?, NORTH AUDLEY STREET, LONDON. TO THE LORD JOHN MANNERS, M.P., WHOSE GENTLE BLOOD IS ONLY AN ILLUSTRATION OF HIS GENTLER CONDUCT, AND WHOSE WHOLE LIFE MAY WELL REMIND US THAT THE ONLY CHILD OF PHILIP SYDNEY BECAME A MANNERS, BECAUSE HE IS HIMSELF, AS TRUE AND BLAMELESS, THE PHILIP SYDNEY OF OUR GENERATION. 815266 PREFACE. IT is not without much misgiving and mistrust that I commit these fragments to the public. They are most of them the compositions of a very young author; written at different periods during the last few years, " Blending Poorly yet truly, strivings gained or lost, As one in whom two natures keep contending, Neither of which has yet come uppermost." They are, therefore, I fear, full of incoherencies of ex- pression, and inconsistencies of sentiment. But they are not without something of unity in their system nor a sustained purpose in their design. PREFACE. It is thus, not without an object, that I have referred so frequently to France. For in treating of many parties and opinions, I have here been able to speak without prejudice or favour. I could here admire the genius of great men, without being called upon to share in their feuds and passions. I could here confess, without a fear of misinterpretation, that I see the grandeurs of conflicting principles, that I am moved by the glorious recollections, now of the Old Monarchy, now of the Re- public, now of the Empire. I have pitied the fallen fortunes of the Duke de Bordeaux. I have regretted the death of the Duke of Orleans. I have mourned over the grave of Armand Carrel. But it was not only out of a desire to learn arid speak the truth of all parties. It was natural to me, attempting to suggest modern historical reflections, to turn to that great people, whose recent history is a mighty panorama; where the colour- ing is more brilliant, the groups more striking, the tints more varied, the contrasts more abrupt, where the lightis softer, the shade more dark ? than in any other which I know. It is here that we have seen the most perfect PREFACE. Ill theory of Absolutism. It is here that we have looked upon the most perfect theory of a Republic. It is here that the Great Compromise between the two will be the most broadly tried, most severely tested, most earnestly discussed. It is also not without a hope that, in drawing my common and most familiar illustrations from France, I may do something, however trivial, and however humbly, to promote a kindlier acquaintance, a softer spirit, a gentler feeling between "The two fair sisters of civility." I have now only to apologize for the many imper- fections of this book. One thing only I am certain of, that I am not dishonest with myself; that it contains nothing which, in the lighter pieces, does not represent a real feeling nothing which, in those of a less trifling nature, does not at least essay to teach some lesson of mutual forbearance. Even in the worst of men, I Lave not forgotten that there is more to love than to hate. B2 IV PREFACE. But, while I have been obliged, especially in the ballads, to adopt extreme opinions, I need scarcely say that they are not always my own. Nor, on the other hand, in borrowing the names of Great men, am I presumptuous enough to suppose that I am writing as they would have done. It is rather a sense of im- perfection a consciousness that, without the idea which their memories suggest, I should be unable to carry out some thought which in me is only a feeble tendency, but in their lives has been fulfilled. It is the same feeling which will induce a young member to cheer a senti- ment which he believes, and calls his own, although he feels, as it becomes developed by an orator, that it extends farther, and rises higher than his own capacity can reach. CONTENTS, Page The Aristocracy of France . . 7 Venus and Adonis ... 39 Dialogue between a Protestant Missionary and a Priest of Buddh . . .44 The Tuileries .... 60 Mary Stuart her last Prayer . . .56 Charles Stuart Conishead Priory . . 59 The Catholic Cavalier 1641 . . .60 Louis XIV. and Charles II. . . 67 La Rochefoucauld . . . .70 Sonnet . . 71 Sonnet . . . . .72 Sonnet. .... 73 Newmarket . . . .75 The Touching for the Evil . . 88 King James the Second . . .93 Sonnet ...... 102 Versailles . . . .103 The Earl's Rising 1715 . . .106 A Cabinet Dinner in the Last Century . 112 An Opposition Scene in the Last Century . .118 Sonnet . . . .145 Grassmere . . . .146 Klrunore .... 147 VI CONTENTS. Pas* Cambridge 1837 . . .151 Eskdale . . 152 Ambleside Church . 155 Richelieu .... 158 The Question . . . .164 The Serenade .... 166 The Loyalist of the Vendee . . . 172 Notes to the Loyalist of the Vendee . . 177 The Jacobin of Paris . . .182 Barnave .... 189 Mirabeau ..... 191 Dumouriez .... 217 Hoche . . . . .232 Marat . . 245 Hebert . . . . .249 Brissot .... 255 Barbaroux .... 260 Tallien . . . .262 Louvet ..... 267 Couthon .... 278 St. Just . . . . .281 Robespierre . . . .303 New Athens . . . .353 Fifteen and Twenty-five . . . 356 Dialogue between an English Radical M.P. and a French Radical Deputy . . . 359 Armand Carrel . . . 367 On the Death of the Duke of Orleans, July 13, 1841 372 Toleration .... 376 The Merchants of Old England . . 381 THE AKISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. THE aristocracy of France is the most illustrious that the world ever saw. There may be more ancient titles in Scotland or in Germany, more arrogance of descent in Italy or Spain, more gentle blood in our own old manor houses of Northumberland or Lancashire ; but no aristocracy can compete with hers in sustained and European illustration. The very vice of the system was the cause and continuation of its brilliancy. The noble- man of the ancient regime was born to the high places of the army and the state, as with us he is born to his hereditary possessions. The baton of a Marshal, the seals of a minister, the government of a Province, devolved almost as surely as the heraldic quarterings upon a shield, or the seigneurial rights of an estate. The doctrine of "the aristocratic succession" was upheld with a religious pomp, and a more than religious intole- rance. It was not so much an order as a hierarchy. It C a c^ M i **! 8 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. was a hierarchy based upon exclusion, and rule,and form, and caste. It had its army, its navy, its law, its church, and its finance, all patrimonies rather than profes- sions. If the Duke of Marlborough had been born a Frenchman, there would have been a succession of Dukes of Marlborough, Marshals of France. If Lord Somers had been first President of the Parliaments, there would have been a long line of Somers's upon the Bench. The history of old France is the biography of fifty families; it is almost written in the proverbs of their ancestral pride in such phrases as, " Le beau sang des Noailles, or " L'esprit des Mortemart." It was this serial and continuous celebrity which made the great names of France as familiar in every other country as their own. The foreigner who heard of the Montmorencis, Rohans, Mostesquious, La Tre- mouilles, his great contemporaries, had heard his father and his grandfather repeat the same names, as belong- ing to the great Frenchmen of his day. They became the household words of every household on the Con- tinent. France sowed them broadcast, as she stretched out her hand over Europe. The German peasant who fled before the armies of the Marechal de Richelieu, would remember the traditions he had heard in his childhood, of the great Cardinal, who had been so THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. faithful an ally of Gustavus, and so bitter an enemy of Tilly. The young and high-born Chanoinesse, who at the close of the last century prayed night after night for the deliverance of her royal country-women would recall to mind that all her hopes depended upon a descendant and namesake of Condes. She would mingle her interest in the Lafayettes, and La Roche- foucaulds the actors of the wild drama then perform- ing, with her reminiscences of far other Lafayettes and La Rochefoucaulds, the real heroes of some Scuderi romance. It is curious to see into what minute and small par- ticulars the hereditary principle entered and obtained. The most magnificent among the courtiers and states- men of Louis XIV. was Fouquet. The sumptuousness of one of his fetes, the splendours of his Praslin, provok- ed the jealousy of the king, and were the cause of his dis- grace. Who was the most extravagant of the courtier- statesmen of the next age ? It is one of the same family, restored to favour, the Marechal de Belleisle, " with three hundred saddle horses always in his stable." But the links in the long chain of patrician renown are often of a nobler and more sterling metal. The same civil courage which was conspicuous in the high seats of justice, to enhance the legal abilities of a Pas- 10 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. (juier, now almost three centuries ago, still graces arid adorns the same name. The Bourbon Minister of Jus- tice, who, under the Restoration, was so determined an enemy of the Jesuits, inherited that hatred from his ancestor. The friend of Louis Philippe, the Chancellor of his disturbed and stormy reign, is no unworthy descendant of that Etienne Pasquier, the Minister and Counsel of Henry IV., who did so much to attemper his " regni novitas," and consolidate his rule. It is pleasing also to trace the great legal House of La- moignon, from its founder in 1514, through nine suc- cessive Presidents, Presidents a mortier, and Magis- trates, down to that good Lamoignon-Malesherbes, the heroic defender of Louis XVI. It is with a similar feeling that we regard the rival glories of the Moles, who could boast two first presidents, and two Presidents a mortier, and whose present representative (the son, too, of a daughter of the Lamoignons), has brought into the public service, those same fearless virtues, which made De Retz declare, " that if it were not blasphemy to say so, he should pronounce the Chancellor (Mole) a man as dauntless as Gustavus or the Prince." Such were among the fairest examples which the hereditary system could afford. It is strange that there should have been as manv as there were. But, with THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 1 1 an excitable and restless nation like the French, pros- perity did not induce an unambitious inertness. Idle- ness was not the condition of a title, a luxurious ease not the privilege of rank. The nobleman who claimed the immunities, claimed also the labours of the state. Its great offices and functions were only for the few, but they were never performed with more of personal activity than by grandees like the Le Telliers,and the Choiseuls. the young patrician who was so insolent to the pekins of the bourgeoisie, would allow no one else to fight for them but himself. It would be unfair to try him by our stricter standards of obligation and morality. There was a wild patriotism at the bottom of all his reckless- ness and bravado. He did his duty to his country, but he would do it in his own way. He did not con- quer the less because he hummed the gayest air of the last opera, or smoothed a perfumed ruffle amidst the roar and danger of the battle. It must also in fairness be acknowledged in favour of the French aristocracy, that it would have been impos- sible in any other country to have ensured, out of so small a field, so limited a choice, such great and dazzling services. The old idea of honour supplied the want of a larger and public competition. But it would be wrong not to point out the natural conse- 12 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. quences of this exclusive and formulary narrowness of system ; the inveterate ingratitude, the consummate perfidy, " the vicious perfection" of sectarian selfishness, which were its results. It was a sense of this truth which accounts for Louis XVIII's almost invincible reluctance to consent to an hereditary chamber. A slight glance at history will confirm the wisdom of his opinion. It was an august and magnificent creation, the sovereignty of France, at the close of the seventeenth century ; but it is with empires as with palaces. We think too much of the proprietor, and too little of the architect. When Louis XIV. exclaimed, " L'Etat c'est moi," we admire the great King, but forget the greater Cardinal, who enabled him to say it. We wonder at the majestic structure of the edifice, but we forget the materials of which it was composed. Let me pause for a moment, to take them to pieces, and examine them. When Richelieu ordered the Constable de Mont- morenci, notwithstanding his name and achievements, to be beheaded, whende Bassompierre the companion- in-arms of Henry IV., was dragged by his commands to the Bastille, he was influenced by no capricious or unnecessary cruelty. He was carrying out, by deter- THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 13 mined means, a determined end. Upon his attaining the ministry, he found the king only the first of his nobles. He resolved to make him something more. He undertook to concentrate all the power which he saw dissipated among many great Feudatories and Lords. His first care was destruction, his second centralization. His first object was to break the cisterns into which the waters had been gathered ; his second, to direct and receive them in one fountain head. His design was eminently successful in its two-fold scope. Enactments, the most severe, Confiscations the most sweeping, were levelled at the chiefs of the Aristocracy. At the same time, a legislation more subtle, and more fatal, invaded its spirit. He punished duellists with death. He encouraged marriages be- tween the higher and middle classes. His sister married a lute-player, his niece a prince of the blood. He filled the great offices of state with men of the people and adventurers. His policy was to confound and equalise, all classes below the king. But not satisfied to dedicate his own life to this object, he devolved his power upon a successor whom he himself had formed, who was instigated by the same motives, and who, sprung like himself from the democracy, inherited, with instinctive zeal, his hatred, and his views 14 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. of Aristocracy. But the character of Mazarin was less firm than that of Richelieu ; it inspired the great lords with hope, he sought to govern by dividing, rather than by crushing them. The Rebellion of the Fronde broke out. It was the last effort of Feudalism to rise up against the far-sighted Oppression which was destroying it. And, at its close amidst the ruin and exhaustion of so many princely fortunes, the decay and wreck of so many ancient houses, there arose the strongest executive that the world ever knew, the monarchy of Louis XIV. Thus it was in the demoli- tion of an Aristocracy that the foundation of the Monarchy was laid. But the sagacious policy of the two Cardinals was not destined to be continued by the great King whom they had made. He took pains in nothing so much as in rebuilding what they had pulled down, in raising up what they had so skilfully destroyed. The ancient races of France had disappeared. But all that splen- dour and magnificence which had belonged to the Dukes of Burgundy and Guienne, the Counts of Flan- ders and Thoulouse, he delighted to revive for flatter- ers, and mistresses, and valets. What wonder that the " 021! de boeuf" so rung with praises of his sumptuous- ness and generosity, that their echoes have lasted even THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 15 to our own time, and been caught up and repeated by modern historians ! Alas ! it would have been well for his descendants if he had been born the meanest and most parsimonious of his race. The blood of Louis XVI. would never have stained the stones of the Place de la Concorde, nor his daughter been an exile at this moment in that Austria, which was the country of her mother. The fatal system thus blindly founded by Louis XIV. was recklessly adopted by his successors. The Re- gent of that House of Orleans between which and the Middle Class there seems some mysterious tie carried honours and dignities into the very heart of the bourgeoisie, Less generous than his predecessor, he sought not so much to enrich as to ennoble. The Bourse and the Rue Quincampoix were deemed worthy to give their illustration to the Aristocracy. The Par- liamentary families were summoned to participate in his lavish degradation and profuse abasement of re- wards. But the reign of Louis XV. was to bear the palm from both these different excesses of abuse. He gave orders upon the Treasury to as many courtezans as Louis XIV. He gave patents of nobility to as many roturiers as the Regent. It is in his time that we read of plebian mistresses whom empresses were 16 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE, constrained to address as " cousins;" and of a Due de Richelieu whose expenses for three months amounted to 80,000. It is clear to the most superficial observer, who looks back, at this distance of time, upon scenes of such ex- travagance, that no country could long support two such burdens as an absolute and profligate king, and an insolent and tyrannical aristocracy. Rut it is not so clear to simple and upright minds, that the first ought to fall by means of the last, the benefactor through the intervention of the benefited. It is difficult for them to believe that a king can oppress his people, but not caress his nobles, with impunity. Yet such was the melancholy truth. It was not the poor and persecuted who were the instigators and leaders of the Great Re- volution. That Clermont-Tonnerre who is inveighing with such eloquent indignation against class-legislation, and the separation of the three orders, who is thus urging and hastening on the first Act of the Revolu- tion, who is among the most successful antagonists of the Court, was descended from a country lawyer, whom the beneficence of the monarchs had raised to that in- fluence which he thus perverts to their ruin and de- struction. That de Laincourt, the trusted and familiar friend of Louis XVI., whose house had received so THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 17 many and such signal tokens of the royal bounty Re- giments, two Dukedoms, a Marshal's staff, who owed all his wealth and position, all his rank and possessions to the Crown, was not ashamed, after the taking of the Bastille, to become the second President of the Consti- tuent Assembly. That de Noailles, whose name de- rives all its renown from royal favour and condescen- sion, to whose race had been given so many princely graces, batons, mitres, ribands, by the Baurbons, insulted their descendant by receiving him, on his forced return from Varennes, at the Tuileries. But why eliminate names from the list, when the whole catalogue is so black with treachery ? Why dwell upon a stray passage, when the whole story of aristocratic ingratitude is so notorious ? Who does not remember that it was the violence of the patrician D'Espremenil which provoked the fatal convocation of the States General? Who has forgotten the tale of those two young nobles, the Lameths, how, poor and necessitous, their education was defrayed by the gene- rosity of Marie Antoinette, and how they repaid their benefactress, by harangues at the Feuillants ? Who has forgotten that the first to desert their king, to emi- grate, were the nobility ? Who has not heard of a Count of Mirabean, and a Marquis of Lafayette ? 18 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. But that more detestable policy has never been suffici- ently branded, which, in its refinement of selfishness, animated the aristocracy to second the worst efforts of the populace, to push them to extremes, to goad them to excess, careless of any outrage to their king, reckless of any danger to his person, in the hope that, out of an exaggerated anarchy, they might the sooner recover their grandeurs and possessions. The whole history of the Revolution, from its alpha to its omega, from its first thought to its last deed, from Voltaire to Talley- rand, is written in the perfidy of nobles. Remember the Prophet and Precursor of that Great Reformation. Recall his person so softly apparelled, his residence so delicately furnished. See him in his study ! It is hung with the portraits and needle-work of sovereigns. His portfolio is full of their correspondence. He is proud of nothing so much as of being a Gentleman of the Chamber. He delights to compare Louis XV. to Trajan. He will not bow to God, but he cringes to Madame Pompadour. He receives a pension through her influence. He is enabled by her bounty to display the ostentation he delights in. He drives out every day in a gilt coach, with four horses. He insists upon the inhabitants of Ferney calling him " Monseigneur." He despises and tramples on " the canaille." The THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCR. 19 main offence of Christianity, in his eyes, is, that it is a religion of the people ; the chief fault of the apostles that they were not gentlemen. Yet this luxurious lord, who sapped all the authority that was above, and all the faith that was beneath him, could write about the tyranny of monarchs, and the evils of their sway ! Such was treachery in theory. Another aristocrat it was, who raised its practice into a science, and realized a standard of falsehood which the Borgias were une- qual to attain. That de Talleyrand, of whom it has been said that he regarded speech only as a means to conceal the thought, oaths only as stepping stones to personal advancement, whose eulogy has been writ- ten, that he elevated " silence into eloquence, talent into genius, experience into divination ;" who exercised these rare gifts to undo every authority and betray every power which employed him, was as fine a gentle- man as Voltaire. He, too, was the idol of a drawing- room. His epigrams would have been caviare to the multitude ; but they were aptly seasoned to the palate of a worn out and paradoxical society. His wit was never so brilliant as among applauding Duchesses and delighted coxcombs. The monarchy, as a principle, he despised, because he despised its obligations. The peo- ple he hated, because he feared them ; and the last c 2 20 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. years of his life were devoted to defeat and thwart every endeavour to enfranchise or enlighten them. I should, however, be ill understood, if I were thought to censure the particular examples I have cited. It would be absurd to accuse individuals of that for which they can be only mediately to blame. It would be as idle to seek the reason of their conduct in themselves, as to lament over human nature, and mourn that men are men. Why deplore the excesses of an oppressed population ? It is the tendency of misery to brutalize. Why regret the perfidy of nobles? It is the tendency of prosperity to harden. Their education and pursuits alike prepare and exact the condition which is essential to their existence. It is the very nature of an aristocracy to be sycophantic during the stability of monarchy, and perfidious during its decline. Woe to the sovereign who confided in, Woe to the people who submitted to them ! I have thus endeavoured to show, while the French Aristocracy was attired in her robes of state, and decked out with all those golden presents which the Bourbons delighted to lavish on her, that she was unsound, and rotten to the core. Brilliant as was her illustration, I have not been blind to her defects. With reign after reign, which I have t been considering but a succession THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 21 of glory, and renown, and panegyric for the same names, I have not repeated this, without referring to the vice which detracted from them. But the aristo- cracy of France is now presented to our view in a far different attitude and aspect. They have undergone a great and terrible vengeance. They have been doomed to a shameful and bitter penance. Emigration and Death with the Revolution, Exile and Proscription with the Empire, Slight and Disappointment with the Restoration, Disqualification and Disgrace with the July dynasty ! From the moment when their fa- thers rode out of Paris, with the flames still smoulder- ing beneath the ruins of the Bastille, down to this our own time, their career has been one long mortification. The sternest of moralists will admit that the retribution has been more than ample. The severest of republicans might be moved at the recollection of some among its earlier passages. It is little more than half a century ago, when fair ladies and princesses, the most winning in their manner, the most tender in their love and friendship, the most beautiful in grace and form that ever shone through a crowded drawing-room, were dragged by their hair into the street, were flung by one butcher to another with unseemly and ribald jesting, were tossed upwards to the nearest lantern, there to 22 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE'. hang, were mocked and taunted in their dying agonies were mutilated even before life had departed, while pieces of their delicate flesh were displayed as trophies by savages, with wild dancing and ferocious song. Or perhaps a more lingering fate awaited them. There was many a daughter of a patrician race, whose whole life had been one of charity and good, the only changes of which had been from a father's house into a convent, and from a convent to a prison, and whose sole consola- tion there, was laid in the fresh arrivals which informed her that the hour of her death and liberation must be near. Imagine the scenes before her eyes, the prayers and the oaths, the blasphemies and the tears the contrast of vice and virtue. Here the meeting of a father and a son, who had each hoped that the other might survive. There the reproaches, and the curses, of some victim to his Judge of the week before, now become himself a victim. Upon this side, the terrible earnestness of irony, with which men acted their own judgment and execution. Upon that side, the blind- fold game, which was to show who was to be the next to die. And these were the daily spectacles which a young maiden had to look upon, whose only ideas of mankind had been derived from the holy men to whom she had confessed, or the poor whom she had relieved. THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 23 Nor was escape without distresses of another and often sadder nature. The great lady, whose sorrows hitherto had only been imaginary, whose tears had never been shed except over " Manon Lescaut," or " Paul and Virginia," whose only notions of foreign lands had been taken from the theatre, whose idea of rustic hardship was all from a Greuze or a Watteau, was driven to wear coarse disguises, to ride about in carts, to sleep in lofts, in a constant agony of anguish and apprehension. Or if she found safety in Austria or England, new trials were only to begin. The obscure lodging, the unknown language, the ostentatious assistance, the pity of the good-natured vulgar, the courtesy of the supercilious few ; these things were hard to bear, for those who had been of the proudest, and the wealthiest, the most courted, and the most adored ; for those whose least caprice had been the example of European elegance, and whose slightest whisper the canon of universal fashion. Nay, the commonest consolation of a foreigner in a strange land was not allotted to them. They could feel no pleasure in hearing of their country. The post could only bring tidings of the destruction of their paternal halls, the alienation of their old domains, the triumphs of a cause which they loathed, the murders of dear relations, and familiar friends. But those, who 24 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. unlike the chosen sister of Marie Antoinette, could survive these shocks, bore up with unfailing and coura- geous hearts honour to their memory. It was with smiles as bright as had ever been reflected by the gorge- ous mirrors of Versailles, that the highborn beauty would essay to welcome the partner of her former splendours, in the mean and gloomy rooms, which her unforgotten taste could still adorn. And it was with almost the same light- heartedness that he had come home in former days to speak of a successful match, with the weight against him, or a set of tennis won against all odds, that he now told her how one more guinea had been advanced upon his star of the St. Esprit, or one more pupil called on in a fashionable square. These things are melancholy to relate. I have myself heard a Montmorenci describe the horrors of St. James's Street, how he was mobbed for his foreign costume, and laughed at for his foreign ways. But it is still more melancholy to remember, that there were in those days some among us who deemed it a solemn duty to strike the stricken, and trample on the fallen. There were statesmen who did not scruple to tell them, that they were a class set apart as an expiation and a shame. And when year after year of long suffering had waned away, without any sign of hope or alleviation, it was no wonder that THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 25 they were almost tempted to believe them. They began to think that they should never see again the pleasant places of their ancestral France. The doom of St. Peter was upon them. They tried to deny their master and themselves. They sought to hide in foreign service, in the councils of Russia in the armies of England in the colleges of Rome. But the Restoration came at last. And, at first, it seemed as if the old things were to come back in the old ways. A Richelieu more almost of a Russian than a Frenchman, who knew more of Odessa than of Paris, was made Prime Minister, in virtue, it might appear, of his family's prescriptive right to rule beneath the Bourbons. The great charges were restored to their former holders, or to the families in which they had become inherent. A Conde became Grand Master. A Talleyrand Grand Almoner. The Dukes of Gra- mont d'Havrc, and de Luxembourg, the Prince de Poix, returned to their posts, as Captains of the Guard. A de Dreux Breze was again called to fulfil the same functions which had provoked the courtly malice of St. Simon, and which Mirabeau's eloquence has made historical. But these things were but the shadows of the past. They were the living semblance of a dead reality a Mezentian attempt to yoke the departed and 26 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE, the present, the spirit that had gone, and the form that was only permitted to exist. The fifteen years which made the Restoration, were little less trying to the aristocracy, than had been their exile. Their estates were only partially restored. Their titles were usurped. The law of entail was not re-enacted. The old privi- leges were gone. The parliaments had passed away. The seigneurial rights were never named, except for disavowal or abhorrence. Their juster claims were un- heeded by the king. They were adjudicated upon by strange courts, which had grown up beneath a stranger code. But they bore up with fruitless gallantry against the tide. It was all in vain that they were more monarch- ical than the monarch, more Bourbon than the Bour- bons. They opposed the misplaced concessions of Louis XVIII. They had no share in the misplaced resistance of Charles X. For this time the tragedy was to be travestied and reversed. It was not the aristocracy which destroyed the monarchy. It was the monarchy which destroyed the aristocracy. It almost reads like the first two plays of an Athenian trilogy, (the third of which is hereafter to be discovered,) so sustained was the gloomy reciprocity of Fate and Retribution. Another fifteen years have now well nigh passed THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 27 away, and the clouds have not yet become dispersed. But let what may be the vicissitudes of France, (and the wisest among us, are unable to foretell them,) the great names will always re-appear. This is no unreasoning or thoughtless theory. They are entrenched deep in the pride of the nation. Their strongholds are the vanities of the vainest of people. Even the most en- thusiastic of republicans will ostentatiously tell you that, alone of all the ancient monarchies, France is still ruled by an indigenous Sovereign. Even the most fanatical of democrats will boast that alone in poverty and ruin his nobles receive a deference of which aristocracies far more flourishing are ignorant. They can show an illus- tration, which, whether of old time or of new, few other countries can produce. The modern titles of Dalmatia and Montebello, of Moscow and Tarentum, are in glorious harmony with the warlike names of Crillon and de Broglie. The sovereign line of Montinorenci is yet continued in its four ducal branches of Montrnorenci, Luxembourg, Laval, and Beaumont. The princely house of Gramont still recruits the army with youthful soldiers, who burn to emulate the deeds of their ancestor at Fontenoy. The Noailles, Dukes of Noailles, Mou- chy, Ayen, and de Poix, numbering four Marshals of France in three generations, are still extant, to serve 28 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. and do her honour. It is true that amidst troubles and distractions, some high names have passed away. The last of the Brissacs was butchered at Versailles. The imperial race of Lorraine, with all its splendid recollec- tions of the Guises and Mayenne, of Joyeuse and Aumale, is within the last half century extinct. But the streets of Paris still nightly echo to names which stir the heart like a trumpet. Rohan and de Sabran, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Gontaut-Biron, De Beauffre- mont, and de Luynes, de Coigny and de Montesquiou. Nor, what is not without account among a light people, are the materials deficient of a brilliant and fascinating court. The wit, the grace, the beauty for which old France was so famous, are still continued in the great house of de Castellane. The daughters of the Chateaubriands are still as lovely as Franchise de Foix. There are still fair ladies as gently born as any who ever intermarried with the chivalric lineage of La Tremb'ille, to watch over the interests of its youthful offspring. " L'esprit de Mortemart," that which en- hanced the superb charms of de Montespan, has lost nothing of its renown, in the graceful persons of its present representatives. But all these elements of elegance and courtesy, all these means to dazzle and to win, all these appliances of polish and refinement, are THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 29 now neutralized by the alienation of the Faubourg from the Tuileries. There may be in this but little of political prudence. There cannot but be much of self-denial and sincerity. The question which they have to determine is the most difficult which conscience can have to entertain. Let no one blame their decision. It is one which Great Publicists have affirmed with equal confidence on either side; it is one which no casuist has been able to elnci- date, no divine been competent to certify. It is the old doubt between a love of order and a love of opinion ; the old choice between the duty of obedience with peace, or the satisfaction of faith with disturbance. Who shall pronounce a judgment? Who shall weigh the exact amount of truth and error, where there must inevitably be so much of both? Who can presume, in the vanity of his intellect, to blame the alter- native, which the wisdom of all time has still left inde- terminate? Who would not rather learn when the right is thus doubtful and ambiguous a lesson of for- bearance and toleration ? For on the one hand it is a sad thing that men, like M. M. Berryer and de Dreux Breze, whose sympa- thies are necessarily on the side of authority, should be compelled by the falseness of their position to weaken 30 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. and oppose it. Is it not a melancholy thought that genius and eloquence such as theirs should be neutral- ized for effective good, by their romantic allegiance and refined devotion to the past ? How mournful is their political position T Absolutists, they are playing the game of democracy, conservatives they are promoting disturbance, loyalists, they are leading to revolution. Is there right principle in this ? Are not principles ir- respective of man's changes of dynasties and persons of kingdoms and their overthrow ? Upon what ac- cidents they turn ! If the Guises had shown more of determination, the Bourbons might now have been only the first gentlemen of France. But theirs must be an irksome and ungrateful task for temperaments which are alive to all the beauty of order, but which are seeking to mar its fairness, which carry with them convictions which every day they are obliged to belie which feel all the force of that truth which every hour they are obliged to contradict. " Of law there cannot be less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world. All things in heaven and earth should do her homage the very least as feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power." On the other hand, and notwithstanding all this false- THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 31 ness of position, there is no such example in our times of that public virtue, which is so rare among communities, and which may suggest a comparison with Platsean self-devotion, and perhaps for as ungrateful an Athens. Still, it is a touching and heroic spectacle. A race which remains apart, as it were, self-exiled in its own country which prefers the faith of their fathers before all things, which clings to the elder line as to its visible presence, which through penury, and shame, and insult, have never forsaken or abated an opinion. And they have had their reward. They are freed from splendid sins and great temptations. They have no longer a vul- gar or immediate ambition. Their connection with the State for Aristocracy has its own Erastianism to rue is now no more. The golden shackles are removed. They are breathing the free air of their ancestral es- tates. They are mingling with the people. Out of their abasement they have gained new powers. They have found new strength in the soil. They have de- rived new faculties, experiences, influences, require- ments, from their robust and plain-spoken associates. And, if ever they shall again be called to govern, they will not forget the lessons of their allies, nor the sym- pathy which their own long knowledge of calamity must surely have provoked. 32 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. But I am already more than presumptuous in at- tempting to praise or to blame contemporaries. It is not given to a foreigner to discriminate between the nice shades of party difference, or even to adjudge between those nobles who affect the Orleans Tuileries, or those who prefer the workshops of the people.* It is suffi- cient that his own admiration is disinterested and sin- cere. He has ventured to pay to the Aristocracy of France a homage full of regret for the past, full of solicitude for the future. It is offered in their misfor- tune and decline. His praise, however valueless, is not for the powerful ; his song, however humble, not for the prosperous. And, in his augury of a fairer fortune, he hazards no political opinion if he has been unable to separate their destinies from those Elder Bourbons, with whom, all their renown, their virtues, their defects, and it may be their hopes, are connected. * " The Monarchy of the Middle Classes." THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 33 THE AEISTOCEACY OP FEANCE, I. OH never yet was theme so meet for roundel or romaunce As the ancient aristocracy and chivalry of France ; As when they went for Palestine, with Lewis at their head, And many a waving banner, and the Oriflamme outspread ; And many a burnished galley, with its blaze of armour shone In the ports of sunny Cyprus, and the Acre of St John ; And many a knight, who signed the cross, as he saw the burning sands, With a prayer for those whom he had left, in green and fairer lands. God aid them all, God them assoil, for few shall see again Streams like their own, their azure Rhone, or swift and silver Seine. God aid him the first baron, .the first of Christendom*, God aid the Montmorenci, far from his northern home. And they are far from their Navarre, and from their soft Garonne, The Lords of Foix and Gramont, and the Count of Carcassone, * " Dieu aide au premier Baron Chretien," the well-known Montmorenci motto. The device of the Great Constable of that name is better worth remembering " NOBLESSE OBLIGE," NOBILITY HAS ITS DUTIES. D 34 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. For they have left, those Southron knights, the clime they love so well, The feasts of fair Montpellier, and the Toulouse Carousel, And the chase in early morning, when the keen and pleasant breeze Came cold to the cheek, from many a peak, of the snowy Pyrenees ; And they have vowed that they will vie with the Northmen in the plain With De Joinville, and with Artois, and with Thihaut of Cham- pagne : But with them all might none compare, how great or grand his line, With that young knight, who bore in fight, the blazon of Sergine.* Nor could one boast of all that host that went against the Moor, So fair a feat, or one so meet for praise from Troubadour. He clove his way, where Lewis lay, with the Moslemin around, He clove his way, through all the fray, and bore him from the ground. And thus he earned a prouder name than herald ever gave, The foremost of the foremost, and the bravest of the brave. * " Of all the King's men-at-arms, there was only one with him, the good knight, Sir Geoffrey de Sergine, and who I heard say, defended him in like manner as a faithful servant defends the cup of his master from flies, for every time the Saracens approached the King, he guarded him with vigorous strokes of the blade and point of his sword, and it seemed as if his strength was doubled." Joinville. THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 35 II. Oil never yet was theme so meet for roundel or romaunce, As the ancient aristocracy and chivalry of France ; As when they lay, before Tournay, and the Grand Monarque was there, With the bravest of his warriors, and the fairest of his fair ; And the sun that was his symbol and on his army shone, Was in lustre, and in splendour, and in light itself outdone. For the lowland and the highland, were gleaming as of old, When England vied with France in pride, on the famous Field of Gold, And morn, and noon, and evening, and all the livelong night, Were the sound of ceaseless music and the echo of delight. And but for Vauban's waving arm, and the answering cannonade, It might have been a festal scene in some Versailles arcade ; For she was there, the beautiful, the daughter of Mortemart, And her proud eyes flashed the prouder for the roaring of the war. And many a dark-haired rival,* who bound her lover's arm With a ribbon, or a ringlet, or a kerchief for a charm ; * Madame de Montespan was gifted with that rarest of beauties light hair, with dark black eyes and eye lashes. D2 36 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. And with an air as dainty, and with a step as light, As they moved among the masquers, they went into the fight : O brave they went, and brave they fought, for glory and for France, The La Tremb'ille, and the Noailles, and the Courtenay of By- zance, And haughty was their war-cry, as they rushed into the field, The de Narbonne and de Talleyrand,* in Castilian on each shield. And well they knew de Montesquieu, and Rohan, and Loraine, That a bold deed was ever sure high lady's smiles to gain. For none were loved with such true love, or wept with so true a tear. As he who lived a Courtier, but who died a Cavalier. * The motto of the de Narbonne was in Spanish. " Nos descendemos de reyes, sino los reyes de nos." That of the Talleyrands was still more superb, " Re que Diou." The mottoes of the old French aristocracy are in haughty contrast with our own more reveren- tial and loyal devices. The two which I have just cited, were almost insulting to the monarchy. Scarcely less so was the scroll beneath the shield of the Mortemarts, " Ante mare, undse," " Before the sea, were the waters ;" or that of the LaRochefoucaulds, "C'est mon plaisir." There is a gentler spirit in our own, in the " Aimez loyaute," of the Paulets, or the " Ung je servirai," of the Pembrokes. THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. 37 III Oh never yet was theine so meet for roundel or romaunce, As the ancient aristocracy and chivalry of France. As now they lie in poverty and dark is their decline ; For the sun that shone so long on them, it now hath ceased to shine. And the mighty house of Bourbon, that made them what they were Kneels humbly at the Austrian's feet, beneath the Austrian's care. And the nineteenth Louis knows not France, and his queen she never sees. Her soft St. Cloud, her Rambouillet, her solemn Tuileries ; And the revel, and the pageant, and the feast that were of yore, And courtly wit and compliment these things are now no more; Save in some old man's memory, who loves to ponder yet On Lamballe's playful jesting, and the smile of Antoinette. And bids his son remember, how the middle classes reign In the Basilic of Monarchs, and the Nobles old domain ! For these they have lost all things save their honour and their names : Chateaubriand and de Breze, and Stuart of Fitzjames, And Levis, and La Rochejacquelin, and the brave and blameless few, Like de Biron and de Luxembourg, the loyal and tne true : 38 THE ARISTOCRACY OF FRANCE. Then, though their state be fallen all Europe cannot show Such glory as was theirs of old, such glory as is now, For they themselves have conquered, themselves they have for- gone, And they their own relinquish, till the King shall have his own. Then grant, God, grant, that day may come, and long shall it endure, For the poor will find true friends in those who have themselves been poor ; And the Noble, and the People, and the Church alike shall know, A Christian King of France, in King Henry of Bordeaux. VENUS AND ADONIS. 39 VENUS AND ADONIS, " IT is a horrible thing to quarrel with a father," was the reflection of Pomponio Vecellio as he rushed from his home into the night air. It was a beautiful Spanish evening. The broad moon was above his head. The fragrance of citron, and vine, and olive was about him. And Madrid, with its hundred ascending spires, seemed in the still silence to indicate heaven, and calm, and rest. " Horrible, horrible," and he wept aloud. A light gleamed from a window opposite. It showed him that Tiziano Vecellio had sought solace in his studio. He had appealed to art to redress the wrongs of nature. The son pondered. It was a lesson to him which he was trying to profit by. In all the enthusiasm of repentance he had already vowed to throw himself at his father's feet, had sworn to forego his wayward life, to exercise his own talents, to realize his own visions 40 VENUS AND ADONIS. upon canvass. He crossed himself in the certitude of his good resolutions. A Madonna, with bright golden hair and angel eyes, had even smiled on his determina- tion, and was herself to be its theme. Alas for man's firmness ! A quick light step first, then a soft sweet voice fell upon his ear. In another moment he was swearing eternal love for the darkest and brightest eyes of Castille. And if a thought of his profession came across him, it was but to hand down the form and grace and beauty of his reconciled mis- tress to an admiring posterity. And the father ! Ah nature is stronger than art ! he had but gone to his painting room, to watch the re- treating steps of his son. He was too proud to call, but to fond not to look after him. He had seen him, first with his arms crossed, and his eyes upraised. A painter himself, he had no difficulty in divining what was then passing in his mind. There was joy in the old man's tears. But this new outrage! it too had chanced before his eyes. The light is no longer to be seen from the street. The curtain has dropped from his hand. He is bend- ing over his easel; his occupation is but mechanical, but like all habits it is a relief. Even in spite of himself VENUS AND ADONIS. 41 and his sorrows, as the gorgeous colours of his school spring into life, he feels interested and engrossed, although it is only drapery he paints. It is a curious picture that before him. The subject is Venus and Adonis. But while the liuibs are perfect, and completed where the heads should be there is a blank, yet the story is almost told without them. There is invitation, half checked by modesty, in every line of one figure. And reluctance, half shame, half desire, breathe throughout the other. What is the mystery about those heads ? Night after night, for some time past, have there been shown into that room the models of those forms. But their faces have been masqued. To-night they have promised him those masques shall be removed. It was a glorious and a gay time for painters, the sixteenth century. Courted by the generous and noble, they learned to become not less generous themselves. Secrets were not withheld from them, from fear of divulgement. Honour was not kept back from them, because their origin was poor. Their lives were full of enjoyment and magnificence and renown. Were Titian in the mood, he might delight to remember how Charles the Fifth picked up his brush, and declared himself distinguished in so doing. 4*2 VENUS AND ADONIS. The old man is perhaps thinking of those past days. Ever and anon he exclaims, in all the abruptness of his anguish. " I, too, should have abdicated ! Would, too, I had sacrificed with my Caesar this world, and its vain glories." Watch him in his agony ! It gives but more force to his touch, and more vividness to his composition ! Mark, how he follows out his thought. In fragmentary and bitter sentences, he contrasts the profligacy and disobedience of his son, with the piety and virtues of Philip the Second. While Pom- ! ponio Vecellio was wasting all his inheritance of coin and talent in carouses and debauchery, the son of Charles the Fifth was upholding the One Faith against Heresy ; how worthily the most catholic of Kings ! The contrast is so painful, that it animates his anger, and enhances his indignation against his son. The door is opened. A servant ushers in two per- sons masqued, and concealed in long dark cloaks. The taller and statelier figure advances. His words were very haughty, as of one who had summoned all his pride to master his sense of shame. "Titian, thou hast loved. I have yielded to a wo- man's tears and last request. I have henceforth higher cares and higher duties. Even Venus cannot woo me from them."* * This picture is in our National Gallery. VENUS AND ADONIS. 43 As he spoke, he unmasked his companion and him- self, and disclosed the features of Anna d'Eboli and Philip the Second. How well he fulfilled any inten- tion of abandoning his mistress, her influence over him for twenty years subsequently to this scene, attests. Poor Pomponio Vecellio was seldom afterwards re- buked by his father. He did not therefore sin more, or less. 44 DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PROTESTANT MISSIONARY, DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PROTESTANT MISSIONARY AND A PRIEST OF BUDDH. Protestant Missionary. Let us walk by the side of this stream, and when we are tired, we can sit down by its banks, and resume our conversation of yesterday. Priest of Buddh. Do you see that tall plane tree ? Let us sit down there. It will be pleasant in its cool shade, and on the soft grass, with waters rippling at our feet to think reverently, and speak of our God.* P. M. This is indeed a spot to remind us of His presence. As our heads recline upon this gentle steep, we can look far into the bright heavens, but Him we cannot see or reach. P. B. But He has revealed Himself to us : only why declare that the dispensation in which I put my faith, is not true but false ? * See Plato's Phocdrus. AND A PRIEST OF BUDDH. 45 P. M. Do you not think the same of mine? p. B. Nay, I*say not so. Each race may have its different requirements. Each temperament its distinc- tive faith. Each character may want a different meed of revelation. You live under yours, I live under mine. It were sin for either of us to transgress them. P. M. But two exclusive religions cannot both be true. Truth is one and separate. P. B. God's truth is larger than man's truth. What in man's near-sightedness seems an obstacle, may to Him be but a link in the universal harmony. P. M. But if a religion be obviously inharmonious? P. B. I know not that any can be such. It may seem so to us, but that it is so, who shall say ? P. M. What ! not if it be savage and idolatrous, full of loathsomeness, and cruelty, and sham-worship ? Take your own for instance. You macerate your limbs, and prescribe mutilation and suicide to your votaries. You bow down before wooden idols, and stones, and stocks, and man's handiwork. Is there no conscience, no instinct within you, which say, that all this is worthless and unreal ? P. B. Nay, there is a voice which prompts me to pain, and denial, and mortification. Brother, these things are not loathsome, but pure. As, day after day, 46 DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PROTESTANT MISSIONARY, and fast after fast, and pang after pang, I feel my spi- rit rise above the pulp and carrion which would drag it to the earth, that voice tells me, I am fitter for wisdom, and nearer to the truth. You tell me that it is vain to worship the creation of man's hands. I worship it not. It is to me the symbol of the Godhead. The other, I worship no more than you do the black lines and types of your Sacred Book. And if at certain seasons we deem it right to die for our faith, your eyes filled yesterday with tears, when you spoke of martyrs who had fallen for your own. P. M. But yours are matters of rule, which cannot be infringed ; ours of free and voluntary impulse. P. B. Then we are the more right. Man, way- ward, and rebellious, cannot be too tightly bound and fettered by forms, and orders, and commands. P. M. Hold, we are getting into details, and lose sight of our main differences. I have said that I con- sider your faith false, from its very nature. I will waive that objection. I will say, that it is false, be- cause you have no evidence of it. P. B. Evidence ? I have what is better Faith ! P. M. Will you have faith against evidence, against reason, against understanding ? P. B. My Religion is but the stronger when so AND A PRIEST OF BUDDH. 47 opposed ; and thus should your's be. When you tell me of your doctrine of the Resurrection, is that con- sistent with reason ? Is the Incarnation compatible with the understanding ? P. M. Yes, for they are certified by miracles, which rest upon testimony entirely satisfactory to my reason. P. B. Miracles, that is some interruption of the course of nature ? P. M.Yes. P. B. Did I want satisfaction for my reason, I should not be content with such a guarantee. It seems strange to me that God should mar the harmony, and break the continuity of one revelation, in order to attest the truth of another ; rather, I should say, that that Revelation is from God which is most in accord- ance with that which we all acknowledge to be His. The most natural, the most like nature of all religions, would probably be the one most true. But I cannot reason upon such a subject ; where reason begins, faith must end. P. M. How barbarous a notion ! You would then reject one of God's best gifts the Reason. P. B. Nay, I reject it little more than yoil do, you yourself only admit its partial application. Up to a 48 DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PROTISTANT MISSIONARY, certain point, you are exclusively for Reason, beyond that, exclusively for Faith. P. M. True. Remark however the difference between us. While your faith is utterly groundless and unsubstantial, mine rests upon the sure basis of the understanding. P. B. Is it a sure basis ? Is it not on the contrary like this stream at our feet, ever restless and changeful ; reflecting all things, receiving all things, and alas ! sapping all things ? P. M. It is, I see, impossible to argue with you, be- cause even should I convince your understanding, you would, with so bad an opinion of it, refuse to entertain the conviction. P. B. Undoubtedly, did it militate against my belief. P. M. In my Western world, you would then be called a Roman Catholic. They, too, are a sect who have the same dread with you of private judgment, and individual intelligence. With them, too, Faith is everything, and Reason nothing. They have the same implicit reverence for forms. Maceration and self- denial are part of their practice, as of yours. They regard their Pope as the type of all authority on earth ; much in the same way as you regard your Lama. AND A PRIEST OF BUDDH. 49 Theirs moreover is a religion of Caste, and they are indefatigably anxious, like yourself, to centre all power in the priesthood. Indeed, I see little difference be- tween you ; except that they ever persecute, while you say that you would not molest other religions. P. B. And in my Eastern world, you, Brother, would belong to the Ta-ou-tse persuasion. They, as you yesterday told me of your own Church, have also rebelled, protested, and prevailed against the ancient religion. They also reduce all things to the standard of Reason. They ridicule our fasts and vigils, our limits and restrictions. They pride themselves, as you do, on their superior philosophy and enlightenment. They endeavour to combine, and reconcile, two things incompatible, rationalism and belief. And while our temples are in decay, and our worship is neglected, they are wealthy like you, flourishing like you, and forgive me, my Brother, if I must say it, intolerant as you. 50 THE TUTLERFES. THE TUILEKIES. IN ten years In ten years. The same sentence was repeated in two very different tones. The first voice was sweet and silvery, with a soft and caressing modulation. The se- cond, sudden, abrupt, and as it were surprised into harshness as of one upon the moment unexpectedly pained. The speakers were Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers. The manner of the Queen was ap- parently careless and conversational. But there was a savage hilarity in her flashing eyes which showed that she intended and enjoyed the pang she was inflicting. But her hearer had lived too long at a court not to en- deavour to mask her feelings. It was, therefore, with a seeming unconcern that she asked, " Will the chateau take thus long, Madame, in building ?" " Yes, ma mie, so Bullant and Delorme inform us. THE TUILER1ES. 51 A poor Italian princess has no claim to such elaborate magnificence. But the mother of the Sons of France should, methinks be nobly and sumptuously lodged. At our age, too, (the queen was a far younger woman,) we, who have outlived all the vanities and dreams of youth, should look forward, circumspectly L and pru- dently. We should, (and her hand was thrown play- fully upon the other's still beautiful arm,) sweet Diane, be guarded against all the accidents and caprices of politics. Some day, and who can say how soon, we may require a sure retreat ; and by the blessing of Our Lady and St. Germain, we may hope, here to find it. The allusions to her age, to the instability of Court favour, to the necessity of a retreat, every word was a dagger in the heart's heart of Diane. For one instant her spirit rebelled, and had almost prompted her to re- tort ; but her instinctive gentleness prevailed. And, as she stooped to kiss the Queen's hand, she looked up imploringly and in silence to her persecutor, with her soft eyes glistening with large tears. Was there a wo- man who ever spared a rival? Was there an Italian who ever unlearned hate? " You are ill, fair Cousin. This state and pomp are haply too much for you. We did not know that you thought royalty, with its care and circumstance, always E2 52 THE TUILERIES, so grievous and vexatious. Do not let our poor pre- sence be any hindrance to your retiring. We have heard something, have we not, Yolande," and she looked to the most prudish of her ladies in waiting, " of the charms which solitude affords to the Duchesse de Valentinois ?" Diane was alone. But her mind was ill at ease. It was all in vain that she sought relief from her lute, and one of Marot's liveliest songs. Its joyous refrain was interrupted by a sob. She took up a story of Boc- caccio, and tried to be amused. It was flung away the next moment in disgust. Those horrible words seemed to hunt her. " In ten years." " In ten years," she continued to mutter, as if mechanically, and with- out understanding them. She walked to a mirror, and gazed, long and intently, upon one of the love- liest of faces. But, if her eyes were as full of bright tenderness as ever, it was impossible not to perceive the spite of time beneath them. If her tresses were not less soft and brilliant than of old, there was more than one grey hair, which glittered in more provoking relief, from the dark sheen of the remainder. " And can he love me Henri ? Or if now by some strange infatuation, he does so, alas ! alas ! what must it be in ten years ? He so far younger ! He THE TUILERIES. 53 for one glance of whose eye the youngest and fairest are emulously striving. HE the King ! " " The very same, dearest Diane," a low voice whis- pered in her ear, and Henry the Second of France stood beside her. He had heard his own praises in the way most to flatter him, wrung out of the very earnest- ness of her misgiving, while she had thought herself alone. He had thus seen Woman in her rarest and most beautiful of moods, not when endeavouring to captivate and win, all radiant with conscious charms, but plain, and bare, and true, in all her native weak- ness, in humility, and sadness, and self-distrust. Smiles may cloy, and tears will weary, the most studied coquetteries will fail to please, the happiest pe- tulance to pique, but when a woman throws down her arms altogether, when she casts away from her, pride, and vanity, and self-esteem, when she bows down and acknowledges her natural, feminine, helpless, im- potence, Man's instinct will ever teach him to cling to and support her. Who shall say how much this feeling influenced the King ? Who shall say, that interviews, such as that we have attempted to describe, were not the secret of his long-enduring love ? Who shall say how much 54 THE TUILERIES. of her fascination, in his eyes, was owing to her sense of self-nothingness, and utter reliance upon himself? Certain it is, that till his death, he remained the most constant, loyal, and affectionate of lovers. And if in this, the Duchesse de Valentinois was far more fortunate than younger mistresses of kings, she found, unlike the Rosamund of another Henry, but little to suffer from the jealous hatred of a Queen. She was indeed, banished under the regency of Catherine ; but it was at an age and season when it was rather a boon than a privation. What had she to say to a Court, when to her its only charm had passed away ? Who, amidst its masques and revels, would bethink them of what beauty there might remain in her faded features, when the grey eyes and youthful form of Mary Stuart were glancing by ? " Her lover, her Cid,"* had gone before her : her dearest hope was to rejoin him. The epitaph which she caused to be inscribed upon her husband's f tomb, in Rouen Cathedral, was singu- larly inappropriate. Indivulsa tibi quondam et fidissima, conjux Ut fuit in thalamo, sic erit in tumulo. * Josephine, to the Emperor Alexander, speaking of Napoleon, t Louis de Breze. THE TUILERIES. 55 The chateau, of which mention has been made, was the Tuileries. It was begun by Catherine in 1564. But, like all cunning people of infirm faith, and there- fore prone to occasional credulity, she left it incomplete, in consequence of an astrological prediction, which bade her beware of St. Germain the palace being within the parish of St. Germain of Auxerrois. 56 MARY STUART. HER LAST PRAYER. MAEY STUART* HER LAST PRAYER. I. A LONELY mourner kneels in prayer before the Virgin's fane, With white hands crossed for Jesu's sake, so her prayer may no be vain. Wan is her cheek, and very pale, her voice is low and faint, And tears are in her eyes, the while she makes her humble plaint. O little could you deem, from her sad and lowly mien, That she was once the Bride of France, and still was Scotland's Queen ! II. O, Mary Mother ! Mary Mother ! be my help and stay ! Be with me still, as thou hast been, and strengthen me to-day ! MARY STUART. HER LAST PRAYER. 57 For many a time, with heavy heart, all weary of its grief, I solace sought, in thy blest thought, and ever found relief: For thou, too, wert a Queen on earth, and men were harsh to thee ! And cruel things and rude, they said, as they have said of me ! III. O, Gentlemen of Scotland ! O, Cavaliers of France ! How each and all had grasped his sword, and seized his angry lance, If Ladye love, or Sister dear, or nearer dearer Bride, Had been, like me, your friendless Liege, insulted and belied ! But these are sinful thoughts, and sad, I should not mind me now, Of faith forsworn, or broken pledge, or false or fruitless vow ! IV. But rather pray sweet Mary my sins may be forgiven ! And less severe than on the earth, my Judges prove in heaven. For stern and solemn men have said * God's vengeance will be shown, And fearful will the penance be, on the sins which I have done ! 58 MARY STUART. HER LAST PRAYER. And yet, albeit my sins be great Oh Mary, Mary dear ! Nor to Knox, nor to false Moray, the JUDGE will then give ear ! V. Yes ! it was wrong and thoughtless, when first I came from France, To lead courante, or minuet, or lighter, gayer dance. Yes it was wrong and thoughtless, to while whole hours away In dark and gloomy Holyrood, with some Italian lay. Dark men would scowl their hate at me, and I have heard them tell, How the Just Lord God of Israel had stricken Jezebel ! VI. But thou dear Mary Mary mine ! hast ever looked the same, With pleasant mien, and smile serene, on her who bore thy name; Oh, grant that, when anon I go to death ! I may not see Nor axe, nor block, nor headsman, but Thee, and only Thee ! Then, 'twill be told, in coming times, how Mary gave her grace To die, as Stuart, Guise, should die of Charlemagne's fearless race. CHARLES STUART. 59 CHARLES STUAET, CONISHEAD PRIORY. WE gazed upon the Martyr-king ! his eye Rested, methought, in sadness on his Queen ; That gentle, grave, and melancholy mien Was full of History, and there floated by Vandyke's fair forms, and mournful chivalry. Young, blameless Falkland public-hearted Hyde, And he the mightiest he who meekly died For that dear Church, he served with service high. Anon in Furness's ruined aisles we stood, Friendship was strong within me, the great dead, Had lost their spell ; but still that vision wooed My spirit there, albeit those forms had fled ; For, augur-like, my kindling heart could see The stalwart virtues of a Laud in thee ! 60 THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. THE CATHOLIC CAVALIEE, 1641. I. THE Holy Church be praised ! The King at length hath raised The standard of his sires, in all kinglihood, on high ! Now shall this glorious day, for that one hope, repay The sorrows which have dimmed the brightness of his eye. II. It was twelve years ago, when solemnly and[[slow, There passed down to the Houses the royal cavalcade. And the King therein did ride, with the great Duke at his side ; And loving words, like brothers, they to each other said. THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. 61 III. It was but yesterday, he rode down the array, Midst pike, and axe, and partisan, and many a gleaming sword, And sad, and suffering, He looked withal a King, Like one who only lived to do His duty to the Lord. IV. By God's good help, I ween, that wan and mournful mien, Shall harden heart, and strengthen arm, and steel us in the strife Nor for that wan look alone, shall the Roundhead host atone, Cry Villiers and strike home ! we will have life for life ! V. A hundred years of wrong shall make our vengeance strong ! A hundred years of outrage, and blasphemy, and broil ; Since the spirit of Unrest, sent forth on her behest The Apostate and the Puritan, to do their work of spoil ! 62 THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. VI. Since theTyrant's wanton bride trod the Truth down in her pride, And God, for England's sins, gave power to a Lie, And through the land the light of Falsehood burnt all bright, As each churl thought to see, the day-spring dawn on high. VII. And furiously and fast, like the rushing of the blast, There rose the clang of voices midst strife, and storm, and din. Yet, through that angry tone the Church prayed on alone As a mother pleads the more, for her children when they sin. VIII. She calls you round her son her own Anointed One Her standard is the Cross, oh lift it forth on high. Her wrongs shall be our might, Her Blessing our right Her hopes our own best hope Her Saints our battle cry ! THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. 63 IX. They are coming they are here, each loyal Cavalier, Newcastle, Lindsay, Digby, the Hotspur of the cause ; They are coming with the sword, to rally round their Lord, For the Treasons and the Plots 'gainst His Kingdoms and his Laws. X. They are coming, they are here, each loyal Cavalier Great Strafford's blood hath summoned them, and Laud's un- seemly chains ! Oh blessed be that thought, that England would have brought Back to the mourning Churches where Unity remains ! XI. They are coming, they are here, each loyal Cavalier, No Stanley ever shamed the George upon his breast ! Montrose shall rally forth the clansmen of the North, The Seymour and the Somerset, their liegemen in the West. 64 THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. XII. Ho Roundheads, ye that pray, and cant like Pym and Say Of the sin of Sport and Maying the crime of village games ! Now by the Holy Rood, but ye shall rue in blood The hatred which is borne by each hamlet to your names ! XIII. To the Traitors who betray, like Iscariot for pay, To every hireling member, who sits and votes for gain, Down down with one and all, the men of blood and brawl, With Hazlerig and Cromwell with Harrison and Vane ! XIV. Yon sun which shines to day, upon our brave array, On scarf, and casque, and plume, and banners waving slow, Shall see us charge in scorn, 'gainst the ranks of the forsworn. And every sword grow crimson, with slaughter of the foe ! THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. 65 XV. This Autumn shall not wane, ere the King shall hold again High feasting in Whitehall, for the Armies and the Court ; And the Puritans shall hear, the tidings in their fear, As they cower lone and outcast, at Geneva, or at Dort ! I have, in the foregoing ballad, purposely made no distinction between the Churches of Rome and England. Because, if I had done so, I think I should have been untrue to the character and feelings of the Roman Catholics of the time. The limits which separated the two Churches could not have been thought, by such men as Sir Kenelm Digby, very broad, or the obstacles to union very strong, when an English Bishop had gone over to Rome, and the Pope had offered a Car- dinal's hat to our Primate. The sense, too, of common danger in the triumph of the Puritans, and the interest attracted to the Crown by a Roman Catholic Queen, had probably done much to bring the Roman Catholics F 66 THE CATHOLIC CAVALIER. round the standard of Charles the First. His own in- surmountable aversion to their religion, was not so well known in 1641, as it afterwards became. It was yet to be shown, in his impolitic alienation from the Irish in- surgents, and in his affecting appeal, when on the point of death, to his children (which both Charles the Second, and James the Second, so ill attended to). " In this Church of England, I charge you to persevere."* But the devoted loyality of the Roman Catholic Cavaliers, was irrespective of all the private opinions of Charles Stuart. And the heroic deeds of Worcester, Digby, and Glamorgan, are canonized in the same glorious Calendar with those of Capel, Derby, and Southampton: * Clarke's Life of James II. LOUIS XIV. AND CHARLES II. 07 LOUIS XIV, AND CHAELES II, THE monarchies of Louis the Fourteenth, and Charles the Second, are the half-way house between Chivalry and Fashion. The faith of the first, with many of its old solemnities, was declining. The eclecticism of the last, in all its unreasoning exclusiveness, was beginning. It is a mean passage in the world's history. But there are many reasons why a Frenchman should refer to it with pride. To Englishmen it ought to seem the most shameful of our annals. And yet, it is strange, that it has always been a favourite. " The Merry Monarch" has been the hero of more fictions, plays, and romances, than any other of our Kings. The greatest of our moralists, Dr. Johnson, was never tired of sounding his panegyric. The greatest of our novelists, Sir Walter Scott, has drawn his likeness in lineaments more flatter- ing, (where all that was harsh and repulsive has been v'2 68 LOUIS XIV. AND CHARLES II. more skilfully softened) than in any portrait of Sir Peter Lely. The truth is, that Charles the Second was at the best a sort of provincial Louis Quatorze. He ranted, upon a smaller stage, that part of " Captain Absolute" which the other performed. His Bucking- hams and Rochesters were coarse caricatures of the Villerois and the Rohans. His Wycherley was an execrable Moliere. His Cleveland was a tawdry Montespan. It was evident, from the disgust of the spectators, that the curtain would fall far sooner in England than in France. It did so, but four years after his death to the ruin of his brother and successor There is also this striking difference between Eng- land and France at the period to which I am alluding. They had a small Rebellion and a great Monarchy. We had a great Rebelion and a small Monarchy. The vilest traits of personal littleness, such as Ashley's hypocrisy, and Orleans' treason, are to be found in the Cabal of Charles II. and in the intrigues of the Fronde. The noblest examples of individual heroism, Hampden and StrafTord, Fenelon and Bossuet, belong to our Par- liamentary troubles, and to their Absolutist court. Amidst all the paltriness of the Fronde, there is, how- ever, one character which must inspire interest with tem- peraments of very different tendencies and casts. His LOUIS XIV. AND CHARLES II. 69 youth was one of gallantry and tenderness his age one of reflection and observation. In one of the Noels of the minority of Louis XIV., there is this line, Marsillac est tendre, Conti des dames mal traite, &c. There are few who could have foreseen in this Marsillac, eminent for tenderness, the La Rochefoucauld of the Maxims. Yet the transition is not uncommon. Those who feel deeply, if they survive their feelings, think profoundly. In the subsequent verses, which I have supposed to be written by him to the great Lady of his day, Anne Genevieve de Bourbon, Duchesse de Longueville; with whom, in spite of all the crosses and vicissitudes of civil wars, he was long and passion- ately in love, I have of course had in view, his own well known declaration of attachment, Pour meriter son coeur, pour plaire u ses beaux yeux, J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, je 1'aurais fait aux Dieux. In suggesting thoughts on times, like those of the Fronde, and the Restoration, where the politics were all so little and artificial, the religion so courtly or so turbulent, it would be difficult to find any feelings moro real, genuine, true, or better worth recording, than those of Love. 70 TO ANNE GENEV1EVE TO ANNE GENEVIEVE DE LONGUEVILLE, LADY there reigns, methinks, in thy proud eye, The same imperial look with which of yore The bright Egyptian saw her conqueror Conquered, with all her vassal's fealty Bow to her mystic beauty, for, as high As scornful, gleams the spirit of thy glance ; While many a queenly dream of subject France, And Conde's fame,* and Rocrois' memory, Woo with wild hopes : oh, then, if there should be Dark times with us, our drooping chivalry Would find a new Tremoille, to lead, in thee, As brave, belike, but fairer far than she ! And high amidst their Jiaughtiest blazonry One lance should rear thy pennon to the sky ! * She was the sister of the Grande Conde. DE LONGUEVILLE. 71 TO THE SAME, O LEAPT there forth no scorn from thy bright eyes, Was there no smile of wondering disdain On thy proud lip, to mark this idle strain, And all the rashness of my wild emprize ? Alas albeit my heart within me dies, Thinking of thee, yet should I thee arraign. Thine is the blame ! Ah, who could e'er refrain, Once within range of all those witcheries ? All must be poets, lady, when near thee; And if, perchance, I do but ill express My soul's deep worship for thy loveliness ; 'Tis that my theme is all too high for me. How far too high ! yet could I only gain One smile from thee, this rhyme should not be vain. 72 TO ANNE GENEVIEVE. TO THE SAME, LOVE I not still ? if I have shrunk to-day From all the splendours of thy soft bright eyes, If I, of late, have often turned away From thy dear words, and gentle courtesies, Oh then, believe, my heart longed most to stay, Still think, when I, at times, have pined to touch Thy small white hand, and did that wish gainsay ,- Not that I love not, but love all too much. And so, farewell. Thou art, methinks, some star,* And I, its lowliest, humblest worshipper, Worship the more, because thou art so far, The light and glory of another sphere. As cold and bright. Alas those eloquent eyes Will never heed these fond idolatries ! " It were all one That I should love some bright, particular star, And think to wed it." All's Well that Ends Wett. DE LONGUEVILLE. 73 TO THE SAME, I. Rebuke me not, my love, If I call my love a faith ; Nor chide me if I swear To hold it until death. II. What, if it has no forms, Nor rules, nor rites, nor creeds ; My love should stand for all, Oh, hear it when it pleads ! 74 TO ANNE GENEVIEVE DE LONGUEVILLE. III. No Martyr of the Church, How brave or bold he be,- Hath done one half for Her, That I would do for thee ! IV. Then oh, may I believe, With a venture wild as his, That, all these tortures over, I too, may meet with bliss. V. So prayed I once, and yet These prayers were never known- Those feelings that are false, And unlike mine, are shown ! NKWMARKET. 75 NEWMARKET. IT was the day of a great race at Newmarket. The Heath seemed alive with people. The sun shone brightly, and the keen spring wind provoked health and enjoyment even to those who were careless about racing. Who would not like Newmarket? There are no dust, no booths, no shows, no hells, no beggars. The most beautiful horses in England are around you. There are fair women, and distinguished men. It is a scene for a metaphysician, the ill-concealed impatience, the nervous eagerness, the restless motions of the heavy betters, the triumphant joy of the win- ner who has backed his judgment, the savage anger of the loser, who has lost from information . Nor, is it without a charm to those, who love the traditions of the Past. It was here that " the Duke" of his day felt as much excitement as in chasing the rebels at 76 NEWMARKET. Culloden ; here that Junius's Duke of Grafton, when Prime Minister, would come with that fair lady, for whom he had abandoned that fairer duchess, whom Chauvelin had so adored ; here that, a quarter of a century before, Walpole had won cups, with more plea- sure than he was to win his coronet ; here, that his great rival felt all that interest in racing, which pro- duced his charming paper on Newmarket in " The World." But, the race of which I am speaking, was nearly a hundred years before. It is a match between the Duke of Buckingham's ch. m. Mazarin, 4 yrs., and M. de Gramont's b. h. Boscobel, 5 yrs. ; weight for age ; over a course which would now seem as absurdly long as a Turcoman's. There were two groups upon the Heath, which at- tracted more than ordinary attention . One was gathered around one of those light carriages in which Louis XIV. followed the chase, with his mistresses, and which had been just introduced into England. The other was formed around the betting-post. " What is the last quotation ?" exclaimed to a new- comer, who had cantered up, on a beautiful blood chestnut, a person who was leaning upon the cushion of the little phaeton, and whom even without the dogs NEWMARKET. 77 about him it would have been impossible not to recog- nise as Charles the Second. " Six to four upon your Majesty's." " Odds fish, man, which do you call mine ?" " The French Ambassador's," Sire," was the reply, one which sounded a little like a sneer. Charles coloured, and his eyes instinctively rested upon a grave-looking horseman, at a little distance. He did not appear to belong to the royal party, but remained apart, about half-way between the two groups. The object of his attention seemed utterly unconscious of it, rivetted to the spot by his entire absorbing, unconcealed admiration for the regular features, soft looks, and graceful beauty of one of two ladies in the carriage near the king. "You are right enough, Rochester. I must back Boscobel, after Gramont's complimentary name. Will no one do a commission for me, if only for the humour of the thing ? Go, and bet the odds with Algernon Sydney there, who seems to have eyes for nothing but the beautiful Stuart. He must be quite as much against Boscobel as I am for it." Rochester, ever alive and prompt for mischief, gal- loped off to Algernon Sydney. " A message from the King, my Amadis of Geneva ! Nay, nay, never put 78 NEWMARKET. your hand to your sword ; you know I don't fight, and the message is not hostile." " It is, I suppose, that I should withdraw, my lord. I was preparing I only ventured " Algernon stam- mered at a few unfinished phrases, while his eyes still looked towards Miss Stuart. " Will you, or will you not, take Mazarin against Boscobel,with the King, and he will give you the odds?" " With the Kingmy lord ?" Rochester repeated his message, and Algernon Syd- ney, who saw the King laughing good-humouredly, took off his hat, perhaps somewhat lower than a repub- lican might have approved ; and, at a signal from Charles, rode towards him. " What shall it be in ? You object to Sovereigns, and Crowns, and Caroluses ?" inquired Charles, laugh- ingly. Algernon Sydney might have answered with spright- liness, but he was before the woman whom he loved, and before others. Who was ever eloquent in such a position ? He remained silent and embarrassed. " Not unless they be light or false, Sire/* interrupted Rochester. " Halo there ! you are as bitter to-day as Sir Car Scrope ; what is that conceit of his ? NEWMARKET. 79 ' Thou can'st hurt no man's fame with thy ill word, Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword. is not that the rhyme?" Rochester, like most wits, did not relish this reprisal, and, being a privileged person, turned his horse's head round, and walked quietly away, humming the refrain of a ribald song, then in vogue, against the King. Even Charles's good humour was a little ruffled. He turned to the Duchess of Cleveland, who was tossing the reins she held in her hand, and, in token of her peculiar temper, fretting, teasing, vexing, the noble animals below her. " Are you, too, against me to-day Bosco- bel, or Mazarin?" " O, not Mazarin," said the Duchess disdainfully, " it is such an ugly name." "Is it?" said Charles who could not help smiling. " Here is Sydney, now, will tell us, why Buckingham calls his mare, Mazarin." Algernon Sydney expressed his ignorance with a timidity, which was not natural to him, but which was derived from the same reason as his silence." The King thought him sulky Puritanical affect- ed. " It is to the Mancini, to the gay, clever, versatile, 80 NEWMARKET. voluptuous Manciiii, not to the memory of the old Cardinal, that Buckingham does homage. Why* Master Sydney, we had thought you knew more about France and the French." It was Algernon Sydney's turn to feel annoyed. The red spot mounted to his brow, to hear the calumny which accused him of being bought by France, uttered before the lady of his thoughts. Putting a strong com- mand on his feelings, he remained silent." The race was about to begin. The jockeys had dis- mounted from their hacks, were already on the backs of their respective racers, were each trying their pre- liminary gallop, when their masters might have been seen laughing together in the stables. " Which of us is to win?" exclaimed Gramont. This was not an unnatural question if it had been asked with any appearance of anxiety. " Do you mind letting me to-day, I want to appear a hero or something like it to * the Stuart?'" " On one condition," said Gramont. "Name it," replied Buckingham after a little pause, and with an almost imperceptible look of alarm as he thought of certain money transactions, which had passed between the speaker and himself. NEWMARKET. 81 " Nay, it is not a heavy one ; it is only to give up that infernal Conformity Bill of your's, you have pro- mised the Dissenters. It stands for next week." " Oh, certainly with the greatest pleasure and of course all bets between us are off" exclaimed Buck- ingham, greatly relieved. Such was the Champion of Religious Liberty, in the time of Charles the Second ! The race had begun. Boscobel made all the run- ning. At the ropes he was half a length a-head. The loyal people of Newmarket shouted for joy. At the Judge's stand, Mazarin had come up with a rush ; (which was then undistinguished as " the Chifney ;") and won cleverly by a head. When was the Villiers un- successful at Newmarket ? When was the blue and yellow not triumphant ? It was, in more senses than one, the time of heats ; and the first was over. But, it was so near a tiling, the horse had been tried so much better, and above all, the Courtiers were so sweet upon the Boscobel name, that there were still takers upon him at even. As at Ascot, before the railroad spoilt it, the gentle people at Newmarket walked after each race, upon the course. The King walked first, with his dogs and the Duchess of Cleveland. The Duke of Buckingham, 82 NEWMARNET. radiant with victory, superb with compliments offered his arm to Miss Stuart. Algernon Sydney, who had been talking to her, when he came up, could not for- bear from tendering his. For one moment the lady hesitated ; it was a choice between earnestness and vanity. What woman will not have anticipated her decision ? Poor Algernon Sydney had the mortification of hearing whisper on whisper about him, in praise of her symmetry and elegance, her stately and slender figure, the fawn-like shyness of her natural manners, the grace- ful reserve of her grave courtesies, as she bowed to the crowd of courtiers around her. But what all lovers will well understand Algernon felt no pique against her. He was humbled, sad at heart, and very melan- choly. He could even forgive a yokel in a smock frock by him, who exclaimed, in the heartiness of his admira- tion for the magnificent Grandee, and the beautiful Great Lady " They are made for one another ! " Algernon, full of gloom, had remounted his horse, when he met one of those gipsies, who always infest a race-course. He was in those mournful spirits which predispose one to superstition. There was, also, some- thing that was attractive to him, in her foreign accent something weird and mystic in her strange costume. NEWMARKET. 83 He entered into conversation with her, and endeavoured to forget his own little griefs, in the calamitous vicissi- tudes of the marvellous Race. He had half become a convert to Sir Thomas Browne's beautiful legend, that they are a tribe accursed to all time, for refusing shelter to the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord, when the Royal party came back from thei r promenade. " A gipsy, a gipsy ! We will have fortunes told !" shouted "the merry Monarch." " Begin with the Stuart! Honour to the Beautiful !" The gipsy, according to the cunning of her people, indulged in all these vague generalities, which mean nothing, but she said two things positively. "You are near a person who adores you !" Alger- non felt that she was right. " You will marry a Duke." Algernon could have sunk into the earth with vexation, to see the glance of intelligence which passed between her and the Duke of Buckingham. " Thank God!" lie said to himself " the Fairfax wife is in the way." The next, whom the King designed, was Sydney. The prophecies of the gipsy were very gloomy, and such as befitted Sydney's own mood. At last, when she had foretold plots, treasons, a scaffold, and execution ; G 2 84 NEWMARKET. Algernon began to feel all the singularity of his posi- tion in the Royal Presence. Charles himself was too good-natured not to attempt to disembarrass the Republican. " A truce to graveyards and epitaphs, my mistress ! Here is my hand I will defy you to fetch much mourning out of that, black as it is." The gipsy looked long and intently into the Monarch's hand, and from that again, with the same earnest scrutiny, into his face. After a long pause, she chaunted, rather than spoke, in a sepulchral tone, the following verses : " Of a tall stature, and of sable hue, Much like the son of Kish, that lofty Jew. Twelve years complete he suffered in exile, And kept his father's asses all the while, At length " But the astonishment of the auditors was too much for the reciter's nerves. The gipsy burst into an un- controllable fit of laughter, flung back the hood, worn as a disguise, and disclosed the features of Count An- toine de Gramont. NEWMARKET. 85 " I knew it must be you, Count," said the good- natured King, " from your having given poor Sydney here, a whole Sermon of Bossuet's on the Divine Right. How you came to quote Andrew Marvel, is another matter. He is the only patriot who don't quote you I had thought." Gramont, who no longer spoke in the Basque accent which had imposed upon Algernon, was in the midst of his apology, when the King interrupted him, by saying, " Never mind we will have our revenge at basset, to night. And you, Mr. Sydney, I hope will come and see us, unless,'' he added, smiling, " it is against your conscience to sup in a Palace." Algernon Sydney bowed very low in grateful answer, to so gracious an invitation. He might have been seen that evening, haunting Miss Stuart's every movement with his eyes, although he did not dare approach and speak to her. But an accident placed him by her side at supper. She took his arm in leaving the banqueting room, and said to him one or two of those gentle words, which fall so lightly from the loved, and sink so deeply with the lover. The next day, Algernon Sydney left Newmarket for Penshurst, but before he did so, he sent to Miss 86 NEWMARKET. Stuart the following verses, which were the more in- different, that his sleep had been disturbed all night, with a vision of her walk with the Duke of Bucking- ham. I Another's arm ah, why was this Preferred erewhile by thee ? It did not give him half the bliss, It sorrow gave to me. II. Another's arm yet why should I For this disdain have grieved, It was but meet that hopes thus high Should be thus ill received. III. Another's arm ! ah, Lady bright, I will not now complain, If but for all my joy last night To touch thine own again. NEWMARKET. 87 The gipsy's prophecies came true. Miss Stuart who perhaps never even read Algernon's verses, married a Duke ; Charles, Duke of Richmond. Algernon Sydney who became of far graver and severer habits in after years, died upon the scaffold.* * This tale is, of course, purely fanciful; Algernon Sydney's exile, till 1677, and his declaration of never having seen a Court, being well known ; but I have availed myself of the utmost privilege of romance, in imagining a scene which should illustrate the acknowledged levity of patriots and courtiers in the reign of Charles the Second. 88 THE TOUCHING FUK THE EVIL. THE TOUCHING FOE THE EVIL, I. You have spoken light word, Of the touching of old, But, you never have heard, Of the good Angel-gold. II. For, it was not alone, The Monarch's kind eye, Nor the links that are gone, Tween the low and the high, THE TOUCHING FOR THE EVIL. 89 III. No, not for these only, Though these they were much, Came the stricken and lonely, To kneel to the Touch. IV. The soft hand was put out And the soft solace said, Few mourners could doubt Their evil had fled. V. For, evil it ceases, And sickness it goes With broad golden pieces, And Nobles of rose. 90 THE TOUCHING FOR THE EVIL. VI. Then, when in their rest, In the stillness of night, With their troubles redrest, And their burdens made light, VII. Oh, blame not their blindness, 'Twas the blindness of love, Made them think that this kindness It came from above ! VIII. And when 'twas thus given To those who had need , That something of Heaven, Was Majesty's meed ; THE TOUCHING FOR THE EVIL. 91 IX. Then, list to my warning, And cavil no more, With light words, and scorning, At the good forms of yore. Under King Charles the Second, the angel-gold, which was distributed by the King's almoners, to those who came to be touched, amounted to five thousand a-year. This was a large sum to be given in imme- diate charity, when it is considered that the whole public revenue was under a million and a half. It was a thousand a-year more than the combined salaries of the Secretaries of State, a thousand a-year more than the allowance to Prince Rupert. But it is not so much its amount, which almost makes a regret for this grace- ful superstition, as the direct communication it brought about between the highest and the lowest, between the King and the Poor. If Royalty did but con- descend to lower itself to a familiarity with the 92 THE TOUCHING FOR THE EVIL. people, it is curious that they will raise, exalt, adore it, sometimes even invest it with divine and mysterious attributes; if, on the contrary, it shuts itself up in an august and solemn seclusion, it will be mocked and caricatured. This was one of the secrets of Na- poleon's strength, and one of the secrets of Louis XVIIIth's weakness. If the great only knew what stress the poor lay by the few forms which remain, to join them, they would make many sacrifices for their maintenance and preservation. Dr. Johnson a man of the people if ever there was one, was yet prouder of having been touched by Queen Anne, when he was a child, of speaking about " the great lady in black," of whom he had an indistinct recollection, than he was of all his heroism under misfortune, or of all the erudi- tion of his works. KING JAMES THE SECOND. KING JAMES THE SECOND. WHEN King James the Second was for the last time in London, he was received with shouts of welcome, and cheers of affection, by the populace. It was a great lesson, which it was too late for the Royal hearer to profit by. But if there did not glance across his mind the secret of that, which ought to have been his strength, he could not have been without a suspicion of the secret of his weakness. Where were all those silken courtiers, whom the lavish favour of his house had so fostered and caressed ? Where were all those insolent nobles, whom the Charles's had raised with such wanton prodigality, out of meanness and obscurity ? Where was all that debauched Aristocracy, the gay guests of Hampton Court, the betters of Newmarket and the basset table, the compliant husbands, the officious pan- dars, for whom place on place, and pension on pension, had been created, for whom England had not gold enough, minions and hirelings of France whose os- 94 KING JAMES THE SECOND. tentatious excesses had done more than any Embassy to Rome, to animate the Puritan, and alienate the Protest- ant ? Where were they ? History informs us, but it is in the list of honours of the dynasty succeeding. Oh when will the rulers of the earth understand that their natural allies are the Many, their natural enemies the privileged and Few! The grandson of the Clarendon, who had been so enriched by the Stuarts, was the first to go over, with three regiments, to the Invader. The Danby who had been the Minister of Charles the Second, was to become the first Duke of the new Dynasty. The Churchill, who owed his peerage to his sister's favour, was to be its Hero. The House of Townshend, which derived its nobility from the Restoration, was to become the great nursery of Ministers for the Constitutional Monarchy, which replaced it. " The simplest man of his times," as Lord Boling- broke described King James, was thus the victim of a policy for which he was not responsible. The great nobles, the Sunderlands, Danbys, Halifaxes, who be- trayed him, had been already elevated by others to that station, from which it was impossible for him to remove them. It was in vain for him to look for support from the Church of England. His design (to KING JAMES THE SECOND. 95 any one who will consult his autobiography, this will I think be clear) was not so much to establish Roman Catholicism, as to reconcile the Churches. Vain dream ! In our time it might stimulate the hopes and sympathies of some enthusiasts; in his, it excited universal alienation. And when the Church raised that cry, which has since proved fatal to so many ministries, and which was then powerful to destroy a Monarchy, "The Church is in danger," the House of Stuart, opposed by the clergy, and betrayed by the aristocracy, ceased to reign. It has given to History, in the fall of King James, and the exile of his descendants, the most romantic of misfortunes, but there will always be more of general sympathy for that ruler who conspired with his people, against his nobles. It might be a curious speculation what would have been the fate of James the Second, if he had profited by his grandfather's example in France, if like him he had changed his religion, if he had joined the League of Augsbourg, if he had abandoned the alliance of Louis XIV., if he had deserved less of Hume's praise, " Severe but open in his enmities, steady in his counsels, diligent in his schemes, brave in his enterprises, faithful, sincere, and honourable, in his dealings with all men." It is perhaps an idle task thus to mar the symmetry 96 KING JAMES THE SECOND. of the past, and disturb the harmony of Providence. But it was impossible not to give way to some such reflections, while we stood, on a bright July day, in the little Church of St. Germains. Mass was saying for the soul of the Duke of Orleans. The nave was full of soldiers, who were upon duty for the melancholy ceremony. Before us was the tomb of James the Second. How mournful a renewal of old times, was there, in those two names of Orleans and Stuart! It brought back the tradition of that superb and festive marriage, between Orleans and Stuart, between the brother of Louis XIV., and the loveliest woman of her time, Henrietta of England, who inherited all the beauty of her father, who was so admired at the Court of France, who was so loved by the young and brilliant de Guiche, who died so sad a death, but whose memory is immortalized in the noblest example of modern eloquence, the oration of Bossuet on her death. But there was another association of names close by us scarcely less suggestive of thought. It was the inscription which King George the Fourth had caused to be put upon the monument which he had raised to King James the Second the homage of a Constitutional Monarch to the last Absolute King of England. KING JAMES THE SECOND. 97 REGIO CINERI PIETAS REGIA. FERALE QUISQUIS HOC MONU- MENTUM ASPICIS, RERUM HUMANARUM VICES MEDI- TARE. MAGNUS IN PROSPE- RIS, IN ADVERSIS MAJOR JACOBUS II. ANGLORUM REX INSIGNES J3RUMNA8, DOLENDAQUE NIMIUM FATA PIO PLACIDO- QUE OBITU EXSOLVIT IN HAC URBE DIE XVI SEPTEMBRIS 1701. ET NOBILIORES QUJEDAM COR- PORIS EJUS PARTES HIC RECONDITE ASSERVANTUR. 98 KING JAMES THE SECOND KING JAMES THE SECOND. I. A STORM at night upon the seas, it is a fearful sight, The roaring wind, the rolling surge, the lightning's ghastly light, Now ye be daring mariners who trim yon slender bark, For never yet were waves so wild, or night so drear and dark. II. We joy the night is drear and dark ; no mariners are we We joy for storm and tempest, and the terrors of the sea. Our God, He is a jealous God His wrath it should be shown, When Kings are of their birth-right spoiled, His children of their own. KING JAMES THE SECOND. 99 III. Yet countless was the concourse, and mighty was the throng When last through London rode King James, her citizens among ; And oft, and loud, and long they cheered, for their hearts were in each cheer, And soft it fell, His People's praise, upon their Prince's ear. IV. Then outspake gallant Claverhouse, and his soul thrilled wild and high And he showed the King his subjects, and he prayed him not to fly. Oh never yet was Captain so dauntless as Dundee He has sworn to chase the Hollander back to his Zuyder-Zee ! V. But the King has straightway answered him : no blood it shall be shed, Enough, I ween, of blood has been upon an old man's head : So power, and pomp, and man's esteem, he left and lost them all Rather than that, he better loved, one English life should fall ! H 2 100 KING JAMES THE SECOND. VI. Then, we the few who follow Him, we will His lesson take, And try to count all loss a gain, when lost for Mercy's sake. Yet, who with Powis would not mourn, that he no more shall know His fair red castle on the hill, and the princely lands below. VII. King James has gone to cheer him upon the wave-washed stern, While to the last dim line of cliffs his own looks sadly turn. Yet, though his heart be heavy, it is stout and staunch as when He earned in his bold boyhood the praises of Turenne. VIII. A moment back, and here he stood but not a word we said, But we thought of ancient Lear, with the tempest overhead ! Discrowned, betrayed, abandoned but nought could break his will, Not Mary, his false Regan nor Anne, his Goneril ! KING JAMES THE SECOND. 101 IX. " God help me, my own children, mine have forsaken me " That touching word it has been heard, and God his help shall be. Not here, for earth, he asks not that; O who would ask that boon Who knows men's ways, their fleeting praise, and fame that fades as soon ? X. What is it, Life? a little strife, where victories are vain, Where those who conquer do not win, nor those receive, who gain. But He great shall be His glory, where Kings in glory are, The son of Charles the Martyr, the grandson of Navarre ! 102 SONNET, :i\f\ < SONNET, (TO F. w. F.) DEAR Master I do love thee with a love Which has with fond endeavour built a throne In my heart's holiest place. Come sit thereon And rule with thy sweet power, and reign above All my thoughts, feelings, they to thee will prove Loyal and loving vassals, for they burn With a most passionate fire, and ever yearn And cleave to thee, as ne'er before they clove, Dearest to others. Oh for some strong spell To give me back my childish heart, to shrine Treasures I love too dearly and too well To mar by contact with this life of mine. Yet am I full of fears. Alas beware For knowing me, is ever knowing care ! VERSAILLES, 103 VERSAILLES. IN a sumptuous chamber of Versailles two ladies are sitting. The younger of the two is very beautiful and in the prime of her charms. The elder has not yet outlived hers. There is something very winning in the aspect of the first, so pale and pensive is her face, so beseeching * nd timid her eye. In the second there is also much that is inviting. A beautifully rounded bust, arms exquisitely turned, the most graceful of white hands, and the smallest little feet. Her looks, too, carry with them more of command than her gentle companion's. In the studied light of the apartment, she does not look too old for a Juno. A flatterer might have told her, that, like the goddess, age to her was but an immortality of beauty. What do these two ladies talk of? The time is that of Louis the Fourteenth, the scene Versailles. One is very young. 104 VERSAILLES. with beauty to set the world at her feet ; the other not so old but that her person is still full of fascination. Is it of balls or lotteries, of masques or scandal ? of this rival's invariable luck at basset, or that rival's un- fortunate affair ? Is it of hoops or patches, of rouge or diamonds ? Of Marli, or of Trianon ? They are speaking of misfortune. Nay, they have a title to their theme. Of misfortune and privation, of poverty and dependance. They are, therefore, queru- lous and complaining, full of envious wishes, and inef- fectual reerrets ? Listen. Is it Bossuet or Bourdaloue o who speaks ? The elder lady bids her fair hearer feel joy in her distress. Her eyes light up with the me- mory of a thousand triumphs, as she tells of her own sufferings and denials and mortifications, and abase- ments, and self-mastery. Tales of penance and vigil, of night-watches and fasting, of sore trials and the world's harshness are interchanged. And these, not with tears or stifled sobs, but as if each victory over self, each conquest over will, were more glorious than the victory of Fleurus, or the conquest of Alsace. What unto them are the deeds of Luxembourg or Vil- lars, of Berwick or Vauban ? These belong to the world's vulgar army of heroes ; but they belong to a far nobler army to the host of those who have wrought VERSAILLES. 105 and suffered for the Holy Church. And there hope is, that when the Spouse of Christ shall have summoned her glad array to meet the Bridegroom, among the humblest of her handmaidens may be numbered the names of Frangoise de Maintenon and Marie of Mo- dena and England. 106 THE EARL'S RISING. THE EARL'S RISING, 1715. TO A LAKE PARTY. I. WHERE the Derwent awakes The stillest of lakes, With a broken and tremulous sound, Where the Lowlands are blest With beauty and rest, And the Mountains, like warders, watch round ; II. O, shame upon men, O, shame on them, when These Edens their feuds can invade. Do the streamlets not teach How a place is for each, And Order the sun and the shade ? THE EARL'S RISING. 107 III. From St. John to Helvellyn Wild war-notes are swelling, From Blencathra and Glendaratar, Upon steep, and on crag, Stream banner and flag, And the pennons and plumage of war. IV. Yon mist's silver sheen, In the glen and ravine, Is matched by as silver a thread. Where the Highlands are white With the cuirasses light, And the sabres and spears overhead. V. Yon lakes sultry languor, Is stirred by the clangor And the clang and the clashing of mail. And the deep cloud of haze, Is bright with its blaze, As it upwards ascends from the vale. 108 THE EARL'S RISING. VI. Yon winds as they rise, Are checked by the cries Of gentle and simple and churl ; As the rally cry ran From man unto man, For the King, and the Cause, and the Earl, VII. For foray and fray, In battle array, There are Borderers arming once more : And further yet north, The pibroch calls forth The tartan and plaid and claymore. VIII. For the RatclifFe hath spoken, The RatclifFe hath broken The chains the Usurper had made. Now never was seen So gallant a mien, As he bound to his casque his cockade. THE EARL'S RISING. 109 IX. But, haughty and high, Yet were tears in his eye, As he turned to see Skiddaw again ; And well might he sorrow, For far on the morrow, Would he be from his mountain domain. X. Beneath Alnwick's grey walls A lone trumpet calls The Percy to rise for King James ; And Naworth shall hear, And the Howard revere The might of those long silent names. XI. And many a smile, In merry Carlisle, As the young Earl bowed lowly, attests That the hearts of the fair, With vow and with prayer, Took the field with the Stuart-white crests. 1 10 THE EARL'S RISING. XII. But far other sight, Than of joy or delight, As that army rode gallantly forth, O far other show, Was of wailing and woe, When the tidings came gloomily, North, XIII. How the young Earl had given His soul up to heaven, Still fresh with the brightness of youth ; How his last prayer was said, On his cross-hilted blade, For the Cause and the King and the Truth. XIV. Then should we e'er stand By the sedge-covered strand, Where the lake's ripples mournfully sound ; Or where, to the roar Of her echoes, Lodore Flings her spray, like a snow-storm, around. THE EARL'S RISING. 1 1 1 XV. O, should we again Ever see the domain Where the Ratcliffe shall govern no more ; Where yon arch-broken wall, And the old trees are all That can tell of his grandeur of yore, XVI. O careless of men Remember we then, How the blood of the loyal was shed ; O careless of man Who may scorn all he can, We will pray for the soul of the dead ! 112 A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY, IN the quiet hamlet of Esher, groups of villagers are scattered, full of inquiry and excitement. There have been carriage after carriage, and outriders after out- riders, along its usually silent road, each more gorgeous and showy than the other. What can it all mean ? What can be the reason 1 Another carriage is in sight. It is plainer than the rest, and the curiosity of the crowd is perhaps somewhat abated by disappointment. It is soon to be increased. One among them, less rude than his fellows, has caught a glimpse of the inside. " By Heaven, it is Sir Robert." The words have spread like wildfire. " Sir Robert himself." There are a rush and a press around this chariot, which the more osten- atious equipages had before failed to provoke. " Damn A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. 113 him," exclaims a publican, full of beer and patriotism. " Damn him for his Excise." The feelings of the little mob are evidently those of dislike. " Damn him for a swindler, who was turned out of Parliament," shouts the schoolmaster of the village, and its most erudite and knowing politician. The feelings of the small body are ripening into hate. But, among the nearest to the carriage windows, there is a tall graceful girl, all un- bonneted with haste, with a bright English face, upturned with happy eagerness, and light sunny hair. The Minister, heavy and churlish though he seem, has a quick eye for beauty. He is always alive to the merit of charms such as her's. He has flung a guinea in her lap, and said something which has called up her most scarlet of blushes. The opinions of those scanty bystanders have once more changed. They are shout- ing, hurrahing, hallooing, cheering. Ambitious Esher- ites ! thus to usurp a Parliamentary privilege ; to be so soon turned and swayed by Treasury gold. Reader, are you guessing what Sir Robert Walpole. can have to do at Esher, on a bright summer's after- noon, in 173 ? Your grandfather might have told you. There is not a Will's man, or a White's man of the day, but knows that there is a great Ministerial 1 14 A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. dinner at Claremont. There is not one but would have felt aghast at an attempt so venturesome, as to describe it. Yet it is not difficult to fancy a table laden with massive and gleaming plate, some of it, perhaps, having belonged to Strafford, some to his brother-in-law, Denzil Holies, and now his descendant's the Duke of Newcastle. There can easily be imagined all that renowned and luxurious hospitality, by which even his princely fortune was in the end impaired and broken. Silver and gold, racing cups and shields, curtains of damask, carpets of Turkey, softness and splendour these things are at once conceived and entertained. But the men and the conversation! Hark ! Cannot you fancy you hear a confused mur- mur of voices, through which, ever and anon, you catch the words, "Right of Search," "Peace," "War," " Spain," " the Regent," " Balance of Power," and "Sir Robert?" Perhaps this last word is more often dwelt on and heard than all the others. It might be a curious thought, to some perhaps a melancholy one, to imagine all the assentation and obsequiousness here preferred by the noblest in England, to that plain Norfolk Squire. And yet, there is not one of that select and envied A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. 115 number, who does not cherish a hope of supplanting and succeeding him. Perfidy is the genius of each speech Self the motive of each guest. Are you deceived because Newcastle is so sedulously attentive to Sir Robert's every whisper, because Harry Pelham, with that most sure of all flatteries, has caught and imitated his blunt, frank tone, because black Har- rington seems so full of grave and courteous admiration, or because Carteret, with every successive glass of champagne, repeats his opinions with more point, and his jokes with more vivacity ? And these men are the Counsellors of a great empire. Do they give no heed to their mighty responsibilities ? Do they take no thought of their awful account ? There is not an opinion which they may give to-night, by which millions may not be affected not a decision which universal nations may not have to rue and be- wail. Oh no! or if perchance some stray notion of this sort may cross their minds, it is but to plume their pride, and enhance their self-importance. " How great am I, whose determinations may make the States General tremble for their Commerce, or the House of Austria for her possessions ! How certain am I of the public care in all ages, whose least requirements can drive the descendants of the English Kings from Court i2 1 1G A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. to Court, and whose will, when pronounced, can em- barrass and despoil Spain, even in the New World ! How sure is posterity to exact and cherish every par- ticular of one, whose talents have raised him to a post where his power is so vast and comprehensive !" And yet, in despite of all this glory and magnificence, notwithstanding all the sumptuous consequence of this Cabinet dinner, there was a conversation then perhaps passing between two poor outcasts, for one little syllable of which posterity would give more than for all the opinions of all those Ministers. In a miserable shed, where the wind's free howling prevented even a hope of sleep, two persons, ill and meanly clad, who have there betaken themselves for the night, are conversing with eagerness and animation. It might be a scene, that deserted hovel and that notorious suburb, to plan murder or depredation. But that is no common desperado, who is now inveighing with eloquent ferocity against all convention and all form, and now with piteous and tearful lamentations, pleading hunger, and cold, and anguish, the world's scorn, and his own defiance. And his companion, hungrier, colder, with keener sense of shame, does he interchange, or re-echo the same strain ? Those beautiful truths ! Those calm maxims ! Those A CABINET DINNER IN THE LAST CENTURY. 117 subtlest of arguments ! That imaginative Philosophy ! It might be Plato, amid the hush and quiet of Academe, with reverential pupils around, and Aristotle listening among them : not one without a home, or a dinner, or a bed, or a hope of better things for the morrow. Yet this man is wiser than Plato. Careless of himself he is thinking of mankind. Persecuted by Providence, he is its champion. He is justifying the inequalities by which he suffers. He is rebuking the other for effemi- nacy, under trials such as have been rarely borne by men. He is annihilating the narrowness of his inductions and conclusions. The largest of finite intellects is illustrating the infinitude of God's. Who are these singular wanderers? Speak their names and their distresses to the great guests of Clare- mont, they will have heard of neither. But there are few in our time, who love what is good and true in letters, or pity what is wild and unhappy but will bethink themselves of many a similar passage, in the lives of Richard Savage and Samuel Johnson. 118 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTUEY. IN this sketch I have attempted to pourtray Lord Bolingbroke in other colours than those in which he is commonly represented. His memory is mostly as- sociated with his light, and graceful, and gifted youth, the very idea and type of universal fascination. We are apt to think of him only as the wit, statesman, orator, rake, courtier, Macaroni, Mohawk, author, and conspirator of Queen Anne's reign caressed by all men, admired by all men, almost marvelled at by all men, as much for his excellence in each character, as for his versatility in all. I have chosen a passage of his decline and ruin. It is one perhaps suggestive of sadder and wiser feelings. His manhood had been one AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 119 unchequered series of disappointments. His old age was made up of schemes and regrets. It was variable too, and capricious as his youth. He could still be, on infrequent impulses, " the life of pleasure and the soul of whim," the idol of a Paris supper, provoking, en- couraging, surpassing the ready mockeries of young Voltaire, or giving Fronsac a hint in his precocious dandyism. But he was more often plunged in that gloomy and ferocious hate of all things, which is the lot of old men like Cenci, and which Shelley, with more than the power of Rembrandt, has described. To Madame de Villette alone, he was always the same, uniformly kind, and tender and devoted. He married her at a time of life, when there could have been little love in his sentiments towards her. But she was the romance of his old age. She was to him the impersonation of all his ambitious chances, all his long- ings after power. The niece of Madame de Maintenon, he might hope much from her French connection. Her fortune procured him his recall from exile. Her winning manners conciliated for him the interest of King George's mistress. She was almost as necessary to his intrigues, as she was dear to his reminiscences. He perhaps calculated the effects of her attachment, as he 120 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. would have done those of a paper in the Craftsman, or a speech in the House of Commons. But in their re- lations to one another, if there was little of domestic or tender affection, there was much of a spiritual and reciprocal enthusiasm. She was his heroine, and he her hero. AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 121 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTUKY, SCENE. Lord Bolingbroke's house at Battersea. TIME. 1734. PERSONS. Madamede ViLLETTE(Lady BOLINGBROKE) and Lord BOLINGBROKE. Mad. V. Henry, what moves you so ? J9. Nothing, dear love, But your sweet presence, and the joy it gives. Mad. V. Nay, but I know you better. You are in Your old proud mood ; do I not know that look The savage exultation of those eyes, And the strong scorn upon that lip ? You seem Like some Greek God, with Godhead just avenged. B. A God at my age ! I shall soon believe 122 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. In Gods, and faiths, and creeds, and miracles, If I remain a hero to my wife. Mad. V. Talk not of age ! You have the very look As when I saw you first ; do you remember, It was at Paris, at the Opera, When you had come to sign your Utrecht peace ? And the whole world stood up, as you came in With that half careless graceful ease of yours ; But, when there loudly, and more loudly, rung The vivas, and the plaudits, and the shouts, I marked the sudden grandeur of your change. The radiant inspiration which Success Flung like a glory round you. Ah, dear Henry, How great and how august you looked that moment ! And then, the next, I read, as in a mirror, Disdain and hate, as though to you the rapture Of all that glory and that triumph, lay In the sweet feeling that your foes were crushed. B. Well, and what then Mad. V. Why, that you must not now Cherish this angry passion. Come to me ; Look from this oriel on the quiet Thames, And on this gentle evening. Calm and silence This river's countless smiles, and the quick breeze ; AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 123 You are a poet, Henry, at your heart, And should love these things. B. I love you so much I can love nothing else, and if I hate Is it not you, your doing, you who make me, What is it hate, but love turned upside down. Mad. V. Nay, listen to me B. Nay, but you shall listen. I had not loved you half so well, or truly, Could I not hate with as intense a hatred. Mad. V. Only why hate this Walpole, it is vulgar, So like the mob, to hate the minister. B. Then, has my life been bared to you in vain ; Do you not know two words which mean one thing, St. John and Disappointment ? You, who know me ; You, who have seen me shrinking from myself, Sick, with clenched hands, and tortured, racked with spasms, Yea, writhing in my intellectual shame, Trying to hide, to cower, to find a refuge Where I might never meet the accursed thought That I I Bolingbroke, should be remembered As one who could do all things but succeed ? And then you ask me n^t to hate this thing 124 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. This lackered sham, this mediocrity, This counterfeit that does ! Youth, wealth, and beauty, And courage, and high thoughts, and genius, I have had all, and what have they availed ? Men say, " He might have been, but Walpole is." Mad. V. Dearest, how right you are, and yet how wrong ! B. " Dearest, how right you are, and yet how wrong!" Yes, that is it, so like a woman quibble, With strong broad feelings. Can you understand How you would hate the lover who had robbed you Of your young love, your fairest, freshest feelings, To cast them all into a wanton's lap ? If you can understand this hate, hear me ! It is the Great Man's love, his dream, his passion To rule mankind ; and if some meaner being Supplant him in that love, what should he do ? Mad. V. Despise B. O foolish, idle empty word ! Can the poor houseless wretch who has been cast On the scant common by a narrow landlord, Can he afford to talk about despising ? Yet, I tell you, he is not half so wronged, AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 125 As the great heart, when that is dispossessed, And its large aims are thwarted. Mad. V. Dearest Henry, I cannot argue, I can only weep ! Because of one thing only, I am certain, That no one can be happy if he hates. B. Come, look at me, and let me kiss your tears, Look up at me, anon you asked me why My lip was curling, and my eyes flashed joy, It is that hate too has its happiness, And mine is now at hand. Hark, there are wheels. Now, God in heaven grant me this be not Pope. I am so sick of cynical disgusts, And his long, long monotony of sneers, And murmurs, and repinings ; I so yearn For action, and for those who minister To that great want of mine, that if this be Philosopher, or Atheist, or Divine, I shall leave you with them, and go away. Mad V. Nay, it is I am going, for I see Wyndham and Pulteney coming up the lawn, And could I hate at all I should hate them ; For they take you from me till I despair 126 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. Of my one dream now ever coming true, When you and I should leave this hateful land, This land of ceaseless rain, and ceaseless speech, Of ceaseless agitation and unrest, For that dear France, where we have loved so well. AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 127 SCENE II. BOLINGBROKE, PuLTENEY, WYNDHAM. B. How is it, Pulteney, How is it, dear Wyndham Was the House full ? The speech it went off well ? Or was the attack too savage ? That hit I gave you, Of the sole minister, did they cheer it ? tell me ; I almost think myself St. John again When thinking of that House. What neither speak, It cannot have gone ill. W. Well, but most ill : I spoke what you B. Speak not of speech to me, You are too flurried, nervous, like a child, Ready to cast your troubles any where So it be from yourself. Pulteney, speak you ; You are a man not always in extremes, A brave and earnest man, not to be shaken Out of your manhood by the storm's first whisper. 128 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. W. And what am I ? B. Pshaw, ask yourself, not me ! Now let me hear the scene from the beginning ; I know the Commons' temper, and can tell Better than you, perhaps, what you have done. Who opened ? P. Bromley. B. O, I guess his speech ; The travelled squire, all pied antithesis Of what he saw abroad, and saw not here ; The white for foreign parts, the black for England, Was it not so ? Who next ? P. Another Tory, St. Aubin. Then in answer, long Sir Thomas, And next, a cloud of Catalan-like troops, Cholmondeley and Somerset, Lowther, Watkin Wynne All fighting without lead, and without method, A dreary, hopeless, desultory war. B. But what of their opponents ? P. Even worse : Conduit, Cornwallis, Bladen, the Attorney ; I never saw a House before so weary, So drowsy, so oppressed, so faint and languid. The feelings of July, with the same sense Of coming thunder. B. But it came at last ? AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 129 P. With Barnard and Hynde Cotton, on a sudden, The dead, inert, chaotic mass was touched With the new soul they flung in the debate, And Party Spirit woke, and leaped to life, With all her arms upon her, men scarce knew How eager, anxious, roused they had become, When some stray cheer, or other, was caught up, And echoed, and re-echoed, and returned, Which showed the real battle had begun. B. And he, how looked he, Walpole, did he quail Beneath their joint attack ? P. No, he put on His dogged, common, most unmeaning face, And beckoned Yonge. B. Suave, soft, mellifluous Yonge,* That oratorical kaleidoscope, All broken thoughts, and loose antitheses, And coloured words, and vitreous sentences, And parti-coloured facts, and random hits, And that deep tone of pulmonary pathos, I think I can well guess the effect he made ; Did he not warm, exhilarate, give a tone, * Sir William Yonge. Dr. Johnson thought more highly of his eloquence than of that of any of his contemporaries. 130 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. A higher craving, an intense anxiety, To all around. Now would I have been there, But to have beat him with the stilts he used. P. Nay not e'en you, when in your palmier hour, Ever achieved a more superb success, Than Wyndham did. Now when I was a boy, Full of those classic tales, when states were young, I never more admired, or wondered more ; It was a grave, a great exercitation, A solemn triumph, Roman in its pomp, And in its quiet outset Arguments, And jests, and taunts, and all the foe's best weapons, Were seized by him, and pressed into his service, To grace the grandeur of his slow commencement. B. Dear Wyndham, pardon me I was most wrong, I am grown old and fretful, and but now Spoke bitter words to you, which were as painful As when I chide myself. You will forgive me, As you have often done before, my true dear friend, Will you not, Wyndham ? But you must not speak, For you will never tell me your success. And Pulteney's tidings are to me as music, Or as a lover's voice to love-sick ears ; For I am hate -sick, sick with hate deferred, You know how long, and now I would not lose AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 131 One little accent of this sweet revenge Which you have given me, for that white staff I was the last of Englishmen to hold. Then Pulteney, slow, prolong me my delight ; Be slow, be very slow. P. As Wyndham was, In those prepared cold cruelties of his. He seemed some Spaniard of the Cortez school, Polite and grave in his atrocities. And with a circumstantial savageness, A smooth deliberate solemnity, Which more enhanced the torture that he gave ! Even that Norfolk temper could not bear them, That heavy clay, that drilled indifference, Walpole's own Saxon self gave way at last, And his hand sought his face, and there it moved With all the quick rapidity of shame, As though it sought to hide it. B. Ha stop awhile! O, ye drear months of wasting agony, While I have preyed upon my own hot heart ! O, ye long hours, which have been as ages ! O Shame, Humiliation, Misery, And loss of self-reliance, which, with the old Is bitterness, twice bitter ! Now I swear K2 132 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. By this one word of Pulteney, ye are paid for ! Yea, I would give them all again to feel The exquisite enjoyment of this thought That Walpole has known pain ; for these dull souls, When they do feel, their' s is a hell indeed, I could wish his for ever. P. Hear me out Not that attack which banished ^Eschines, Not the Muraena, or the Catilines, Had crushed, annihilated, withered more, Than Wyndham's at his close. Like peals of thunder, With every flash of lightning, came a cheer, Louder and louder still, but when at last He ceased, in one great blaze of sarcasm, Not one remote, or fragmentary part, Of that hot house, but rose, and cried, and shouted, As if to show the tempest had moved there. B. I tremble now, it is at such a moment That great men act. Yes, I can see you come To tell me Walpole is, in your eyes, Great, (Where all the rest must have been so indeed, ) Virgil's Great Man, who came and hushed the storm; Is it not so ? You might have stayed away, And left me to this lonely farm of mine, Rather than bring such tidings. AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 133 W. Why be bitter, When you repent so, St. John? P. No, he rose not, Unmasked, unnerved, unmanned, he could not rise, But, with an epileptic impulse, forced Dull Harry Pelham forwards, who began With all his own methodical composure, As if no speech, no Wyndham B. Aye, 'tis thus 'Tis always so, what boots it that your blade Be of the truest temper, damascened By care and art, and painful nicety, When it avails no more than a blunt iron Against the vulgar crassitude of man ? Dull Harry Pelham ! God I do not wonder The edge of Attic eloquence was turned By that block wit of his. Yet could I pity So poor a fraud, a subterfuge so mean. Yes, I could mourn for Walpole, that his fame Is made of such vile elements as these. You understand me ; some, perhaps, there are, Would count this trick of Walpole shrewd and subtle, And yet, I swear, it fills me with much shame To see what Scapins are the world's Great Men, That I could weep for wishing to be one. 134 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. O dullard world, with all your blindfold blame ! dullard world, that brands some general If he betray the troops he ought to lead ! But this, this more refined poltroonery, That never meets you broadly face to face, This spiritual cowardice of soul, This moral laches, always on the wheel, This recreant want of root, and faith in self, Which seeks for props in artifice and fraud, And shuffling trick, and false legerdemain, That this dull world it has not wit to see, But open-mouthed and blatant it admires. P. There is a prescience in your bitterness. B. How so ? P. Why, after some few words of mine, 1 was as brief as I could be, in order That by delay he might not find the time To gain the mettle Wyndham scared him out of, He rose at length but not in his defence, But in attack, so plain, so straight, so bold JB. That you have cowered from it, and slunk here. P. No for he treated us as puppets merely ; But you, at once, directly and by name, He flung himself against, and with a hale So hearty and so honest, that his Whigs AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 135 Rallied once more like hounds at his halloo, To hunt you down, who hunted them of old, In a full chorus of brute hate. B. Indeed ! Reach me those cigarillas Wharton sent When last he was in Spain. W. Why trifle so? B. Nay, I forgot, for in your present mood Another of his gifts might suit you better, Some new and fiery Xerez, such, he says, As can throw warmth into a Bourbon's blood, Make Farinelli think he is a man, Nerve the enervate, give a dastard heart, Make cowards brave, the helpless help themselves, Will you not ring for it ? P. Lord Bolingbroke, Enough of this. We have not played your game, To be reproached and taunted with its failure ; It was a bold adventure, risk, and gain, And conduct, and attack, and this defeat, It was all great. And for one little moment, The Victory was with us. As it is, Walpole has struck a note will rouse all England. There is no follower of his motley camp, No common sutler of a pamphleteer, 136 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. No broken vendor of his perjured soul, No placeling Whig, or hireling, but will join The gathering clamour for your banishment. B. I do not contradict you. Few should know That camp so well as you, who left it lately. W. Shame on you, St. John ! do not brawl and quarrel, Like hackney-chairmen ; or, as Townshend does With Walpole, in Gay's Opera.* Let us rather Ponder your danger well ; these stubborn haters Are persevering in their rancorous slowness. For Pulteney, or for me, the worst can happen,' Is that we must keep still ; but you, dear St. John, You must leave England, it is not so long Since Derwentwater died B. Death is God's gift ; Your gift is shame. I should prefer the first. W. What would you do ? What can you hope to do? What can you bring against the House? B. THE PEOPLE - f W. How Revolution ! * The Peachum and Lockit scene, which was written at Lord Townshend and Sir R. Walpole. AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 137 B. Aye, there spoke Petworth, A house in town, and many a broad estate : Now could I curse thee, Property, to see Your two pale faces, Wyndham, Pulteney, now. O, Property ! what art thou but a weight To crush all soul, and paralyze all strength, And grind all heart, and action, out of Man ! Yes Revolution ! since you call it so. But not a delicate and dainty trouble, A ruffle in a ewer of milk of roses, Made by a noble's finger ; not a levee Of Dukes, Earls, Viscounts, Barons, Marquises, All pearls, brocades, and new-plucked strawb'ry-leaves, All coronets and ermine ; not a plot Where nothing vulgarer than peers conspired That glorious, pious, and immortal change, The Danbys, Halifaxes, Somersets, Hydes, Sunderlands, Godolphins, Churchills made, With such peculiar profit to the poor. That is not Revolution. W. What then is ? B. What you might know, were but the people wise! What your sons' sons must some day know in England, If the Few govern only for the Few, As they will do. Their sway perchance may widen, 138 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. This little knot of" seigneurs of a circle,"* Pelhams,and Bedfords, Graftons, Townshends, Cowers, This necklace round the throat of Royalty, Will haply become larger, and at length That Greater Middle Class will force its way To power and dominion ; this may be. But there shall come a day, when a yet greater, The Greatest Class of all, shall know its strength : And the poor trampled people rise at last Teach it to them. Nay, what is your reluctance ? I ask you but to lead a coming movement, I ask you but to speak a coming truth, Throw yourselves forwards, and your names shall be Borne onwards by the universal stream Of passing generations, what you will not ! Two pebbles stiffening in a torrent's course, You cannot hinder Time from flowing on. Then, in your spite, if men like you and Pulteney, Great names Great understandings, will not stoop To tell the People what they ought to be, They will find out, and show you what they are ! But mark the change there is an Eastern tale * From 1547 till the French Revolution, Lucca was governed by a nar- row aristocracy, called in derision " i signori del cerchiolino." AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 139 Which speaks of an imprisoned Afrite, who, In the first hour of his hard durance, vowed Treasure and Empire to whatever mortal Might be his benefactor and release him. But Time passed fruitless on, and in his hate And bitter disappointment, he then swore That he would crush and slay him when he came. Thus is it with a People ! There is still, Yes, still a little left of Time to do That out of love, which will be out of hate. Then save your country, Wyndham, save it, Pulteney. P. This from an old St. Germain's minister ! B. Nay, sneer not, Pulteney, for I feel that sneer, And it were well we should not part unfriends. O, Liberty ! if for one little hour In my wild youth, I faithless proved to thee, To that instinctive truth, which is thy creed ; O hear me now ! hearken and forgive ! For thou too hast a judgment-day to come, Thy judgment-day, when justice shall be done. Thou last sole passion of a heart deceived, Which trusted many, only to be left ; O aid me now, sustain me with belief! For though man changes, thou wilt never change, And thy bright dreams are friends more sure and certain, 140 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. Than this world's Wyndhams, Pulteneys, e'er can be. Thou Mother of fair Order who hast seen So many empires, kingdoms, tyrannies, Powers, dominions, principalities, Dark usurpations of authority, Pass by like clouds, that for a gloomy moment, Stained the pure radiance of God's own design, Whose Truth shone forth in calmness, like the Sun, On men as brothers, and on all as equals. Thou Mother of strong faith ! whose strong convictions Shone on such lives as Galileo's was, And upon Dante's exile, and his death. Thou, whom the graveyard of the past awaits, With all its lost regenerative thoughts, And fruitless indignations against wrong, And aspirations after distant truth, Which thou shalt, in the course of coming ages, Reach, gather, sanction, and confirm at last. Thou Mother of kind Peace, whose final triumph Shall be the Resurrection of the Poor, In those last days, when all mankind shall live In one fair confraternity of Love ! And that sweet legend of the younger world, Shall come to pass, when at a Freeman's voice, The walls of prisons, and of palaces, AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 141 Chains, scaffolds, frauds, monopolies, privilege, Secret tribunals, aristocracies, Armies, and constitutions, all shall fall In shapeless dissolution, formless chaos ; And strife and struggle shall have passed away, Save where the young shall vie with one another In offering gladness to their happy sires, And strewing in their pleasant paths fair flowers Of duty and affection when their lives Shall know no sorrow, save when gentle hearts, May sometimes mourn for those who fought for Truth Through scorn, and cold men's envy, and the loss Of lukewarm friends, who shrunk from earnestness ; Then will they not forget how Bolingbroke, In those dark times of English History, Thought, counselled, acted, only lived for thee ! THE debate upon which I have founded the foregoing scene, was on the repeal of the Septennial Bill, in 1734. Tindal says, " All the writers for the Opposition had always presumed, that the Minister found his account in septennial, more than he could do in triennial parlia- ments and as the prolongation of the time of a par- 142 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. liament's sitting* from three to seven years, was no other than an expedient for preserving the peace of the nation, at a particular juncture, the cause of which they presumed no longer to exist, they summoned up all their force to make a decisive push on this occasion." That, what Tindal says of Sir R. Walpole's having preserved the peace of the Nation, by the introduction of the Septennial Bill, is true, there can be no doubt, because the country was, at the particular juncture he speaks of, in a state of feeling in which it would have returned, not only a Tory, but a Jacobite majority, against him. But, how far so flagrant a violation of the Constitution can be justified, as, for a Parliament to vote to itself a four years' longer lease of its existence, is a difficulty which Whig historians can hardly overcome. Archdeacon Coxe, aware that attack is often the best mode of defence, thus assails the Opposition for their conduct on this motion of Mr. Bromley. " The Oppo- sition," he says, "was divided. The Tories and Jaco- bites who had strenuously resisted the introduction of the Bill, could not obtain the co-operation of the dis- affected Whigs, as it seemed to imply a dereliction of their principles to vote for the repeal of a bill, which they had once thought necessary for the security of the Protestant succession. At the repeated instigations of AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. 143 Bolingbroke, Sir William Wyndham and the leading Tories persisted, and at length carried their point. The Whigs reluctantly complied, and proved, by their manner of conducting the debate, the awkward situation in which they were placed. The motion was made by Bromley, and seconded by Sir John St. Aubin. The only Whigs of any consequence, who spoke for the question, were Sir John Barnard, who said only a few words, and Pulteney,who rose late in the debate. He made a short speech, and prefaced it with an apology for his apparent inconsistency, in voting for the Repeal of a Bill which he had supported at the time of its in- troduction." Coxes Walpole. Why, if this charge were to hold good, it would be inconsistent, after having once voted for a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, in a time of public danger, to urge its re- enactment when that danger had passed away ! The close of Sir William Wyndham's speech upon this debate, was, perhaps, one of the loftiest examples of English eloquence. It appears so even through all the uniformity of the Parliamentary history. Nor was Sir R. Walpole's speech unequal to the occasion. It was a master-piece of oratorical power, grave, weighty, and crushing. The effect of his invective against Bo- lingbroke, was such, that it again banished him from 144 AN OPPOSITION SCENE IN THE LAST CENTURY. England. How bitterly Bolingbroke felt the failure of his schemes the reproaches of his Whig allies the triumph of Walpole may be conceived by this passage in one of his letters to Sir William Wyndham. " I am still," he writes, " the same proscribed man, sur- rounded with difficulties, exposed to mortifications, and unable to take any share in the service, but that which I have taken hitherto, and which I think you would not persuade me to take in the present state of affairs. My part is over, and he who remains on the stage after his part is over, deserves to be hissed off. SONNET. 145 SONNET, " Old times unqueen tliee, and old loves endear." HARTLEY COLERIDGE. EACH heart has some rare dream, which Angels deign To bear from their high home, and which once seen Doth ever at strange times come back again, The dearer, then, that it before had been An unfor^otten and most cherished guest. Such those sweet looks that make me ever fain Recall each link, and love-knot, in the chain Of those old days of childhood not unblest ! And Thou there is no change methinks in thee, Save that the spell is stronger, and the light Of thy quick eyes more winning, soft yet bright, Like those which Petrarch saw, or feigned to see, In the wild trances of his lone delight, Yet not so dear to him, as thine to me. 146 GRASSMERK. GKASSMEBE, Beautiful Grassmere ! when I saw thee last, A spell was on thy waters, now again, I stand beside them, but the plashing rain With fretful speed pours heavily and fast, And the dark clouds which lean upon thee, cast Their sorrows on thee, too, as though the sky Wooed in its sadness, no less sympathy Than in the stainless radiance of the past In all its happier splendours when the sound Of a sweet voice with many-coloured chains, And links of delicate speech, my spirit bound, And the hot blood danced wildly through my veins, Leaping with joy . Pale Grassmere, I am now Joyless, and lone, and desolate as thou. ELEANORE. 147 ELEANORE, How may full-sail'd verse express, How may measur'd words adore The luxuriant symmetry Of thy floating gracefulness, Eleanore ? Every turn and glance of thine, Every lineament divine, Eleanore ? ALFRED TENNYSON. I. THOUGH my every hope be o'er, I will love thee all the more, Let me say so, Eleanore : II. Not because I can descry In thy soft and flashing eye, All thy childhood's Napoli ; 148 ELEANORE. III. Not because thou art more fair Than that namesake of Ferrare* Who, like thee, made Love Despair. IV. Not because in those old days Ne'er was known such theme for praise As your grave and graceful ways. V. Not because your young words fall, (Full of thoughtful truth withal,) In sweet cadence musical. VI. Not because you do combine Many an unfailing sign Of a great Patrician line. * Eleonora d'Este ELEANORE. 149 VII. Not because with simplest air As of them half unaware Beauties choicest gifts you bear. VIII. Faery gifts from lavish Nature, Slender form, and finished feature, And the grace of Grecian stature. IX. Not for these each slighter merit- But because you do inherit Meek, serene, and gentle spirit. X. Yes, for this I love you so, That I would rather life forego, Than lose my love, to lose my woe. 150 ELEANORE. XI. Then in pity hear once more Chance what may, I will adore Thee, thee only Eleanore. CAMBRIDGE. 151 CAMBRIDGE, 1837. Thou should'st have lived, dear friend, in those old days When deeds of high and chivalrous emprize Were guerdoned by the sympathy of eyes That smiled on Valour or by roundelays Sung by the palmer minstrel to their praise. Then, surely, some Provencal tale of old, That spoke of Zion and Crusade, had told Thy knightly name, and thousand gentle ways. Yet, do I love thee more, albeit I blend Bright thoughts for thee in hopeful prophecy, Because thou art, in truth, my own dear friend Who watchest haply with no careless eye The cloud that sometimes saddens on my brow. And .kindly chidest me, as thou didst, but now. 152 ESKDALE. ESKDALE, I. I STAND on Eskdale, down its side, Leaps a stream the crags among, In the high revel of her pride Shouting a rejoicing song To her sisters from afar answering again. II. On, yet onward, now she dashes, Cleaving the clifts asunder Lightning-like 1 , the water flashes, And the earth's echoes thunder, As to trumpet her march, in triumph to the plain. JtSKDALE. 1 53 III. Anon, as lowly vassals bring Their tribute-gifts and tender A tuneful homage, lingering In slow and queenly splendour, She pauses as to hear their soft monotony. IV. Thence bounding with a joyous bound, Like a Maenad in her might, From yon rock she leaps to the ground, In a long white line of light, Veiled by thick spray, like the moon in a shadowy sky, V. When a desolate maiden, she moves In saddest and mournfullest guise, Still grieving for him, whom she loves, Though now not on Latmos he lies Watching her sad eye, till his own filled full with joy. 154 ESKDALE. VI. Sweet stream to me thou art calling, o ' With thy low and pleasant tone, On my sense in rapture falling While I stand by thee alone, Dreaming as wild a dream as ever the Carian boy. AMBLE8IDE CHURCH. 155 AMBLESIDE CHURCH, I. I stood on the same spot, where he Whose House it was, had piteously Set my doubt-fettered spirit free From the strong thraldom of a lie, And raised it to Himself, on high, One little year ago. Around Were the same faces ; all things wore Their ancient aspect, and a sound, That solemn sound, I loved of yore, Fell softly on my heart, and soothed it as before. J56 AMBLESIDE CHURCH. II. And now, albeit I am alone, Musing, as o'er some new found prize, The music of that winning tone Floats near, and thronging memories Ever of this dear day arise. I stand within that chancel still, And he, my own dear friend was nigh, And well I marked the sudden thrill In his quick frame, and kindling eye, And yet more love him now for this new sympathy^ III. Dreamlike it was, in sooth, that hour, Again that solemn tone to hear, To see, bowed down before its power, The accusing ghost of the dead year Evoke with shuddering and fear All deeds of sin and folly done, And some few hopes, which early died, Like wild heath-flowers, that one by one Rise by the Mountain-waters' side, [dried. But droop, and die, whene'er her living streams be AMBLESTDE CHURCH. 157 IV. But haply, if the Autumn rain Fall, in its freshness, from on high, From their parched graves, they rise again To life, uplooking mindfully With grateful love to the blue sky. Soft thoughts, and yearning hopes again, To day in me have taken root, And my poor heart, grown wise, would fain They yet should live, to bear good fruit, E'en when to them, the voice which bade them live is mute. I. r ,K THE Dae de Richelieu and Madame de Tournclles are tte a tte. The most superb and successful gal- lant, of his time is with its most renowned a:id admired beauty. Are they lovers? Court scandal hat long since called them such. But from their manner this might be mistaken for their first interview. Tin u conversation is quick and ceaseless, their gestures animated and frequent. The lady's looks an- full of l>l" li'-s, perhaps of indignation, her language (nil of n TII sal, almost of rebuke. Yet surely that wooer must succeed. What can be so persuasive as the low pas- sionate tone in which he pleads? What so touching as his earnest and deferential humility' Years have now passed by since he first knelt at the royal feet of Adelaide of Burgundy, or vowed eternal love to tin soft eyes of Mademoiselle de Valois. Yet he never u suit with more careful urgent) ormori KiriiELIEU. 159 studied fascination than at this moment. He never looked so handsome, or so miserable. His voice never faltered with half so graceful a cadence ; his eyes never shone half so lustrous, through simulated tears. Is it for her smiles and favours that he is thus inir portunate and instant? Gentle guesser, he has already been amply rewarded with them. Is it only a passing quarrel ? Is he imploring forgiveness for some acci- dental slight, or transient infidelity ? Or is he at length, inveterate and practised libertine, reclaimed into love by those voluptuous and imperious charms ? Fair reader, we are sorry for it, but his heart was never colder, his passions more under sway, his wit and reason more dominant than now. But, he is fast gaining his point. The resistance is getting feebler and feebler. Obstacles after obstacles are disappearing. And, if each concession is given with a sigh, the glance which accompanies it seems prouder and more haughty. Never was so becoming a sur- render, never a capitulation where the vanquished seemed so happy and well satisfied. Only one ob- jection is remaining. The lady's own words will best illustrate the morals of the Court of Louis XV. " But, even if I were to consent, Louis, to forego your love, to accept your sacrifice, how should I over 160 RICHELIEU. look my sisters in the face? Poor Louise* would be so unhappy ! " " She would soon console herself with her rosary and missal. Besides, she cannot be more wretched than she is at present. And, as for Madame de Vintimille, you cannot have any scruple about her. She has already behaved so ill to your eldest sister in sup- planting and disgracing her !" " But the King." The proud beauty seemed embarrassed in finishing her sentence, but Richelieu had no difficulty in divining the doubt which was passing in her mind. " Look there, Marie," he said, pointing to a mirror; " those eyes have the same witchery as Madame de Mailly's, but they are far more brilliant ; that figure is as graceful as Madame de Vintimille's, but it is far more worthy of a Queen." That last remark has gone home. The poison, so skilfully administered, has entered deep into her soul. She has already begun to know that fierce and fiery * The Puchesse de Mailly. It is of her, that the touching story is told that coming one day late to St. Roch, and the crowd giving way to let her pass, some ruffian hallooed out, " Voild bien du bruit pour une ." She humbly interrupted him, " Monsieur, puisque vous la connaissez, priez Dieupour elle" RICHELIEU. 161 passion, so rarely felt by woman, the love of those high above one in station. It was as if the wildest extremes of vanity were blending with the wildest extremes of ambition, to intoxicate and madden her. Need we continue the interview to tell how mourn- fully, and with what elaborate melancholy, Richelieu took leave in resigning his pretensions ; or with what indifference she, who of late watched his every move- ment with interest, now, with her heart already full of turbulent hopes, witnessed his departure ? Nor is it within our province, it belongs to history, to recount the success of Madame de Tournelles, her triumph over the affections of Louis XV., her speedy acquisi- tion of her tabouret, her renown as Duchesse de Cha- teauroux, her warlike counsels to her lover, her impa- tience, at all hazards, for glory. Nor is the author of this scheme unknown to history. The broken fortunes of the house of Richelieu were once more restored. The favourite of the favourite became the first man in France. The Cardinal him- self, in the meridian of his rule, was not more power- ful from his sagacious counsels, than his great nephew had become by his sagacious love. His unrivalled taste for magnificence and splendour was now again able to display itself. All that superb ostentation, 162 RICHELIEU. which had so easily astonished the simple inhabitants of Vienna, was now even to dazzle Parisians, who could remember the Mississippi period. But his extrava- gance, if as lavish and excessive as during his famous embassy, was far more discriminate and just. He no longer paraded the streets with seventy-five carriages, drawn by English horses gorgeously caparisoned, and so loosely shod with silver plates, that with every step they flung them off, as their master's largess to the bystanders. But Academicians began to whisper that if Richelieu's verses were execrable, his suppers were exquisite. Voltaire, always his friend, and always alive to the merits of the fortunate, pronounced him the most agreeable of men. And if the handsomest women of the day vied with each other in proffering him their favours, the Duchesse de Chateauroux never abated in her's pensions, reversions, orders, a Colonel- cy for the young Due de Fronsac, preferment for all his relations and retainers, followed one another in rapid succession. And when at last he was nominated Ge- neral of the Armies of France, in one of the most eventful wars in her annals, men had become so habi- tuated to his good fortune, that they ceased to wonder at its origin. It may have seemed without use to have referred to RICHELIEU. 163 it ; but it is well, sometimes, to reflect, even in Eng- land, upon the causes of Great Revolutions. It is well to remember the dangers of example. The means by which Mirabeau achieved his eminence, become extenuated, when we remember how that of Richelieu was attained, and that many a life in the Court of Louis XV., was to suggest some broad and ferocious parallel in the Revolution. 164 THE QUESTION. THE QUESTION, SHALL I die ? If all my tendencies be to evil, shall I not interrupt the series, and break the chain of my misdeeds? Shall I riot save myself all the responsi- bility of future wickedness ? Shall I not die while I yet have heart enough to do it, while I have feeling to hate the cold, mean, false, old age which perhaps awaits me ? Ay, out of fear for this world's future. Out of love, too, for the next world's future. What is the change ? The bright impalpable for the sordid palpable, the infinite for the definite the unknown for the known. Who shall tell me what is beyond the bright blue waters, and blue skies ? Who cannot tell me, what man's youth and true ambition end in ? It were false reason when the one road leads only to heavy-heartedness and disappointment, and the other goes, we know not whither, not to adventure upon the new path. Why then do we not all die ? Because we THE QUESTION. 165 dare not. The world has grown old, and timid, and faint-spirited, and dotage-driven. Prescription saith, '* You must not," and man blindly acquiesces. The fear of the past is called wisdom, and it is received as a religion. Are there not more religion and true faith in those ceremonies of death which the old East still cele- brates, where it is believed that God will reward self- sacrifice ? A very young man had written rapidly thus far, when he happened to lift up hiseyes,and look outof his window. Bridge, and street, and quays were alive with people. It was a fete in Protestant Geneva, and Rousseau re- membered that they were of rare occurrence. Feelings change quickly with the young. It was not long be- fore he was in the midst of a group of revellers with a glass of his favourite Arbois sparkling before him, and trying to believe that he was not indifferent to the fairest maiden of his party. But, long years afterwards, when vanity had chilled his feelings, and calumnies had made him fretful, he must sometimes have regretted that he did not give his soul up to its Creator while yet fresh with the sunny feelings of his youth. At seventy when he had reached a cold, mean, false old age, he did that which at twenty he must so often have intended. 166 THE SERENADE. THE SEKENADE, I. I stand beneath thy lattice, My fair-haired Emilie, Though standing 'neath thy lattice, Thou wilt not look on me. II. Tben shall my fancy try, With a weak revenge and faint, Thyself, and unseen charms, In memory to paint. THIS SERENADE. 167 III. Those eyes of almond shape, By silken lashes shaded, That Greek and Goddess brow With a crown of ringlets braided. IV. Now though thou hast withdrawn, I am as happy here, Almost, as if thou wert In all thy beauty near. V. Nay, blame me not, I toucli Thy soft and rounded fingers, And my lip is pressed to one Where the dew of childhood lingers. 168 THE SERENADE. VI. Then can you wonder why I dream whole hours away, Beneath that chamber window, Where thou hast scorned to stay ? It was with much feeling and some sense of music, that these few indifferent stanzas were sung, one summer night in a garden of Provence, some eighty years ago. It was the very scene of song, the land of Petrarch and the Troubadours. But that chateau of Louis XIII., with its cold, regular, formal, aspect, those straight and stately walks of Louis XIV., those marble nymphs and goddesses, which seemed to shiver in the cold moon- light, that long uniformity of wings and windows, that grille all gilt with blazonry, these things had far more of the eighteenth century than the old times of Poets and Cavaliers. But it was with as much of " The pang, the agony, the doubt," as if he had been a courtier of King Rene's, as much of impatience as he had been upon the eve of his Cm- THE SERENADE. 169 sade, that a young lover kept an unremitting gaze upon one window of the Chtiteau. At length his pa- tience seemed fairly wearied out. He took up a small stone and flung it gently against the glass. It was not long before it was opened. There were flowers, geraniums, and sweet orange blossoms in the balcony before it but the lover could distinguish through their clustering leaves the regular features, and long fair hair of her he loved. " Hist! hist! it is I." The lady listened. She leaned her delicate head forward. There was a movement, as of doubt. " I, Gabriel de Mirabeau." She heard the name, and at once, with an immediate impulse, closed the lattice. It could not be coquetry; there could not be a more unequivocal symptom of dislike, a more natural instinct of repulsion. But Gabriel de Mirabeau was not a man to be dis- liked and repelled with impunity. He walked to the end of the long greensward before the chateau, and in his passionate mortification, made something of the same vow that another man of genius, our English Sher- idan, made later, under circumstances not dissimilar.* * " That woman shall be my wife," he exclaimed, upon Miss Ogle's marked repugnance to him, after his introduction to her. 170 THE SERENADE. He came back before the chateau. He took up another stone, and flung it with more force against an adjoining window. He was just about to repeat his summons, when it was flung open with some violence, but a very different figure was now presented to his view. Even without that brocaded dressing-gown, there could be no mistaking the Marquis, of Louis XV's. age. Mirabeau's voice grew only more tender and melo- dious. " It is I, Emilie, I, Gabriel de Mirabeau, who adore you ; whom you have deigned to love ; whose hair I am pressing to my lips ; whose letters are shrined in my heart ; whose tokens" How much longer he might have gone on, it would be difficult to say, when the whizzing of a ball close by him, and the report of a pistol, might have alarmed him for his safety. But Mirabeau's nerves were not as another man's. He looked carelessly round, and leaped lightly upwards to a balcony, where he was protected by a sort of verandah. What he had calculated upon took place. In less than a minute, the Marquis was at his side, and another pistol was at his head. " Villain ! swear that you will marry her, or I shoot you on the spot. Swear, this instant !" Mirabeau knocked up the weak arm of the old THE SERENADE. 171 Marquis, and pretended a well dissimulated reluc- tance. " Swear !" The pistol was again levelled at him ; but this time Mirabeau affected to quail before the sight. "I swear, to-morrow nay, here now I will marry your daughter, only only spare my life." " Coward !" muttered the old nobleman, and all the ancien regime was in his manner ; so differently would he have acted in his own youth. " You are a disgrace to your order !" Within the week Monsieur le Comte Gabriel de Mi- rabeau was married to Mademoiselle Emilie de Covet. There were censorious people who remarked that the marriage was rather a sudden one ; and some went so far even as to say, that the Count had been sur- prised on a balcony by the Marquis de Marignane, her father. But this story can scarcely be true, because it is told in history. One thing only is certain, that Mirabeau did not un- learn the bad habit of pistolling he had been taught by his father-in-law. And the letter of farewell which he made his wife write (under fear of being shot if she refused) to the lover of her girlhood, whom she haply expected on that summer evening, was perhaps the most remarkable even of the letters of Mirabeau. 172 THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE, I. Now, as there is a God in Heaven, and Jesu is his son, And to Our Lady grace is given, and to the Holy One ; Now, as in sooth, the Church is Truth ; and if it be her will That false should fail, and right prevail, and good outlast the ill, II. Then by this Heart, and by this Cross, 1 and by our own Vendee ; By every feeling man can feel, or prayer that man can pray, By hope in Him, 2 round whom we kneel, I charge you all to swear One last oath with La Rochejaquelein, to dare as he will dare. THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. 173 III And if my words vaunt overmuch, and if I seem to say That I shall be the boldest, or the foremost in the fray, Full many a name of older fame, there are around I know, Talmont, Foret, Lescure, D'Elbee, and brave Cathelineau. IV. And many a gallant dalesman, and many a mountaineer, To whom their Church, and King, and France, and Gentlemen are dear; [keen; Not strong like theirs my strength may be, my zeal shall be more For they have only heard of that Paris I have seen. V. Where Fraud, and Crime, and Marat reign, and the Triple Colours wave O'er the Churches of Our Lady, and the Blessed Genevieve; Where Agnus, Pix, and Crucifix, are made the wanton's spoil, And the bells which called to vespers, now call to blood and broil. 174 THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. VI. The Priest, those gentle Priests and good, your fathers loved to hear, Sole type below, 'midst work and woe, of the God whom we revere. There's not a street, trod under feet, they have not dyed with gore ; There's not a stone that does not own one martyrdom, or more. VII. The King, I saw the Accursed Cap on his anointed head ; And scoff, and scorn, and gibe, and jest, and mocking words were said ; But he took the nearest hand, and he laid it on his breast, And he bade it count the pulses, and bade it thence learn rest. VIII. The Queen, her proud lip curled with scorn, through all those fierce alarms, Till Santerre came beside her with the Dauphin in his arms; Then, her mien grew still and stately, though she shook in every limb; Her fear was for her infant, her calmness was for him. THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. 175 IX. And then and there I swore Santerre should rue that bitter wrong ; And then and there I swore Santerre should learn my name ere long; And that, this year, should Paris hear, of the loyal hearts and true, In the Vendee, and the Bourbonnais, and the woodlands of Poitou. 3 X. Now, swore I right, or swore I wrong, it is for you to show, For here is the white standard, and yonder is the foe : And by your aid, that oath I made, oh, keep it as your own, May yet restore, (like Joan's of yore,) the Lilies and the Throne. XI. Your pardon, Sirs, the rebel stirs his vanguard is at hand, Let others will, let me fulfill, what orders you command ; What if my years are but nineteen, 4 oh, think what I have seen O, think of that insulted King, and of that Hero Queen. 176 THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. XII. " Then follow me, where'er it be, I make within the foe, And if I flinch, or fail one inch, there straightway strike me low ; And if I fall, swear one and all, ye will avenge my loss." Now, Charge! for De La Rochejaquelein, for the Heart, and for the Cross ! 5 NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. 177 NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. The Loyalist Badge, expressive of feelings at once natural and religious, a devotion of " the heart and of the Cross." 2 The Vendean peasants, Madame de La Rocheja- quelein informs us, always said their prayers before engaging, and most of them signed the Cross every time they fired. They never passed any of the great wooden Crosses, with which the country is studded, without kneeling before it. A scene of this description, at the battle of Fontenay, is especially memorable. " Before the attack, the soldiers received absolution. The generals then said to them, ' Now, friends, we have N 178 NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. no powder ; we must take these cannon with clubs. We must recover Marie-Jeanne !* Let us see who can run the fastest.' The soldiers of M. de Lescure faltered. He advanced, alone, thirty paces before them, and then stopping, called out, ' Vive le Hoi.' A battery of six pieces fired upon him with case-shot. His clothes were pierced, his spur carried away, and his right boot torn, but he was not wounded. ' You see, my friends,' he cried instantly, 'the Blues do not aim well.' The peasants took courage and rushed on. M. de Lescure, to keep up with them, was obliged to put his horse to the full trot. At that moment, perceiving a large Cru- cifix, they threw themselves on their knees before it. M. de Bauge wanted to urge them on. ' Let them pray,' said M. de Lescure calmly. They soon rose, and again rushed on." 3 These were as nearly as possible his own words. 4 " For my part, I know I am but a child, but I hope I have courage enough to supply my father's place to you. Follow me, if I advance against the enemy. Kill me, if I turn my back upon them. Revenge me, if they slay me." the words of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, * A twelve-pounder, which had been taken by the Republicans. NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. 179 before the battle of Aubiers. History has since adopted, and will immortalize them. 5 The fate of Henri de La Rochejaquelein is as well known and as renowned as Bayard's. But the death of a hero can scarcely be too often recorded. One day riding a little in advance of his small army, he fell in with two republican soldiers, upon whom his troops were about to fire, when he cried, " No, no, give them quarter," and coming forward towards them called upon them to surrender. Without a word, one of them raised his gun, and shot him through the head. " Thus perished, at twenty-one, Henri de La Rochejaquelein. Even to this day when the peasants recall the brilliancy of his adventures, his courage, his modesty, his gentle- ness, his qualities as a soldier and a comrade, they speak of him with pride and affection. There is no Vendean whose eyes do not light up, while he tells how he was out with Monsieur Henri." Such was the tribute offered to his memory by Madame de La Kocheja- quelein, in 1814. A year had not elapsed before her own husband, the brother of Henri, was killed on the field of battle, fighting beneath the same banner, in the same Vendee, and for the same cause. His son it was my good fortune to hear speaking, in vindication of his N 2 180 NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. journey to England, at the Tribune of the Chamber of Deputies. The manly frankness, the impetuous sallies, the unflinching resolution of his race, men were pre- pared and expected to find ; but, I heard whisper on whisper of surprise at his quickness, his fluency, his alacrity, and happiness of answer. The Liberals, not- withstanding their common hostility to the Minister, could scarcely forbear from murmuring at his open avowal of Legitimist opinions. The very name of La Rochejaquelein was itself an outrage to them. By and by, too, a chance word of his seemed to intimate a justi- fication of civil war. It was the signal for a perfect storm of clamours and interruptions. It was as if the white flag was waving in their faces. It was as if the Vendean war-cry was ringing in their ears. Even M. Berryer grew alarmed. He rose from his place to remonstrate and protest. It was a trying moment for the speaker. He declared loudly, indignantly, passion- ately, high above all voices, that he had been misunder- stood, " he wish for civil war ! he and his /" With that people of quick impulses the change was instan- taneous. The Left were not only calmed, they were softened and conciliated. For the allusion was not only to himself, not only to his uncle Henri, who had died for Louis the Sixteenth, not only to his father, NOTES TO THE LOYALIST OF THE VENDEE. 181 Louis, who had died for Louis the Eighteenth, but to his wife's brother, Labedoyere, who had died for Napo- leon. Never was there such a lesson given in one person, for forbearance and toleration. Never were names so heroic, associations so glorious, such grandeurs of misfortune united in one person. Fletri it might be, by a Chamber, but the descendants of the La Roche- jaquelein, and the Labedoyere, will not forget to count, even among their ancestral illustrations, the resignation of the courageous Deputy who upheld the liberty of judgment. 182 THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. THE JACOBIN OF PARIS, I. Ho St. Antoine ! Ho St. Antoine, thou quarter of the poor, Arise with all thy households, and pour them from their door ; Rouse thy attics, and thy garrets, rouse cellar, cell, and cave, Rouse over-worked, and over-taxed, the starving and the slave. II. " Canaille" aye, we remember it, that word of dainty scorn, They flung us from their chariots, the high and haughty born. Canaille canaille aye, here we throng, and we will show to- night, How ungloved hand, with pike and brand, can help itself to right. THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. 183 III. It was a July evening, and the summer moon shone fair, When first the people rose, in the grandeur of despair. But not for greed, or gain, or gold, to plunder or to steal, We spared the gorgeous Tuileries, we levelled the Bastille. IV. A little year, we met once more, yea " Canaille" met that day, In the very heart of his Versailles, to beard the man Capet ; And we brought him back to Paris, in a measured train and slow, And we shouted to his face for Barnave 1 and Mirabeau 2 . V. Ho, Conde, wert thou coming, with thy truant Chevaliers, Did'st thou swear they should avenge the Austrian wanton's tears? Ho, Artois, art thou arming, for England's ceaseless pay, Thy Brunswickers, and Hessians, and Brigands of Vendee ? 184 THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. VI. Come then, with every hireling, Sclave, Croat, and Cossack, We dare your war, beware of our's we fling you freedom back. What, Tyrants, did you menace us, now tremble for your own ! You have heard the glorious tidings of Valmy and Argonne ! VII. How like the Greek of olden time, who in the self-same hour, At Plataea, and at Mycale, twice crushed the invader's power, So we had each our victory, and each our double fray, Dumouriez 3 with the stranger, and we at the Abbaye. VIII. but it was a glorious hour, that ne'er again may be, It was a night of fierce delight we never more shall see. That blood-stained floor, that foes' red gore, the rich and ruddy wine, And the strong sense, all felt within, our work it was divine ! THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. 185 IX. They knew that men were brothers, but in their lust they trod On the lessons of their priests, and the warnings of their God. They knew that men were brothers, but they heeded not the Lord, So we taught them the great Truth, anew, with fire and with sword. X. O but it was a glorious hour, that vengeance that we wreaked, When the Mighty knelt for pardon, and the Great in anguish shrieked ! [fears. But we jeered them for their little hearts, and mocked their selfish For we thought the while of all their crimes, of twice five hun- dred years. XI. He used to laugh at justice, that gay Aristocrat, He used to scoff at mercy, but he knelt to us for that ! But, with untiring hate we struck, and as our victim fell, He heard, to hear them echoed soon the cries and jests of Hell. 186 THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. XII. Ho, St. Antoine, arouse thee now, Ho, brave Septembrists all, The Tocsin rings, as then it rung ! Arise unto its call ! For the True Friend of the people, 4 and our own Pere Duchene 5 Have told us, they have need of the people's arms again. XIII. For the Gironde hath turned traitor, and the Moderates have sold , The hard-earned rights of Hoche's 6 fights, for promise of Pitt's gold. And the Pedant, and the Upstart, as Upstart only can, Have dared deride, in lettered pride, the plain and working man. XIV. What We, who burst the bondage our fathers bore so long, That Oppression had seemed sacred in its venerable wrong, What, We, who have outspoken, and the whole world obeyed, With its Princes, and its Monarchs, on their high thrones afraid ; THE JACOBIN OF PARIS. 187 XV. What we, who broke that mighty yoke, shall we quail before Brissot? 7 And shall we bow to him as lowly, as he would have us low? And shall we learn the Courtier's lisp, and shall we cringe and sue To the lily hand of fair Roland, like love-sick Barbaroux ? 8 XVI. No by Great Heaven, we have not riven, the mighty chains of old, The State-craft, and the Priest-craft, and the Grandeur and the Gold, To be ground down by Doctrines, to be crushed by Forms and Schools, To starve upon their Corn Laws, but to live upon their rules. XVII. No, if we must have leaders, they like ourselves shall be, Who have struggled and have conquered with single hearts and free: Who do not ape the Noble, nor affect the Noble's air, With Tallien9 for a Richelieu, and Louvet 10 for Voltaire. 188 THE JACOBIN OF PARIS, [XVIII. No, we will have such Leaders, as the Roman Tribunes were, Couthon 11 and young St. Just 12 and simple Robespierre ; 13 Now glory to their garrets, it is nobler far to own, Than the fair half-hundred palaces, and the Carlovingian throne. XIX. And glory to the thousand proofs, that day by day they give, Of some great end to which they tend, those solemn lives they live. When the Monarch and the Anarch alike shall pass away, And morn shall break, and man awake, in the light of a fairer day. UARNAVE. 189 BAKNAVE. BARNAVE was among the youngest of the Deputies to the States General. He rapidly distinguished him- self as one of the most violent opponents to the Court. His fiery imagination, his warm and impetuous elo- quence, his quick and ready talent for reply, made him the idol of the People. He was the most brilliant orator of the Clubs. His popularity was such, that he could even afford to disagree with Mirabeau, and rebuke him at the Tribune. He became with his youthful friends, Duport and the Lameths, one of the Feuillant Administration. " It is the first duty of a Reformer," says Gibbon, " to prevent any further Re- formation." Barnave now undertook this melancholy enterprise. After having convulsed the nation, having let loose every passion, stimulated every hope, aroused all the strength of cupidity, all the restlessness of ad- venture, he determined that he would control these 190 BARNAVE. distractions, and revert to the regularity of a strong and settled Executive. A little incident confirmed his resolutions. He was sent with Petion to re-conduct the King from Varennes. So touched was he with the sad condition and resigned serenity of the King, the Queen, and Madame Elisabeth, that from that moment the change effected in his opinions became absolute. It has been supposed, not without some reason, that this change was attributable to an ambitious love, and French novelists have not failed to make the most of so romantic an occurrence. Certain it is, that from his return, he became known as the loudest of alarmists, the champion on all occasions of the Monarchy, and, what gave great offence, the inviolability of the Royal Person. But the doom of Falkland was upon him. It was too late then to cry Peace, Peace. When the Constituent was dissolved, he retired to his native place, Grenoble, whence, eighteen months afterwards, he was dragged to Paris and the Guillotine. He died at the age of thirty-two. The great Revolutionary Historian describes the chiefs of the Feuillants with all the happy terseness of his style " Duport thought Barnave spoke the Lameths executed, what was to be done." Thiers. M T UABEAU. 191 'MIRABEAU. IT would be as presumptuous for one individual to write an Encyclopaedia, as a character of Mirabeau. It should embrace all the talents and all the vices, every merit and every defect, every glory and every disgrace. Remember for one moment what he was ! Student, vo- luptuary, soldier, prisoner, author, diplomatist, exile, pauper, courtier, democrat, deputy, orator, statesman, traitor ; he had seen more, suffered more, tl lought more, learned more, felt more, done more, than any man of his own or any other age. He lived in two worlds, the one of thought, the other of action, and he mastered them both. He lived in two existences, the one sub- jective, the other objective, and he was perfect and supreme in each. He was the Aristotle of the first, the Alexander of the second. He was without a rival in his intellect, " genus humanum ingenio superavit" he was without a rival in his industry there was nothing left for him to conquer. He understood clas- sics, languages, metaphysics, mathematics, music, sta- tistics, history, strategy ; he practised fencing, swim- ming, dancing, riding, hunting, shooting, racing, tennis, 192 MIRABEAU. every gymnastic exercise. It is impossible not to recoil from such a Universal History, as this Biography. His education, it must be remembered, was not fostered, like Newton's, amongst affectionate relations, or achieved, like Crichton's, amidst the acclamations of the College of Navarre. It was in prisons and bastilles, with what chance books he might steal or borrow, in penury and proscription, while writing for his bread, while obliged to pander to the public crapulence to get it, that his illimitable knowledge was obtained. It was during as many trials and privations, with a shame as keen and poignant, a temper as impetuous and inde- pendent as Johnson's, that his youth was exhausted. But it was even more miserable than Johnson's, for he was persecuted by a family whom he loved, as passion- ate, wilful, and persevering as himself. " I have had," he said, on one occasion, " fifty-four lettres de cachet in my family ; yes, gentlemen, fifty -four, and I myself, of these, have had seventeen for my own share. You see," he continued, with bitter pleasantry, " I have in- herited, as heirs do in Normandy." But if the misfor- tunes of his youth seem almost incredible, the achieve- ments of his manhood were not less so. From the moment that his voice was heard in the States-General, his career became a series of triumphs. The only M IRA BEAU. 193 success that will bear a comparison with his was Lord Chatham's ; but Lord Chatham, was, at first, only great in invective, and Mirabeau was the greatest in every department of eloquence. He was more logical than Maury, more ready than Cazales, more fluent than Barnave, more subtle than Sieyes, more methodical than Robespierre, more vehement than Danton, more rheto- rical than Verginaud, " not Plato more copious, not Lysias more simple, not Isocrates more finished, not Hyperides more fine, not Athens itself more Attic." It is the absurd consolation of secondary capacities to believe that his colossal reputation was the work of his subordinates. Dumont, Duroveray, Claviere, were only to him what Ney, Massena, Lannes, Bessieres, were to Napoleon. He discovered their special gifts, and adopted them. But it was beneath the glow of his inspiration alone that their talents ripened into action beneath the providence of his genius only that they were of service to the State. Dumont tells us, that Mirabeau was fond of describing characters by double names. He called Lafayette, the happiest nickname ever given, a Cromwell- Grandison. But it would have taken more than any two of his contemporaries, and those of a far different character from Dumont or Claviere, to make a Mirabeau. o 194 MIRABEAU. Honore-Gabriel Riquetti de Mirabeau was born at Bignon, close to Nemours, in 1749. His family was originally Florentine, but had come to settle in Provence, in the thirteenth century. They had belonged to the Ghibelline faction, and the aristocratic principles which young Mirabeau inherited from his Italian ancestry he never entirely forgot. Even in the Constituent As- sembly he could say, " the Admiral de Coligni, who, by the way, was my cousin." At fifteen, he wrote a panegyric on the Grand Conde, which he published. At seventeen he went into the army, and he then broke forth into all those excesses, which those who have been over-strictly educated, commonly indulge in, when they first leave their paternal home. His father, whose re- searches in political economy, whose severity of charac- ter,and whose strong love ofjustice,suggestacomparison with that Samuel Romilly, who was to be the friend of his son, employed punishment, rather than remon- strance, to reclaim the youthful officer. At the news of his first love adventure, he caused him to be exiled to that Isle of Rhe, where he might have time to reflect upon the inutility of the passion, and illustrate this truth by recollections of Buckingham and Anne of Austria. He obtained his liberty with great difficulty, on condition that he would serve as a volunteer through MIRABEAU. 195 the campaign of Corsica. He did so, and his gallantry obtained for him the rank of a Captain of Dragoons. He wrote to his father, to beg him to buy him a troop. " It was not thus," he answered, " that the Bayards and Duguesclins commenced." Young Mirabeau in disgust quitted the army, and wrote a pamphlet in which he espoused the cause of that Corsican people against whom he had been seen to combat. It must have been a severe trial to him to have left the army thus, because long afterwards he said, in speaking of this period, *' I had read every book, which treated of war, in any language, dead or living." It was immediately after this that he married. I have elsewhere described, and but little exaggerated, the adventure to which he owed the hand of Mademoi- selle de Covet. Amidst the letters de cachet which followed his marriage in rapid succession, one exiled him to the fortress of Joux. He was now twenty-six years old, and the rare persuasion of his eloquence prevailed upon the governor to allow him the range of the neighbouring town of Potarlier. Here he saw for the first time Sophie de Ruffey, a young and inter- esting, but not beautiful, person, who was married to a man past sixty, the Marquis de Mounier. Mirabeau fell desperately in love with her, and his love was o2 196 MIRABEAU. returned. But he had a rival, in another sexagenarian, the Count de St. Mauris, the governor of Joux and Pontarlier. This rival informed both the husband of the lady, and the father of Mirabeau. The storm which was thus conjured, was such, that Malesherbes wrote to him a letter, " I am quitting the government, and the last piece of advice I can give you, is to fly, and take service in some foreign country." Mirabeau followed these counsels, and took refuge in Switzerland ; but he had scarcely arrived there, when he learned that the Marquis, furious at the escape of his dishonourer, had obtained an order of the king, to confine his wife. He was on the point of returning into France, to effect her escape, when she joined him, having managed it herself. From Switzerland they passed together into Holland, where he was compelled to seek a subsistence from the employment of the booksellers. He trans- lated Watson's Life of Philip the Second, and Mrs. Macaulay's History. The pay which he received was so insufficient, that to gain his daily bread, he was obliged to work at his drudgery, as a translator, from six in the morning till nine at night. He found time, however, to publish a memoir against the Marquis de Mirabeau, in which all the affection of his tenderer vears was converted into a hatred no less excessive M1RABEAU. 197 than unnatural. But even in Holland, in the heart of a free country, the French Government, at the instance of his father, found means to arrest him. Mirabeau had learned cunning from misfortune. He besought the police agent, who had seized him, to allow him a last interview with his friends. He took advantage of it to implore them to save his Sophie, by taking his escort by surprise, at the passage of Moerdyk. They promised to be there, to fling the infamous spy into the river, and to rescue the two lovers. At the passage of Moerdyk Mirabeau looked for them in vain. Upon their arrival in France, Mirabeau was cast into Vincennes, and Madame de Mounier was confined in the Convent of Sainte Claire, at Gien. It was thus impossible for them to meet, but they managed to cor- respond through the compassion of M. Lenoir, lieute- nant-general of police. It is this period of Mirabeau's life which it is impossible to contemplate without disgust, and something like contempt. He had arrived at that age when men of genius, who have lost successively their faith and principles, begin to lose even the dignity of vice. They cease to respect their own bad convictions. They mock at all things themselves included. They degrade the evil spirit within them into a sort of Satan- Sea pin. It is the change from Lara into Don Juan ; 198 MIRABEAU. from Arouet into Voltaire ; from bitterness into mock- ery, and from gloom into cynicism. In Mirabeau this transition had already taken place. The last vestiges of feeling had now passed away, and the intellect reigned supreme in all its original depravity. He took a pride in parading his immunity from the affections. While his children were dying he was composing such books as the " Erotica Biblion," and the " Libertine of Quality ;" selling poison to gain his bread. While he was writing the most passionate love-letters to Sophie, he was en- gaged in a simultaneous intrigue with two other women. It was not without a retributive justice that, as a sequel to these disgraceful passages of life, she should have poisoned herself for another lover. In the midst of these stirring personal events Mira- beau was not unmindful of politics. It was in Vicennes that he composed his work upon " Lettres de Cachet." Unable to obtain paper, he had written it upon the margins and between the lines of the books, which were lent to him ; and he had torn out the pages which he used. At length, in 1780, he was released from prison. But, panting for that excitement, which was the breath of his existence, he determined to liberate Madame de Mounier. He obtained an impression of the convent's keys, and repaired thither at night. But MIRABEAU. 199 he was too late. The abbess had been forwarned, and he had barely time to make his escape. Mirabeau, nothing daunted by his failure, hastened to Pontarlier, where, five years before, he had been condemned to death, for non-appearance to the citation of M. de Mounier. He pleaded his own cause ; and the effect upon his judges, of his eloquence was such, that not only was he absolved of contumacy, but his mistress was restored to liberty, and her husband had to defray the costs and expenses of the action. Mirabeau was so dazzled by these forensic triumphs, and so impatient for that notoriety which inevitably attaches to flagrant contrasts, that he now sued his wife, Madame de Mira- beau, to come and live with him. But, notwithstanding all the natural energy and affected pathos of his appeal their separation was formally confirmed, by the Parlia- ment of Paris, on the fifth of July, 1783. Mirabeau now passed over into England. He had been at school with Sir Gilbert Elliot, afterwards Lord Minto, and through him he got admitted into the society of Lansdowne house. Through D'lvernois he also obtained an introduction to Sir Samuel, then Mr. Romilly, who thus speaks of him, in his Memoirs, lately published : " His extraordinary talents, the disorders of his tumultuous youth, the excesses he had committed, 200 MIR A BEAU. the law-suits in which he had been engaged, the harsh treatment he had experienced from his father, his im- prisonment in the dungeon of Vincennes, and the elo- quent work he had written, with the indignant feelings which so unjust an imprisonment inspired, had already given him considerable celebrity in Europe ; but it was a celebrity greatly inferior to that which he afterwards acquired. He brought with him, to this country, a short tract which he had written against the order of Cincinnatus, lately established in America, which it was his object to publish here. He was desirous that an English translation of it should appear at the same time with the original. He read his manuscript to me, and seeing that I was very much struck with the elo- quence of it, he proposed to me to become his trans- lator, telling me that he knew that it was impossible to expect anything tolerable from a translator who was to be paid. I thought the translation would be a useful exercise for me. I had sufficient leisure on iny hands, and I undertook it." But Sir Samuel Eomilly not only condescended to become Mirabeau's translator, he also honoured him with his friendship. He became " very intimate," and corresponded with him. Thirty years afterwards, in looking back to this period of his life, he undertakes a defence of his character, which . 'IKABEAU. 201 coming whence it does, cannot be omitted in any notice upon Mirabeau. " Violent, impetuous, conscious of the superiority of his talents, and the declared enemy and denouncer of every species of tyranny and oppression* he could not fail to shock the prejudices, to oppose the interests, to excite the jealousy, and to wound the pride of many descriptions of persons. A mode of refuting his works, open to the basest and vilest of mankind * was to represent him as a monster of vice and profli- gacy. A scandal once set on foot is strengthened and propagated by many who have no malice against the object of it. Men delight to talk of what is extraor- dinary, and what more extraordinary than a person so admirable for his talents, and so contemptible for his conduct, professing in its writings principles so excel- lent, and in all the offices of public and private life putting in practice those which are so detestable? ' But it was not only with grave and deep thinkers, like Romilly, or with such dexterous and able politicians as Lord Shelburne, that Mirabeau lived in England. He seems to have seen most of our literary men, and it is just possible that he may have paid a visit to Bolt Court, before Johnson's death, in December, 1784. He ought, were it only out of sympathy, to have done homage to the most impetuous temperament of the pre- 202 MIRABEAU. ceding generation. Wilkes he once met at dinner, and not unnaturally the conversation turned upon Crimi- nal Law. They severally took opposite sides of the old argument, between the merits of a stringent code, leniently administered, and those of a lenient code, stringently executed. Mirabeau attacked, Wilkes de- fended the severities of the English system. Mirabeau, not satisfied with having the best of the argument, declaimed with vehemence against Wilkes's profound immorality, and Sir Samuel Romily, who was present, says, "with a man less cool, less indifferent about the truth, and less skilled in avoiding any personal quarrel with Wilkes, the dispute would probably have ended with very serious consequences." Mirabeau was soon to engage in a war of pamphlets with an adversary as immoral and amusing as Wilkes. Immediately after his return to France, he published a memorial about the " Water Company" of Paris. This was answered by Beaumarchais and the bitterness and vehemence of their personalities, were not unmeet preli- minaries to the warfare of that Revolution, which they had both done much to forward and provoke. It is in one of these brochures, that Mirabeau made that strange confession, unique for its honesty, among writers upon economy. " I am not much of a speculator ; but MTRABEAU. 203 when one knows the first four rules of arithmetic, and can conjugate the verb have, one is an eagle in fi- nance." Shortly after this controversy, Calonne, whose genius for expedients had something in common with that of the young adventurer, sent him upon a mission to Ber- lin. Here he contrived surreptitiously to obtain some statistical information, for which fraud he was com- pelled, within twenty-four hours, to leave the Prussian territory. He revenged himself by publishing his " Secret History of the Court of Berlin," which book was burnt at Paris by the hand of the common hangman. But the time was now at hand when Mirabeau was to avenge himself for the insults and wrongs he had received from Authority. The States General were convoked. Rejected by the Provencal nobility, he flung himself into the arms of the people. He caused a board to be put over his door, with the inscription, " Mirabeau, Clothier." The Senechausse of Aix re- turned him with acclamation to Versailles. But he never forgave the nobility. He compared himself to Caius Gracchus proscribed by the Senate. " Thus," he said, " perished the last of the Gracchi, by the hand of a patrician; but with his death-wound, he flung dust upwards to the sky, and called the avenging Gods, to witness, and from that dust sprung Marius Marius 204 M1RABEAU. less grand in his extermination of the Cimbri, than in his annihilation of the Roman Aristocracy! Privileges must have an end, but the people are eternal." On the fourth of May, 1789, a great Catholic solemnity, preceded the installation of the States General. The young King, the beautiful Queen, the Royal family, the Minister, the Deputies of the three Orders, went in procession from Notre- Dame, to the Church of St. Louis. The precedents of the time of Henry the Fourth were religiously observed. First came the Clergy, in their gowns and square caps ; then the Bishops, in violet robes and rochets. After the Lords Spiritual, followed the Lords Temporal ; the Princes, the Dukes and Peers, the Nobles arrayed in black, with vests and sleeves of cloth of gold, cravats of flowing lace, and the well-known hat of Arques and Yvry, with its long and waving feather. Behind these were marshalled the third estate, habited also in black, in short civic cloaks, and without plume or loop to their hats. It was a proud moment for Mirabeau to feel himself at length upon a theatre worthy of his genius. With what disdain must he have regarded in his broad strong nature, the puerile artifices of the Duke of Orleans, who lingered behind his order, with the desire of being remarked, not confounded, among the third estate ! With what MIRABEAU. 205 contempt must he have heard the indecent cheers with which the sermon of the Bishop of Nancy, full of vague generalities about Liberty, was applauded in that old Church of the Crusades ! The next day when his name was called out, it was received in tumult, with groans and hisses. But there was something in his appearance, his majestic height, his massive and enormous features, all furrowed and seamed with disease, his extravagance of arrogance, his terrible reputation, the report of his tremendous elo- quence, which awed and silenced them. There were among them men who had read the Secret History of the Court of Berlin, and remembered passages, like the following attack upon the King. " If you perchance do that once, which the son of your slave shall have done better than you, ten times a day, there are Courtiers will say, that you have per- formed an extraordinary action ; if you obey your passions, they will tell you, you do well ; if you be pro- digal of subjects' sweat, as if it were river water, they will tell you you do well ; if you lay a tax upon the air, they will tell you you do well ; if you avenge yourself, you so powerful they will tell you you do well ; did they not say it when Alexander in his frenzy poignarded his friend? when Nero assassinated his mother?" 206 MIRABEAU. To pursue the further career of Mirabeau, with any attempt to record its oratorical and legislative triumphs, would be to write the history of the Constituent As- sembly, down to the hour of his death. His speeches for those three and twenty months only, fill five volumes. There is also the less reason to exhibit the trophies of his genius, that he is far better known in England than any other of the Revolutionary Statesmen. His character has been written by Brougham, his panegyric by Carlyle. It would moreover be impossible to reduce the labours and speeches of Mirabeau, into any unity of purpose. His intellect had exhausted the truths of every system, and like the galleries of Napoleon's Paris, could display the perfections of every school. Where can we find such a justification of Rebellion as in his answer to D'Epresmenil, who had called him to order, for a re- flection upon the inviolability of the Royal person? " You have all heard my hypothesis of a despot, and traitor King, who comes with an army of Frenchmen, to exact the prerogatives of Tyranny. Well, Gentle- men, a King in that case, is no longer a King." On the other hand, after he had been corrupted by the Court, how beautiful is his description of a Monarchy. "The King is the perpetual representative of the People, MI R ABE A U. 207 while the Commons are only its momentary vicars/' Speaking of the innumerable interests attached to a Constitutional Sovereignty, he made use of this fine comparison, " A great tree covers a large surface with its shade. Its profound roots extend far down, and are interlaced among eternal rocks. An earth- quake alone can suffice to bring it low. Like unto this image, Sire, is a Royalty, which rests upon a Consti- tution." It is too generally supposed that Mirabeau was only great in vehemence, in the SeworriQ of Demosthenes. There are passages in his speeches more exquisitely thoughtful, more elaborately finished, than in any which ever fell from M. de Serre, or Mr. Canning. For instance, " The liberty of all knows no other limit than the liberty of each." Or this, " We are not savages, who have arrived here all naked from the banks of the Oronooko, to form a society. We are an old, too old a nation. We have a pre-existing Government, a pre- existing King, pre-existing prejudices. These we must adjust, as we can, to the Revolution, to break the speed of the transition." There are few fragments so per- fectly graceful as his panegyrical appeal to the Abbe Sieyes, to come forward with a measure which his nerve seemed unequal to propose. And as a model of '208 MIRABEAU. polite, studied, and sustained rhetoric, his celebrated speech on a National Bankruptcy, may rank by the side of our great modern master's declaration of South American independence. It was however in the impulses of immediate inspira- tion in the quick irritability of his fierce invective, that he was most formidable, most admirable, most him- self. As, Longinus said of Demosthenes, " he flashed his lightning round his contemporaries ; for a man could easier look with undaunted eyes upon the light- ning's glare, than contemplate without emotion his vari- ous and alternating passions." He is described upon these occasions, by those who saw him, to have seemed almost like a wild beast. His features were distorted into a hideous ferocity. His eyes, red with excitement, shot forth flames. His broad chest dilated he shook his dishevelled hair, as a lion would his mane. He foamed at the mouth, there escaped him, as if involun- tarily, short, sharp, abrupt cries, until he had lashed himself into the full grandeur of his rage, when he bounded upon his prey, with a roar like thunder, and with a savagery of sarcasm, which mangled as it crushed. " Tell your King Tell him that the hordes of foreigners, by whom we are invested, received yester- MIRABEAU. 209 day, the visit of princes, princesses, minions, favourites, received their counsels, caresses, presents ! Tell him that the whole night long, these foreign satellites, gorged with gold and wine, have predicted, in their impious songs, the enslavement of France, and in their brutal vows, have invoked the destruction of the National Assembly. Tell him, that in his very Palace there are courtiers, who have led their dances to the measure of this Barbarian music, and that such was the eve of the Feast of St. Bartholomew." Again, how magnificent is this defence. " Gentle- men, you all know the story of that Roman, who, to save his country from a great conspiracy, exceeded the powers which the laws conferred on him. Swear, said a captious tribune to him, that you have respected the laws. I swear, was the reply of this great man, that I have saved the state. Gentlemen, / swear that I have saved the public safety." And these famous words which rallied the drooping courage of the As- sembly and which so astounded the Grand Master of the Ceremonies : " The Commons of France are resolved to deliberate ; and you, Sir, who can in no way be the organ of the King towards the National Assembly ; you, who have here nor place, nor vote, nor right of speech, go tell p 210 MIRABEAU. your master, that we are here by the power of the People, and that nothing but the force of bayonets shall drive us hence." In retort and repartee, in sallies and attacks, in quickness of reply, in all the guerilla movements of debate, Mirabeau was also without a rival. He was as perfect a partisan as Mr. Pulteney, or Mr. Fox, without, like them, " having blundered into ex- cellence." How happy, for example, this answer to the Abbe Maury, who had charged him with having called the mob in to his aid : " I shall not degrade myself by refuting the accusation this moment, made against me, unless, indeed, the Assembly shall elevate it to my notice, by ordering me to answer. In that case, I shall think that I have said enough for my justification and renown, by naming my accuser and myself." To those who attacked the title of " French people," he was little less contemptuous. " I adopt it, I defend it, I proclaim it, for the very reasons for which you assail it. Yes, it is because the name of ' People,' is not suffi- ciently esteemed in France ; because it is tarnished and obscured by the rust of prejudices; because it presents an idea at which pride is alarmed, and vanity revolted ; because it is pronounced with scorn in the MIKABEAU. 211 saloons of the Aristocracy, yes, it is for all this, gentlemen, that I could wish, it is even for this that we ought to impose on ourselves the obligation not only of elevating but of ennobling it of rendering it henceforward respected by Ministers, and dear to every heart." His voice, too, was such that he could always com- mand the Assembly. Loud above the tumult was heard his imperious injunction " Silence aux trente voix" High above all others he towered at the Tri- bune, when he shouted aloud, " I will leave this tribune triumphant, or in pieces." It is, as M. Thiers says, a doubt which will be dif- ferently solved by the respective admirers of Mirabeau and the Revolution whether he would have been as successful on the side of Authority as on that of Insur- rection, whether his Herculean energies would have vanquished the Hydra, whether he would have been able to repress the popular chiefs, who wished in their turn for power ; whether he would have been able to say to Robespierre, " Remain in your obscure faubourg," and to Danton, " Be still, within your section." That this was not impossible, M. Thiers has seen a proof, since he wrote his History. He has seen a revolu- tion charged with dangers as alarming and a spirit as p 2 212 MTRABEAU. audacious, rolled back by an energy and controlled by a genius, only inferior to Mirabeau's. He has served under Casimir Perier. And he may still see the same system of aggressive domination continued by a States- man, who combines all the characteristics of the three great Revolutionary schools ; the intellect of the Gi- rondins, the corruption of the Dantonists, and the severity of the Mountain. Soyez impitoyables, M. Guizot's words, are as cruel as any that St. Just ever used. It is certain that his notorious connection with the Court was of no injury to Mirabeau's popularity. He charged at the head of the aristocracy with the same ardour as when leading the people. Their admiration for him was like that of his Cossack enemies for Murat. They delighted in the brilliancy of his ap- pearance, and gloried in the versatility of his triumphs. Pie was still their champion. He was as much their hero as a Grand Seigneur, as he had been as a dema- gogue. The very magnificence and splendour which the gifts of the Court enabled him to display, were a homage to their choice. The luxuries of his sumptuous hotel, the lavishness of his superb expenditure, were rather matters of satisfaction than offence. There was a genuineness, an honesty, a breadth, in his enjoyment, MlKABEAU. 213 which seemed to invite their simple and ready sympathy. There was nothing of exclusion, fashion, or selfishness about it. It was that sort of Foxite extravagance which men rather love than envy. But the gold which the Court flung to the passions of Mirabeau destroyed him. He plunged into a course of debauch- eries so intense, into orgies without a parallel in excess, even among the feeble Princes of the East, and which never before, except, perhaps, in the case of Lord Somers, co-existed with so strong an intellect. But Lord Somers only occasionally gave way to his passions ; in Mirabeau they devoured his whole existence. His lust was as encyclopaedic as his knowledge. It em- braced every experiment, invention, combination, of blandishment and pleasure. His mornings were ex- hausted in contests to which those of Pericles and Cimon, Caesar and Pompey, were insignificant and tame; his nights were consumed in a lascivious intemperance, in comparison with which those of the Regency were decency. But his intellectual powers and energies were not enfeebled or debilitated. He determined to show that he was no mere Rietizi ; he might break down, but he would not languish or relax. To the last he continued to work, to write, to speak, to agitate, to intrigue 1 , with unabated spirit, and indomitable force. 214 MIRABEAU. At last, his physical strength gave way . He prepared for his death-bed with the calm courage of an ancient Stoic, and the delicate care of an Epicurean. " Read this oration at the Tribune to-morrow," he said to Talleyrand, the boon companion of his happier hour, " it will be pleasant to hear a man speak against wills, who is dead, and has made his own." " Support that head," he said to his servant, " it is the strongest in France. Would that I could leave it to you." His jealousy of Mr. Pitt's greatness disturbed his dying moments. " That Pitt is the minister of preparatives. He governs by a system of threats ; I should give him trouble if I lived." The curate of the parish having come to offer the rites of the Catholic Church, Mirabeau declined them with politeness, saying, that he had his superior already in the house the Bishop of Autun. " No," he exclaimed, " I will die in my own way. Open the windows, bring perfumes, flowers, music." And he ordered beautiful objects and sweet sounds to be brought within the range of his languid and declining senses. But Providence was not thus to be eluded. The agonies of his death were so excruciating that even his powers of endurance were worn out. He called repeatedly for laudanum. Cabinis, his physician, gave him a cup with a soothing draught, to deceive him. He MJRABEAU. 215 drunk it eagerly, and the moment afterwards expired, on the 2nd of April, 1791. The news of his death was received with profound grief by the Court, the Middle Class, and the People. All parties had hoped, believed, trusted, in him; they knew that he alone was able to conduct the Common- wealth. The Constituent Assembly adjourned ; a gen- eral mourning was ordered ; a magnificent funeral prepared. The old church of St. Genevieve was turned into a Pantheon ; and Mirabeau's remains were the first admitted by the side of those of Descartes. The solemnity of their installation was among the most superb spectacles of the time. All the authorities of the State, and the City, the Clubs, the Sections, the Assembly, the Army, attended. It was like the apo- theosis of a Roman emperor, rather than the burial of a simple statesman. But a little later, in 1793, his statue was ordered to be veiled, and two agents of police, at night, removed his body to the notorious cemetery of Clamart, where it now lies undistinguished among murderers and criminals. A quarter of a century ago, there might have been seen at Athens, the fittest monument to his genius. Upon a broken pillar, close to the Lanthorn of Demos- thenes, there was this inscription : 216 MIRABEAU. " To Mirabeau ! Blessed be the man who shall respect these stones." They have disappeared. Alas ! for that Sectarianism which profanes the Catholic. Alas ! for that Party- spirit, which insults even the dead. DUMOURIEZ. 217 'DUMOUKIEZ, " WHERE nothing great is to be done, the existence of a great man is impossible." Such is the thoughtful remark of M. Cousin. The idea must have been often anticipated, in the bitter secrecy of unavailing genius ; and never with more of indignation and repining, than in the last years of Louis XV. Often must Dumou- riez have walked down Longchamps, and seen the crossed batons upon carriages, the proudest exploits of whose princely owners had been driving four-in-hand. Often must the dust which was whirled up by the graceful phaetons of the Duthe and the Guimard, have tarnished the brightness of his useless uniform. Often in that gay crowd of military coxcombs, who were heroic only in imitation of the worst failings of Saxe and Conde, often among dancers and mistresses and singers, who combined all the extravagance, with more than the patronage of Ministers, must the Man of Genius have contrasted their high and brilliant 218 fortune, with the fate of such as Lally, the young, the gallant, the high-spirited, the Clive of France, gagged like a malefactor, with his hands tied behind him, ex- ecuted on a scaffold, or with Dupleix, her Warren Has- tings, dying a beggar, while Cagliostro was receiving the diamond presents of the great. But a keen ob- server, like Dumouriez, might have foreseen the beginning of the end. To parody the thought of M. Cousin, were nothing Noble is done, the existence of Noblemen becomes impossible. " At the opening of the Revolution," says M. Thiers, " Dumouriez, in spite of his bravery, his military and political genius, his fifty years, was nothing more than a brilliant adventurer. Yet he still preserved all the fire and boldness of his youth. As the Revolution advanced, he addressed himself to all parties, ready to act for all, so long as he was allowed to act himself. But, with an intellect so ready, so flexible, so vast, with a courage calm and impetuous by turns, he was admirably fitted to obey, but was incapable of governing. If, with his genius he had been gifted with the passions of Mirabeau, the will of Cromwell, or even the dogmatism of Robespierre, he would have ruled France and the Revolution." He had attached himself very early to Gensonne, one DUMOURIEZ. 219 of the Girondist chiefs. A purely intellectual party will always, from the jealousy inevitable to it, have many leaders, and Dumouriez was too curious and experienced an observer not to perceive that this de- fective organization might, itself, lead to the prose ip- tion or expulsion of those whom he already ironically termed the "Jesuits of the Revolution." With this view, he did not neglect the Jacobins. He read reports there which were greatly applauded. He also estab- lished a communication with Delaporte, the Intend- ant of the Civil List, the devoted friend of Louis XVI. With a hold upon every faction, it was only natural that Dumouriez should be called to the Minis- try. The King offered him the place of Minister for Foreign Affairs, made vacant by the decree of accusation against Delessart, but as Louis was still attached to the accused Minister, he only offered the seals pro- visionally. Dumouriez, knowing the strength of his position, refused them when burdened with so humili- ating a condition, and finally obtained them on his own terms. He was no sooner in the Ministry than he put on the Cap of Liberty at the Jacobins, and swore to govern only by them, and for them. When introduced to the 220 DUMOURIEZ. King, he endeavoured to remove the disgust which this conduct had inspired in him, and at last succeeded in touching him by his many proofs of devotion, while by his wit, he enlivened his moments of sadness. He persuaded him that he only courted popularity to ensure the safety of the Throne. His first dispatches were written in the most superb and dictatorial terms, in order to provoke a European war. What wonder that Dumouriez should have so ardently desired it ; for six and thirty years he had been studying the art in theory ! He flattered himself, and made the patriots believe, that the conquest of Belgium would be very easy. " The country was to rise at the first appearance of the French, and thus was there to be fulfilled that message of the Assembly, to the King's Coalition." " Send us war and we send you liberty." After the failure of this expedition, his enemies spread a report that Dumouriez had tried to ruin La- fayette and Rochambeau, by giving them a plan without the means of executing it. Another circumstance embroiled him with the Girondists. On becoming minister, he had asked for six millions of francs for secret service money, of which he was to render no 1)1 MOURIEZ. 221 account whatever. The Feuillants and Robespierre had opposed the grant ; but through the influence of the Gironde, it was agreed to, and Dumouriez received his six millions. Petion having applied to him for funds for the Paris police, Dumouriez refused to pay him more than one instalment. From other quarters it was learned or suspected, that he had spent a large sum on his own pleasures. Roland, at whose house the Gironde met, was indignant, as well as the whole party. At one of these meetings remonstrances were made to Dumouriez, on the nature of his domestic expenditure. At first he answered wittily and gaily, then he became angry, and at last quarrelled outright with his colleagues. He refused, after this scene, to attend their assemblies, and gave as his reason that he hated to talk of public affairs before a woman. This quarrel produced important results. The King, by the advice of Dumouriez, dismissed his colleagues in the administration. Dumouriez was appointed to the War Office, as well as to the Foreign Department. He nominated Monge and Beaulieu, creatures of his own, in the room of Roland and Claviere. But the Girondist majority of the Legislative, reinforced by the Feuillants, were driven to extremities by this premature assumption of the Dictatorship. The celebrated letter 222 DUMOURIEZ. to the King, in which Roland had given in his resig- nation, was ordered to be read, and received with tremendous acclamations. Dumouriez, in the midst of groans and hisses as excessive, rose to read a report, as Foreign Minister. He concluded it with difficulty ; and recommenced speaking as War Minister. The interruptions now became general. It was almost im- possible to proceed. Guadet, with characteristic vehe- mence, cried out, " He is giving us a lesson." " And why not," was the cool reply. His calm and unruffled intrepidity daunted the assembly. He was heard in silence to the end, when he folded up his report, to carry it away with him. " He is going to fly," was the excla- mation. " Not yet," he retorted, and he quietly went back to the Tribune, untied his red tape, signed his report, and then, without one muscle of his face being moved, walked slowly towards the door. He was here mobbed by deputies who crowded round him, saying " You will be sent to Orleans."* " So much the better," was his good-humoured answer, " I have need of baths, a milk diet, and repose." Louis XVI. had not the courage nor the inclination to uphold so audacious and dangerous a minister. He * Delessart had been sent to Orleans for trial, by the High National Court. DOMOURIEZ. 223 was replaced by the Feuillants, Barnave, Duport, and the Lameths. Upon the termination of their short- lived ministry, and the re-accession of the Girondists, Dumouriez, whom they wished to keep out of Paris, was appointed to the command of the Army of the North. The history of the memorable campaign which followed, has been written by M. Thiers, with all his own happier spirit, and it is said, with all the skill of a Jomini. One sentence will, to many minds, throw more of illustration on the lines of Argonne, and the battle of Valmy, than any work of any writer upon strategy ; " Dumouriez had faith in France, when she had no faith in herself." After the evacuation of the French territory by the Prussian troops, Dumouriez returned to Paris. The Massacres of September had occurred, the elections were over, and the struggle between the Girondists and Montagnards was beginning. Dumouriez, from the facility of his temper, and the congenial ease of their characters, was drawn towards Danton, then Minister of Justice, and avowedly neutral between the two parties ; in his careless philosophy, perhaps, despis- ing the earnestness of both. Dumouriez availed himself of his popularity to indulge in ostentatious expenses, to which few of the men, then eminent, dared openly give 224 DUMOURIEZ. way. He was only in Paris four days, but even during that time, he was denounced for this by Marat. The ac- count given of their interview at Talma's supper; Marat's indignation at the lacqueys, heiduques, and chasseurs, the " old regime" of the manners, tone, etiquette, there prevailing, are exquisitely characteristic and ridiculous. Dumouriez departed, disgusted beyond all reserve with the politics of the capital : " It is by gaining battles," he said, " that we must preserve France." He now prepared to invade Belgium himself. At the end of October he was at Valenciennes. On the sixth of November was fought the battle of Jemmapes, which was, as Dumouriez wrote to Paris, gained by the intrepid charge of the present King of the French. But the Jacobins were already prejudiced against " Caesar Dumouriez," as he was maliciously named. For six months they harassed, thwarted, stinted, calumniated him in every way. At last they deter- mined to supersede him, notwithstanding his success. General Beurnonville, the secretary at war, was sent to replace him, and there were four other Commissioners associated in his mission to put Dumouriez under arrest. They arrived at St. Amand, the head-quarters of the army, and they proceeded with determination to fulfil their duty. Camus had scarcely pronounced the sus- DUMOUR1EZ. 225 pension of the General, when Dumouriez stamped his foot, a body of Hussars entered, and the five familiars of the Revolutionary inquisition, Beurnonville, Blancal, Lamarque, Camus, and Quinette, were themselves arrested. But their surprise, great as it must have been, at this audacious reprisal, must have been still greater, when they found themselves escorted to the enemy's camp at Tournay, and there informed that they would be considered as hostages who should answer for any severities employed against the Royal Family. This to Camus, who had gone post from Liege, to vote for the King's death, on the seventeeth of January, and who well knew what was the fate intended for the Dauphin and his sister ! Dumouriez the next morning repaired to his own camp, where his reception was apparently not affected by the step which he had just taken. On going, how- ever to Conde, to meet the Archduke Charles, the Prince de Cobourg, and Mack, with whom he had been for some time in secret communication, he met two regiments of French volunteers. As he had not ordered them to move, he was about to dismount, to write an order for their return, when he heard cries, and the report of fire-arms. The regiments were broken up, some of the men were actually pursuing him, with Q 226 DUMOURIEZ. shouts of " stop Traitor," while others were disposing themselves in groups to cut off his retreat towards a ditch. Dumouriez immediately dashed forward, out- stripped his pursuers by the fleetness of his horse, and spurred it at the ditch, His horse refused. He threw himself off, into the ditch, and came out of it on the other side, amidst a perfect hailstorm of bullets. Mounting a groom's horse which was happily at hand, he rode off at full speed, towards Bury, where he arrived in the evening, and was joined by Mack and Cobourg. He spent the whole night in making conditions with them, and he greatly surprised them, by an- nouncing his intention of returning once more to his camp. The next day, Dumouriez presented himself to his army, accompanied by a staff of Imperial Officers. Some troops of the line surrounded him, and showed him slight marks of devotion, but the greater number were silent, gloomy, and discontented. They told him that upon the news of his desertion to the Austrians, the artillery had left the camp, and that whole divi- sions of the army had marched to Valenciennes, to join the corps of Dampierre. Dumouriez now per- ceived how useless it was to remain. He left his army for ever, and passed over to the Imperialists, nr MOURIEZ. 227 followed by numerous officers, among whom was the youthful warrior of Jemmapes, the Duke de Chartres. He was also escorted by Berchiny's whole regiment of Hussars, who refused to be separated from the Captain who had so recently led them to victory. The Prince de Cobourg received him with the great- est respect. He wished to renew the negociation of the preceding day, and to put him at the head of a second army of Emigration, to be composed of far other mate- rials than the " damerets" of Coblentz. But, after two days, he told the Prince that this could never be. " He had hoped," he said, " to have entered Paris at the head of French troops, using the Imperialists only as auxiliaries, but that as a Frenchman, he could not undertake to lead the foreigner into France." It would indeed have been strange if the Leonidas of Argonne, the Thermopylae of France, had been also a type of the recreant Melian who betrayed. Dumouriez, on his refusal, asked for passports to retire into Switzerland. They were granted to him immediately. " The high estimation," says M. Thiers, " in which his abilities were held, and the low value that was set upon his political principles, obtained for him a treatment very different from that of Lafayette, Q2 228 DUMOURIEZ. who was then expiating his heroic consistency in an Olmutz dungeon." Immediately after these events, Dumouriez, upon whose head the French Convention had set a price took refuge in England. He had assumed the Italian name of Peralta, and he had formed hopes of being permitted to live here in retirement. " I seek a house at a distance from London, where I can remain quiet, and wait the end of the troubles of my unfortunate country. If the greatest statesman in Europe, Mr. Pitt, and you, my Lord,* will agree to this, so neces- sary to my safety and my repose, I shall remain in the greatest privacy." His request was refused. " Your stay in England," Lord Grenville wrote in his answer, " will be subject to too many inconveniences, to make it possible for the government of this country to permit it. I cannot but regret that you had not gained in- formation in this particular before you came to England. If your wish had been made known to me, before you undertook the journey, I would have informed you without reserve, that it would have been a useless one. It remains now with me to point out to you my opinion, * Lord Grenville. DUMOURIEZ. 229 that you must conform without delay to the decision I have been under the necessity to communicate to you by this letter. " I have the honour to be, &c., &c. " (Signed) GRENVILLE." But before many years had elapsed, Dumouriez was invited over to England, to defend that country in which an asylum had been so ignominiously refused to him, It was at the time of Bonaparte's projected invasion, and of the Camp at Boulogne. In a little lodging in Half Moon Street, he might have been seen, pro- nouncing, with all the presumptuous intrepidity of his nature, upon plans for the defence of England and Ireland, of which he knew nothing but Half Moon Street. It was thought that because he had successfully defended France, he had a special talent for defending England. There would have been more wisdom in inquiring, as I have since heard one of our own Penin- sular heroes remark, who was then employed in re- ceiving the instructions of Dumouriez) what was likely to be the nature of the attack ; for, the idea of an in- vasion of England had been suggested to the French Ministry, during the American War, by Dumouriez himself. For his services, however, such as they were, he received a large pension from the English Govern- 230 DUMOURIEZ. ment and after a long life, thenceforward of compara- tive inaction the only remarkable event of which was his accompanying the Duke d'Enghien to Ettenheim, he died in England, in 1823. " Thus," says M. Thiers, in that exquisitely terse and thoughtful style which provokes another com- parison with that English leader, like himself an historian, whom, in courage, adventure, and capacity, he so much resembles, and whose high character he would do well to emulate, " thus ended the career of a great man of a man endowed with every talent, that of diplomatist, minister, general ; with every cou- rage, that of the statesman, who confronts the storms of the tribune, of the soldier who braves the fire of the enemy, of the commander who does not flinch from a desperate position, nor the hazards of a daring enter- prize. He struggled hard to wrestle with the Revolution, but being without principles, without the moral ascend- ancy which they procure, with no other influence than that of Genius, which soon wears out in so rapid a suc- cession of men and things, he proved a signal example of the truth, that an Individual cannot prevail against a Nation's passion, until it has run its course and been exhausted. In passing to the enemy Dumouriez had neither the excuse of Bouille's aristocratic prejudices DUMOURIEZ. 231 nor of Lafayette's political refinements, for he had tole- rated license until it thwarted his own projects. By his defection, he accelerated the fall of the Girondists, the great Revolutionary Crisis. Nevertheless it must not be forgotten that at St. Menehould he taught us to face the enemy with coolness, and at Jemapes while he awakened and aroused us, he reinstated France in the ranks of the Great Nations. If he abandoned, he also saved us." " He passed a melancholy old age, far away from his country, and we cannot resist a feeling of profound re- gret, at the spectacle of a man, fifty years of whose life were spent in Court intrigues, thirty years in exile, and three years only on a theatre worthy of his genius." The young and sanguine will however derive, from this portrait so mournfully conceived and so gloomily coloured, the same lesson that they learn from lives like Mahomet's, Rousseau's, or Alfieri's. A life of pre- paration will not fail of glory. 232 HOCHE. 4 HOCHE. IF Madame de Mirepoix, or any other great lady, had been told, " In tea-cup times of hood and hoop, Or when the patch was worn," that, in the same Carrousel of Versailles, where they would hold their very breath from awe for its superb and splendid traditions, where the inches by which one lady's sedan might pass another's, were the sole object of their youth's ambition, and their life's discus- sion, if they had been told, that there should one day arise a statue in that Royal Square, they would have assumed, beyond a possibility of question, that it must be one of a Bourbon Warrior, of Louis the Twelfth, Henry of Navarre, or the Great Conde. Even the HOCHE. 233 lineage of the La Tremoille, or the Montmorenci, would to them have seemed mean and out of place, in those Monarchical and Capetian precincts. But what would have been their astonishment, if they had been informed that it would be raised in honour of a menial groom, then in the king's stables, who afterwards enlisted as a private soldier, and became a general of a French Republic. Hoche was born in 1768; at fourteen, he was, as I have said, employed by Louis XVI. Like Holcroft, in the stables of Newmarket, he cared more about books than horses, and all his slender earnings went in their purchase and acquisition. At sixteen he entered the French Guards. In 1789, when they went over to the people, Hoche was one of their leaders. He afterwards exchanged into the Municipal Guards, and there he speedily obtained the rank of officer and adjutant. In 1792, he became a lieutenant. He was afterwards named on Leveneur's staff, when Dumouriez invaded Holland. He was still his aid-de-camp, at the time of that General's desertion, and accompanied Leveneur to Paris. Here he obtained, through the influence of the Mountain, who were anxious to rear up a race of Gen- erals as devoted to them as Lafayette was supposed to have been to the Feuillants, and Dumouriez to the 234 HOCHE. Gironde, the defence of Dunkirk, then menaced by the Duke of York. The English were obliged soon afterwards to raise the siege. Hoche's success pro- cured for him the highest military rank. In 1792, he had, with difficulty, got his commission as an officer ; in the early part of 1793, he was nominated General of Brigade, and in the same year, General of Division. In two campaigns he had thus traversed every grade, and each step had been the reward of some signal and memorable exploit. Before the year expired, his ambi- tion was crowned by the command of an army, that of the Moselle. There is something noble and heroic in a Republic's infancy ; like boyhood, it is full of trust and generosity. The army to which Hoche had been appointed, had hitherto been inactive. He inspired it with a martial ardour, and gave it a direct, immediate, and definite plan. This was to raise the siege of Landau, and drive the Prussians out of Alsace. He was admirably seconded by St. Just, the most impetuous of Provveditori. But he had to confront a captain educated beneath the eyes of Prince Ferdinand and Frederick the Great. Hoche determined to oppose to the manoauvres of the old school, the instincts of a genius as daring as that which, in Napoleon, was to form the new school. He left a HOCHE. 235 certain number of men on the Sarre, to mask his move- ment, and with that rapidity of action which charac- terizes a French march, he flung himself across the Vosges,to attack Wurmser's army, which had descended upon the Lower Rhine. He had so opened communi- cations with Pichegru, that while that General attacked the right and centre of the enemy's army, Hoche took them in flank. He completely routed Wurmser near Weissembourg, raised the blockade of Landau, took possession of Spiers, Worms, Germersheim, and finally chased the Austrians out of Alsace. Great as were these triumphs, it is probable that he was himself too sensible of them, and that his language was already too much like that of our Parliamentary Fairfaxes and Lamberts. St. Just, at any rate, to whom the merit of the campaign was in no small measure owing, took umbrage at the exaltation of the youthful general, and contrasted it with the politic and well considered reserve of Pichegru. The command of the army was taken from Hoche, and he was banished to Nice. He had scarcely reached it before he was arrested by order of the Committee of Public Safety, dragged to Paris, and thrown into the Conciergerie. It was not till the ninth Thermidor that he was released. In the delicate and luxurious re-action which was its consequence, Hoche's 236 HOCHE. exceeding beauty, his gentle manners, his polished taste, his unmerited sufferings, raised him high in the graces of Mesdames Tallien and Recamier. It was as much from their fair offices, as from his own renown, that he was appointed General of the Army of the West. He was here destined to display as much ability as a civilian as he had done as a warrior. There are small men who delight in narrowing the capacity of great captains, and confining it to military objects. But a great general is nearly always a great statesman. And this is especially true in commands like the Duke of Wellington's in Spain, or Hoche's in the Vendee. where political events occurred, changed, were deter- mined on, with a rapidity which mere ministers could never attain or comprehend. The admirable justice of Hoche's views in his com- mand, are shown in his despatches ; " Send men," he wrote to the Government, " as moderate as they are valiant, who can mediate as well as fight." He ex- pressed himself in the same tolerant and conciliatory spirit towards the Catholic priesthood of so distracted and disturbed a province : " These peasants must have priests ; let them keep their own since they so desire it." He was even beneficent to the insurgents of the rural districts. u Many of these have suffered severely, HOCHE. 237 and are pining to return to their agricultural employ- ments. Let us give them some assistance to enable them to put their farms in order. With regard to those who have become inured to warfare, it will be im- possible to throw them back upon the country, which they will trouble with their idle and restless practices. They must be formed into regiments, and enrolled in the service of the Republic. They will make an excel- lent advanced guard, and their hatred of the Coalition which has betrayed them, will ensure their fidelity. What signifies its cause to them, they must have war. Remember the bands of Duguesclin going to dethrone Peter the Cruel, and the regiment raised by Villars, among the fanatics of the Cevennes !" While Hoche was thus influenced by large and kindly feelings towards his opponents, he did not fall into the mistake of ordinary minds, and neglect his followers and troops. His lenity, to strict disciplinarians will seem almost exaggerated ; but it was not less from a wise policy than from his own gentle disposition, that he wished to breathe into all around him a spirit of for- bearance and indulgence. " What would you have, my good friend." he said to a lieutenant, who had com- plained of some drunken excesses, " if soldiers were philosophers, they would not fight at all." 238 HOCHE In the midst of these pacific works, came the de- scent on Quiberon. He drove back the invaders to the peninsula of Aurai. Hoche repulsed the desperate attack of the Count d'Hervilley. They retired to an almost impregnable position. The moment was critical. Hoche called a council of war. He proposed to take the fort of Penthievre by storm. It was opposed on the ground of rashness. " What," exclaimed Hoche, " are the rules of art in such a case ? What we want is rashness, the army lacks munitions of all kinds, if the insurrection ex- tends, I will no longer answer for my troops." This energetic reasoning prevailed. The fort of Penthievre was stormed ami captured, sword in hand. After his victory Hoche behaved with his characteristic huma- nity. The Convention had ordered a general massacre of the prisoners ; Hoche refused to be the instrument of instructions so savage and disgraceful. The Directory being appointed shortly afterwards, Hoche, through Barras, with whom he had often supped beneath illuminated lamps, in the fair gardens of Passy or St. Cloud, recovered the influence which he had momentarily lost. He proceeded on his career of vic- torious pacification, with great courage and admirable tact. He vanquished the Chouans with their own HOCHE. 239 weapons. He divided a detachment of his army into bands of fifty or sixty, whom he trained and exercised in their own peculiar warfare, and continually surprised and took them* prisoners. But, while he chastised the marauders, he was always kind and even generous to the priests and the poor. Success, however, produced its usual results. " I am brave," he wrote to the Directory, " against bullets, but not against intrigues ; I beg you to confirm my resignation, and to appoint my successor." But the Directory would not allow him to resign until the insurrection was entirely extinguished. This was soon afterwards effected, in the capture and execu- tion of Stofflet and Charette. He now marched northwards, and a like success attended his efforts in Anjou, Maine, and Brittany. In 1796, Hoche was intrusted with the command of the Irish expedition. His good fortune among the priest-led and devout people of the Vendee, the new republic which Bonaparte had raised in Italy, inspired him with similar designs for Ireland. But the ele- ments were against him. A storm arose, which sepa- rated his ship from the rest, and upon his reaching the coast, he found neither troops nor ships. He returned, full of chagrin, to France, but the Directory were so little disposed to blame him, that he was immediately 240 HOCHE. appointed to the noble army of the Sanibre and the Meuse, eighty thousand men, amply furnished and equipped. He opened the campaign of 1797 by cross- ing the Rhine at the head of his troops ; he gained successively the battles of Neuwied, Uckwrath, Alten- kirken, and Diedorff; the Austrians lost eight thou- sand men, and thirty pieces of cannon. Hoche pur- sued with that celerity, of which he had already given such memorable proofs, when general of the Army of the Moselle. In four days he had been victorious in three pitched battles, and five inferior skirmishes. He was arrested in his glorious career, by the news of the Convention which Bonaparte had signed at Leoben. It was a hard trial to bear, an interruption to so tri- umphant an ambition, one which had hoped to dic- tate peace beneath the walls of Vienna : but, with the unfailing loyalty of genius, Hoche was the first to recognize the Power which had already spoken in thunder to the Ancient Dynasties. You speak of recognizing the French Republic," said Bonaparte to Merfeld; the French Republic does not require to be recognized. It is to Europe what the sun is to the heavens. Woe unto the blind who know not how to see, or how to use it !" There is a touching accord, a natural sympathy, among great HOCHE. 241 men, which it is, alas, the business of the mean and envious to disturb. But Hoche was proof against their machinations ; he had already stood forward, in support of Bonaparte, after the 13th Vendemaire ; and he still felt that divine impulse which heroism ever provokes, as he read the burning words which had withered all the objections of Commissioners, or the solemn and beautiful opening of his letter to the Archduke Charles, " Brave soldiers make war, but desire peace." Soon after the suspension of hostilities, Hoche, who had been of great service to the Directory, in counter- acting the intrigues of his old rival, Pichegru and the Clichyens, was appointed Minister of War. But the feeble measures and the moral cowardice of his col- leagues so disgusted him, that he begged permission to retire to the head-quarters of his old army, at Wetzlar. But, before he did so, with a singular generosity, he put at the Government's disposal the greater portion of a rich dowry, which he had just obtained with a youthful bride. The news of the 18th Fructidor, and the tri- umph of Augereau, that coarse and butcherly fanatic, (which would have been his,) over the Clichyens, filled him with a bitter pleasure. It was the mixed feeling of the spirited and gallant Ireton, at the vulgar popularity of Harrison. But in the prime of youth, vigour, beauty, R 242 HOCHE. and talents, Hoche was suddenly taken ill. A dry, racking cough, a hectic flush, a constant perspiration, all the signs of a consumption alarmed his friends and the army, who adored him. Nevertheless, he still per- formed his duty. He was determined to die like the old Paladin, " with harness on his back." " Prescribe," he said to the doctor, " prescribe for my fatigue any- thing but rest." At length, on the 1 7th of September, he was too weak to rise from his bed, and the next day he died. " Thus," says M. Thiers, " ended one of the fairest and most affecting lives of the Revolution! This time, it was not upon the scaffold. Hoche was twenty-nine years old. While yet a common private, in the French Guards, he had, in a few months, formed his education. He combined, with the physical intrepidity of a mere man-at-arms, a character of decision, an intelligence of the highest, a rare knowledge of mankind, an intuitive political sagacity, but, above all, the omnipotent incen- tives of the passions. His own were fiery and ardent, and, in all probability, the sole cause of his death. A particular circumstance enhanced the interest which his great qualities inspired ; he had always seen his career interrupted by some unexpected accident. Conqueror of Weissembourg, and on the outset of a most brilliant HOCHE. 243 campaign, he was on a sudden cast into prison. Released from prison, and condemned to inaction in the Vendee, he there fulfilled the noblest of civil functions ; at the moment when about to realize his grand design on Ire- land, the elements, and mis-apprehensions again arrested him ; transferred to the army of the Sambre and the Meuse, he had scarcely borne off a glorious victory before his advance was suspended by the preliminaries of Leoben ; at length, when at the head of the army of Germany, and, from the situation of Europe, with the loftiest destiny before him, he was cut off in the meridian of his fortune, by an illness of eight-and-forty hours. In other respects, if a fair fame may compensate for the loss of life, he could not be more nobly compensated than by the early loss of his own. Victories, a great pacification, a genius equal to all things, a probity without a stain, a universal idea that he alone could have competed with the conqueror of Rivoli and the Pyramids, that his ambition would have remained Re- publican, and proved a barrier to that ambition which pretended to a throne ; in one word, high achievements high conjectures twenty-nine years these things make his memory. It is surely beautiful enough ; let us not regret that he died in youth. It will ever be to R2 244 HOCHE. the honour of Hoche, Kleber, Desaix, that they never became Marshals. They had the glory of dying freemen and citizens, without being reduced, like Moreau, to seek an asylum in the Armies of the Foreigner." MARAT. "245 MARAT. MARAT was the editor of a paper which he named "The Friend of the People." It is as difficult to vvrite without disgust of so grotesque a being, as to believe in the sort of worship with which he was re- garded at Paris during the latter portion of his life, and after his death. Still, it is impossible not to admit that all we know of him is through the traditions of his enemies, of Royalists, who never could forgive him the twenty-first of January, of Girondists, who never could forgive him the twenty-seventh of May. At any rate, his intellect, clouded as it was by a constitu- tional insanity, was probably not so mean or despicable as they have represented it. Voltaire was even so struck by a pamphlet of his, on the respective influences of the mind and the body, as to have reviewed it. Timon (M. Cormenin) says of him, " Marat was not an orator, 246 MARAT. he was not even a mob speaker. But he was not with- out ability as a polemic; and he had shrewdness enough to divine ambition beneath its mask, and courage enough to tear it off." His attacks upon the Newtonian Philosophy betoken a similar hardi- hood and a contemptuous impatience of all received authority. As the Revolution advanced, it became de- veloped into the most sanguinary intolerance. As early as August, 1 789, he declared that eight hundred deputies ought to be hanged at the top of eight hun- dred trees in the Tuileries ; and he had the audacity to place Mirabeau's name first upon the list. For this he was prosecuted by the Commune of Paris. The National Guard of Lafayette broke into his house, but Danton managed his escape. He seems at this period to have had the most intimate understanding with the Orleanist party. The cellars of the Cordeliers were a constant refuge to him the apartments of Legendre, or of Desmoulins, and even the boudoirs of those light actresses who enlivened the sombre orgies of Egalite. His effrontery increased with his impunity. " The Friend of the People" became more and more frantic, and more and more popular. It is curious to remark, that his chief demand, at this period, was a Dictator ! When the Conventional elections began, he was named MARAT. 247 by almost universal acclamation a metropolitan member, and what was more extraordinary (for violence is a common title to the suffrages of capitals) the colleague of a Bourbon. He was received in the Convention, as Mirabeau had been by the States-General, with insult and disgust. He repelled the scorn of his adversaries with an increased ferocity. " Massacre," he said, " two hundred thousand partisans of the ancient regime, and reduce the Convention to a fourth." They attacked him for having called for a Dictator. The words of this article seem now to have something of a prophecy. " Count not upon this or any other assembly. Fifty years of anarchy await you, and you will only emerge from them by means of some Dictator ; a true patriot and a perfect statesman. Oh babbling people did you but know how to act /" When menaced with imprison- ment, he pulled out a pistol at the Tribune, and de- clared that he would shoot himself upon the spot. It was by such extravagancies that he prevailed, and excelled all others in that moment of delirious agitation. It was hard to say whether he was most cruel or most mad. Dumouriez, Vergniaud, Brissot, Louvet, the young Due de Chartres, whosoever became in any way distinguished, was the sure mark for his atrocious invec- tives. One man alone maintained the least controul 248 MARAT. over his excesses. He hated, feared, abused, but was ruled by, Robespierre. The blind and vague caprices of the one, required to be led by the methodical, direct, determinate intellect of the other. Danton, indeed, shortly before his death, again renewed his intimacy with him, but it was rather as a protege than a patron. But the end of Marat was at hand. On the 13th of July, (a melancholy anniversary in French History, for a far other reason,) in 1793, Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday. Divine honours were paid to his memory. Prayers were addressed to him. The most blasphemous analogies were drawn of his sufferings. Altars were raised, and that nothing might be wanting to combine the most solemn portions of the Pagan system and the Christian Revelation, a host of victims was immolated in his honour. Nor was this public adoration merely ephemeral ; months afterwards his ashes were installed in the Pantheon in the place of those of Mirabeau ! HEBERT. 249 6 HEBERT, OUR OWN PiiRE DUCH^NE. THIS was the name of Hebert's paper, which sur- passed even Marat's in atrocity and circulation. It was first started in opposition to another journal of the same name, which the Counter-Revolutionists had originated with considerable success. This was however soon unable to cope with its younger rival, in pandering to the vulgar appetite of the period. Hebert's articles were written in slang, rather than in French. They were full of blasphemy and obscenity. They were hawked about the streets, by men with the most ribald oaths, and the most degrading recommendations. " He is in a passion to day, the Pere Duchene." His previous life had well fitted him to be the Editor of such a paper. He had come up to Paris at a very early age, to seek his fortune. Of a natural subtlety, and an unscrupulous, though cowardly character, his 250 HEBERT. existence had depended upon a well-calculated system of the meanest frauds and the paltriest swindling. He had been dismissed from his place as cheque-taker at a theatre, for embezzlement. He became a footman, and was discarded for the same offence. He combined all the effrontery of a Roderick Random with all the poltroonery of his companion. Vagabond, scroundrel, thief, he disgraced the cause of Larevelliere and Lindet by his disgusting adherence. He was among the ruffians who mocked the dying moments of Madame de Lamballe, and who outraged her remains. He was always foremost of some infuriate section, when some courageous royalist, like De Maury, or Cazales, was to be hunted and attacked. He was one of that commis- sion who interrogated the Dauphin, and who forced upon his signature a paper which he could not under- stand, which accused his mother of crimes, of which Civilisation was never guilty, and which no history but that of Rome has recorded. "What!" exclaimed Robespierre, " was it not enough to have made her a Messalina, but he must also make her an an Agrippina!" From that moment he determined upon Hebert's ruin. But this was no easy undertaking. Hebert had suc- ceeded to all Marat's popularity with the sections and the populace. He had already beaten the Convention. HEBERT. 251 Arrested and imprisoned by its orders, the people had come en masse to the bar of the Assembly, insisted upon his release, and, upon gaining their point, had borne him in triumph to the Commune, where he was offered a civic crown. Through Ronsin he had the Revolution- ary Army, through Vincent the mob, through Chau- mette and Gobel, he was at the head of those detestable fanatics who had denied the existence of a God, and had celebrated the Festival of Reason. This was of itself so repugnant to " the Theophilanthropy," which was the basis of Robespierre's whole system, that it enhanced his resolution to effect Hebert's disgrace, and, what in those days was synonymous, his death. But, he could only attain his object by sacrificing the Dantonists. The march of the Revolution had been so rapid, that these had in their turn become what the Feuillants and the Girondists had been before, sus- pected and unpopular, as Moderates and Indulgents. Robespierre determined to pair off the Dantonists against the Hebertists. He resolved to sacrifice the first to the ultra-Revolutionists, to get at the last for himself. He struck his own blow first. With ad- mirable tact he made St. Just bring forward his memorable report of the 13th of March, 1794 in 252 HEBERT. which he ascribed all the ills of the Republic to two parties, the first .of which wished to make Liberty a Bacchante, the second a Prostitute. He described the first as composed of the seditious and the incendiary, of libellers and atheists ; the second, as made up of stockjobbers and speculators, the libertine and the debauched. And, in the absurdly imitative language of the time, he called upon the Convention to put to the order of the day, Justice, Probity, and all the Re- publican virtues. The same evening Robespierre went to the Jacobins, and demanded an extraordinary sitting for the morrow. Everything announced some great change. Hebert, alarmed, repaired to the Cordeliers, where he had long been supreme. For a moment the struggle seemed as if it would be long and doubtful. The strife between the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, between the parent club, and its younger rival, promised to be distinguished for its parricidal violence, amidst the savage and internecine contests of the period. But Hebert wanted to himself. He suffered himself to be arrested that very night without an effort. But that nothing might fail to apprize Danton of his fate, to show that Robespierre's policy was double-edged, there was associated in the arrest, Herault-Sechelles, HEBERT. 253 the most polished, the most fascinating, the most elegant of hosts, a man of letters and of taste the Lucullus of the Revolution. Hebert behaved with the same shameless cowardice which had branded his life, at his execution. He fainted on the way to the guillotine. And the populace, as vile as himself, pursued him to his death with the same ribald and obscene expressions, by means of which his journal had gained such disgraceful notoriety. It is, however, happily not through this that Hebert will be known to posterity. But as long as the elo- quence of invective shall be admired, so long will the vieux Cordelier of Camille Desmoulins perpetuate his memory, for the scorn of ages. I cannot forbear from quoting one passage from it. " Ne sais tu pas, Hebert, que lorsque les tyrans d'Europe veulent faire croire a leurs esclaves, que la France est couverte des tenebres de la barbarie, que Paris, cette ville si vantee par son Atticisme et son gout, est peuplee de vandales ; ne sais tu pas, malheureux, que ce sont des lambeaux de tes feuilles qu'ils inserent dans leurs gazettes? comme si le peuple etait aussi igno- rant que tu voudrais le faire croire a M. Pitt ; comme si on ne pouvait lui parler qu'en langage aussi grossier ; comme si c'etait la le langage de la convention et du 254 HEBERT. comite de salut public ; comme si tes saletes etaient celles de la nation ; comme si un egout de Paris etait la Seine." * * * * * Well might M. Thiers declare the asperity, the cynicism, the eloquence of Rome and Athens had reappeared among his countrymen with Republican liberty. BRISSOT. 255 ' BEISSOT. THERE, perhaps, never was a leader who attained political eminence with less of vice or virtue than Brissot. He was of that vacillating, changeful, uncertain, tempo- rizing character, which belonged to statesmen like Harley, or to the smooth and narrow ministers of the Italian Republics. It is difficult, in the absence of any principles or truths declared by him, to understand the celebrity which he acquired in his own time, or that he should have founded a school to which he gave his name ; but his position was one which has seldom been favourable to real greatness ? he was the chief of an intermediate party, whose only object was a compro- mise. Unlike the most part of the revolutionary statesmen, Brissot was no longer young when the Bastille was taken. He had already attained to some fame as an author. He had also undertaken the fashionable jour- 256 BRISSOT. ney, and, like the Duke de Lauraguais, had gone to England, to learn to think. He had, moreover, been to America, to study the youngest of Republics. He affected the modes, customs, language of the United States, dressed like William Penn, and even, as he thought, Anglo- Americanized his name, in calling him- self Brissot de Warville, His Anglomania and Ame- rican predilections alike recommended him to Lafayette, by whom he was employed, in inferior matters, up to 1791. The unpopularity which began at that time to attach to that general, alienated and estranged from him the greater number of his creatures. Brissot took an opportunity of separating from him openly, in the prominent part which he played in getting up the peti- tion for the deposition of the King, which produced such riots and commotions in the city. By this he obtained better and more solid patronage than that of a " grand seigneur," the People's, and was elected to the Legis- lative Assembly. Here, his presumed knowledge of England and America procured for him a seat at the Committee of Foreign Affairs, where, by one of those paradoxes which come so naturally to a weak and un- certain intellect, he became the most violent advocate of a war with England. For this he incurred the hos- tility of Robespierre, whose favourite idea was peace, BRISSOT. 257 and he denounced him at the Jacobins. The fury of his Parisian auditory was raised to the highest pitch, TV hen Robespierre intimated that it was Brissot's design to introduce the federal principles of the United States into France. In the meanwhile Brissot was himself engaged in the work of denunciation in the Assembly. He was the author of the impeachment against Delessart, then foreign minister. Dumont gives two anecdotes at this period, of Brissot, whom he knew well, and whom he calls a " moral and religious man," which speak little in favour of his religion or morality. Du- mont was remonstrating with him on the injustice of the charges which had sent Delessart to Orleans for trial, by the National Court, when Brissot interrupted him with disgusting levity, saying " It is a necessary party manoeuvre. I know he will be acquitted, because there is no evidence against him, but we shall have gained our object, by preventing his return to office." " Good God," was Dumont's answer, " are you so deep in party Machiavelism ? Is this Brissot who now per- secutes an innocent man?" The defence set up by Brissot was the common excuse which men without passions adopt in palliation of their meannesses. " Look at the extreme simplicity of my dwelling, and my table worthy of a Spartan inquire into my domestic life, and 258 BRISSOT. see if you can justly reproach me, with dissipation or frivolity. For two years I have not been near a theatre!!" The other anecdote related by his friend is still more revolting. " Brissot was so violent, that I once heard him propose to disguise a body of French soldiers as Austrians, and make them attack some French villages during the night ; and that, on receiving intelligence of this attack, a motion should be made in the Legisla- tive Assembly, and the question of war carried by a decree of enthusiasm." After the Legislative Assembly was dissolved, and the Convention summoned, Brissot, in that terrible arena, and in front of such combatants as Guadet, Vergniaud, Condorcet, was unable to keep his position as chief of his faction. But in foreign countries his fame was already established. He had been a member of the previous Assembly ; and, in our Annual Registers, and the newspapers of the day, the Girondists were generally known as the Brissotins. He had, however, sunk into a mere red-tape politician. He occasionally made philanthropic speeches on negro slavery, which pro- duced little or no sensation in Paris, but did much to make the insurrection in St. Domingo. He was also the reporter of the war against England and Holland, BRI9SOT. 259 on the first of February, 1793. On the thirty-first of May, in the same year, he was condemned to death, with the rest of his party. He managed to escape, on his way to Switzerland, as far as Moulins, where he was arrested. He was carried back to Paris, and guillotined, on the thirty-first of October at the age of thirty-nine. s2 260 BARBAROUX. 8 BARBAROUX. CHARLES BARBAROUX whose name will live as long as the Marseillaise, was first brought into public notice, by the part he took with his fellow-citizens upon the patriotic impulse given by the Duke of Brunswick's in- vasion. He was at the head of the heroic band who marched to defend Paris. He was in the heat of the fray, the most remarkable of all the combatants, on the tenth of August. Nominated a deputy to the National Convention, he attached himself to the Gironde, and became their most adventurous and audacious sup- porter. He was always ready to introduce their most odious and unpopular measures. He shared the fate of his party, and was guillotined one month after their arrest in 1793. It is, however, as much from the interest, which he, perhaps unwittingly, inspired in the affections of Madame Roland, as from his political BARBAROUX. 261 career that he is likely to be known. She delights to speak of the young republican, " beautiful as an An- tinous," who always shared, upheld, and often antici- pated her own opinions. It is not strange that in a country, where so little of truth is necessary to historic fiction, that the loves of Charles Barbaroux and Manon Jeanne Roland, have been so often told by the Drama and Romance. 262 TALLIEN. TALLIEN. TALLIEN was the " curled Antony" of the Revolution. He was the idol of " the golden youth," the type and mirror of their classic dandyism. He will long be re- membered as having struck down the Brutus whose severity they so dreaded, and whose virtue they so hated. He will long be known for that re-action of civility and gentleness which the ninth Thermidor intro- duced. His connection with the stern and thoughtful statesmen of the time, is the more remarkable from antithesis and contrast. It is like the alliance between Buckingham and the Puritans, between the most versatile of voluptuaries and the most earnest of enthu- siasts. But in the earlier period of the Revolution, Tallien was quite as notorious for his excesses as a Jacobin, as for his extravagancies of luxury and plea- sure. He was the spokesman of one of the most violent TALLIEN. 263 Sections at the bar of the National Assembly. He was one of the most ferocious of the Septembriseurs. He not only voted for the death of Louis XVI., but against the permission to see his family, and against the appeal to the people. On the day of the king's execution he was elected President of the Convention, to which he had been deputed by the department of the Seine and Oise. Three weeks afterwards he undertook the de- fence of Marat. The only excuse which can be offered for him, is one which makes greatness in a season of movement, and mars it in one of inaction, his youth. He, too, was only twenty-four. The same change, also, which each leader of the Revolution was successively to feel, which drove Barnave in disgust to Grenoble, and Danton to Arcis-sur-Aube, was shortly afterwards effected in him. He was sent to Bordeaux to pursue and extirpate the remnant of the Girondists. But here, like " the soft triumvir," he was to change his politics for one as beautiful, as winning, as bewitching as Cleo- patra. He was struck by the graceful figure of a lady who had been thrown into prison as an aristocrat. He went near her, and her lustrous and melancholy eyes, her Spanish loveliness, her forlorn condition, still farther interested and abstracted him. She was the daughter, he was told, of the Spanish banker Cabarrus, and had 264 TALLIEN. been married at fourteen to a M. deFontenai. She was then only nineteen, and was condemned to die. Such was her story. He not only saved her life, but he married her; and her influence reclaimed him to humanity. He became as distinguished as a moderate, as he had been as a Montagnard. But he still preserved all the care- less audacity which had previously borne him into ex- tremes. He it was who confronted, accused, beat down, and trampled upon Robespierre. He it was who flung a dagger upon the Tribune, and swore that he had armed himself with it to pierce the new Cromwell to the heart, if the Convention should want the courage to decree his accusation. But, upon succeeding to the power, he did not neglect the precautions, of his predecessor. Like him he pretended that his life was menaced, and he took advantage of this pretext to destroy those of whom he was envious and impatient. But his sway was of short duration. The counter-Revolution frittered itself away in dissipations. It was in vain that he at- tempted to regain the attachment of the more extreme Republicans the " root and branch men"* by mea- sures of outrageous severity against the Royalists, after the Quiberon expedition. His popularity was now * Lord Clarendon. TALLIEN. 265 reduced to those saloons where his fair bride was supreme. His insignificance was every day more and more plain, and more and more mortifying. He de- termined to turn again, but it was, this time, at the wrong moment. Upon the eve of the eighteenth Fructidor, he apologized for the exasperation of his opinions, and the excesses into which they had impelled him. His recantation, however, although it destroyed his little remaining influence in Paris, recommended him to Bonaparte, who took him to Egypt. He became the editor of a newspaper there, a singular employment, in a province of the Sultan's, for one who had ruled over France, with all the authority of her most Christian kings who was still under thirty -who was the son of the Maitre d'hotel of the Marquis de Bernis. But the most extraordinary vicissitudes of his life were yet to come. Upon his return homewards he was captured by an English ship. He was to come to London as a prisoner. He was to live there, courted and caressed by the Whigs and Foxites. He was again to see a delicate and a brilliant society. He might compare the splendours of the Luxembourg with the splendours of Devonshire House. During the Empire his life was one of obscurity and misfortune. His wife divorced herself from him to 266 TALLIEN. marry the Prince de Chimay, then Comte deCaraman. It was with difficulty that he could obtain from Napo- leon a consulship, the last refuge of a dandy. The French Brummel was exiled to Alicant. It must have been a mournfnl sight to have seen, in 1815, in the streets of Paris, a prematurely aged invalid, blind from fever, poor, and in debt, the suppliant of royal bounties ; and to have been told, that he was once the Regicide Tallien the gayest and greatest of his time. It speaks also well for Bourbon clemency, that he was relieved in his extreme want and misery, by the orders of Louis the Eighteenth. LOUVET. 267 10 LOUVET. " LOUVET," says Madame Roland, in her Memoirs, " whom I knew during Roland's first tenure of office, and whose agreeable society I always saw as much of as possible, could, like Philopoamen, pay more than the interest of his ill looks. Of a small stature, and insig- nificant appearance, short-sighted and slovenly, he was passed over by the vulgar, who did not remark the nobility of his brow, the fire which animated his eyes, his countenance beaming with frankness and high feelings, with fine sallies and ingenious pleasantries. The world of letters and of taste is well acquainted with his romances, which combine the graces of fancy with the temper of philosophy, the lightest of styles with the happiest of judgments. But politics are indebted to him for graver works, the matter and principles of which attest in favour of his intellect and spirit. It is 268 LOUVET. impossible to unite more talent, with less of pretension and more of bonhomie. Courageous as a lion, simple as a child, a man of sense, a good citizen, a vigorous writer, he can make Catiline tremble at the Tribune, dine with the Graces, and sup with Bachaumont." The style of the period in this panegyric is so exquisitely copied (and by a precieuse as pretty and as strict as any who ever talked transcendental grammar with Voiture, at the Hotel de Rambouillet) that it almost reads like a squib of JV'r. Canning's for the Anti-Jacobin. But Madame Roland was only fulfilling a debt of gratitude in speaking so enthusiastically of Louvet, because he was the most active, if not the ablest member of the Gironde. And if his counsels had been attended to, and Robespierre crushed in the first days of the Na- tional Convention, they would never have experienced that series of terrible re verses, which ended, with the lives of their best and bravest, on the thirty-first of May. Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray, was born at Paris, on the eleventh of June, 1760. His father was a paper merchant. His childhood was not a happy one, for his father lost no opportunity of marking his preference for his elder brother. Louvet, naturally proud and sensi- tive, was cut to the quick by jealousy and envy. His inverted affections were the impulse of a career which LOU VET. 269 was to be distinguished for long-continued and perse- vering animosities. "The child is father of the man." At seventeen Louvet finished his studies, and became the secretary of a learned mineralogist, M. Dietrick, a member of the Academy of Sciences. It was shortly after this, that the Baron de Monthyon founded an annual prize of virtue, which was to be adjudged by the French Academy, and the Academy of Sciences. Louvet's connection with M. Dietrick probably induced him to write for it. He pleaded for the claims of an aged female servant, who, having exhausted her slender savings in the support of a reduced gentlewoman, her former mistress, had now hired herself out as a nurse, that she might continue her respectful charities. His eloquence achieved the most complete success. The prize was adjudged to his benevolent client, and his own reputation for philanthropy established. He was set down as a " good young man," a class which, however individually amiable, are as a body, good for nothing, either to their country or society. Louvet was of a temper which delighted in falsifying received opinions in general ; and he was especially determined that his own particular life should prove no exception to his practice. While all the respectable world was praising him, he was writing " Faublas ;" the first part of which 270 LOUVET. appeared in 1787. Its popularity was excessive and immediate, not so much from its freedom and licen- tiousness of thought, as from the hardihood of its Re- publicanism. Its success, however, could not tempt Louvet to leave the country in which he had now for some time resided. Six years before, in Paris, he had fallen in love with a beautiful girl, who was destined by her family to marry a man whom she detested. Louvet's passion was returned, but the ar- rangements which sacrificed her were insuperable. Immediately after the ceremony her husband took her abroad, and it was not till his death that she had been able to join Louvet, in his quiet retreat, twenty leagues from Paris. Here it was that he heard the first events of the French Revolution. His " Lodoiska," as he loved to call his mistress, as courageous and heroic a woman as the noble Pole of his romance, herself, at the news of the taking of the Bastille, bound the tricolor upon his arm, and implored him to seek fame in the Capital. But Louvet was too passionately enamoured of her and of his solitude, to be so easily moved. It was not till October that he left the country, carrying with him his pamphlet, " Paris Justified" which procured for him admission among the Jacobins. From this period down to the Convention, all his works were LOUVET. 271 written with a revolutionary object. His " Emilie de Varmont" was composed in defence of a married clergy. His " New Noble, or the Bourgeois Gentleman of the Eighteenth Century" was so full of audacious strokes, that it was refused, even at that time, by the theatre which had acted Figaro. Its manager, in rejecting it wrote to him, " I should require cannon to act this piece." About this time he got acquainted with Vergniaud, Guadet, the Rolands, and their friendship was of con- siderable service to him. He started a paper called " La Sentinelle ;" and Roland, then in office, gave him money, from public funds set apart for the purpose of supporting a Ministerial press. He was even on the point of being made Minister of Justice, in the Giron- dist Administration, instead of Duranthon ; but Robes- pierre, who already disliked him for advocating the war, and opposing his own scheme of a Pacific Demo- cracy, denounced the intended appointment at the Jaco- bins, and thus prevented it. From that moment the death-struggle began between the two. There was something of principle, besides mere rancour, in their rivalry something of that long duel, between prudery and debauchery, in which the world, in all times, has been engaged. Profligate, in- 272 LOUVET. dolent, credulous, romantic, wayward, social, petulant, Louvet could not but dislike the unswerving onwardness of Robespierre's almost solitary career, while he could not but be jealous of the success which attended, what he conceived, was his hypocrisy. " It is I who accuse you I, Louvet !" he exclaimed, when they met for the first time, face to face, in the National Convention. The moment was favourable. The Girondists were at the full height of their popu- larity. Petion had been nominated mayor of Paris, by a majority of 13,899 votes, while Robespierre had only received twenty-three. The speech in which Louvet brought forward his accusation, had long been prepared, but was charged with all the lively animosity of a more instantaneous retaliation. It was published by order of the Convention, and many of its passages, such as the apostrophe to Danton,then Minister of Justice, whom he accused before Posterity, of conniving at Robespierre's ambition ; his attack upon Marat, " the spoiled child of assassination," his solemn denunciation of the Mountain, are not inferior to the noblest examples of Vergniaud's eloquence. When he had concluded amidst the most tumultuous applause and enthusiastic cheering, Robes- pierre rose. He took advantage of the murmurs and yells of execration which his presence excited, to claim LOUVET. 273 a delay and an adjournment, to prepare for his defence. It could not decently be refused. That same night, at the Jacobins, motion was brought forward after motion, in condemnation of Louvet's horrible conduct, and to effect his expulsion from the Club. Upon the fifth of November, the day to which the discussion had been prorogued, Robespierre, supported by the Jacobins who had filled the Tribunes with their friends, entered the Convention, assured of a triumph. His speech, it is well known, was eminently successful. It was as remarkable for dexterity, astuteness, and tact, as the accusation had been for the boldness and the recklessness of its invective. It was in vain that Louvet endeavoured to obtain a hearing in reply. It was in vain that Barbaroux, with all the generosity of his nature, pleaded for his friend; and, as he could not gain possession of the tribune, rushed to the bar, to be heard as a petitioner. The timidity of the Plain, the fears of the Centre, were aroused by the aspect of the rude people above them, inflamed to savageness to find the middle class attacking, and themselves on the defensive. Robespierre was even strong enough to reject with con- tempt the mediation of Barrere, who proposed an amendment that the Assembly should pass on to the order of the day, " Considering that the National 274 LOTTVET. Convention ought not to occupy itself about other interests than those of the Republic." " Order me none of your orders of the day," inter- rupted Robespierre, " if the preamble is to be thus in- sulting !" He could not forbear showing, in his elation, that he considered his own interests as thenceforward inseparable from those of France ; and Louvet must have foreseen,from that hour, that the moral poltroonery of the men of compromise and half measures, had des- troyed a party which had a majority in the Assembly, which was by far the most popular in the country, and which, even in Paris, had carried the election to the mayoralty. He took but little part in the furious de- bates which, six months afterwards, immediately pre- ceded the ruin of the Gironde. He was too well aware that, an opportunity lost in politics is irretrievable. He remained mournfully anxious, restless, and on his guard. One night, his wife (he had now married his boyhood's love) heard unusual vociferations and extraordinary clamours at the Jacobins, near which she was living, in the Rue St. Honore. She had the courage to proceed there. The hall was filled with ruffians, brandishing sabres and pistols, and demanding, with loud cries, the death of her husband, Brissot, Guadet, Gensonne, LOU VET. 275 Vergniaud, and other chiefs of the Gironde. Collot d'Herbois, the President of the evening, was encou- raging their sanguinary passions. " Yes," he said, " in despite of the intriguers, we will save Liberty with you." She heard a man in military uniform declare, that " he trampled the idea of personal indemnity beneath his feet," and that " arrest was only a means towards re- venge." She hastened to her husband, who, upon her information, hurried with the arms which were then ordinarily carried by members, from door to door, to warn his friends and appoint a place of meeting and of refuge. At Petion's, he found many of them assembled. With all that authority which practical men assume over the imaginative, Petion refused to entertain alarms so unreasonable and wild. He opened the window the rain was pouring in torrents, " At any rate," he said coldly, " there will be nothing to-night." But in seasons when anything real is to be done, when events occur with rapidity, when business must become action, or be ridiculous, practical men are apt to be mistaken. The deliberations of the Jacobins, that night, cost Petion his life. He followed Louvet, Brissot, Larevel- liere, to Bordeaux, where they had betaken them- selves to rouse the department. But it was too late ; he perished miserably from hunger, and his body was T 2 276 LOUVET. afterwards found, half devoured by wolves, on the barren landes near the sea. Louvet in his perilous exile was supported by the heroic consolations of his wife. He found in her a de- votion the most self-denying, the resources of a quick- ness which was never at fault, a fortitude under suffer- ings which was above all praise. The details of their proscription are given with scrupulous minuteness, and a touching simplicity in his memoirs. After the ninth Thermidor, when Robespierre had fallen, Louvet returned to Paris. He obtained his admission into the Convention, not without great oppo- sition from Goujon, and the remains of the once power- ful Mountain. The re-action also of indulgence had brought back many of the emigrants of '90 and '91, who had, at that time, been attacked with the utmost vehemence by Louvet. He thus, notwithstanding the extreme impetuosity of his temper, found himself be- tween two fires, a man of neither party, hated by the ultra-Republicans for his conduct to Robespierre, un- forgiven by " the golden youth" for his earlier severities. He " eat his heart away," in a desperate and fretful poverty. An action brought against him by a Royalist writer, one Isidore Langlois, sufficed to exhaust his life, enfeebled by the privations of his exile and the morti- LOUVET. 277 fication of his return. While on his death-bed he was nominated by the Directory, Consul at Palermo ; but the grace came too late. He died on the 25th of August, 1797, at the age of thirty-seven. The partner of his romantic and eventful fortunes could not bear the thought of a separation. Upon the news of his death she took poison ; but medical aid was, against her will obtained, and she was induced, by the sight of her children and their affectionate dutifulness, never to renew her attempt. 278 COUTHON. 11 COUTHON. THAT sickly, melancholy, and prematurely old man, sitting between St. Just and Robespierre, a cripple with none of the graces of oratory, obliged even to speak sitting, must have seemed a strange leader for a Revolution. Something, however, he still preserved of those ardent passions, to which he owed all his infirmity. It was, while about to keep a rendezvous with a lady to whom he was tenderly attached, that he started on a dark winter night, from his house in the country. He lost his way, got into a swamp, from which he was with difficulty extricated, and then only to lose the use of his limbs, from that moment. This incident naturally saddened, and cast a sombre shade over his fortunes. There was a mournful severity about his character, which belonged to a Roman of free Rome, or to some of our own Puritans and Regicides. Like them, his COUTHON. 279 public career was animated and sustained above all the littleness of a personal ambition, by a constant sense of self-imposed denial and self-constituted justice. It was a fine high impulse which moved him to offer himself as a hostage to Bordeaux, when he supported the accusation against the Girondists, as a pledge for the treatment they were to receive at Paris. There was a strange solemnity, a wild idea of civil responsi- bilities, in the manner in which he so inexorably carried out the decree for the desolation of Lyons, when with a silver hammer he struck the grandest mansion in the Place de la Belle Cour, with the haughty words, " La loi te frappe." There was some- thing sadder and more touching, something of the old sense of Nemesis, in the quiet irony of his answer, when accused of wishing to become a Dictator and a King. " I, a King, I !" They were the last words he was to speak in that Convention, where he had been so dreaded. He was flung into prison with Robespierre and St. Just, whose high regenerative visions he had been wont to reduce and formularize into practice. In the cart which carried him to execution he was unable to stand, from his paralysis, and it is said that, unrecog- nized by his ancient colleagues, he was trodden under foot, and trampled on by them. His execution was 280 COUTHON. almost a mockery, there was so little of life or manhood left in him. Couthon was no unapt type of the Revolution. Its youth and his were alike begun in romance and senti- ment. They alike ended in shame and disappointment. He became, as it did desperate, cynical, cruel, san- guinary, unrelenting, indiscriminate, with rare intervals, which the recollection of his larger and younger sympathies afforded. ST. JUST. 281 12 ST, JUST, " YOUNG St. Just is coming, deputed by Aisne in the North, more like a Student than a Senator, not four and twenty yet, who has written books, a youth of slight stature, with mild mellow voice, enthusiast olive complexion, and long black hair.*" It reads like one of Ossian's heroes, in that mystic and melodious style. Not four-and-twenty yet, at the meeting of the Convention ; and in less than two years he was to die, to leave a name, to represent a system, as long as time shall endure. He was born at Decize, in the Nivernais. He owed his seat to the friendship of Robespierre. His Republicanism was already de- termined and mature; but he was at a time of life when, if his opinions had anticipated all the firmness of * Carlyle's French Revolution. ST. JUST. a faith, they had still all the freshness of a feeling. Earnest almost to austerity, disinterested to self-denial, tribune of the people, deputy, statesman, poet, soldier, his career will bear, and must challenge an inquiry. There was a melancholy fire in his eyes, that mystery of sadness in his beautiful aspect, which, as in faces like Charles the First's, bespoke and foreboded misfortune. He looked upon life only as a trust; but he looked upon it also a revelation. He was fond of solitude. He entered the Convention while grave statesmen were playing at prejudices, while even men like Guadet and Vergniaud were hissing Marat, with all the in- difference of one who was wrapt in an inner self, of one who had a vision of his own, " as though he corpses saw, and walked the tomb." He was called at first sight, in derision, the Apocalyptic. He held his head high, as Camille Desmoulins tauntingly said, as if it had been a Sacrament. But there was in him an iron will which sustained his solemn and deliberate con- victions. There were no mere momentary impulse. His voice was measured, impressive, low, as if to show the importance he was not ashamed to attach to them. He believed in Rousseau. He was led by Robespierre, because, far older than himself, he had preceded him in the same ground,and had extended, developed, reasoned, ST. JUST. 283 built, upon his own conclusions. Such was the St. Just who first approached the Tribune. It was to press the immediate judgment of the King; that he should be tried as a rebel, not as a citizen, as one who had fore- gone the pledged conditions of his vicarious Majesty, and therefore as a traitor. He added, " Whom does the Republic conciliate by compromise ? Let us never rest, till the hatred of Kings pass into the very life blood of the People." He shivered at a blow, the Constitutional formulae, which were attempted as a defence. " Open resistance," he said, " is no part of the character of Louis ; he has affected to agree with all parties, as at this hour he would affect to agree even with his judges." When the trial which he thus pre- cipitated was over, he voted for the death, against the reprieve, and against the appeal to the People. He astounded the Convention by proposing that they should themselves direct the operations of their armies, inde- pendantly of the Executive. " One will only," he exclaimed, " should there be in the State." This, his fixed idea of unity and centralization, he pursued with all the indomitable perseverance of his character. On the fifteenth of May, 1793, he proposed the suppres- sion of every departmental administration. On the 284 ST. JUST. twenty-third he brought forward a motion that there should be but one Municipality in any town, be its population what it might. On the thirty-first he instituted his report against the federalists of the Gironde. But there was another reason, besides their federalism, why St. Just could not forgive the Giron- dists. His republican simplicity revolted at the intel- lectual supremacy which they had assumed. " This nobility of fame," he exclaimed, "is worse than a nobility of blood." On the first of October he proposed a total change in the measures of the government. He introduced the state of the Nation, in a dark and terrible picture, charged with all the sombre colouring of his melancholy fancy. He proposed a decree which was adopted in the unanimity of terror, the first article of which declared the government Revolutionary till the Peace. It went on to place " the Executive, the Ministers, the Generals, all constituted bodies, under the controul of the Com- mittee of Public Safety, who would report every eight days to the Convention." Thus, within eleven months of his entrance upon a political career, this young and enthusiastic fanatic had borne his ideas triumphant over all opposition, and had made them the law of France. ST. JUST. 285 The same month in which he had been thus success- ful in the Convention, was to find him with the army of the Rhine. He was received with shouts and cheers of congratulation by the soldiery. The cry of " Landau or death" rose from the ranks. He communicated a new vigour to commanders as well as men. He insisted upon a daily attack upon the lines of Weis- sembourg, that conscripts like himself might learn to fight. He exposed his own person to every danger, but when the battle was over, he was as merci- less to those who had shown any want of courage, as he was profuse in his rewards to such as had joined in the wild chorus of the " ga ira," which he had shouted in defiance to the cannon of the Austrian. Upon his return to Paris he renewed his alliance more closely than ever with Robespierre. " When- ever," says M. Mignet, " Robespierre wished to take the Convention by surprise, Couthon was employed ; when- ever he wished to take it by storm, he selected St. Just. If there was a murmur or a hesitation, he appeared himself, and one word of his was sufficient for universal silence and terror." But St. Just went even farther than Robespierre. DARE, was his favourite word ; one as bold as Stafford's THOROUGH. " Dare !" he said, 286 ST. JUST. " that word is itself a revolution. Those who make one by halves are only digging for their graves." I have already mentioned, in the sketch of Hebert, his report of the thirteenth March, (twenty-third Ven- tose,) against the Dantonists and Hebertists. One of the speeches which preceded and tended to it was nearly as remarkable, that of the twenty-sixth Febru- ary (eighth Ventose). He had attacked the Hebertists for their extravagancies of cruelty ; he changed his tone upon a sudden, and attacked the new moderates for their simulated compassion for the remains of the Aristocracy. " You have," he said, " one hundred thousand prisoners, and the Revolutionary Tribunal has already condemned three hundred culprits. But, under the Monarchy, you had four hundred thousand prisoners. You hanged fifteen thousand smugglers. You broke three thousand men upon the wheel. At this very hour, there are four millions of prisoners in Europe whose cries you do not hear, while your parri- cidical indulgence is permitting the enemies of the nation to triumph. We ! we are interchanging reproaches, while the monarchs of the earth, a thousandfold more cruel, are slumbering in crime." Directly after the fall of Danton, St. Just repaired ST. JUST. 287 again to the army, but, this time, to that of the Sambre and the Meuse, then before Charleroi. His fiery im- patience could not brook the delays of the siege. His personal intrepidity was never more heroically exhi- bited ; but his severity to others amounted to atrocity. He shot whole batches of officers for their inertness. He even caused a lieutenant-colonel to be executed. But in the midst of these rigours, he was summoned back to Paris where Robespierre required his assist- ance more than ever. He hastened immediately upon his arrival to the Committee of Public Safety. He was received coldly and with embarrassment, by the rival triumvirate, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud Varennes, and Barrere. He saw that there was no time to be lost. He implored Robespierre to strike quickly and with force. He went with him to the Committee, but, upon their appearance, they ceased to deliberate. Robes- pierre now no longer hesitated. Upon the eighth Thermidor, he threw down the gauntlet, in announcing a new proscription, as the only means of safety for the Commonwealth. His speech was received without a single plaudit, in mute consternation, by the Conven- tion. In the evening St. Just accompanied him to the Jacobins, where he recited the same speech amidst the enthusiasm of these, his unflinching adherents. The 288 ST. JUST. people were true, then ; that was sufficient to animate St. Just to the uttermost excess of hardihood. He left Robespierre with the Jacobins, to concert with them for his dispositions for the morrow, and proceeded alone to the camp of the enemy. He was received, as a deserter, with caresses and distinctions. But instead of replying to their flattering importunities, to detach himself from Robespierre, he seated himself at a table, and began writing. It was the act of accusation against them he was preparing. They inquired what it was; but his only answer was : " You have cut me to the very heart : I shall open it at the Convention." The die was thus cast. The ninth Thermidor dawned upon two conspiracies. Upon the one side were nearly the whole Convention, rallied and serried together by their common fears, and the majority of the Committee of Public Safety. On the other, were Robespierre, Couthon, St. Just, the Commune, the Revolutionary Army under Henriot, the Clubs, and the populace. St. Just, true to his nature, began the attack. His first sentence was a direct incrimination of his opponents. Tallien interrupted him ; and then began the terrible struggle of the day. The minority bore up courageously against the enormous superiority of numbers in the Assembly, opposed to them. The majority, with even ST. JUST. 289 more intrepidity, forgot the disparity of numbers out of doors. It was such a contest as the Forum had never beheld, even in the last days of Roman freedom. It was an awful drama, which even the genius of Coleridge has been unequal to dramatize. Each party displayed the ferocious earnestness of combatants who knew that victory meant life, and that defeat was death. The sitting began at twelve o'clock in the day. It was ad- journed at half-past five, upon the arrest of Robespierre, his brother, Couthon, Lebas, and St. Just. But they had necessarily calculated upon this result. Their trust was in the Hotel-de-Ville, where Henriot, the commander of the forces, and Fleuriot, the mayor, had been posted since twelve o'clock. Upon hearing the news of this arrest, they sounded the tocsin, and summoned the Sections. They sent, also, a deputation to the Jacobins, who received it with transports of accla- mation. They sent an answer back, that " the Society keeps watch for the country she has sworn to die rather than live under crime." Henriot to excite the populace traversed the street at the head of his staff, calling upon the people to arm to save their country. It was during this absurd fanfaronnade that two Conventionalists met him in the Rue St. Honore. They called upon some gensdarmes who happened to be by, to seize him in the u 290 ST. JUST. name of the Law. They obeyed, and Henriot was cap- tured and carried bound to prison. Still, everything as yet was uncertain. Robespierre, St. Just, Lebas, the younger Robespierre, and Couthon, had been delivered, by orders of the Municipality, backed by detachments of troops, from their several confinements. It was impossible to foresee in what manner the day was to determine. From twelve to six it had been in the favour of the Convention ; from six to eight it had turned to the profit of Robespierre. He, himself, had been the first to reach the Hotel de Ville, amidst shouts of " Long live Robespierre perish the traitors !" Shortly afterwards St. Just arrived, and, after him, Henriot, who had been released in his turn by Coffinhal, at the head of two hundred artillery-men. The Convention which had adjourned at half-past five till seven, had by this time re-assembled. Every minute brought with it adverse tidings the successful assumption of supreme power by the Commune the deliverance of the prisoners their installation at the Hotel de Ville the frenzy of the Jacobins the sum- mons to the Sections the release of Henriot. At this moment Amar, one of the members, rushed in with the intelligence that Henriot was pointing his cannon against the Convention itself. ST. JUST. 291 " Citizens" exclaimed the President, covering him- self, " the moment has arrived for us to die at our posts." " Yes, yes, we will die here" were the shouts which re- sponded to his call. The Assembly were not unequal to the occasion. They instantaneously decreed a vote of outlawry against Henriot, and remained steadfast, con- tent to await the issue in their places. But while their courage was thus conspicuously shown, Henriot's cowardice was destroying every ad- vantage which the forethought of the triumvirate and the spirit of the Jacobins, had obtained. He suffered himself to be overruled by the reluctance of the gunners to fire their cannon against the Convention. The tran- sition from successful disobedience to mutiny was imme- diate. Henriot, half drunk and distracted by his fears, had barely time to mount his horse and fly to the Hotel de Ville, before they declared for the Law. Here he found the Sections gathering in force. It was nine o'clock, the hour which the Commune had appointed for their coming. They came in a state of uncertainty and disquietude, ill-informed as to the causes of the quarrel between the Commune and the Convention. The sight of Henriot, flying and pale with fear, gave a prestige of triumph already to the Assembly. This was immediately followed up by the appearance of the u2 292 ST. JUST. commissioners, deputed by the Convention to inform them of their decrees, and to invite them to put them in execution. They obeyed, deserted the Hotel de Ville, and presented themselves successively before the Assembly, which they swore with loud cries to defend. Such is the magic of authority, and so habituated are the fond and trusting people to obey the first who may have the courage to assume it. From this hour it was evident that the cause of the Triumvirate, of Robes- pierre, St. Just, and Couthon, was lost. But St. Just did not join in the angry reproaches with which some of his colleagues were loading Henriot. " Scoundrel," exclaimed Coffinhal, " it is your cowardice which has destroyed us all." With these words he threw himself upon him, and flung him from the window. St Just was of another temper. He remained silent and serene, sus- tained by the lofty consciousness of having acted up to and fulfilled the stern convictions which his sense of duty had prescribed. But the time had now arrived when the Convention felt itself strong enough to assume the offensive. Barras, who had been sent to raise what force he could, and arm the schools, which always play a part in a Paris insurrection, had returned and announced that he was ready to march. Bourdon too, who was at the head of ST. JUST. 293 a great number of battalions, called upon the Convention to authorize a general assault upon the Hotel de Ville. " Go !" said Tallien, who had taken the President's chair, " and may to-morrow's sun find no conspirator alive !" It was now past midnight, and the triumvirate could hear, in the still summer air, the heavy tread of the advancing columns, and the cry of "Vive la Con- vention Nationale," from that populace upon whose aid they had so surely counted. Robespierre, full of his classic ideas of self-sacrifice, too proud to be a witness to the triumph of his foes, discharged a pistol at him- self, which fearfully mangled but did not kill him. Lebas imitated his example but with better success. Robespierre, the younger, threw himself from a window of the third story, but survived his fall. Couthon, with a feeble and uncertain hand, struck himself two or three times ineffectually with a dagger. St J ust, alone, looked calmly on, awaiting the fury of that people who knew not, in their ignorance, that it was for loving them he was to die. On the tenth Thermidor, (the twenty-eighth July, 1794,) at five o'clock in the afternoon, he was carried amidst the taunts and curses of the mob, to execution, Robespierre, it is said by M. Mignet, notwithstanding the agony he was enduring from his wound, bore an 294 ST. JUST. expression upon his face of pity for the crowd around him. St. Just preserved a haughty self-respect: " He nothing common did, nor mean, Upon that memorable scene." He was apparently absorbed in those same high visions of a better state, which have bewildered and destroyed so much youthful genius, so many spirits, " beautiful and swift," too sensitively alive to the con- trast between what is, and what ought to be. St. Just's was a pure and lofty character. He is the hero of extreme Republicans ; the Cid of their Cancio- nero ; the expression of as superb a nationality. He is the St. Dominic of their Calendar, as unsparing and practical a fanatic. He is the generous and fiery All of their Dispensation, one as sanguinary as Maho- met's. He was the most intrepid thinker of his times. At twenty he had already meditated a social system as strange as the " new Atlantis," where there should reign simplicity, equality, austerity, and force. He saw it realized. " Long before the tenth of August," says M. Thiers, " he had forecast in the depths of his sombre intelligence, the scheme of a supernatural society ; and his enthusiasm had borne him onwards to those extremities of opinion, to which Robespierre ST. JUST. 295 had only arrived through hate. New in the midst of the Revolution," he is speaking of 1792, "in which he had scarcely entered ; a stranger as yet to all its struggles, its faults, and its crimes ; belonging to the Mountain by the violence of his convictions ; charming the Jacobins by his audacity and spirit, captivating the Convention by his talents, he had still a popular repu- tation to acquire. His ideas, always well entertained, but seldom well understood, did not produce their right effect until they had become, through the plagiarism of Robespierre, more common, more clear, and more ripe for declamation." It was not surprising that St. Just was so often unin- telligible to his contemporaries ; he lived in the Past ; he tried them by its standard, and he found no sym- pathy. He preferred to commune with poets and heroes, with the Sophocles and Pericles of his soli- tude. His feelings, speeches, duties, were all cast in imitation of the antique. His favourite study was the classic history, and he learned from it a sense of self- denial which preserved his character amidst the tempt- ations of power, as stainless and severe as that of Antonine. His devotion amounted to a worship, of which his life was the sacrifice. On one occasion, he exclaimed : " The traces of Liberty and Genius can 296 ST. JUST. never be effaced from the universe. What if the world has been empty since the Romans, their memory still fills it!" It is this idolatry which burst forth in such en- thusiastic exclamations, that will throw a light upon his career. It is not by confounding his regenerative visions with the blood-thirsty brutalities of the Heberts, Goujons, Ronsins, or his pure life, with the frauds, debaucheries, intrigues, orgies, of the Mirabeaus, Dan- tons, and Talley rands of the Revolution, that any purpose of truth can be served. We should try him by testing others, Let us imagine high-souled and ardent enthusiasts, such as Akenside and Charles Townshend, thrown into the French Revolution, before their youth had passed away, while their friendship was still cemented by their common passion for Liberty, while still animated by poetic prophecies of coming greatness, while yet offering up verse in honour of the Puritans ; " Not Fairfax wildly bold "While bare of crest he hewed his fatal way, Through Naseby's firm array To heavier dangers did his breast oppose, Than Pym's free virtue chose, When the proud force of Strafford he controlled."* Let us imagine them called upon to act to legislate * Ode to Charles Townshend, by Akensid . ST. JUST. 297 to serve and save their country, during a period like the Revolution. Let us imagine them mingling with men as fanatical and earnest as themselves, who, each attached a faith of his own to that word Republic, for which he was prepared to die. "Warm with every notion that by nature or accident had been connected with the sound of liberty,"* they would hear one universal aspiration after Civilisation, Progress, Free- dom, Morality, Independence, Fraternity ; nor would they fail to catch some portion of that inspiration which elevated those around to the stature of ancient greatness. They would see men who a few years before had been in obscure and even menial situations, deliberating and watching over the public safety administrating,accusing, judging, speaking, providing for the wars, the arsenals, the finances, the affairs, the consumption of a great free People ; they would see them haranguing at the Jaco- bins, consulting at the Committees, reporting to the Convention, working fifteen hours a-day, corresponding with fourteen armies, dictating to a coalition of Kings the terms which victories had justified. They would have to choose between proscribing or being proscribed, between being an accuser or a victim. That was no * Dr. Johnson, of Akensidc. 298 ST. JUST. season of half measures, or expediency, no time of compromise or vacillation. Yes and No meant life or death at the chance will of whatever party might be uppermost, among thirty millions of men, split into innumerable factions, which yet, like the fragments of a broken mirror, each reflected a perfect, single, and complete idea. Nor if they chose aright, was success without its dangers. Pursuing the triumph, they were charged with being dictators'; faltering from mercy, they were denounced as conspirators. They rose every day to look death in the face, but they were supported by the glory of their reward. They were Rulers, States- men, Ministers, Orators, at once, and the eyes of the world were upon them. Upon a career so full of renown and peril, Charles Townshend and Akenside would not, for one moment, have hesitated to engage. " The Tarpeian rock," they would have exclaimed, " was close to the Capitol. ' 4 They would not have recoiled because their path was beset by scaffolds and dungeons, or because the cries of the butchered and the drowning might ring within their hearing. " Marius," they would have said, "was not deterred in his unswerving patriotism, by the shrieks of his patrician victims." They would have found excuse and absolution for every excess of the Revolu- ST. JUST. 299 tion, in the bloody struggles of the Roman Forum. But the diversity of temper which estranged them in England, would still have separated their fortunes. Charles Townshend's facility of disposition and rare social endowments, would have led him in the progress of atrocities to become an Indulgent. He would have been the friend of Danton, the guest of Herault-Se- chelles. His politics would have been as unsettled and as variable as those which earned him in Parliament the name of " the weather cock." He would have coquetted with Egalite, as he coquetted with Leicester House. He would have flitted from party to party, and house to house, caressed and admired for his bons- mots, and his readiness of raillery. His wit, too, in that atmosphere of political competition, would have become more keen and severe, exacerbated to an intensity of bitterness. He would have been a Camille Desmou- lins, with happier elocution, but scarcely so eloquent, with asperities as brilliant, but thought less profound, with opinions as restless, but with an ambition more direct, unscrupulous, and sustained. And if hisdeathhad come upon him, as unopportunely as it did in England, (when Lord Chatham's illness had almost put the Premiership within his reach,) he would have been as poignantly and deeply affected to part with Power, as 300 ST. JUST. utterly unmanned by so early a separation from the mistress he had so devotedly, so constantly served, as was Camille to leave his bride, the "beloved Lucile" of his farewell letter. " Farewell, Lucile, dearest Lu- cile," was its conclusion, " I feel that the shores of life are waning from my sight I see Lucile, yet once more ; I am looking upon you once again ; my fettered arms embrace you, my manacled hands caress you, my severed head reposes on you I am going forth to die." Akenside's plebeian origin, his love of contradiction, his enmity to all things established, would have thrown him forward into ranks more advanced, and opinions more austere. He would have attached himself as closely, as did St. Just, to Robespierre. He would have rushed into his closet, as eagerly, with some new para- dox to be asserted, or some received and old one to be crushed. He would have found a fitter audience in the Jacobins, than in the Squires of Northamptonshire, for his clamours for Equality. He would have quoted not Hobbes and Shaftesbury, but Spinosa and Rousseau. He would have dogmatized, with as persevering an acuteness. He would have adopted in extenuation of his systematic cruelties, an apology like that of St. Just. " The fire of Liberty has refined us, as it chases the scum from the vessel to purify the metal that remains." But ST. JUST. 301 if Akenside was a more admirable Poet than St. Just, if the Pleasures of Imagination are a more successful poem than Organt, he had not enough of character or resolution to become a statesman of his height and pro- portions. He would have been as ruthless but not so disinterested; his list of proscriptions would have been as long, but his capacity was unequal to plan, enact, execute, the measures which made the Revolution. And of the greatest among these, St. Just was the originating power, the report against the King, that against the Girondists, and that against the respective friends and followers of Danton and Hebert. It is by such comparisons that we shall best appreciate the Greatness of St. Just. He was a Poet Republican. He was of that temper, which in its fairest uses, may form a Great man, and in its worst abuses can never form a mean man. He was exalted by that spirit of Liberty, which at its highest, may make almost a prophet, and at its lowest, almost an assassin, which glorifies even into a Milton, and degrades even into an Alibaud. But nothing of self-advancement or self-interest, nothing of a stunted morality, nothing of small delin- quencies, belongs to characters like these. They are capable of great virtues or great crimes. And, if St. Just had lived, he would have disdained the mimetic 302 ST. JUST. grandeurs of an Imperial Dignitary, even with the bribe of such enormous appointments as a Vice Grand Elector. But with his ancient companion-in- arms and comrade, Hoche, with whom he must soon have been reconciled, he would have rendered France as great, and yet more formidable, than she became under the empire. And they would have given to her, in their own lives, a renown which would have been only less glorious, and far more pure, than that which now attaches to the idea of Napoleon. ROBESPIERRE. 303 13 KOBESPIERE WE are very apt in England to confound together all the numerous parties of the French Revolution to merge their distinct and separate principles of action in one general and indiscriminate obloquy, and to brand Robespierre as responsible for all its terrors and excesses. Yet the differences among the many factions of the time were marked intelligible and plain, their only bond of union being the desire to establish an equality more or less exceptional. It was a sense of this the universal idea of fraternity then prevailing which accounts for the extravagant language of M. de Lamartine, that the French Revolution was the only practical attempt that a nation ever made to realize the doctrines of Christianity. There was the party of the Feuillants, Barnave, and the Lamcths; the party of the Gironde, Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet, and the 304 ROBESPIERRE. Rolands; the party of Danton, Camilla Desmoulins, Lacroix, and Legendre ; the party of Robespierre, Couthon, and St. Just ; the party of Marat, with its subdivisions of Chaumette-Gobel and Hebert-Ronsin ; the party of Billaud Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, and Barrere ; the party of Tallien and Barras ; the party of Bourbotte; all of them in their turn eminent and formid- able. But, through all the strife of phrases and the war of individual ambitions, there were three natural forces which predominated, triumphed, and succeeded. There was the power of the Intellect, as represented by the Gironde. There was the power of Self-indulgence, (or as it is called by a new school of political ethics, of Hedonism,) with all the passions for its auxiliaries, as represented by the Dantonists. There was the power of Self-Denial, with its aids of hypocrisy and respecta- bility, as represented by Robespierre. After the empire had passed away, and during the quiet times of the restoration, when men began to look back, with a view to history, to the storms through which they had safely issued, the Girondists and the Dantonists became the champions of respective schools. The Doctrinaires, the Liberal Royalists, it was even whispered Louis XVIII. himself, were partial to the memory of the victims of May, 1793. There was many ROBESPIERRE. 305 a sentence of eloquent ministers, like De Serre and Laine, turned with some allusion to the mournful fate of Guadet and Roland, or with Vergniaud's beautiful illustration of " the Revolution, which, like Saturn, had devoured its own children." On the other hand, the Dantonists became the heroes of the Opposition. Dan- ton, himself, is the Achilles of M. Thiers' Epic. He is scarcely made less of by M. Mignet, or M. Cormenin. The orators of the Left were in moments of excitement not afraid to quote, apply, adopt, his passionate and coloured language. But both parties, Ministry and Opposition, alike vied with one another in disavowing, disclaiming, abusing, recoiling from Robespierre. As time, however, advanced, and old prejudices be- came dispelled, the revolutionary history was more truly and thoroughly investigated ; and, year by year, there grew among Republicans the idea that the fame of Robespierre had been unjustly dealt with ; nor was the truth less cherished by those radical and paradoxical enthusiasts, because the calumnies had been long sanctioned and received. Little by little the desire to vindicate and sustain the fair character of their ancient chief, spread through the whole Republi- can body. In 1833, the Society of the Rights of Man did not shrink from publishing and affirming as their 306 ROBESPTERRE. own, the celebrated " Declaration of the rights of Man," which Robespierre had presented to the Con- vention. From that time, the feeling in favour of Robespierre has only increased with the persecutions which the Liberal Associations have undergone from authority. It may still be seen, boldly and energetically avowed, in the columns of" La Democratic Pacifique" or " La Reforme" and the young and brilliant editor of the last paper thus expresses himself in a work pub- lished this year, about Robespierre.* " There were two men in Robespierre, the philosopher and the tri- bune. As a philosopher, he was not so bold a thinker as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mably, or Fenelon. But, as a tribune, he had amassed up against himself whole hoards of revenge. Superior in devotion to those war- riors of ancient Rome, whose lives were offered to the spirits of gloom, he, for his heroic end with savage magnanimity, dedicated his name to the execration of futurity. He was of those who have said, ' Perish our memories, rather than those ideas which will make the salvation of the world ;' and he became responsible for all its chaotic enormities, until the hour when, wishing to save the Revolution, which was engulphed * Histoire de dix ans par Louis Blanc. 4th vol. ROBESPIERRE. 307 in blood, he disappeared, and was dragged down by her. Vanquished his history written by the victors Robespierre has left a memory accursed." Maximilian Robespierre was born in 1759, at Arras, He was early left an orphan, and without means of education or subsistence. But the Bishop of Arras obtained for him an exhibition at the College of Louis le Grand, at Paris, and thus provided for his mainte- nance. His college career was distinguished, his Greek and Latin verses were unexceptionable, and he obtained prizes in the years 1772, 1774, and 1775. He also made himself remarkable for a boyish Republi- canism, a classic and imitative Liberalism, a seeming independance and severity of character, which caused one of the professors to nickname him " the Roman." After his degree, Robespierre studied the Law for some time in Paris, and then proceeded to exercise the pro- fession of Advocate in his native city. Here he be- came eminent in all the civil troubles which, even in the provinces, the vacillations of the feeble and totter- ing government produced. His scrupulous integrity, his respectable and grave life, his profession of a superior morality, his reputation for a love of justice, procured for the young lawyer his nomination to the States General. Dumont gives us an interesting ac- x2 308 ROBESPIERRE. count of his maiden speech. The clergy, to gain popu- larity, had deputed the Archbishop of Aix to the Lower House, to propose a conference of the Three Orders on the condition of the poor. This prelate had spoken with great earnestness of the agricultural distress and the poverty of the country parishes; he had produced a piece of black bread, which a dog would have re- jected, but to which the peasantry were reduced ; and he had implored the Assembly to better the condition of the people. " The tiers etat perceived the snare, but dared not openly reject the proposal, as it would render them unpopular with the lower classes ; when a deputy arose, and after professing sentiments, in favour of the poor, still stronger than those of the pre- late, adroitly threw doubts upon the sincerity of the intentions avowed by the clergy." " Go," said he, to the Archbishop, " and tell your colleagues, that if they are so impatient to assist the suffering poor, they had better come hither and join the friends of the people. Tell them no longer to en- deavour, by unworthy means, to make us swerve from the resolutions we have taken ; but as ministers of reli- gion, as worthy imitators of their masters, let them forego that luxury which surrounds them ; let them resume the modesty of their origin ; dis2harge the ROBESPIERRE. 309 pampered lackeys by whom they are attended ; sell their superb equipages, and convert all their superfluous wealth into food for the indigent." " The speaker was Robespierre. His speech was succeeded by a flattering murmur of ' Who is he ?' and it was not until some time had elapsed, that a name was circulated which, three years later, made France tremble. Reybaz, who was seated next to me, observed : * This young man has not yet practised enough ; he is too wordy, and does not know when to stop; but he has a store of eloquence and bitterness which will not leave him in the crowd.' Mirabeau's judgment of him, which Dumont does not mention, was still more re- markable, and provokes a reminiscence of Hampden's prophecy of Cromwell's greatness ; " Robespierre will go far ; HE BELIEVES WHAT HE SAYS." On the twenty-first of October 1789, he again came forward in behalf of the People and the Poor. He vehemently attacked and opposed the enactirient of martial law, which Lafayette had proposed, after the murder of the baker Francois by the mob. He also defended the populace after the massacres of Foulon and Berthier, when Barnave made use of those terrible words, " This blood ! was it then so pure ?" But he did so with more dexterity and less of frankness than 3JO ROBESPIERRE. the Feuillants. He was, however, the first to proclaim the necessity of revolutionizing France, and the prema- ture audacity of the phrase did not fail to make him enemies among the Few. He advocated at the same time the illimitable liberty of the Press ; and this bold conviction was not without a similar effect. He also especially contributed to pass the self-denying ordinance, which precluded any of its members from a seat in the Legislative Assembly which was to succeed it. These measures, with others of a similar tendency, and his constant attendance at the Jacobins, where he was called by acclamation "the Incorruptible," obtained for him a popularity which encouraged him to measure himself against Mirabeau. He opposed his scheme of electoral reform with the utmost vehemence, although it made any one who paid fifteen francs in taxes, eligible as a voter, and anyone who paid fifty francs in taxes, eligible as a deputy. " This law consecrates an Aristocracy," was the strange and new language of Robespierre. The odds, however, intellectually and numerically, were too disproportionate; and Mirabeau carried his plan through the Assembly. Robespierre next con- fronted him in a better cause ; he defended the Prince de Conde, whom Mirabeau wished to declare a traitor to his country. He also defended M. de Lautrec, an ROBESPIERRE. 311 enthusiastic loyalist, as if to show that he could respect strong convictions. Indeed he made himself, at this period, remarkable for his aversion and abhorrence of all severities. When pains and penalties were proposed against the garrison of Nancy, he declared that it was as cruel as it was useless to punish the soldiery ; that Bouille alone and the officers deserved chastisement. He also introduced a bill to abolish the punishment of death. The sentimental philanthropy which he had extracted from Rousseau, recommended him even less to the people than his ostentatious disinterestedness. On the fifth of April, 1791, he proposed that no mem- ber of the Assembly could form part of an Admi- nistration. This motion he succeeded in carrying. A few days later, he advocated the emancipation of the negroes, with statements the most exaggerated of their oppressed and suffering condition. He also opposed Barnave's motion, that the colonies should be allowed to legislate for themselves ; and on this occasion, he made use of an expression which marks the inflexible obstinacy of the man. " Perish the colonies, rather than one principle." " Perish commerce," said Mr. Windham, nearly at the same time in England, and quite as absurdly; "but live the Constitution !" The labours of the Constituent had now nearly closed. 312 ROBESPIERRE. Brissot had got up the petition of the Champs de Mars for the deposition of the King. Robespierre who dis- liked, and perhaps was jealous of him, obtained as much popularity by asserting in the Assembly, that the Queen was amenable to justice, as a simple citi- zen, and the King, as any other public officer. When the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, he was drawn in a triumphal car round Paris, with Petion ; and, as a more solid reward, he was appointed Public Accuser, an office which he manifested great repugnance to accept. Robespierre, now that he was, principally through his own exertions, debarred from a seat in the Legisla- ture, devoted himself entirely to the Jacobins. Here he denounced the war and the war party, with a vehemence the more intense from his hatred of Louvet and Brissot. Perhaps, also, it was owing to the vio- lence of their speeches, to Isnard's furious attacks upon the King, and to the extreme opinions of the Girond- ists, that he began to moderate his own. He had no share in the 20th of June, none in the 10th of August insurrections. He circulated a paper called " The De- fender of the Constitution." He refused the office to which he had been elected He withdrew himself alto- gether from the society of Petion and the Rolands, and cultivated the acquaintance of moderate men and ROBESPIERRE. 313 mediocre intellects. " Unaccountable as it may seem," says M. Thiers, " he excited an enthusiasm in the sub- ordinate circles in which he moved, by his dogmatism and his reputation for public virtue. He thus based his popularity upon blind prejudices and inferior talents. Austerity and an unimpassioned perseverance have something of fascination for ardent characters, and even for higher understandings. It is certain that there were men disposed to assist Robespierre, with a zeal, energy, and abilities far superior to his own. Camille Des- moulins called him his Aristides, and pronounced him eloquent." After the 10th August Robespierre appeared at the head of his section at the bar of the National Assembly, to propose a monument in honour of the slain. His tone towards the Legislature was already scornful and imperious. In preparing the massacres of September Robespierre also took no part. He kept aloof from all public measures, and wrapped himself up in a mys- terious reserve. But the influence of his character, it might be of his hypocrisy, was such, that he was univer- sally designated as first man in France ; his enemies called him " The Dictator," but, this term, so far from being of any injury to him, increased his popularity with Marat and the mob, who were clamouring for 314 ROBESPIERRE. unity in government. Marat even sought him out, in his lodgings in the Place Vendome. There could not have been found a stronger contrast than between the broad maniacal fanaticism of the on e mind, and the system- atic and small concinnity of the other. There were scattered about Robespierre's room, prints, miniatures, portraits of himself; here he gave himself up to the most untiring study of Rousseau. He thought, lived, moved, had his being only in the world of Emile, and " The Confessions." His political principles were all derived from the Contrat Social. His Political econo- my was as barbarously absurd as the Discours sur les causes de V inegalite parmi les hommes. He carried the paternal principle of Government to its highest and farthest pitch. He interfered not only with labour but with prices. He denounced luxury at the Jacobins in the evening, in the gorgeous phrases which he had culled from the Prize Essay. He treated the people as St. Preux did Julie. It was with paroxisms of jealousy, as wild as the lover's, that he watched the mere approach of a rival. It was with the tears and transports of as sentimental an enthusiasm that he told the people how he loved. It was only before them that his hard, practical, conceited, imitative nature was moved into passion. But there was something of ROBESPIERRE, 315 Rousseau in his very egotism and self-sufficiency. The same spirit which covered his walls with pictures of himself, was the feeling which had prompted "The Confessions. Marat left him in disgust, and called him " a small man." It would have been a juster description to have called him a man with one idea. Robespierre had so entirely saturated his mind with Rousseau's doctrines had so obstinately narrowed it within the range of his writings that his perception of real life was absolutely vitiated. The brutal activity and san- guinary measures which Marat proposed to him, he recoiled from, not from a sense of humanity, because, like all theoretical philanthropists, he was far too much enamoured of his own ideas not to enforce them at any risk and cost ; but because they did not blend, harmon- ize, and accord with his own system. Nevertheless, this disagreement did not prevent their joint return, among the Paris deputation, to the National Conven- tion. Nor did it prevent Marat from acting thence- forth under the control, if he sometimes disobeyed the orders, of Robespierre. On the twentieth of September, 1792, a fortnight after the September massacres, the Convention met, for the first time, at the Tuileries. Their first duty was to 316 ROBESPIERRE. elect a president and secretaries. The nomination of Petion, and as his subordinates, of Vergniaud, Brissot, Condorcet, and Camus, showed the great preponderance of the Girondists. The next step taken by them was to abolish Royalty, and decree the Republic. The Abbe Gregoire, who brought forward the proposition with these words as blasphemous as any that even he had ever uttered " The history of kings is the martyrology of nations," looked round in vain for the support of his ancient colleague, Robespierre. His motion was carried unanimously, but Robespierre was absent. It was immediately after this, that Rebecqui, Bar- baroux, Brissot, began that series of attacks on the Paris members, and on Robespierre in particular, which were at last consummated in that famous accusation of Louvet, which Madame Roland has called the Robespierride. I have, in the sketch of Louvet, de- scribed the effect of this harrangue upon his audience, the coolness and self-possession of Robespierre in his plea for delay, and his final triumph on the fifth of November, by the aid and fidelity of the Jacobins. From that hour he became absolute and supreme. On the thirtieth of the same month, he took part in the debate on the condemnation of the king. The view which he took of this procedure was singular, and little favourable to ROBKSP1ERRE. 317 the power of the Legislature. He was perpetually on his guard against any usurpation of power by them which might be directed against the People. " You have no sentence to pronounce," he exclaimed, " here are neither accused, accuser, judge it is a great measure of public safety to be taken, an act of National Security to be declared." To those Girondists who hesitated and faltered out an apology who invoked the Consti- tution in defence of the King he addressed a menace full of irony and bitterness. " You speak of the Con- stitution ! The Constitution forbade what you have done. If He could be punished only by deposition, you could not pronounce that without a trial. You have no right to keep him in prison, but he has a right, on his release, to ask for indemnity and damages. The Constitution condemns you. Go, then, to the very feet of Louis, and implore his clemency." When Louis XVI. was brought before the bar of the Assembly, Robespierre did not shrink from avow- ing that he was touched by the serene and gentle con- duet of the King; but the inflexible pertinacity of his opinions was proof against his better feelings. " The greatest mark of devotion," he said, " which can be given to one's country, is to stifle every impulse of sensibility." It must have been with a secret satis- 318 ROBESPIERRE. faction that he witnessed the pitiable inconsistencies of Vergniaud and other Girondists, who spoke in defence of the King but voted against him. The reason adduced by them in palliation of their weakness, was also a triumph to Robespierre, because it was by the adoption of the same argument which he had himself throughout uniformly used. Vergniaud apologized for the changes in his convictions by saying, " that the state of the nation, its troubles, distractions, Civil War, demanded the King's death." Robespierre must have foreseen from that moment, that the Girondists, not- withstanding their majority, were given over to his hands. He watched their career of brilliant imbecility with indefatigable hate, until at length the opportunity he had so long desired was afforded to him by the defection of Dumouriez. As early as February 1793, he gave the first intimation of his intentions against them. In April several of the sections had already petitioned the Assembly against the Federalists. On the tenth of that month, Robespierre, in a long oration, traced the connection of the Girondists with Dumou- riez, and with the family of Egalite. He ended with a proposition to send before the Revolutionary Tribu- nal, the Orleans's and every accomplice of the Traitor; " with regard to the deputies, Guadet, Gensonne, ROBESPIERRE. 319 Vergniaud it would be a sacrilege," he added, with bitter mockery, "to accuse such honourable men.' " In Hateriam statim invectus est ; Scaurum cui im- placabilius irascebatur, silentio tramisit." The Tragedy was brought to a close on the thirty-first of May. The Girondists were absurdly imprudent even to the very last, and even in the most trivial details. When Robespierre had almost wearied out the attention of the Assembly by his ambiguous and vague generalities, Vergniaud was foolish enough to interrupt and call on him to conclude. " Yes, I will conclude, against you, against you who " and Robespierre proceeded in a strain of direct invective, which almost arose into eloquence. After the triumph of the Mountain over the Gironde, the victors naturally quarrelled among themselves. Chabot and the more fanatical Republicans who had followed Marat, began an attack upon the Committee of Public Safety. Robespierre who had declined a seat at it, undertook its defence in a speech of great moderation. He consented, however, not unwillingly, to a reform of its constitution; its numbers were re- duced to nine, which was its original complement; and although he still for the moment refused to belong to it, he secured a majority of his adherents in its counsels. 320 ROBESPIERRE. At the Jacobins, where the strife between the Dantonist- Indulgents and the Anarchists, with Hebert and Collot d'Herbois at their head, was furiously raging, he took part boldly with the first. " It is high time," he said, " to put an end to these ridiculous and shameful exhibitions ; I could wish that the Society would employ itself upon mattters which it might more profitably consider, and that it would dismiss the greater portion of those which are agitated here, as idle as they are dangerous." M. Thiers, apparently a little conciliated in favour of Robespierre, by this defence of Danton, thus speaks of his policy at this time. " Robespierre perceiving all the peril of a new Revolutionary inundation, which would have overwhelmed all principles of Government, endeavoured to rally the Jacobins round the Conven- tion, the Committees, and the old Patriots. Every thing was to his own advantage in this useful and praiseworthy policy. In preparing the power of the Committees, he was preparing his own. In defending Patriots of the same date and of contemporary energy, he was indemnifying himself, and preventing Opinion from selecting victims by his side ; moreover, he thus placed himself far above those whose protector he became." ROBESPIERRE. 321 But the extravagant and increasing license of the extreme party made it necessary for Robespierre him- self to control them. He became a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in the room of Thuriot, and at the same time, introduced Carnot into the Government, in the place of Gasparin. His first measure was to put down the disgraceful persecution of the clergy, in which Hebert, Chabot, Clootz, were then employed. One instance will suffice to illus- trate its horrors. Some Sisters of Mercy, of the order of St. Vincent of Paul, whose holy duty it was to tend the sick, had been scourged by prostitutes through the streets of Paris. In the outset of his first speech at the Jacobins, after his accession to office, he defended Madame Elisabeth ; he proceeded to deny the exist- ence of any superstition, except in the imagination of the ruffians whom he was opposing ; he expressed the most vivid and profound disgust for the Worship of Reason, and the almost bestial prejudices of its instiga- tors. He added in behalf of his own views of tolera- tion, " Men have supposed that the Convention had proscribed the Catholic religion. No, the Convention has not done this, and never shall. Its intention is to uphold that Right of Private Judgment which it has decreed ; but at the same time to punish those who Y 322 ROBESPIERRE. may abuse it, to trouble public order. It will not per- mit a persecution of unoffending clergymen, be their religion what it may ; but it will chastise them with severity whenever they shall dare take advantage of their ministry, to delude our citizens, or to arm Preju- dice and Monarchy against the Republic. " There are men who go still farther, who under the pretext of destroying Superstition, wish to make a sort of religion of Atheism itself. Each philosopher, each private individual, may think upon these subjects as he pleases ; the man who imputes a crime to him for his convictions, is a madman ; but that public man, that Legislator, would be a hundred times more a madman who should adopt such opinions. The National Con- vention abhors them. The Convention is no mere book-maker or system-monger. It is a political and popular Institution. Atheism belongs to Aristocracies. The idea of a Great Being, who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime that is the idea of the people. It is the poor who are at this moment applauding me ; should I find critics it will be among the guilty and the rich. I have been, since college, but an indifferent Catholic ; I have never been a lukewarm friend, or a cold champion of humanity. I am every hour more and more attached to the moral ROBESPIERRE. 323 and political views which I have ventured to present to you. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." Horrible as this blasphemy seems to us, in a land which is blest and sanctioned by the Church's presence, it must be remembered that the Constituent Jansenists had first uncatholicised France, in withdrawing her from the Latin Communion ; and that these, in their turn, had been overthrown and proscribed by the miscreants who had established the Worship of Reason. Robes- pierre had belonged to neither of these parties ; and the defence which I have quoted, was at that time con- sidered and mocked at as religious. The Deism of Robespierre, was the Piety of the Revolution ! It is strange, however, that the fanatical Atheism of Ana- charsis Clootz, Chabot, and the Hebertists, was more particularly revolted at the light Epicureanism of Dan- ton and his followers. There was too much of the old regime in the gaiety, the wit, the suppers, the follies of these careless votaries of Pleasure. The strife between the two factions was deadly in its ferocity. I have else- where quoted the " Old Cordelier" of Camille Desmou- lins, which will give some idea of its savageness. The Hebertists had even begun to attack Robespierre for his protection of Danton, when he came to the resolu- Y 2 324 ROBESPIERRE. tion of asserting the public peace by destroying both parties. The sensual materialism of Helvetius was almost as much out of place in the severe Republic which he had forecast, as the brutal rationalism which Clootz and his followers had adopted from the German Illuminati. The execution of Danton, on the 3rd of April, 1794, left Robespierre apparently without a check or an im- pediment to his self-absorbed and ambitious career. He exposed his principles where before he had only ventured to hint and suggest them. He no longer shrouded himself in a morbid reserve. He acted freely, and, except where he was misled by his suspicions, in strict pursuance of his philanthropic and pacific system. M. Mignet says, " One finds the sacramental words of this sect in all the speeches of the reporters of the Committees, and, above all, in those of St. Just and Robespierre. Liberty and Equality for the government of the Republic ; Unity and Indivisibility for its form ; the weal of all for its Conservatism ; Virtue for its prin- ciple ; the worship of the Supreme Being for its reli- gion ; probity, fraternity, moderation, for the elements and conditions of society." But, as M. Mignet observes, there was not one of these fair-seeming words which did not serve for the condemnation of some party or ROBESPIERRE. 325 some men. The Royalists and the Aristocrats were proscribed in the name of Liberty and Equality ; the Girondists in the name of Indivisibility ; Camille Des- moulins,and the Moderates, in the name of the Common- weal ; Chaumette, Clootz, Hebert, all the atheistical and anarchical faction, in the name of the Supreme Being ; Chabot, Bazire, Fabre d'Eglantine, in the name of Probity ; Danton, in the name of Modesty and Virtue. But it was not out of any capricious, or even instinctive cruelty, that Robespierre had thus sacrificed so many parties to attain his end. He had done so out of a confidence in his theories which amounted to fana- ticism ; out of a love of them which verged upon in- sanity. The proof that he was animated by no mere misanthropic thirst of human blood, is to be found in his conduct towards the seventy-three Conventionalists, the subordinates and adherents of the Gironde. He preserved their lives in spite of all the clamours and the demands of the populace. He had stricken the chiefs, but he spared the followers. It was the same spirit which had led him, in the Constituent, to defend the soldiers of the Nancy garrison, while ho proposed a punishment for Bouille, and their officers. Nor was this resistance to the popular exactions without danger. The Sections would, at this time, continually pour down 326 ROBESPIERRE. to the Assembly, present themselves at its bar, and urge the Mountain to more violent extremities. They would compare it to Mount Sinai, and call upon it to launch in thunder the eternal decrees of Justice and the People's Will. But, if these in no way subserved or aided his dreams of regeneration, Robespierre not only would not entertain them, but he treated the proposer with a marked disdain, as if to show that his motives and designs were inscrutable to them. In the four months which intervened between Danton's death, his prophetic summons to Robespierre " I drag Robespierre down with me Robespierre is following me," and Robespierre's own fall on the ninth Thermidor, he laboured with an almost incredible success, to found, construct, consolidate his theories. He levied fines, confiscations, liturgies, upon the rich. He checked in- dustry by taxing profits. He subjected luxury to domiciliary regulations. He imposed an income tax which robbed the wealthy without benefiting the poor. Every individual was allowed to have forty pounds a- year, which were exempted from taxation. From forty pounds to four hundred pounds, there was a tithe pro- portionally exacted; thus, a man with eighty pounds a-year, paid four pounds to the State, a man with four hundred paid thirty-six pounds. Beyond four hundred ROBESPIERRE. 327 a-year he took away ALL for the service of the year. Thus a family of four, with four thousand a-year, would be allowed four forties, one hundred and sixty pounds intact ; four hundred pounds of their fortune would be subject to the tithe, which would leave them, together with the exemption, five hundred and twenty pounds a-year, while the rest would be entirely taken away. But it was not only by such barbarous spoliation that Robespierre carried out the paternal principle of govern- ment. He flooded the market with assignats and paper money. He endeavoured to sustain their value by declaratory enactments, as absurd as Lord Bexley's. He destroyed all competition, by establishing a maxi- mum of price ; the natural consequence of this legisla- tion was, that farmers, manufacturers, and shopkeepers, alike became regrators, and withdrew their goods from circulation. To correct this evil, and as a remedy for the dearth and disturbance which ensued, Robespierre inflicted the most exorbitant penalties on those who withheld articles of primary necessity, such as bread, meat, grain, vegetables, fruit, fuel, butter, linen, salt, leather, cloth, wool, tallow, hides, hemp, and a long list of specified articles, which included about every French produce except silk. Such was the political economy of Robespierre ! By a series of vexatious 328 ROBESPIERRE. interferences and harassing restrictions which it has never been pretended that he believed otherwise than for the public benefit he reduced the industrious classes to a state of poverty, helplessness, and starvation. And, if he had been permitted to continue much longer in the same course of despotic superintendance and de- terminate appraisement, he would have produced effects similar to those of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and have transferred the capital, skill, labour, and enterprize of France to some foreign country. His measures were popular at the time, because they had the show of an immediate benefit, and kindly care for the poor. He enacted low prices ; he prevented over- work ; he ministered to their recreation ; he established public refectories; he drained and allotted lands for the needy; he instituted sanatory laws, public walks, schools, theatres, and exhibitions. The government was everywhere present, noting a citizen's means giving or taking away providing for his necessities, in- struction, maintenance, amusement; prescribing for his least requirements and caprices ; wrapping the full grown man in the swaddling clothes and the cradle of an infant. The aspect of the capital would have delighted a Fourierite. Paris had become one vast Phalansterium . ROBESPIERRE. 329 But, while Robespierre thus brought the views of a policeman into the government of a great country, while he attempted to make a sort of happy family of thirty millions of men, he did not forget the more tran- scendental lessons of his school. " Let us remark," says M. Thiers, " a very singular thing ; these sectaries by whom no human ordinance was respected, who, thanks to their extraordinary contempt for others, and their extraordinary esteem for themselves, were in awe of no opinion, and cared little for offending the public's ; who had rejected every thing of Government that was not absolutely necessary ; who had admitted no other authority than that of a few elective officers ; who had cast off all distinction of classes ; who had not shrunk from abolishing the most inveterate and the most strongly rooted of all religions ; these same sectaries paused before two ideas, God and Morality. After having discarded all those ideas from which they thought that they could disengage mankind, they were domin- ated by the empire of the two last, and they immolated a party to each. If all men did not believe in them, all nevertheless felt the necessity of recognizing a gen- eral and intelligent principle of Order in the Universe. It was the first time in the world's history, that the dis- solution of all authorities had left society a prey to 330 ROBESPIERRE. spirits purely systematic, (for the English had believed in Christianity,) and these spirits, which had gone be- yond the limits of all other received ideas, adopted and proclaimed the ideas of God, and a Morality." On the 18th Floreal, (the 7th May, 1794,) Robespierre brought forward his proposition to decree a Solemn Feast for the Recognition of God. His speech was an elaborate and even brilliant imitation of Rousseau. It was full of irony and pathos, bitterness and eloquence. " Who," he cried, " has given unto thee the mission to declare to the people that the Divinity is not ? O thou who canst so passionately feel for this arid doc- trine, but who never feelest passionately for thy country, what advantage dost thou find, to persuade man that a blind force sways his fate, and strikes at random, vice and virtue ? Is his soul a breath so frail, that it lives not beyond the portals of the tomb ? The idea of his nothingness, will that inspire him with higher and purer thoughts than that of his immortality ? Will it inspire him with more respect for his fellows or himself, with more of devotion for his country, with more of courage to confront a tyrant, with more of contempt for death or pleasure ? O ye who regret a virtuous friend, ye love to think that the fairer portion of his being has escaped the sentence ! Ye, who are weeping over the ROBESPIERRE. 331 bier of a son or a bride, is there consolation in his words, who tells you that there remains of them no- thing but the vile dust ? Unhappy one, who art ex- piring beneath the blow of an assassin, thy last gasp is an appeal to the Eternal Justice. Innocence upon the scaffold, it makes the tyrant turn pale on his chariot of triumph. Think you it would have this ascendancy, were the grave to equalize oppressor and oppressed ? " There was much of the asperity of his master in these remarks on the Encyclopaedists. " This sect in politics remained always far below the Rights of the People ; in ethics, it went far beyond the destruction of super- stition. Its leaders would declaim against despotism, yet they were pensioned by despots ; to-day they pub- lished lampoons against a court, to-morrow, dedications to a king ; now a sermon for a courtier, now a madrigal for a courtezan. They were superb in writings, and slavish in antichambers." There was much of strength and power in many of Robespierre's speeches, now that he felt himself free to indulge abroad in the dreams of his solitude, to bring before a public, where there was no longer any talent which he feared, no genius to surpass and to obscure the studies, the visions, the aspirations of his life. He knew and loved his subject the secret of all oratorical 332 ROBESPIERRE. success. This, for example, was a noble image. " Who would speak ill of the orb, which is animating nature, for the light clouds which glide athwart its radiance? " This thought is also profound, and its illustration ele- gant. " Man's reason resembles the globe which he inhabits. One half is plunged in darkness, while the other half is alight." The conclusion to the celebrated speech which I have so largely quoted from, contained a singular tribute to Rousseau. " Ah ! had he been the witness of this Re- volution, of which he was the precursor, who can doubt that his generous soul would have embraced with trans- port the cause of Equality and Justice ?" The ashes of Rousseau, after it, were solemnly installed in the Pan- theon, his widow presented to the Convention, and pen- sioned. It was also followed by those decrees of Feasts, the tidings of which produced such mockery in Europe, " To the Supreme Being,"" To the Martyrs of Li- berty," " To the Republic," " To Freedom,"" To Truth," "To Justice," To Modesty," " To Hero- ism," "To Stoicism," "To Frugality," " To Mis- fortune," &c.,&c. Their bare enumeration is the best key to Robespierre's whole system. There are few things more ridiculous to others than a student or a man of business in love ; Robespierre ROBESPIERRE. 333 was both, and he was enamoured even to monomania with the cold unreal lifeless image which he had up- raised. If St. Just had been upon the spot, his grave talents for action would, in all probability, have pre- served Robespierre from the absurd and fantastic ex- travagancies of the twentieth Prairial, (eighth of June.) But Robespierre was doomed by his self-worship; " by gazing on himself grown blind," he believed that his colleagues were as earnest as himself. He looked above him instead of around him. He revelled in the ideal loftiness of his own aspiring imagination, and he forgot to note the cynical sneers upon the lips of Billaud- Varennes, or the Voltairian incredulity of Collot d'Her- bois and Barrere. What, indeed, could be so con- summately ludicrous as the appearance of Robespierre at the solemnity in honour of the Supreme Being, with bouquets of wheat and flowers in either hand, in a dress a la Polonaise, designed by David, while his face was almost hidden by the drooping and the waving of his plumes ? His design was as absurd as his costume. He wished to merge the Statesman in the Prophet, the Ruler in the Priest. " People !" he exclaimed, after a long and Rousseau-like harangue, "to-day we will surrender ourselves to the pure transports of a perfect 334 ROBESPIERRE. joy ; to-morrow we will return to strive with tyrants and with vices." " He spake of virtue ; not the gods More purely, when they wish to charm Pallas and Juno sitting by ; And with a sweeping of his arm, And a lack-lustre dead blue eye Devolved his rounded periods." " Most delicately, hour by hour, He canvassed human mysteries, And trod on silk, as if the winds Blew his own praises in his eyes ; And stood aloof from other minds, In impotence of fancied power. " With lips depressed as he were meek, Himself unto himself he sold ; Upon himself himself did feed."* It would be impossible to describe Robespierre more truly, tersely, finely, wisely. He had lost all self- * Alfred Tennyson. ROBESPIERRE. 335 command in the boundlessness of his self-satisfac- tion. His cold, narrow, callous organization had been proof against the inspirations of political success ; but his spiritual triumphs as a Reformer and Philoso- pher, filled him with a delirious and almost insane agitation. His truths were affirmed ; his definitions accepted ; his discoveries adopted ; his faith believed ; his system established. His maxims, Virtue and the Supreme Being, were in every mouth. His genius, his eloquence, his greatness, were the constant theme of every speaker, in the Convention, at the Clubs, among the Mob. The feeling which had made the Cardinal de Richelieu so susceptible of flattery for his verses, now lashed the vanity of Robespierre to madness. He had none of the qualities for which he was panegyrized and lauded. He had heard himself designated as " the Incorruptible," without emotion, because he felt and knew that it was true ; but in many a lonely hour of misgiving and distrust, he must have doubted whether he had not mistaken ability for genius, and tendencies for fulfil- ments. And now a universal nation had, as it were, been deputed to tell him that he was the Best, the Wisest, the Greatest of her People ; to choose him as her Prophet, Judge, Ruler ; to bless him as her Saviour and her Founder. What wonder that Robespierre 336 ROBESPIERRE. grew dizzy and bewildered ; that he was faint after so intense an intellectual debauch ; that his head reeled, and his pulse failed ; that for forty days he remained inactive, exhausted, enervated, paralyzed, by his sense of Pleasure. But his inaction was a trance rather than a lethargy. It was the fruition of a joy which his whole life had been preparing, in which the Past and the Present were mingling visions, " With many a voice of ONE delight." Men who have force of character enough to deceive themselves, will be sure to deceive others. There was a sect at this time in Paris, who amidst the general admiration and adulation of Robespierre, were dis- tinguished for their fanatical idolatry. They openly worshipped him. They called him the Messiah, and the Restorer. An old woman, a sort of Joanna South- cote, named Catherine Theot presided over the mystic ceremonies which were held in his honour. Robespierre, who could have been but little flattered with this coarse and vulgar caricature of his own esoteric and metaphysical self- worship, looked upon it probably with a good-natured and supercilious pity. But, the majority of the Committee of Public Safety, who still ROBESPIERRE. 337 leaned towards Rationalism, who were opposed to Faiths of any kind, and who had only disguised their contempt of the Feast of the Recognition, from their dread of its Hierophant now thought the existence of these mysteries a fair opportunity to strike a blow to his discredit. They caused the whole sect to be ar- rested. A letter was found, half-written from Catherine Theot to Robespierre, in which she termed him her beloved son, and her Prophet. Vadier, a member of the Committee of General Security, to which all matters of police and inferior domestic interest were intrusted, brought forward a report against the new religionists. He did so in a way to throw ridicule, indirectly and obliquely, upon Robespierre. He purposely mis- spelt the name of Theot, and changed it into Theos while he insinuated that Robespierre was not only a patron, but an Apostle of the Sect. Robespierre who wished to tolerate all religious convictions, endeavoured to save them. He foresaw that if this mierable fanati- cism was proscribed, a new persecution would be directed against all Faiths, his own particular form of Deism not excepted. He disdained to reply to the report, he spoke ambiguously of the necessity of purifying the Committees, his words were coldly 338 ROBESPIERRE. received by the Committee of Public Safety, he hastened to the Jacobins, where he was greeted with the usual acclamations. Robespierre with a majority against him in both Committees, now no longer went near them. He also neglected the Con- vention. He thought that it was enough, as in the days of the Legislative, to conciliate and pay his court to the Jacobins. But his retirement proved fatal to him, as it had to Danton. He forgot the superstitious awe with which the multitude, when swayed by no strong or immediate passion, regard external symbols of power , Committees, Cabinets, Ministries, Legislatures. Couthon gave the first intimation of the attack, which Robespierre now saw was inevitable, if he meant to live. In the last days of June, at the Jacobins, he said, " The shades of Danton, Hebert, Chaumette, still glide amongst us, to perpetuate trouble and divisions. Re- assure yourselves the number of the guilty is happily limited ; four, perhaps, or at the utmost, six, and they shall be laid low, for the time has come to deliver the Republic from the last enemies who conspire against her," Ominous words which were duly reported to the Committees, and prepared them for the struggle. It was at Passy, amidst their wine cups and with ROBESPIERRE. 339 courtesans by their sides, that Barrere and his col- leagues planned their conspiracy. At one moment Barrere was nearly making terms with Robespierre ; " if he had only asked for Thuriot, Lecointre, Roviere, Panis, Cambon, all the rump of the Dantonists, we could understand one another; if he had demanded Tallien, Legendre, Freron, Bourdon de 1'Oise, well and good, but for Duval, Vadier, Vouland it is im- possible to consent " * Duval was an old Farmer General who had been renowned for the excellence of his dinners under the old regime, and who, although he had obtained a sort of personal indemnity by his report against the Farmers General, was still fond of the luxurious life and the voluptuous habits of the Monarchy. Barrere and he were intimately connected ; Vadier and Vouland were members of one of the Committees ; and the proscrip- tion of either, was a symptom impossible not to be entertained with alarm. On the 7th Thermidor (the 25th July,) the Jacobins at the instance of Couthon, presented a petition to the Assembly. " They came," they said, " to intrust their solicitudes to the bosom of the Convention. They called * Mignet. z2 340 ROBESPIERRE. upon it to strike all traitors and intriguers, to reassure the respectable man, to maintain that union which made its force, to preserve in all its purity the Sublime Worship, of which every citizen was the Minister, and virtue the sole behest ; in order that the People might make it alike their pride and duty to defend their representative at the hazard of their lives." On the 8th, Robespierre seconded the design of the Petition, in his last and most famous oration. " Let others," he said, "paint before you their flatter- ing pictures, I am here to tell you the truth." He proceeded to draw the most lively representation of the agitation which existed abroad, the panic which every where prevailed, and the projects against the Con- vention, which were attributed to him. He complained bitterly that he was the scapegoat for every mischance and crime of the Revolution. He was designated, he said, a tyrant ; because he had acquired influence among the People, by telling them the truth. " What then do you desire, you who pretend that Truth in the mouth of the People's Representative, should be without a power ? Truth has its own force, of a surety, its own passion, its own supremacy, its own touching and terrible accents, which echo as loudly in the heart of the innocent as in the conscience of the ROBESPIEKUU. 341 wicked which it would be as impossible for falsehood to imitate, as for Salmon eus to mimic the thunders of the heaven. Accuse, then, the Nation. Accuse the People, who feel and love it. Who am I, whom you accuse? a slave of Liberty a living martyr for the Republic's sake, a victim, no less than an enemy, of crime!" At last, after he had thus defended himself with a presience, perhaps, of the fate which awaited his memory, he exposed the weakness, the vacillations, the political incredulity of the Committees. " Where, then, is the remedy for all these evils ? You must punish traitors, you must remodel the offices of the Committee of General Security ; you must purify that Committee itself, and subject it to the Committee of Public Safety ; you must purify the Committee of Public Safety itself, you mnst form the Government beneath the supreme authority of the National Convention, at once its centre and its judge; and so crush every faction beneath the weight of the National Authority, to raise upon their ruins the might of Liberty and Justice. These are the principles of the Revolution. If it be impossible to assert them without being called ambitious, I shall conclude that these principles are proscribed, that tyranny reigns among us, but I shall not remain silent. What, can 342 ROBESPIERRE. you object to a man who is in the right, and who knows how to die for his country? I was born to combat Crime, but not to govern and direct it. The time has not yet arrived, when good men can serve with impu- nity the State." Such were the plans of Robespierre. Another pas- sage of this speech explains his feelings, and shows that he had not yet recovered from the excitements of the eighth of June ; that he still loved to linger and to dwell amidst its animating and gorgeous reminiscences. " Citizens, you have attached to the cause of the Revolution every heart that is innocent and gentle. You have shown it to the world in all the splendour of a celestial beauty. O, day, for ever fortunate when the whole and universal People of France arose to proffer to the God of Nature, a homage not unworthy of Him ! How touching an assemblage of every object which could enchant the eyes and the souls of men. O, honoured age ! O, generous ardour of our country's children. O, simple and pure joy of our youthful citizens. O, tears of softened matrons ! O, divine charm of guilelessness and beauty ! O, Majesty of a Mighty People, happy in the very consciousness of its force, its glory, and its virtue. Being of Beings, on that day, on which the Universe first issued from thine all- ROBESPIERRE. 343 powerful hands, shone it with a light more pleasant in thine eyes, than upon that day, when crushing the yoke of crime, and error, it appeared before Thee, worthy of thy regards, and of its destinies ? " Singular time, when upon the eve of an insurrection, the Chief of a conspiracy thus offered up so rhetorical a prayer, and when, within eight-and-forty hours of pronouncing it, he had died upon the guillotine ! His discourse was received with gloom and terror by the Convention. He was continually interrupted and called upon to name the traitors whom he had de- nounced. Charlier shouted to him, " You who affect the courage of virtue, have the courage of truth." When he had finished, Lecointre, his most obstinate and persevering enemy, ascended the tribune. It was to move that the speech should be printed ; to pay it a compliment, instead of replying to it. In the evening Robespierre presented himself to the Jacobins. He was received with the most fanatical demonstrations of attachment and affection. He read to them the oration which had caused so great a sensa- tion in the Assembly. His voice was drowned in their applause. At its close he uttered these prophetic words : " The speech which you have just heard is a will before a death. I saw this to-day ; the league of the 344 ROBESPIERRE. wicked is so strong that I cannot hope to escape it. I bow to it without a regret; to you I bequeath my memory, it will be dear to you, and you will defend it." The protestations of devotion by which these dis- couraging and mournful words were answered, roused him a little. " Well, then, we will try to save Freedom ; but if, notwithstanding all our efforts, we must give in, it is calmly that I shall drink my hemlock." " Robes- pierre !" exclaimed one of his followers, in a transport of enthusiasm, *' I will share it with you." The events of the ninth Thermidor are well known, St. Just has severely launched his first sentence of in- crimination before he is interrupted by Tallien. " I demand," he shouts," to be heard. Let the veil which has so long shrouded Robespierre at length be torn aside!" His words are received with cheers, loud and long, which are repeated and reiterated again and again, as if to show that every voice in the Convention is making an effort to be restored to independence. It is in vain that St. Just turns upon Tallien, his glance of fire, beautiful and terrible. It is in vain that he denounces him in that heroic tone which has been heard above the thunders of the battle. Billaud Varermes is already in the tribune. He cries " The Convention is between two shambles it will perish if it ROBiiSPIERKE. 345 is feeble." (No, no, it shall not perish. Every mem- ber is standing up ; they are waving their hats they interchange oaths to save their country.) Billaud- Varennes "Is there here a single citizen who would exist beneath a tyrant?" (Never, never, perish the tyrants /) Robespierre springs to the staircase of the tribune in another moment he is behind Billaud; he shouts to the president to be heard. (The majority are yelling out, " Down with the tyrant down with him /") Twice the cry is caught up, and rings once more through the vast hall. Tallien is also in the Tribune. He attempts to be heard. They listen. " I saw yesterday the sitting of the Jacobins, I shud- dered for France. I saw the muster of this new Crom- well's army. I armed myself with a poignard to strike him to the heart if you failed in the courage to decree his accusation." (Tallien throws his dagger down amidst tremendous acclamations.) Robespierre is on the topmost stair of the tribune. He claims his right to speak. He is determined to be heard. (He is deafened by new shouts of" Down with the tyrant Down ivith him, down with him /") 346 ROBESPIERRE. Barrere enters He speaks from his place, he en- deavours in vain to restore tranquility. Robespierre persists from the Tribune : Tallien hurls him from it, and pursues his denunciation. He paints the career of this " dastard selfish and sanguinary rhetorician." Robespierre, suffocating with passion, gasps out imprecations. He looks imploringly to the benches of the Mountain. They turn their heads away some give no sign others menace and insult him. A hundred voices " The accusation the decree" Louchet " This must end. (Arrest him, arrest Mm.) Robespierre the younger " I partake the crimes of my brother, let me partake his punishment." Robespierre turns to the centres " It is to you, men pure, that I address myself, and not to brigands. (Violent interruption.) For the last time, president of assassins, I demand my right of speech." (Shouts of " No, no, never.") The tumult increases Robespierre exhausts himself in efforts his movements are convulsive his voice is hoarse. Gamier "The blood of Danton is choking you !" The decree of arrest is at length proposed and passed ROBESPIERRE. 347 amidst the most tumultuous disorder. It is scarcely pronounced, when, from every part and corner of the living and moving masses, there arise sustained and passionate shouts of " Liberty for ever !" " The Re- public for ever!" " The tyrants are no more !" The concluding passages of this struggle the most doubtful, the most variable, the most eventful, in all civil history have elsewhere been described. It has been pretended by some that Robespierre did not at- tempt suicide, but that he was wounded by a gendarme, one Meda. This man, himself, wrote a pamphlet in which he asserted the fact, and he afterwards received a pension for it from the Government. But this will always be a moot question, and the more so, because it is impossible from a study of Robespierre's imitative character, to determine whether he was more likely to have been swayed by the classic example of a Cato or a Phocion. The last scene of the tragedy is painful to dwell on. The mob environed the cart which bore Robespierre to execution, mocking and cursing him. They pointed to his linen, reeking with blood, and shouted to him, "It is the blood that you so love !" The executioner tore from him the bandage which bound his shattered jaw, and the piercing cry of agony 348 ROBESPIERRE. which escaped him was echoed by a round of ferocious laughter. " Robespierre, then," says M. Thiers, " could not play the part of usurper with us. Why was it given to him to survive all those great men of the Revolution, so superior to him in power and in genius a Danton, for example ? He was incorruptible, and a pure repu- tation is essential to the multitude. He was without pity, a fatal quality in a revolution. He had a perse- vering and untiring self-esteem, a necessity in being always before the public. It was owing to these things that he surpassed his rivals. But he was of the worst kind of men ; a bigot without passions, without the vices to which they lead ; but also without the courage the grandeur and the sensibility which generally ac- company them. A bigot, living only in communion with his own vanity and his own creed, hiding himself on the day of danger, returning to receive homage for the victory which had been won by others, is one of the most hateful beings who ever ruled over mankind, and, we might almost say, one of the vilest, had he not been endowed with a strong conviction and a tried integrity." But this is far too Dantonesque a character of Robes- pierre M. Thiers has tried him by a balance in which ROBESPIERRE. 349 the Passions predominate over the Duties. He has omitted the great vice which the vulgar have attributed to him his love of blood. Yet he has also omitted that, which in their eyes was his great virtue his suc- cess, He conquered the Constituent, he dictated to the Legislative, he intimidated the Convention. He effected this by a strong sense and rigid performance of duties, (while all around him were moved by interest or impulse,) which, however little they can meet with English sympathy, it would be difficult to condemn by any standard of mere morality. He was not to be seduced from his object by any bribe, intrigue, or fas- cination. He pursued his public course with a straight- forward and unswerving onwardness of purpose. His private life was, to the last, pure and irreproachable. Poor, he lived within his income ; he was scrupulous in little matters, careful in his dress, regular in his habits, laborious in his industry, attached to every de- cency and all respectabilities. He had lived thirty-two years when the Constituent was dissolved ; and if there were few who, at that time, thought him a great man, there were none who did not call him a sincere and a good man. The general opinion was, that he was an obstinate, and what we call a crotchetty, philanthropist. But subtle and keen observers, like Sieyes or Talley- 350 ROBES PIER RK. rand, in all probability foresaw that his opinions were so fanatical in their excess that they might well plunge him into any other. He belonged to that worst species of monsters, which the elder Scaliger once eulogistically termed the monstrum sine vitio. He derived a sort of indemnity for his barbarities in the excellence of his morals, and the austerity of his character. By nature he was averse from cruelty. He wrote a pamphlet against the punishment of death ; he introduced a bill against it. His timid and narrow bigotry revolted at the large and broad traditions of the feudal age. It would be absurd to account for the inconsistency be- tween his early life and the Reign of Terror, by attri- buting the first to hypocrisy. An hypocrisy of thirty- two years duration becomes a principle which no man would do ill in adopting. The reason of Robespierre's cruelty is to be found in the intensity of his self-esteem. He was the very incarnation of the letter I ; but it was not a genuine and certain faith, as with an Englishman ; it was rather a wayward, suspicious, fretfnl egotism, a faint and wavering shadow of Rousseau's own uncer- tain and sensitive idiosyncrasy. It was to this, the fanciful demon which possessed him, that he sacrificed his hecatomb of victims. The opinion of Mirabeau at the beginning of Robes- ROBESPIERRE. 351 pierre's public career, has been quoted. Long years after it was over, Napoleon who knew him well, thus confirmed it at St. Helena. " I asked his opinion about Robespierre.* ' Robespierre/ he replied, ' was by no means the worst character who figured in the Revolu- tion. He opposed trying the Queen. He was not an atheist ; on the contrary, he had publicly maintained the existence of a Supreme Being, in opposition to many of his colleagues. Neither was he of opinion that it was necessary to exterminate all priests and nobles, like many others. Robespierre wanted to pro- claim the King Jwrs de la loi, and not to go through the ridiculous mockery of trying him. Robespierre was a fanatic, a monster, but he was incorruptible and incapable of robbing, or of causing the deaths of others, either from personal enmity, or a desire of enriching himself. He was an enthusiast, but one who really believed that he was acting right ; and died not worth a sous. In some respects Robespierre may be said to have been an honest man. All the crimes committed by Hebert, Chaumette, Collot d'Herbois, and others, were im- puted to him.' " The judgment upon Robespierre of such men who * Barry O'Meara's Voice from St. Helena. 352 ROBESPIERRE. had studied his character, will hardly be disputed. The moral his life presents to inferior understandings, is the same which we were taught in England, by Mr. Pitt's immediate successors. It is a public evil when clerks become Ministers, and statists Statesmen ; when small men inherit from the great. Mediocrity with the inspi- rations of Genius ; Robespierre enforcing the visions of Rousseau, a mortal in the chariot of the sun, and the world was nearly plunged into darkness, and civili- zation retarded in her onward and radiant career ! NEW ATHENS. 353 NEW ATHENS, Is it a scene at Athens ? There are lamps of graceful oval, which give a mellow and shaded lustre. There are double-handed goblets, such as Socrates used to drain, when vying with Alcibiades. There are servants who bear fruits and wines, to the sound of softest music. There are lyric songs, " With such as these Aspasia won sweet smiles from Pericles." There are beautiful women, with slender foreheads, and tresses delicately braided round their small heads. There are broaches, and fibulae, the deep-bosorned tunic, and the sandal, with its becoming strings. There is the red bonnet of Phrygia, and the grasshopper in gold. Surely, this must be some Athenian revel, with 2A 354 NEW ATHENS. its accomplished citizens and travelled foreigners. It must be the " at home" of some Hetsera, the resort of the most polished, the most learned, the most renowned of mankind. The symmetry, the elegance, the luxury of Greece are all here. The quick, rapid manner, the ceaseless impulse, the visible suddenness of thought, the magnetic interchange of feeling, these things also are not wanting. The conversation, too, is of liberty and art, of philosophy and the theatre. There are groups of politicians, who, rare thing ! are speaking of the people. There are others who are discussing vic- tories over tyrants, and the heroic devotion of Repub- licans. But there is among them a man far greater than any Athens ever saw. See him, with long hair far down, waving on his shoulders, with dark eyes flashing with genius, with features regular as those of an Antinous, with lips compressed and disdainful, with a mien superb as of a God! But the lady who is at little intervals speaking laughingly to him, seems all unconscious of his great- ness or divinity. She is a sunburnt and coquettish brunette, with large languid eyes, and an air of the most indolent repose. There is something, however, of command even in her indolence. The mystics of her NEW ATHENS. 355 own land have foretold that she shall be a Queen, and she loves to remember the prophecy. It might be an Egyptian, who had come to see all the arts and wonders which had forsaken her country, to grace and embellish Athens. Gentle reader, I have, perhaps, betrayed you by my guesses. It is a soiree at the Citoyenne Tallien's, in 1794. It is the first meeting of Napoleon Buona- parte and Josephine Beauharnais. 2x2 356 FIFTEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE. FIFTEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE, 25. LITTLE school-boy, come here. What book are you reading ? 15. The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. 25. Do you like it, are you amused ? 15. Amused, what a word ! to ask if I am amused ! I am dazzled, fascinated and bewildered, if you will. I am awed and astonished. It seems to me like a succession of flashes of lightning, all beautiful, and grand, and terrible. 25. With nothing after them, but thunder. 15. 0, how ill you understand it. Was Lodi nothing, or Arcola, or Rivoli ? Was the eighteenth Brumaire nothing? Were Marengo and Austerlitz, were Jena, and Ulm, and Freidland, all nothing and the campaign of fourteen ? and the hundred days ? 25. Little school-boy, this is all very fine, but you FIFTEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE. 357 are drunk with words. Do these convey any idea to you ? 15. (indignant) Yes, a sense of the heroic, of what is noble and just. 25. I see, I see, exactly, pray don't go on, all blaze, and fame, and worship. But now, did it never strike you in another light, all this ? 15. (eagerly) Oh yes, as full of philosophy and instruction. Don't you remember Byron's magnificent lines : " The desolator " 25. Leave the desolator alone, for the moment. Did it never occur to you, that it must have been all a great bore ? 15. A bore? 25. Yes, I say advisedly, a bore. Now let us take as a sample any one of those flashes of lightning. Marengo was a proud moment in Napoleon's life. 15. I would give ten years of time, to live such another. 25. Would you? Well now, do you think he slept the night before the battle. 1 5. What an association ! Sleep and Marengo ! His mighty and untiring genius was, I should imagine, 358 FIFTEEN AND TWENTY-FIVE. revolving great designs by which the destinies of nations were to be swayed. 25. Then he did not sleep that night. Do you think he slept the night after it ? 15. What amidst the exultation, and fever, and delirium of such a victory ! " The triumph and the vanity The rapture of the strife ! " 25. Yet his life was a series of Marengos, that is, according to you, a series of sleepness nights. Now, one more question, little school-boy. Do you think he enjoyed his Chambertin, during the campaigns of 1813-14? 15. He was enjoying an antepast of immortality, a certainty of the admiration and sympathy of future 25. Pooh, some day or other you will find out that there are no cares however gaudy, no responsibilities however ornate, which are not full of vexation and of harassment. The golden apples are full of ashes. It is only babies who bite through them. 15. (aside) What a lump of dross that is ! 25. (aside) Poor little devil my dreams were like his, once, and now they are something like that smoke which I am doing my best to puff away. DIALOGUE, ETC. 359 DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ENGLISH EADICAL M.P., AND A FRENCH EADICAL DEPUTY. E. R. PRAY take a chair, Sir, I am delighted to see you. F. R. You do me a great deal of honour ; I ven- tured to leave at your door yesterday, a letter from Monsieur . E. R. Oh, yes, but I need not assure you that between us it required no letter of introduction. The mind of man should in these days communicate directly and immediately with the mind of man. WE, WE should despise these absurd conventions of an obsolete frivolity. We, who are members of the same great movement, leagued together in the same mighty cause, brothers in the same wide fraternity of resistance to 360 DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ENGLISH RADICAL M.P., power, and principality, and dominion, to the tyranny of Monarchs and Aristocrats. F. R. Your earnest eloquence overwhelms, over- powers me. See, the tears are in my eyes ! The warmth of such a reception I could not calculate upon. The Frank had no right to expect it from the Saxon. Oh, how a miserable ministry must tremble before those glorious words, that great and magnificent energy. E. R. Sir, they do they did last night. F. R. Ah ! what was the question ? E. R. A proposition to add to the Navy. You should have heard my indignant reclamations. F. R. Miscreants ! to speak of adding, when they should speak of doubling. Mark me, Sir, all Minis- ters are dead to the National honour. Would you believe it, there was a doubt at one time about our fortifications. No, I see you cannot credit it. I assure E. R. You misunderstand me. It was for the re- duction of so preposterous a grant that I spoke last night. The sacred principles of Economy . F. R. Economy ! What is the interest of economy, compared with the greatness of a country ? Is economy greater than France ? A great nation, Sir, does not AND A FRENCH R \DICAL DEPUTY. 361 recognize economy. Was it economy which carried France beyond the Rhine, to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Moscow ? Was it economy which planted the tricolor upon the Pyramids which dictated the sublime con- ception, that the Mediterranean was only a French lake that would have wrested India from your sway, that would have divided the world at Erfurht that made kings of Rome, and might have made kings of Jeru- salem ? E. R. Horror upon horror ! I must protest against such barbarous sentiments. I see nothing in what you describe so enthusiastically but the most profligate of ambitions supported by the most grinding of taxations. Thank God ! these are not the doctrines of English- men. F. R. C with politeness} I am glad to hear it. It is the better for French conquest. But, upon this point, I fear I shall not make myself intelligible to you. The distinction of race prevents it. Why, however, dispute upon one subject, when upon all others we agree. Let us embrace, my friend. O that this embrace were a type of union among the oppressed and subject of the earth. Europe would have reason to tremble at our acolade. E. R. (submits to the embrace recovering, says) 362 DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ENGLISH RADICAL M.P., Come, then, to-niglit to the House of Commons. You will be delighted beyond measure. D. brings on Uni- versal Suffrage. F, R. I shall indeed be delighted to see that insane theory annihilated by your friend. E. R. What can you mean? He is in favour o. it. F. R. Good God ! It is what our worst Legitimists, our most violent Aristocrats, are always clamouring for. These are the doctrines of the old Pavilion Marsan. E. R. (aghast.) Indeed (after a little while J O, now I have found out your objection. You think the masses are not yet sufficiently prepared for the recep- tion of so great a trust as the franchise. You would educate and enlighten them. Here, at least, we agree. One of our staunchest partizans is about to bring ior- ward a motion, to appropriate a large sum of money to the great and beneficent object of Education. F. R. I must be mistaken. I can scarcely believe that I am indeed speaking to a Radical. Why, these two principles of Universal Suffrage and National Education, are the very requirements exacted by a de la Rochejaquelein, as the title to his Parliamentary sup- port. Education ! I nauseate, abominate the word. It is the main hope of every Aristocrat. He knows that it would be monopolized by those surpliced scoundrels, AND A FRENCH RADICAL REPUTY. 363 the priests. He knows that Universal Suffrage would put in motion their influence over an ignorant and brutal peasantry. With these atrocious theories of yours, put in practice in France, Sir, we should have a marquis once more running a bourgeois through the body, merely for his morning's exercise. Do not call yourself a Radical. You are a Legitimist, a Vendean, a Carlist any thing but a Radical, E. R. Do not slander me. I am a thorough-going, consistent, Anti-Corn-Law-League Radical Reformer ! Read my last speech upon Free Trade. These, at least, are principles which all Liberals of all nations cannot but entertain. Let us exchange the produce of our respective countries. Let us carry out the intention of a beneficent Providence. Manchester is half ruined, you shall array yourselves in cotton. Bordeaux is half bankrupt, we will make merry over wine. The growers of the Gironde will sympathize in our efforts, and venerate our memories. F. R. (aside.) Bordeaux and the Gironde ! I could have sworn he was a Carlist. E. R. (continuing.} Let us arise and crush and slay the demon which would raise a barrier between the brothers of the earth. Let us extirpate Monopoly. Let us approximate every climate and every soil. 364 DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ENGLISH RADICAL M.P., What belongs tons shallbelong to others. What belongs to others shall belongto us. Our jaquenets and hollands shall cover the face of the globe. We will give waist- coats to the black man, and breeches to the red man. The King of the Sandwich Islands shall wear the but- tons of Birmingham in his diadem, and feel prouder. The Queen of Otahiti shall think her charms more charming, as she sees them reflected in the wares of the potteries. Reverse the picture only for a moment. The fat plains of the Vistula and Elbe shall teem for our granaries and store-houses. The rich valley of the Mississipi shall be our own. Spain shall send us her sherries, and Naples her oil. The mahogany of Hayti shall shine in our workshops. The watches of Geneva shall tick within our fobs. The soup of the operative at the beginning of his dinner, shall be flavoured by every spice island in the Indian Seas ; his coffee at its end, be genuine Arabian. F. R. (who had keen getting very much excited after the mention of the Queen of Otahiti s name.) I can stand this no longer. What, Sir, is all this galimatias to France ? Do you imagine France will permit this extravagance of barter ? Have you asked the leave of that mighty people? She is the first nation of the world in arms, she must be the first in arts. Not a AND A FRENCH RADICAL DEPUTY. 365 shot ought to be fired in Europe without her permis- sion, not a cargo be unladen unless it be her own. Our native industry is as active and as skilful as your own. It must be protected and encouraged, stimulated and fostered. We beat you at Fontenoy and Thoulouse. We will beat you in cotton and in iron. If we com- peted in Colbert's time with the glass of Venice, with the crystal of Bohemia, with the looms of Damascus and Cashmere, we have more than enough energy to surpass your starving artisans of Paisley and of Bolton. Democracy must not be less devoted to France than Absolutism. If the Monarchy protected the labour of its subjects, the labour of its citizens will be dear to a Republic. I say again, Sir, it must, it shall be pro- tected. France must be the first in manufactures, as she is the first in war, in civilization, in science, in lite- rature, in every thing. E. R. Surely, surely, I cannot be talking to a Member of the Movement Party in the nineteenth century. Your sentiments upon every point are iden- tical with those of the obtusest Tory, the most bigoted and benighted country gentleman. I speak to you as a citizen of the world ; you answer me with some worn- out shibboleth of patriotism. I mention the sacred principles of economy ; you utterly disregard them. 366 DIALOGUE BETWEEN AN ENGLISH RADICAL M.P., The right of the people to an extended suffrage, you tell me is a Carlist dogma. You refuse, for the same reason, to educate them. You oppose to the axioms of Free Trade, absurdities of which Squire Western would have been ashamed. I can see little use in pro- longing so fruitless and discordant an interview. F. R. I agree with you, Sir, although I never should have been the first to say it. I have the honour to wish you good morning. One word only at parting. If your theories were carried out in France, Henry the Fifth would be on the throne, and I in the Bastille. JE. R. And if your principles were carried out in England, a worse fate would befall my country. I, Sir, should not be in Parliament. ARMAND CARREL. 367 ARMAND CARREL, I. WE weep not, we mourn not Armand Carrel ; Though we knew, though we prized, though we loved him well ; For he died in his youth, as the brave should die, With his spirit still burning with chivalry. II. It was gentle and good, in the olden days, To bear a brave lance in your true love's praise ; And never was knight would be known to fame, But was ready to die for his ladye's name. 368 ARMAND CARREL. III. But it was not for smile, or for glancing eye, Or for grace, or for beauty, that he would die ; But he made her through life something holy and fair, And her name, when he breathed it, was almost a prayer. IV. Then honour to him who made his France, His ladye, his mistress, his heart's romance ; Yet who would not do what Carrel has done For the thoughts, God gave him, he calls his own ? V. Yes, each has a truth which to him is given, Yes, each has a faith which has come from heaven ; And the heart that, in love, will the most adore, Has another and higher, it loves the more. ARMAND CARREL. 369 VI. Then little he brooked that his own high thought Should to scoff, or to scorn, or to taunt be wrought ; And the People and Truth were to him as dear, As the love of fair lady to true chevalier. VII. But, never like him for some delicate word Or of thanks, or of courtesy, bared he his sword ; But a wrong to Conviction he would not endure ; And he fought for his Love, while he fought for the Poor. VIII. O, oft, we have marked the disdain in his eye, For the men of the moment, raised haughty and high; And they dwindled beside him, so great did he tower, 'Midst all the small grandeurs of place and of power. 370 ARMAND CARREL, IX. But softly and low, as a sister might speak, He spoke of their woes to the fallen and weak, Or with all the fond smiles, and the pride of a brother, His joy would flash forth at the joy of another. X. Then ill could we spare him, who in woe or in weal, Was the foremost to succour, the foremost to feel. But we cannot lament. His blessing is sure, Who fought the good fight of the feeble and poor. XI. And in long after ages shall Citizens hear, How the People had also their true Chevalier, Whose name, when he died, was a banner did more Than the Bourbons white flag or usurped Tricolor. ARMAND CARREL. 371 XII. We weep not, we mourn not Armand Carrel, Though we knew, though we prized, though we loved him well; For he died, in his youth, as the brave should die, With his spirit still burning with Chivalry. 372 ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS. ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OP ORLEANS, JULY 13, 1841. I HAD been dining alone at the Trois Freres. I strolled out to enjoy the delicious air of evening among the trees of the Palais Royal. A crowd of people were passing continually to and fro, and now and then I caught snatches of their conversation. It mostly turned upon the pending elections. Names, the sound of which had not for long years been heard in France, were again in men's mouths. The Legitimists had declared against the hateful inaction of Conservatism, and the degraded Ministry of the Foreigner. ALaRochejaquelein, a Gra- mont, a Barillon, had been returned to vote in the sense of aCaulaincourt,aCambaceres,aCarnot. Singular as- sociation of names ! Singular vicissitudes of history ! But in those gardens, so full themselves of romantic ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS. 373 change and marvellous incident, it was difficult to feel interest in the passing broils of factions so unreal and so impotent. Madame de Stae'l has said, " The stranger is the posterity of one's own time ! " I leaned against a tree, and felt how little future times would care about a crisis, when the whole difference lay between a Mole and a Guizot. It was impossible to care for changes of government which would bring with them no changes of policy, in alleys where Richelieu had walked with Mazarin where Duboishad been wont to seek the Regent, with fresh plans of financial economy, or with new schemes for the night's debauch where Egalite had talked treason with Camille Desmoulins, or sen- timent with Madame de Genlis and where Louis Philippe had often masked his yawns in listening to the abstractions of the Doctrinaires, and the pedantries of Lafayette. Still there was something of connection be- tween the present and the past. The tricolor was waving proudly over the spot where, half a century before, it had first been raised. The spirit which was animating those groups around me, and which was the burden of all their discussions, Hate of England, was the same which, two hundred years ago, had brought the Great Catholic Cardinal into conjunction even with the Puritan Reformers. 374 ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS. I had scarcely written thus far upon the insignifi- cance of the present election in France, when our courier rushed in to announce an event which may change the whole aspect of European politics. The Duke of Orleans is dead. His horses ran away with him in a light carriage; he jumped out, fell upon his head, and only spoke once afterwards, some few inco- herent words in German his wife's language. Poor king ! poor queen ! poor brothers ! poor sisters ! poor wife ! The only united royal house that ever was ! The saddest procession ! The dead body carried on to Neuilly, escorted by soldiers, with tears upon their rough faces. The King, Queen, Madame Adelaide, Princess Clementine, Due d'Aumale, and Montpensier following on foot. By their side, people, gradually in- creasing in numbers, following with deep and silent sympathy, priests, who, of their own accord, join themselves to that melancholy throng, and chant a requiem ! "Why was it not I?" the poor father muttered repeat- edly, and the mother, inthemidst of all herown anguish, could not help exclaiming, " Oh, what a misfortune for France ! " ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF ORLEANS. 375 ON THE DEATH OP THE DUKE OP ORLEANS, 1842. FAREWELL dear Paris ! Let ine, ere I leave, Albeit in Saxon song prefer on high True prayers for thee, in saddest sympathy With each sad shrine of thy St. Genevieve. By those fair thoughts of olden amity, Which we should both, from wiser sires, receive ; By St. John's hopes, and Utrecht's severed tie, By this last loss, that we together grieve ! O from that hour, when Orleans breathed no more, By that dark sight, when France's sorrow gave Another colour to her tricolor, By our own England's wail o'er his young grave, Yea, by all this, Feud here henceforward ends, One common woe has made two rivals friends. 376 TOLERATION. TOLERATION. IT was a beautiful palace. Before it ran a long and sloping terrace, full of the most brilliant flowers, and ending in a low and graceful balustrade. Upon this, at just intervals, were placed simple Greek vases, of exquisite symmetry and proportions. A little farther on, in happy contrast to the dazzling whiteness of the marble building, the broad branches of cedars flung far out their full green flakes, which fell, now mirrored into basins of clear-water, now fan-like on the sward. It was a bright summer afternoon. Nothing could be so pleasing to the eye as the alternate relief of soft shade and delicate tracery given to the architecture, by the screens of foliage, which half concealed The shapes that it revealed To the meditative eyes. There was something Oriental in the scene. The un- TOLERATION. 377 clouded sky, the dusky cedars, the stately palace, the strange fragrance, the far noise of running waters. I might have been gazing upon the Alhambra, or the Taj. I lay down upon the grass, and surrendered myself to the illusions thus provoked. My imagination rioted in vague and dim reminiscences of Mahometan glory. I was now with Ali and the Fatimites, now with the Caliphs or the Abassides. My mind was full of tales of valour, and romance, and generosity. The conquest of Egypt and Morocco, the invasion of Spain, the learning of Cordova, the politeness of Damascus, Charlemagne and Haroun-Al-Raschid, Saladin and the Crusades, Boabdil and Granada! What animated associations ! What themes for luxu- rious or thoughtful reflection ! What inevitable incitement for future history, among a race almost as numerous as that of Christendom, and far more sus- ceptible to the legends of their faith ! Such were the train and tenour of my thoughts, when methought they were interrupted by a light step near me. I looked up, and beheld a maiden of singular loveliness. Her eyes were very large and full of fire. Her dark hair seemed still darker in its contrast to her fair pale forehead, and the small diamond crescent which glittered 378 TOLERATION. above it. She beckoned me to follow her. I arose and obeyed, in silent admiration and astonishment. Her robe of loose green concealed her shape, but I could ever and anon perceive her small white feet, shining like glowworms before me. She stopped at the portal of the palace. I would fain have addressed her, but she at once hushed and silenced me. " Stranger," she said, and her voice was full of quiet and melodious meaning, " speak not ; think on as thou hast thought. Ever think good of others, ever wish good for others, ever do good to others." She took my hand in one of hers, as she spoke, while with the other she pressed against the gate. It flew open at her touch, and dis- covered what seemed an endless corridor of marble. At first I could distinguish nothing but a long, broad line of light. But, as I advanced, I could see that on either side of the vast hall, were ranged golden thrones and upon them were seated the Mighty Warriors and Rulers of the Faithful. But the maiden passed on swiftly and regardless of them all, till we had arrived nearly at the extreme end of the hall. And here methought I saw direct before me, a throne far loftier than any of those I had seen before, with many steps up to it, and a canopy all inlaid, and heavy with precious stones above. And, TOLERATION. 379 beyond this again, a golden staircase arose, and it ap- peared to extend high upwards, far beyond the reach of mortal sight. And, as I drew nearer to the throne, methought it was the Great Prophet himself who sat thereon. And when we reached the lowest step, the maiden bowed down her head upon it, with folded arms and humble attitude. But, lest I should be thought to kneel and worship, I crossed myself in sign of my own Western Faith, and stood upright before the Prophet. And he came down the steps, and looked earnestly into my face, and smiled kindly. And he said, " Thy heart has been stirred within thee at the glories of Islam. Doubt not. Truth is not mine only, but multiform. And Benevolence is the discipline of Truth." With these words, he raised me up to the very foot of the throne, and bade me look around me. And I saw not one throne, but many thrones ; not one corridor, but many corridors, and they all ended at the foot of the illimitable golden staircase. And when I had gazed and wondered, and reflected, he motioned to the maiden, who ascended the steps, and took me again by the hand. And again we passed down the hall, and at length reached the portals, which once more flew open at her touch. And as they closed behind me, I heard the same quiet and silvery voice 380 TOLERATION. saying, " Ever think good of others, ever wish good for others, ever do good to others." I turned round to look for the maiden, but she was no longer by me. I shouted for her, but my shouts were only echoed by the murmurs of the fountains. I awoke, and found that I had been asleep beneath a lofty cedar in the beautiful garden. It was all in vain that I pined for my past vision, the splendours I had seen, and the mystic visit of the maiden. I grew weary of solitude, and returned full of disappointment into the busy city. As I entered, men were gathering in knots and clusters, and speaking earnestly upon some news of general and absorbing interest. I stopped to inquire what it might be. " What," one said, " have you not heard, how the Mahometans have murdered the Christians ?" And he related to me a tale of terrible butchery, in one of the far provinces of Asia. And when he had done, he went on to tell how " the Christians intended to be revenged, and how a war of extermination alone, ought to satisfy justice." I turned away from him, because I could feel no sympathy. But I thought upon the words of my dream. " Ever think good of others, ever wish good for others, ever do good to others. Truth is not mine, but multiform, and benevolence is the discipline of truth." THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. 381 THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND, I. THE Land, it boasts its titled hosts, they could not vie with these, The Merchants of Old England, the Seigneurs of the Seas ; In the days of Great Elizabeth, when they sought the Western Main, Maugre and spite the Caesars' might, and the menaces of Spain ; And the richly freighted argosy, and the good galleon went forth, With the bales of Leeds or Lincoln, and the broad cloths of the North ; And many a veteran mariner would speak 'midst glistening eyes, Of the gain of some past voyage, and the hazards of emprize ; Or in the long night-watches the wondrous tale was told Of isles of fruit and spices, and fields of waving gold. 382 THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. And the young and buoyant-hearted, would oft that tale renew, And dream their dearest dream should be, their wildest hope come true. So with brave hearts and dauntless, they sailed for the Unknown ; For each he sought his inmost thought, and a secret of his own. And reason fair, how wild soe'er had been each young belief, O reason fair ! had they to dare with Raleigh for a chief ! Then, when long years had glided by, in those colonies they made, The same free spirit, which was theirs, in those Plantations stayed. As refuge here and shelter full many an exile found, When the Old World grew in dotage, and by Priests and Kings was bound. And in some far savannah, where man had never been, They came with thoughts as simple as was that savage scene ; Or in the lonely prairie they kept their solemn tryst, When Sacred Word and Hymn were heard, and the equal laws of Christ, And the young and strong Republic was by these in virtue bred, She was cradled in Adventure, she was nursed in good men's dread, The young and strong Republic that has filled the world with fame, And with great praise and marvel of the Anglo-Saxon name. And well she shows her origin in the deeds that she has done, With her Franklin, and her Whitney, and her hero Washington. Then glory to the Fathers who had such sons as these, The Merchants of Old England, the Seigneurs of the Seas ! THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. 383 II. The land, it boasts its titled hosts, they could not vie with these, The Merchants of Old England, the Seigneurs of the Seas. In the days of the Guelphic Georges, when the dream had come again, Of a Treasure land, where a daring hand had only to glean and gain. And all that in past times our forefathers had told, Of the gorgeous Mississippi, and the Southern seas of gold, Was now outdone, where the Eastern sun poured its fire in lava streams, Through bold Dupleix's, and Labourdonnaye's, and Lally's conquest schemes ; But little they knew what he could do, when on fair Plassy's vale The bright-eyed young Adventurer flung his sword into the scale ; And like the Roman Legend the fate of nations swayed, With the glory of the impulse, and the greatness of the blade. For the Fiat had gone forth, and the Orient was to be The slave of a Northern mistress, the Island of the Free. And of the three Great Races that met in conflict there, The fierce Mahratta swordsman, and the Mussulman Ameer, Was high above all standards, the Company's displayed, Was high above all war-cries, the war-cry of the Trade. 384 THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. And from that hour there grew the power, was made by no human hand, But as erst was given in grace from Heaven to a free and chosen land. For, lo ! by a sign that was divine, there were revealed once more, The greatness, and the courage, and the soul that were of yore And one vast rnind, itself combined, the Ancient and the New, The ardour of the Christian, and the calm of the Hindoo. And after Hastings, still there came a great and glorious line, Of Proconsul on Proconsul to tend his high design ; Of councillors and heroes, whose names shall live for aye, With the Wellesley of Mysore, and the Wellesley of Assaye. Then glory to the merchants, who had such chiefs as these, The Merchants of old England, the Seigneurs of the Seas. THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. 385 III. The land it boasts its titled hosts they cannot vie with these, The Merchants of old England the Seigneurs of the Seas, In the days of Queen Victoria, for they have borne her sway From the far Atlantic islands, to the islands of Cathay, And, o'er one-sixth of all the earth, and over all the main, Like some good Fairy, Freedom marks and blesses her domain. And of the mighty empires, that arose, and ruled, and died, Since on the sea, his heritage, the Tyrian looked in pride, Not Carthage, with her Hannibal, not Athens when she bore Her bravest and her boldest to the Syracusan shore, While the words of Alcibiades yet echoed wide and far, " Where are corn fields, and are olive grounds, the Athenian's limits are." And in each trireme was many a dream of the West, and its un- known bliss Of the maidens of Iberia, and the feasts of Sybaris Not in those younger ages, when St. Mark's fair city ran Her race of fame and frailty, each monarch's courtezan, Not Lusia in her palmier hour, in those commercial days, When Vasco sailed for Calicut, and Cambens sang his praise, 2c 386 THE MERCHANTS OF OLD ENGLAND. Not Spain with all her Indies, the while she seemed to fling, Her fetters on the waters, like the oriental king, Not one among the conquerors that are or ever were, In wealth, or fame, or grandeur with England may compare. But not of this our Sovereign thought, when from her solemn throne, She spoke of the Poor, and what they endure, in her low and thrilling tone, And offered a prayer that Trade might bear relief through the starving land, To the strong man's weakened arm, and 'his wan and workless hand. And by the power, that was her dower, might Commerce once more be The Helper of the Helpless, and the Saviour of the Free. Then Glory to the Merchants, who shall do such deeds as these, The Merchants of Old England, the Seigneurs of the Seas. WALTER SPIERS, PRINTER, 17, NORTH AUDLKY STREET. YC 16233 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. RENEWALS ONLY TEL. NO. 642-3405 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. ft* So ?' **** ^ J " '* *>< a ^ ^ 3 tt i, o_ t% ?- itt ^ ffM ^% 4 '\ |P1U> i .B-7 MN22!qjJ4 RY REt CIS. KC 2 7 iiuru. ;RARY k, it novel ;ry of ; F i, r LD21A-60m-3.'70 (N5382slO)476-A-32 General Library University of California Berkeley 1