claims of the original owners: and Dumont did not choose to appear in the character of agent or compiler to a man whose personal character was so immeasurably below his public re

nown.

Before he quitted Paris,* he saw his friend in a situation entirely new, that of President of the Assembly, and never was the chair so admirably filled. It called forth powers which no one ever dreamed of his possessing. He introduced an order and a precision into the proceedings, of which, till then, people had no conception. With a word he cleared the question of every thing unessential; with a word he appeased tumult and confusion. He showed the most judicious respect to the whole body, he managed the parties in it with incomparable skill,- his answers to the various deputations which appeared at the bar, whether prepared or extemporaneous, were always remarkable for their gracefulness and dignity, and were satisfactory even when they conveyed a refusal;-in a word, his activity, his impartiality, his presence of mind were such, as wonderfully to exalt his reputation in a post which had been a fatal quicksand to most of his predecessors. He had the singular address to make himself appear the first man in the Assembly, although he could no longer ascend the tribune, and might therefore be thought to have lost his most brilliant prerogative. His enemies joined in the choice, in hopes of his extinction; instead of which, he blazed out with more splendor than ever.

[ * Not before quitting Paris. Dumont left Paris for London in March, 1790. See p. 243. In the latter part of the year he went to pass six months at Geneva, and spent, on his way, three weeks at Paris. p. 253. It was during this residence that he saw Mirabeau as President of the Assembly. Of the same period he gives, likewise, the following reminiscence. "I remember a scandalous anecdote of the Abbé Lamourette, who was afterwards Bishop of Lyons; he was at dinner; Garat, Volney, Cabanis, Palissot, and several others were there. Lamourette was the author of the discourse of Mirabeau upon the civil constitution of the clergy, and Mirabeau appeared to me not to entertain the same opinion, in private, which he had maintained in public, for he wished for a catholic clergy, though he would not have liked a dominant or cxclusive clergy. Palissot was speaking of the Abbé Gregoire, who shewed great zeal for religion; and, with the usual intolerance of these gentlemen, accused him of being only a charlatan and a cheat. Not so,' said Lamourette, 'I have been 'his teacher in theology, and I can assure you that he believes in God a 'hundred times more than is necessary.' 'Take care,' said Mirabeau, 'there is a Genevan, whom you will offend, for he believes in God from 'the bottom of his heart.' 'And I too,' said Lamourette, 'I should be very 'sorry to be misunderstood.' After dinner, as I opened a new book upon the table, my attention was attracted by this title: Meditations of the Soul 'with its God; by the Abbé Lamourette, Professor of Theology," &c. pp. 262, 263]

But the career of this extraordinary being was now drawing to a close. His health was sinking under the joint operation of various causes, a life of incessant hurry and agitation, which left him no interval of repose from seven in the morning till 10 or 11 at night, the fierce and burning corrosion of violent passions,the more chronic fever of an impatient and irritable spirit ;-and, lastly, the artificial heat supplied by frequent imprudences of a luxurious table. He said, that if he were a believer in slow poisons, he should fancy that some pernicious drug had been given him. At last, the inflammation of his system produced ophthalmia; and when he was President of the Assembly he was compelled to apply leeches to his neck in the intervals between the morning and the evening sittings. When Dumont took leave of him, his emotion was greater than he had ever seen him betray. He said, that probably they should never meet again; and then, he added, in a prophetic tone, (which savoured, nevertheless, of his usual egotism)

"When I am gone my value will be perceived. The evils which I have labored to arrest, will then rush over the whole of France. That faction which trembled before me, will then be left without control. I have nothing before my eyes but visions of evil. Ah, my friend, how truly did we judge when we wished to hinder the commons from declaring themselves the National Assembly? Here is the origin of all the mischief. Ever since they succeeded in this, they have shown themselves unworthy of their victory. They have chosen to govern the King, instead of governing by the King. But very soon it will be neither he nor they that will govern. A vile faction will tyrannize over all, and cover the whole kingdom with horrors.'"

At the time when these terrible presentiments were uttered, Dumont believed that they were chiefly prompted by his hatred for certain individuals whose influence was then almost predominant. The honest man of Geneva could not imagine that the leaders of the jacobinical gang had wickedness enough to accomplish such dire vaticinations. But France and Europe soon felt that the dying man was indeed a prophet. In three months after delivering this dismal burden, Mirabeau was no more.

In the remainder of this work will be found many interesting traits of the character and private life of this individual. They are such as tempt us, most powerfully, to an extension of this article. We have done our best to resist the seduction; but we are not wholly proof against it, and are unable to forbear soliciting the patient attention of our readers to some further particulars. There never was, perhaps, a more curious compound of greatness

and littleness than was exhibited in the life of this strange mortal. He was gifted with powers to control the destinies of an empire, and yet he was capable of things which would disgrace a swindler or a fortune-hunter. He was master of expedients which might have excited the mortal envy of Ferdinand Count Fathom. For instance he addressed a young lady with a view to matrimony. The parents of the damsel discouraged his attentions, and a rival appeared, dangerous enough to stimulate his vanity and to awaken his ingenuity. In this emergency, nothing could be more masterly than the result of his deliberations. One evening, a carriage was seen to convey the Count to a spot near to the door of the lady, and there it remained for several hours. This phenomenon, of course, raised the curiosity of the neighbourhood; and the spies of the rival reported that the Count Mirabeau had been seen to enter the house of his mistress, and that he had remained there all night. The success of this contrivance was quite as complete as any of the subsequent political triumphs of the orator. The lady, from that moment, was out of the market; the rival incontinently sounded a retreat; and the parents were but too happy to hush the matter up by a speedy marriage! But the fates are sometimes grievously blind to the most transcendent merit! In this instance they were not propitiated even by the powers displayed by Mirabeau. The match turned out miserably unpropitious. It was soon broken by mutual infidelities; and a final separation was the

consequence.

His disposition to fatten upon literary pillage, displayed itself even at this period of his life. He would begin an address to the idol of his heart with the following words,-"Listen, my beloved friend I am about to pour my whole soul into your's.' And this transfusion of his soul turned out to be nothing more than the transcription of an article from the Mercure de France, or from the last new romance. Again, before his public life commenced he had many an hour of weary solitude, in which "his "imagination devoured itself." And what did he do to allay these unnatural cravings, but compose an amatory work (un ouvrage érotique) which was neither more or less than a compound of all that was impure, in all the authors of antiquity!

It was astonishing (says Dumont) to see a man like Mirabeau emerge from all this mire of obscenity. Astonishing, in truth, it was: so astonishing, that there is only one thing more wonderful; and that is, that having emerged into a region where his energies might have been the salvation of a kingdom, he should think, without loathing, upon the scenes of his original degradation; and still more, that he should endure to act them over again. But human nature is, in the beginning, the middle, and the end of it, an

enigma. We have only to think of poor old Sheridan, - and there, alas! is an end of all speculation on the matter. If the heart is corrupt and unclean, what are the most commanding powers of intellect or imagination but the whiting of the sepulchre? It must be allowed, however, that Mirabeau was deeply sensible that his loss of character was to him a tremendous and irreparable damage. Dumont has seen him weep burning tears of regret for it. "Most cruelly," he exclaimed, "do I expiate the 66 errors of my youth." But these tears did not flow from the pure source of awakened moral sensibility, but from the bitter fountain of disappointed ambition. He felt conscious that if his reputation for virtue had been equal to his renown for talent, all France might have been at his feet. The wonder is, that when he became known, he made no magnanimous efforts for his own redemption. What can be said of a man who, while he was wielding "the fierce democratie" of France, could condescend to intrigue with the scolding and cheating wife of an obscure bookseller?*

But let us turn away from his moral character to his merely mental faculties. With all his powers, we can scarcely conceive it probable that, such as he actually was, he could ever have made much deep or permanent impression in the British Parliament. Occasional bursts of powerful rhetoric do not answer there. They do nothing for a man but fix the eyes of the public upon him in expectation of greater and more useful things and if he disappoints that expectation, there is an end of him. Now Mirabeau would, infallibly, have disappointed this expectation. It has been stated above that he was no debater. He was only a great political electrician. This did very well in France, where people are fond of electrical shocks. But Englishmen have no notion of being galvanised, and made to kick and sprawl to no purpose. They have no objection to occasional excitement, but they do not,

[* "I am not fully acquainted with the private life of Mirabeau, and his domestic intercourse with his father, his mother, his wife. The violence of his passions during youth may have justified the severity of his father, but the Marquis de Mirabeau, as passionate as his son, never knew the art of managing this unruly character. Instead of influencing his son by affection, to which he was susceptible, he wished to subdue him by force, against which he rebelled. He said himself, that his family was that of Atreus and Thyestes. The variance between the father and mother, by forming two hostile factions among their children, had early accustomed them to constraint and dissimulation; and the example of vice had but too powerful an empire over a temperament like that of Mirabeau, precocious in every respect, and corrupted by women long before his reason had attained maturity. Had he been willing to describe his education, we should have known the secret of that singular union of contradictory qualities, which was always observable in him." pp. 263, 270.]

like Frenchmen, live upon excitement. That Mirabeau had mental talents, which might have qualified him for a debater, may be very possible; but it is extremely questionable whether his temperament would ever have endured the necessary training. He had great activity, but very little industry. He could, whenever he chose it, get up the information necessary for a great occasion with surprising quickness; but he had nothing like sustained and habitual diligence. He never knew what it was to be constantly accumulating a capital of valuable intelligence and accomplishment. He was never in a condition to endure a run upon his mind; and without this substantial fund, a man is at any moment liable to stop payment, or at least to be reduced to the humiliating necessity of a reliance on the help and credit of his neighbours. Mirabeau was perpetually on the brink of this sort of insolvency; and, occasionally, he fell into it. In his own country this did not ruin him; but it would very soon have done for him here. With us, it very rarely happens that the fate of a great measure turns upon a fine speech. The gift of utterance is only one of many faculties by which the public man has to win his way to the confidence of his hearers. If Mirabeau had been, in England, only the same sort of person that he was in France, we should never have heard of him as the unique and only orator, the solitary example of supreme eloquence in his generation. His admirer, Dumont, confesses that he was decidedly inferior to the athletes of the Parliament of England. Nay, Mirabeau himself was aware of his own defect, for he said on one occasion, when he had failed to make an impression, "I perceive that, in order to speak extemporaneously on a subject with any effect, it is necessary to "begin by knowing it." Obvious as this may appear to us, it is, we believe, a discovery yet to be made with our volatile neighbours. *

[* "If we view him as an author, it must be allowed that all his works, without exception, are pieces of mosaic, of which, if each of his fellow-laborers should take back his own part, little would remain to him; but he had the merit of giving new brilliancy to whatever he touched; of throwing in, here and there, luminous passages, original expressions, apostrophes full of fire and of eloquence. It was no common power which he possessed, of discovering talents in their obscurity, of giving to each of his agents the kind of encouragement best suited to the individual, of animating them all with the zeal with which he was filled, and of making them unite earnestly in a labor of which he alone was to reap the glory.

"He felt himself wholly incapable of writing connectedly, if he were not supported and directed by the borrowed labor of another. His style, too full of effort, frequently degenerated into bombast, and he was disgusted with the emptiness and incoherence of his ideas; but when he had a plan marked out, and materials furnished, he understood well how to prune, bring together, add greater spirit and life, and stamp the whole with the impress