But though so thoroughly French himself, he had, nevertheless, a mighty contempt for some of the peculiarities of Frenchmen. He utterly disdained that "false heat" which he described as "the thunder and tempest of the opera." He never lost the senatorial gravity and composure. Even his dignity, however, had something about it which we should deem almost laughable; the air of pretension, the attitude of pompous grandeur, — the head thrown back, the chest dilated, the shoulders squared!

of his own eloquence. This is what he called giving the point [trait] to a work; this point consisted in a striking expression, an image, a sally, an epigram, a piece of irony, an allusion, something animated and bold, which he considered absolutely necessary for sustaining the attention of readers. It is easily seen, that this mania for point is very dangerous to good taste, and that it conducts rapidly to the affectation which marked the decline of literature.

"As a political orator, Mirabeau had, in certain respects, the most distinguished talents; ready observation, unfailing tact, a power of discovering immediately the real spirit of the Assembly, and of applying his whole force to the main point of resistance, without wasting it upon mere accessories. No one ever accomplished more by a single word; no one ever hit his mark with more precision, or oftener carried with him the general sentiment, sometimes by a happy insinuation, and sometimes by a sarcasm, which struck fear into his opponents. At the tribune, he was immovable; those who have seen him know that the waves rolled around him without disturbing him, and that he even remained master of his passions when assailed by every insult. I remember to have heard him deliver a report relative to the city of Marseilles; every word was interrupted by abuse from those of the right side; he heard the epithets, slanderer, liar, assassin, wretch, and all the eloquence of the fish-market sounding in his ears. He stopped for a moment, and addressing the most violent, in his softest tones, 'I wait, Gentlemen,' said he, 'till these civilities have ceased;' and he went quietly on as if he had been received in the most favorable manner. He never suffered himself to be so provoked as to forget the proprieties of a public speaker. But what he wanted, as a political orator, was the art of discussion, in subjects which required it. He had not power to grasp a series of reasonings and proofs; he could not refute methodically; and he was thus reduced to the necessity of abandoning important motions, after he had read his speech. Having made a brilliant entry into the field he disappeared from it, and left it to his adversaries. This fault was in part owing to his undertaking too much, and not reflecting enough. He came forward with a discourse which had been made for him, and on which he had bestowed little thought; he had not taken the trouble to anticipate objections, and to discuss details; and was thus very inferior, in this respect, to the combatants whom we see in the Parliament of England. The triumph of Fox, for instance, is in refutation. He goes over all the arguments on the opposite side, delights to place them in the strongest light, to give them new force, to station himself in the post of the greatest difficulty, and then, one after another, he reduces them to dust, and never shows greater power than when he has been thought in imminent danger of an overthrow. The only debaters of the National Assembly who had any of this talent werc Maury, Clermont-Tonnerre, Barnave, and Thouret." pp, 275-279.]

-All this on the floor of St. Stephens would only make people stare; and, perhaps, inquire who was the honorable member's dancing master? On the other hand, he had some redeeming qualities which might have partly overpowered the bad effect of his ostentatious bearing. His self-possession was marvellous. We have already seen that it was sufficient to bear him up in the midst of the bewilderment in which he was entangled by the absurdities of the Marquis of Caseaux. It sometimes displayed itself in a manner still more extraordinary. In the very midst of his most animated harangues, he could receive and peruse a succession of scraps in pencil, handed to him by his friends; and whenever they were worth using, he could introduce their contents with surprising effect into his speech; so that Garat used to compare him to a mountebank, who could tear a piece of paper into twenty pieces, swallow the fragments, and then reproduce them whole.

Mirabeau died insolvent. He had been the pensionary of Monsieur and the King, and may possibly have received the wages of other employers. But the accounts of his venality were probably much exaggerated. "I know not how it is," he would say, "that I am such a beggar, having all the kings, and all their treasures, at my command." It does not appear that his mercenary habits brought with them any sense of degradation. Pride," as Dumont observes, "was, to him, in the place of "integrity." The price paid for him only elated his selfimportance. "A man like me," said he, "may accept a hundred "thousand crowns; but a hundred thousand crowns cannot pur"chase a man like me." He affected to consider the money he received purely as an instrument, without which he could not do his work and it must be admitted that he never appears to have entertained the thought of raising a fortune out of his pay. The splendor and luxury of his style were, doubtless, very much to his taste; but it is also true that, in a certain measure, they were necessary for the establishment and extension of his influence. He considered himself, in short, not as the pensionary, but merely as the banker and agent of the King.

It is the opinion of Dumont that, if he had lived, he would have curbed, and even have crushed the Jacobins, and given to France a constitution fit for rational beings. To us this appears extremely doubtful. He might have accomplished this, if steadiness, high principle, and self-devotion, could, by miracle, have been infused into his nature. There would then have been "a "combination and a form indeed — to give the world assurance of stateman." But alas! this must, surely, have been as impossible as to erase the ravages of the small pox from his countenance.

His death, however, was, beyond all doubt, a deplorable loss to France. It was the extinction of all hope or chance of salvation. It was the signal which let slip the hell-hounds of massacre and confusion. His decease was as the breath of life to the Jacobinical faction. Robespierre, Petion, and a multitude of other obscene birds, who hid themselves from the lightenings of his eye, then took wing; and the whole land was covered with their hideous ravin.

His greatest quality, in the judgment of Dumont, - was political sagacity. In this he appears to have left all immeasurably behind him. In 1782 he spoke of the assembling of the States General as a thing that must infallibly come to pass, and foretold that he himself should be a deputy, although, at that time, he was but a needy adventurer in literature. No one penetrated, as he did, into all the consequences of the Séance Royale, or saw through all the motions and designs of the popular party. On the breach between them and the Crown, he exclaimed, "You "will now have nothing but massacre and butchery, you will "not even have the execrable honor of a civil war." And when his death was approaching, he said to Talleyrand, "I carry with "me the last shreds of the monarchy."

He was so incessantly tossed about by the waves of political life, and brought into perpetual contact with such a multitude of various characters and interests, that, in a comparatively short time, his experience became immense; and the effect was, that language failed him, in his attempt, to describe the many-colored results of his observation. He was obliged to coin a phraseology for himself, to exhibit the shades and gradations of talent and quality, vice and virtue, which were constantly present to his mental perception. Nothing like pretension could escape the search of his penetrating discernment: but he had also an eye for every thing that was truly great and good. "There was in him," — to use the exact words of Dumont, - an enthusiasm for what was "fair and noble, which his personal vices never could degrade. "The mirror might be soiled and tarnished for a time, but it always resumed its lustre. If his actions and his words were at "variance with each other, it was not from falsehood or hypocrisy, but from mere inconsistency (inconséquence). His reason enabled him to soar; his passions made his flight devious "and unsteady." He was, in a word, a Colossus, made up of gold, and clay, and materials of every sort. "There was in him "much good, much evil, much of every thing. It was impossible "to know him, without being forcibly taken with him. He was a man whose energy qualified him to fill a vast sphere." It was greatly to be lamented that the elements with which "he

"filled his sphere" were of such a miscellaneous and conflicting nature; or that he was removed before he had an opportunity of establishing the final predominance of the salutary principles.

One chapter of this most interesting volume is devoted to anecdotes, bon mots, and traits of private character. We could transcribe them with delight; but this must not be. * One of his

[* We will here venture, however, to insert some of those notices of well-known individuals with which M. Dumont has enriched his work.

"Mirabeau introduced us to Dupont de Nemours and Champfort. Dupont, who had been the editor of the Ephémérides du Citoyen, (The Citizen's Journal), Dupont, the warm friend of Turgot, enjoyed the reputation of an honest man, and a wise economist; but he made himself a little ridiculous by his importance, when he modestly complained of the labor of corresponding with four or five kings. We found him, one morning, engaged in a work on leather, in which he showed that the administration had been constantly varying the regulations relative to this article: 'It will be pleasanter reading than a novel,' he said, and, as a specimen, he read us seven or eight chapters, mortally tiresome; but he made us amends by anecdotes respecting the Assembly of the Notables, of which he had been secretary. He repeated to us a very successful bon-mot, relating to the subject of tithes: The tithes,' said the Archbishop of Aix, in a plaintive voice, the tithes, that voluntary offering of the piety of the faithful.' . . . 'The tithes,' rejoined the Duke of Rochefoucauld, in his simple and modest tone, which gave additional point to the sarcasm, 'the tithes, that voluntary offering of the piety of the faithful, about which there are now forty thou'sand law-suits pending in the kingdom."— pp. 20, 21.

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"I returned to London with the famous Paine and Lord Duer, a young Scotchman, infatuated with liberty and republicanism, an honest and virtuous enthusiast, who would have supposed he was doing the greatest service to his country, by engrafting in her bosom the principles of France. I had seen Paine five or six times, and was willing to pardon, in an American, his prejudices against England. But his incredible egotism and presumptuous self-sufficiency disgusted me with him. He was drunk with vanity. According to his own account, he had done every thing in America. He was a caricature of the vainest of Frenchmen. He believed that his book upon the Rights of Man might supply the place of all other books in the world, and he told us, in so many words, that if it were in his power to annihilate all libraries, he would do it without hesitation, that he might thus destroy all the errors which they contained, and commence a new chain of ideas and principles with his Rights of Man. He knew all his own writings by heart, and he knew nothing else. He even recited to us some love-letters, written in an extravagant style, which he had composed in his youth, and which were worthy of Mascarille. He was a man of talents, full of imagination, possessing a popular eloquence, and adroit in the use of ridicule. My curiosity respecting this celebrated writer was more than satisfied in this journey, and I never saw him again."—pp. 331, 332.

“M. de Talleyrand, a descendant of one of the most noble families of France (and even of sovereign counts), was the eldest of three brothers; but, being lame from his infancy, he was not thought worthy of figuring in the world, and was destined to the church, though possessed of none of those qualities which can render this situation tolerable in the Roman communion. I have frequently heard him say, that, being despised by his

sayings, however, we cannot forbear to record. He was of opinion that the world had, hitherto, been governed by illusions, but that these were now passed away. "Mankind" -he said,

parents as a disfigured being, who was good for nothing, he had imbibed, in infancy, a serious and melancholy humor. He had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother; he was compelled to resign his right of primogeniture in favor of his second brother. When he was at the seminary at which he was educated, he confined himself to a very small number of companions, and his habitual gloom, which rendered him unsocial, gave him the reputation of pride. Condemned to the church, he no more adopted its sentiments and character than did the Cardinal de Retz and many others. He even trespassed the limits which are allowed to high birth and youth; his manners were any thing but clerical. But he could observe external proprieties, and whatever were his habits, no one knew better what was to be said, and what to be kept secret.

"I do not know whether he had not a little too much ambition of producing effect by an air of reserve and depth. Upon a first introduction, he was generally very cold; he spoke very little, but listened with great attention; his countenance, of which the features were a little swollen, seemed to announce effeminacy, and a strong and deep voice appeared to contrast with this physiognomy. He kept at a distance, and did not expose himself. The English, who have general prejudices in relation to the character of the French, found in him neither the vivacity, nor the familiarity, nor the extravagance, nor the gaiety, of the national character. A sententious manner, a cold politeness, an air of careful observation, these formed a rampart about him, in his diplomatic character.

"In intimate society, he was wholly different; he gave himself up to the pleasures of conversation with a relish peculiarly his own, and continued it far into the night. Familiar, endearing, attentive, full of little civilities, he made life easy to himself, by a sort of epicurism, and was willing to be amusing, in order to be amused. He never exerted himself to speak, but he was choice in his expressions, and said fine things, which were not well understood, except by those accustomed to listen to his conversation. It was by him that the speech, quoted by Champfort, was made, when Rulhiere said, 'I do not know why I have the reputation of being 'wicked; I never did but one wicked thing in my life.' The Bishop of Autun, who had as yet taken no part in the conversation, said to him with his sonorous voice, and with a tone full of meaning, When will that be 'finished?" One evening, when playing at whist, the conversation turned upon a lady, sixty years old, who had just married a sort of valet de chambre. The Bishop of Autun, counting his game, said, 'At nine, we do not ' reckon honors.' This kind of wit belonged to him. He had learnt it of Fontenelle, to whom he was strongly attached. He related to me an infamous action of his colleague, C., at which I was indignant, and said to him: 'The man who could do this is capable of assassinating.' 'No,' he replied coolly, not of assassinating; but of poisoning.' His manner of relating a story was full of grace. He was a model of good taste in conversation. Indolent, voluptuous, born to the possession of fortune, born to greatness, he was able, in his exile, to accustom himself to a simple mode of life, to submit to privations, and to share with his friends the only resource which he had saved from France, the wreck of a magnificent library, which was sold very cheap, because, even in London, party spirit prevented any considerable collection of purchasers." pp. 359-363.

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