MIRABEAU'S spiritual gift will be found on examination, to be verily an honest and a great one; far the strongest, best practical intellect of that time; entitled to rank among the strong of all times. Hear this man on any subject, you will find him worth considering. He has words in him, rough deliverances; such as men do not forget. As thus: 'I know but three ways of living in this world: by wages for work; by begging; thirdly, by stealing (so named or not so named). Again: Malebranche saw all things in God; and M. Necker sees all things in Necker!' There are nicknames of Mirabeau's worth whole treatises. 'Grandison-Cromwell-Lafayette:' write a volume on the man, as many volumes have been written, and try to say more! It is the best likeness yet drawn of him, -by a flourish and two dots. Of such inexpressible advantage is it that a man have 'an eye, instead of a pair of spectacles merely;' that, seeing through the formulas of things, and even 'making-away' with many a formula, he see into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it! -M. Mirabeau. DANTON. IF Bonaparte were the 'armed Soldier of Democracy,' invincible while he continued true to that, then let us call this Danton the Enfant Perdu, and unenlisted Revolter and Titan of Democracy, which could not yet. have soldiers or discipline, but was by the nature of it lawless. An Earth-born, we say, yet honestly born of Earth! In the Memoirs of Garat, and elsewhere, one sees these fire-eyes beam with earnest insight, fill with the water of tears; the broad rude features speak withal of wild human sympathies; that Antalus' bosom also held a heart. "It is not the alarm-cannon that you hear," cries he to the terror-struck, when the Prussians were already at Verdun: "it is the pas de charge against our enemies." "De l'audace, et encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace, To dare, and again to dare, and without limit to dare!"-there is nothing left but that. Poor Mirabeau of the Sansculottes,' what a mission! And it could not be but done,-and it was done. But indeed, may there not be, if well considered, more virtue in this feeling itself, once bursting earnest from the wild heart, than in whole lives of immaculate Pharisees and Respectabilities, with their eye ever set on 'character' and the letter of the law: "Que mon nom soit flétri, Let my name be blighted, then; let the cause be glorious, and have victory"! By-and-by, as we predict, the Friend of Humanity, since so many Knifegrinders have no story to tell him, will find some sort of story in this Danton. A rough-hewn giant of a man, not anthropophagous entirely; whose 'figures of speech,' and also of action, 'are all gigantic;' whose 'voice reverberates from the domes,' and dashes Brunswick across the marches in a very wrecked condition. Always his total freedom from cant is one thing; even in his briberies, and sins as to money, there is a frankness, a kind of broad greatness. Sincerity, a great rude sincerity of insight and of purpose, dwelt in the man, which quality is the root of all: a man who could see through many things, and would stop at very few things; who marched and fought impetuously forward, in the questionablest element; and now bears the penalty in a name 'blighted,' yet, as we say, visibly clearing itself. Once cleared, why should not this name too have significance for men? The wild history is a tragedy, as all human histories are. Brawny Dantons, still to the present hour, rend the globe, as simple. brawny Farmers, and reap peaceable harvests, at Arcissur-Aube; and this Danton-! It is an unrhymed. tragedy; very bloody, fuliginous (after the manner of the elder dramatists); yet full of tragic elements; not undeserving natural pity and fear. In quiet times, perhaps still at a great distance, the happier on-looker may stretch out the hand, across dim centuries, to him, and say: "Ill-starred brother, how thou foughtest with wild lion-strength, and yet not with strength enough, and flamedst aloft, and wert trodden down of sin and misery;-behold thou also wert a man!" CAMILLE DESMOULINS. -M. Mirabeau. THIS Procureur Général de la Lanterne has a place of his own in the history of the Revolution; there are not many notabler persons in it than he. A light harmless creature; as he says of himself, a man born to write verses; but whom Destiny directed to overthrow Bastilles, and go to the guillotine for doing that. How such a man will comport himself in a French Revolution, as he from time to time turns up there, is worth seeing. Of loose headlong character; a man stuttering in speech; stuttering, infirm in conduct too, till one huge idea laid hold of him: a man for whom Art, Fortune or himself would never do much, but to whom Nature had been very kind! One meets him always with a sort of forgiveness, almost of underhand love, as for a prodigal son. He has good gifts and even aquirements; elegant law-scholarship, quick sense, the freest joyful heart: a fellow of endless wit, clearness, soft lambent brilliancy; on any subject you can listen to him, if without approving, yet without yawning. As a writer, in fact, there is nothing French, that we have heard of, superior or equal to him for these fifty years. -M. Hist. of French Revolution. -SLIGHT-BUILT-; he with the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that figure is Camille Desmoulins. A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly sparkling man! -F. R., Part I., B. IV. 4. ROBESPIErre. CONSIDER Maximilien Robespierre; for the greater part of two years, what one may call Autocrat of France. A poor sea-green (verdâtre), atrabiliar Formula of a man; without head, without heart, or any grace, gift or even vice beyond common, if it were not vanity, astucity, diseased rigour (which some count strength) as of a cramp: really a most poor sea-green individual in spectacles; meant by Nature for a Methodist parson of the stricter sort, to doom men who departed from the written confession; to chop fruitless shrill logic; to contend, and suspect, and ineffectually wrestle and wriggle; and, on the whole, to love, or to know, or to be (properly speaking) Nothing:—this was he who, the sport of the wracking winds, saw himself whirled aloft to command la première nation de l'univers, and all men shouting long life to him: one of the most lamentable, tragic, sea-green objects, ever whirled aloft in that manner, in any country, to his own swift destruction and the world's long wonder! CAGLIOSTRO. -M. Mirabean. ONE of the most authentic documents preserved of him is the Picture of his Visage. An Effigies once universally diffused; in oil-paint, aquatint, marble, stucco, and perhaps gingerbread, decorating millions of apartments: of which remarkable Effigies one copy, engraved in the line-manner, happily still lies here. Fittest of visages; worthy to be worn by the Quack of Quacks. A most portentous face of scoundrelism: a fat, snub, abominable face; dew-lapped, flat-nosed, greasy, full of greediness, sensuality, oxlike obstinacy; a forehead impudent, refusing to be ashamed; and then two eyes turned up seraphically languishing, as in divine contemplation and adoration; a touch of quiz too: on the whole perhaps the most perfect quack-face produced by the eighteenth century. There he sits, and seraphically languishes, with this epigraph: De l'Ami des Humains reconnaissez les traits: Tous ses jours sont marqués par de nouveaux bienfaits, Le plaisir d'être utile est seul sa récompense. VOLTAIRE. -M. Cagliostro. VOLTAIRE'S worst enemies, it seems to us, will not deny that he had naturally a keen sense for rectitude, indeed for all virtue: the utmost vivacity of temperament characterises him; his quick susceptibility for every form of beauty is moral as well as intellectual. Nor was his practice without indubitable and highly creditable proofs of this. To the help-needing he was at all times a ready benefactor: many were the hungry adventurers who profited by his bounty, and then bit the hand that had fed them. If we enumerate his generous acts, from the case of the Abbé Desfontaines down to that of the Widow Calas, and the Serfs of Saint Claude, we shall find that few private men have had so wide a circle of charity, and have watched over it so well. Should it be objected that love of reputation entered largely into these proceedings, Voltaire can afford a handsome deduction on that head: should the uncharitable even calculate that love of reputation was the sole motive, we can only remind them that love of such reputation is itself the effect of a social humane disposition; and wish, as an immense improvement, that all men were animated with it. -M. Voltaire. THE truth is we are trying Voltaire by too high a standard; comparing him with an ideal which he himself never strove after, perhaps never seriously aimed at. He is no great Man, but only a great Persifleur; a man for whom life and all that pertains to it, has, at best, but a despicable meaning; who meets its difficulties not with earnest force, but with gay agility; and is found always at the top, less by power in swimming, than by lightness in floating. Take him in this character, forgetting that any other was ever ascribed to him, and |