T'esprit humain) can imagine, and this when | Philip Second; doing endless Gibeonite work: the heats are so excessive, and we are worn earning, however, his gold louis a day. Sophie sews and scours beside him, with her scft fingers, not grudging it: in hard toils, in trembling joys begirt with terrors, with one terror, that of being parted,-their days roll swiftly on. For eight tropical months!-Ah, at the end of some eight months, (14th May, 1777,) enter the alguazil! He is in the shape of Brugnière, our old slot-hound of the South-west; the swelling of his legs is fallen now; this time the human mind has been able to manage it. He carries Kings orders, High Mightiness' sanctions; sealed parchments. Gabriel Honoré shall be carried this way, Sophie that; Sophie, like to be a mother, shall behold him no more. Desperation, even in the female character, can go no farther: she will kill herself that hour, as even the slot-hound believes, had not the very slot-hound, in mercy, undertaken that they should have some means of correspondence; that hope should not utterly be cut away. With embracings and interjections, sobbings that cannot be uttered, they tear themselves asunder, stony Paris now nigh: Mirabeau towards his prison of Vincennes; Sophie to some milder Convent-parlour relegation, there to await what Fate, very minatory at this time, will see good to bring. "Crime for ever lamentable," ejaculates the Fils Adoptif; "of which the world has so spoken, and must for ever speak!" There are, indeed, many things easy to be spoken of it; and also some things not easy to be spoken. Why, for example, thou virtuous Fils Adoptif, was that of the Canteen-keeper's wife at If such a peccadillo, and this of the legal President's wife such a crime, lamentable to that late date of "for ever?" The present reviewer fancies them to be the same crime. Again, might not the first grand criminal and sinner in this business be legal President Monnier, the distracted, spleen-stricken, moonstricken old man ;-liable to trial, with nonacquittal or difficult acquittal, at the great Bar of Nature herself? And then the second sin- Conceive the giant Mirabeau locked fast, ner in it? and the third and the fourth? "He then, in Doubting-castle of Vincennes; his hot that is without sin among you!"-One thing, soul surging up, wildly breaking itself against therefore, the present reviewer will speak, in cold obstruction; the voice of his despair rethe words of old Samuel Johnson: My dear verberated on him by dead stone walls. Fallen Fils Adoptif, my dear brethren of Mankind, in the eyes of the world, the ambitious haughty "endeavour to clear your mind of Cant!" It man; his fair life-hopes from without all is positively the prime necessity for all men, spoiled and become foul ashes: and from and all women and children, in these days, within,-what he has done, what he has parted who would have their souls live, (were it even with and undone! Deaf as Destiny is a Rhafeebly,) and not die of the detestablest as-damanthine father; inaccessible even to the atphyxia; as in carbonic vapour, the more hor- tempt at pleading. Heavy doors have slammed rible (for breathing of) the more clean it looks. to; their bolts growling Wo to thee! Great That the Parlement of Besançon indicted Mi- Paris sends eastward its daily multitudinous rabeau for rapt et vol, abduction and robbery; hum; in the evening sun thou seest its that they condemned him "in contumacious weathercocks glitter, its old grim towers and absence," and went the length of beheading a fuliginous life-breath all gilded: and thou?— Paper Effigy of him, was perhaps extremely Neither evening nor morning, nor change of suitable; but not to be dwelt on here. Neither day, nor season, brings deliverance. Fordo we pry curiously into the garret-life in Hol- gotten of Earth; not too hopefully remem land and Amsterdam; being straitened for room. bered of Heaven! No passionate Pater-PecThe wild man and his beautiful sad-heroic cavi can move an old Marquis; deaf he as woman lived out their romance of reality, as Destiny. Thou must sit there.-For forty-two well as was expected. Hot tempers go not al- months, by the great Zodiacal Horologe! The ways softly together; neither did the course of heir of the Riquettis, sinful, and yet more true love, either in wedlock or in elopement, sinned against, has worn out his wardrobe; ever run smooth. Yet it did run, in this in- complaints that his clothes get looped and stance, copious, if not smooth; with quarrel windowed, insufficient against the weather. and reconcilement, tears and heart-effusion; His eyesight is failing; the family disorder, sharp tropical squalls, and also the gorgeous nephritis, afflicts him; the doctors declare effulgence and exuberance of general tropical horse-exercise essential to preserve life. weather. It was like a little Paphos islet in Within the walls then! answers the old the middle of blackness; the very danger and Marquis. Count de Mirabeau "rides in the despair that environed it made the islet bliss-garden of forty paces;" with quick turns, ful; even as in virtue of death, life to the hamperedly, overlooked by donjons and high fretfullest becomes tolerable, becomes sweet, stone barriers. death being so nigh. At any hour, might not king's exempt or other dread alguazil knock at our garret establishment, (here "in the Kalbestrand, at Lequesne the tailor's,") and dissolve it? Gabriel toils for Dutch booksellers; bear- was in no case Mirabeau's method, more than ing their heavy load; translating Watson's Diogenes's. Other such wild-glowing Mass And yet fancy not Mirabeau spent his time of Life, which you might beat with Cyclops' | Catholic countries will free a soul out of purhammers, (and, alas, not beat the dross out of,)gatory, Mirabeau is once more delivered from was not in Europe at that time. Call him not the strong place: not into his own home, the strongest man then living; for light, as we (home, wife, and the whole Past are far parted said, and not fire, is the strong thing; yet call from him;) not into his father's home; but him strong too, very strong; and for tough-forth;-hurled forth, to seek his fortune Ishness, tenacity, vivaciousness, and a fond gail- mael-like in the wide hunting-field of the world. lard, call him toughest of all. Raging pas- Consider him, O Reader; thou wilt find him sions, ill-governed; reckless tumult from very notable. A disgraced man, not a broken within, merciless oppression from without; one; ruined outwardly, not ruined inwardly; ten men might have died of what this Gabriel not yet, for there is no ruining of him on that Honoré did not yet die of. Police-captain side. Such a buoyancy of radical fire and Lenoir allowed him, in mercy and according fond gaillard he has; with his dignity and to engagement, to correspond with Sophie; vanity, levity, solidity, with his virtues and his the condition was that the letters should be vices,-what a front he shows! You would seen by Lenoir, and be returned into his keep-say, he bates not a jot, in these sad circuming. Mirabeau corresponded; in fire and tears, stances, of what he claimed from Fortune, but copiously, not Werter-like, but Mirabeau-like. rather enlarges it: his proud soul, so galled, Then he had penitential petitions, Pater-Pec-deformed by manacles and bondage, flings cavis to write, to get presented and enforced; away its prison-gear, bounds forth to the fight for which end all manner of friends must be again, as if victory, after all, were certain. urged: correspondence enough. Besides, he Post-horses to Pontarlier and the Besançon could read, though very limitedly: he could Parlement; that that "sentence by contueven compose or compile; extracting, not in macy" be annulled, and the Paper Effigy have the manner of the bee, from the very Bible its Head stuck on again! The wild giant, and Dom Calmet, a Biblion Eroticon, which can said to be "absent by contumacy," sits volunbe recommended to no woman or man. The tarily in the Pontarlier Jail; thunders in pleadpious Fils Adoptif drops a veil over his face ings which make Parlementeers quake, and at this scandal; and says lamentably that there all France listen; and the Head reunites itis nothing to be said. As for Correspondence self to the Paper Effigy with apologies. Monwith Sophie, it lay in Lenoir's desk forgotten; nier and the De Ruffeys know who is the most but was found there by Manuel, Procureur of impudent man alive: the world with astonishthe Commune in 1792, when so many desks ment, who is one of the ablest. Even the old flew open; and by him given to the world. A Marquis snuffles approval, though with qualibook which fair sensibility (rather in a private fication. Tough old Man, he has lost his own way) loves to weep over: not this reviewer, world-famous Lawsuit and other lawsuits, with to any considerable extent; not at all here, in ruinous expenses; has seen his fortune and his present strait for room. Good love-letters projects fail, and even lettres de cuchet turn out of their kind notwithstanding. But if any not always satisfactory or sanatory; wherething can swell farther the tears of fair sensi- fore he summons his children about him; and, bility over Mirabeau's "Correspondence of Vin- really in a very serene way, declares himself cennes," it must be this: the issue it ended in. invalided, fit only for the chimney-nook now; After a space of years these two lovers, to sit patching his old mind together again, wrenched asunder in Holland, and allowed to (à rebouter sa lête, à se recoudre pièce à pièce:) correspond that they might not poison them-advice and countenance they, the deserving selves, met again: it was under cloud of night; in Sophie's apartment, in the country; Mirabeau, 66 'disguised as a porter," had come thither from a considerable distance. And they flew into each other's arms; to weep their child dead, their long unspeakable woes? Not at all. They stood, arms stretched oratorically, calling one another to account for causes of jealousy; grew always louder, arms set a-kimbo; and parted quite loud, never to meet more on earth. In September, 1789, Mirabeau had risen to be a world's wonder: and Sophie, far from him, had sunk out of the world's sight, respected only in the little town of Gien. On the 9th night of September, Mirabeau might be thundering in the Versailles Salle des Menus, to be reported of all Journals on the morrow; and Sophie, twice disappointed of new marriage, the sad-heroic temper darkened now into perfect black, was reclining, self-tied to her sofa, with a pan of charcoal burning near; to die as the unhappy die. Said we not, "the course of true love never did run smooth ?" However, after two-and-forty months, and negotiations, and more intercessions than in part of them, shall always enjoy; but lettres de cachet, or other the like benefit and guidance, not any more. Right so, thou best of old Marquises! There he rests then, like the still evening of a thundery day; thunders no more; but rays forth many a curiously-tinted lightbeam and remark on life; serene to the last. Among Mirabeau's small catalogue of virtues, (very small of formulary and conventional virtues,) let it not be forgotten that he loved this old father warmly to the end; and forgave his cruelties, or forgot them in kind interpretation of them. For the Pontarlier paper effigy, therefore, it is well: and yet a man lives not comfortably without money. Ah, were one's marriage not disrupted; for the old father-in-law win soon die; those rich expectations were then fruitions! The ablest, not the most shame-faced man in France, is off, next spring (1783,) to Aix; stirring Parlement and Heaven and Earth there, to have his wife back. How he worked; with what nobleness and courage, (according to the Fils Adoptif:) giant's work! The sound of him is spread over France and over the world; English travellers (high foreign lord Earth's (in Nature's) own rocks; and will not tumble prostrate! So true is it what a moralist has said: "One could not wish any man to fall into a fault; yet is it often precisely after a fault, or a crime even, that the morality which is in a man first unfolds itself, and what of strength he as a man possesses, now when all else is gone from him." ships) turning aside to Aix; and "multitudes thunder-riven, but broad-based, rooted in the gathered even on the roofs" to hear him, the Court-house being crammed to bursting! Demosthenic fire and pathos; penitent husband calling for forgiveness and restitution:-"ce n'est qu'un claque-dents et un fol," rays forth the old Marquis from the chimney-nook: "a chatterteeth and madman?" The world and Parlement thought not that; knew not what to think, if not that this was the questionablest able man they had ever heard; and, alas, still farther, that his cause was untenable. No wife then; and no money! From this second attack on Fortune, Mirabeau returns foiled, and worse than before; resourceless, for now the old Marquis, too, again eyes him askance. He must hunt Ishmael-like, as we said. Whatsoever of wit or strength he has within himself will stand true to him; on that he can count; unfortunately on almost nothing but that. Mirabeau's life for the next five years, which creeps troublous, obscure, through several of these Eight Volumes, will probably, in the One right Volume which they hold imprisoned, be delineated briefly. It is the long-drawn practical improvement of the sermou already preached in Rhé, in If, in Joux, in Holland, in Vincennes, and elsewhere. A giant man in the flower of his years, in the winter of his prospects, has to see how he will reconcile these two contradictions. With giant energies and talents, with giant virtues even, he, burning to unfold himself, has got put into his hands, for implements and means to do it with, disgrace, contumely, obstruction; character elevated only as Haman was; purse full only of debt-summonses; household, home, and possessions, as it were, sown with salt; Ruin's plough-share furrowing too deeply himself and all that was his. Under these, and not under other conditions, shall this man now live and struggle. Well might he "weep" long afterwards, (though not given to the melting mood,) thinking over, with Dumont, how his life had been blasted, by himself, by others; and was now so defaced and thunder-riven, no glory could make it whole again. Truly, as we often say, a weaker, and yet very strong man, might have died,-by hypochondria, by brandy, or by arsenic but Mirabeau did not die. The world is not his friend, nor the world's law and formula? It will be his enemy then; his conqueror and master not altogether. There are strong men who can, in case of necessity, make way with formulas, (humer les formules,) and yet find a habitation behind them: these are the very strong; and Mirabeau was of these. The world's esteem having gone quite against him, and most circles of society, with their codes and regulations, pronouncing little but anathema on him, he is nevertheless not lost; he does not sink to desperation; not to dishonesty, or pusillanimity, or splenetic aridity. Nowise! In spite of the world, he is a living strong man there: the world cannot take from him his just consciousness of himself, his warm open-hearted feeling towards others; there are still limits, on all sides, to which the world and the devil cannot drive him. The giant, we say! How he stands, like a mountain; Mirabeau, through these dim years, is seen wandering from place to place; in France, Germany, Holland, England; finding no rest for the sole of his foot. It is a life of shifts and expedients, au jour le jour. Extravagant in his expenses, thriftless, swimming in a welter of debts and difficulties; for which he has to provide by fierce industry; by skill in financiership. The man's revenue is his wits; he has a pen and a head; and. happily for him, "is the demon of the impossible." At no time is he without some blazing project or other, which shall warm and illuminate far and wide; which too often blazes out ineffectual; which in that case he replaces and renews, for his hope is inexhaustible. He writes pamphlets unweariedly as a steam-engine: On the Opening of the Scheldt, and Kaiser Joseph: On the Order of Cincinnatus and Washington: on Count Cagliostro, and the Diamond Necklace. Innumerable are the helpers and journeymen (respectable Mauvillons, respectable Dumonts) whom he can set working for him on such matters; it is a gift he has. He writes Books, in as many as eight volumes, which are properly only a larger kind of Pamphlets. He has polemics with Caron Beaumarchais on the water-company of Paris; lean Caron shooting sharp arrows into him, which he responds to demoniacally, "flinging hills with all their woods." He is intimate with many men; his "terrible gift of familiarty," his joyous courtiership and faculty of pleasing, do not forsake him: but it is a questionable intimacy, granted to the man's talents, in spite of his character: a relation which the proud Riquetti, not the humbler that he is poor and ruined, correctly feels. With still more women is he intimate; girt with a whole system of intrigues, in that sort, wherever he abide; seldom travelling without a―wife (let us call her) engaged by the year, or during mutual satisfaction. On this large department of Mirabeau's history, what can you say, except that his incontinence was great, enormous, entirely indefersible! If any one please (which we do not) to be present, with the Fils Adoptif, at "the autopsie," and post-mortem examination, he will see curious documents on this head; and to what depths of penalty Nature, in her just self-vindication, can sometimes doom men. The Fils Adoptif is very sorry. To the kind called unfortunatefemales, it would seem, nevertheless, this unfortunate-male had an aversion amounting to complete nolo-tangere. The old Marquis sits apart in the chimneynook, observant: what this roaming, unresting, rebellious Titan of a Count may ever prove of use for? If it be not, O Marquis, for the general Overturn, Culbute Générale? He is swallowing Formulas; getting endless acquaintance with the Realities of things and men: in audacity, in recklessness, he will not, it is like, be wanting. The old Marquis rays out curious observations on life;-yields no effectual assistance of money. draws towards completion, and it becomes ever more evident to Mirabeau that great things are in the wind, we find his wanderings, as it were, quicken. Suddenly emerging out Ministries change and shift; but never, in of Night and Cimmeria, he dashes down on the new deal, does there turn up a good card the Paris world, time after time; flashes into for Mirabeau. Necker he does not love, nor it with that fire-glance of his; discerns that is love lost between them. Plausible Calonne the time is not yet come; and then merges hears him Stentor-like denouncing stock-job- back again. Occasionally his pamphlets probing, (Denonciation de l'Agiotage:) communes voke a fulmination and order of arrest, wherewith him, corresponds with him; is glad to fore he must merge the faster. Nay, your get him sent, in some semi-ostensible or spy- Calonne is good enough to signify it beforediplomatist character, to Berlin; in any way hand: On such and such a day I shall order to have him sopped and quieted. The Great you to be arrested; pray make speed thereFrederic was still on the scene, though now fore. When the Notables meet, in the spring very near the side-scenes: the wiry thin Drill- of 1787, Mirabeau spreads his pinions, alights serjeant of the World, and the broad burly on Paris and Versailles; it seems to him he Mutineer of the World, glanced into one another ought to be secretary of those Notables. No! with amazement; the one making entrance, friend Dupont de Nemours gets it: the time the other making exit. To this Berlin busi- is not yet come. It is still but the time of ness we owe pamphlets; we owe Correspond-"Crispin-Catiline" d'Espréménil, and other ences, ("surreptitiously published"-with con- such animal-magnetic persons. Nevertheless, sent;) we owe (brave Major Mauvillon serving the Reverend Talleyrand, judicious Dukes, as hodman) the Monarchie Prussienne, a Pam- liberal noble friends not a few, are sure that phlet in some eight octavo Volumes, portions the time will come. Abide thy time. of which are still well worth reading. Generally, on first making personal acquaintance with Mirabeau as a writer or speaker, one is not a little surprised. Instead of Irish oratory, with tropes and declamatory fervid feeling, such as the rumour one has heard gives prospect of, you are astonished to meet a certain hard angular distinctness, a totally unornamented force and massiveness: clear perspicuity, strong perspicacity, conviction that wishes to convince, this beyond all things, and instead of all things. You would say the primary character of those utterances, nay, of the man himself, is sincerity and insight; strength, and the honest use of strength. Which, indeed, it is, O Reader! 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. These books of his ought to be riddled, like this book of the Fils Adoptif. There is precious matter in them; too good to lie hidden among shot rubbish. 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 sees into the thing itself, and so know it and be master of it! As the years roll on, and that portentous decade of the Eighties (or "Era of Hope") Hark! On the 27th of December, 1788, here finally is the long-expected announcing itself: royal Proclamation definitively convoking the States-General for May next! Need we ask whether Mirabeau bestirs himself now; whether or not he is off to Provence, to the Assembly of Noblesse there, with all his faculties screwed to the sticking-place? One strong dead-lift pull, thou Titan; and perhaps thou carriest it! How Mirabeau wrestled and strove under these auspices; speaking and contending all day, writing pamphlets, paragraphs, all night; also suffering much, gathering his wild soul together, motionless under reproaches, under drawn swords even, lest his enemies throw him off his guard; how he agitates and represses, unerringly dexterous, sleeplessly unwearied, and is a "demon of the impossible," let all readers fancy. With "a body of Noblesse more ignorant, greedier, more insolent than any I have ever seen," the Swallower of Formulas was like to have rough work. We must give his celebrated flinging up of the handful of dust, when they drove him out by overwhelming majority :— "What have I done that was so criminal! I have wished that my Order were wise enough to give to-day what will infallibly be wrested from it to-morrow; that it should receive the merits and glory of sanctioning the assemblage of the Three Orders, which all Provence loudly demands. This is the crime of your enemy of peace! Or rather I have ventured to believe that the people might be in the right. Ah, doubtless, a patrician soiled with such a thought deserves vengeance! But I am still guiltier than you think; for it is my belief that the people which complains is always in the right; that its indefatigable patience invariably waits the uttermost excesses of oppression, before it can determine on resisting; that it never resists long enough to obtain complete redress; and does not sufficiently know that to strike its enemies into terror and submission, it has only to stand still, that the most innocent as the most invincible of all powers is the power of refusing to do. I believe after "And if you do not answer, but keep silence, shutting yourselves up in the vague declamations you have hurled at me, then allow me to add one word. "In all countries, in all times, aristocrats have implacably persecuted the people's friends; and if, by some singular combination of fortune, there chanced to arise such a one in their own circle, it was he above all whom they struck at, eager to inspire wider terror by the elevation of their victim. Thus perished the last of the Gracchi by the hands of the patricians; but, being struck with the mortal stab, he flung dust towards Heaven, and called on the Avenging Deities; and from this dust sprang Marius,-Marius not so illustrious for exterminating the Cimbri as for overturning in Rome the tyranny of the Noblesse!" der, and sigh forgotten by him. For this Mirabeau too the career at last opens. At last! Does not the benevolent Reader, though never so unambitious, sympathize a little with this poor brother mortal in such a case? Victory is always joyful; but to think of such a man, in the hour when, after twelve Hercules' Labours, he does finally triumph! So long he fought with the many-headed coil of Lernean serpents; and, panting, wrestled and wrang with it for life or death, forty long stern years; and now he has it under his heel! The mountain tops are scaled, are scaled; where the man climbed, on sharp flinty precipices, slippery, abysmal; in darkness, seen by no kind eye,-amid the brood of dragons; and the heart, many times, was like to fail within him, in his loneliness, in his extreme need: yet he climbed, and climbed, glueing his footsteps in his blood; and now, behold, Hyperion-like he has scaled it, and on the summit shakes his glittering shafts of war! What a scene and new kingdom for him; all bathed in auroral radiance of Hope; farstretching, solemn, joyful: what wild Memnon's music, from the depths of Nature, comes toning through the soul raised suddenly out of strangling death into victory and life! The very bystander, we think, might weep, with this Mirabeau, tears of joy. Which, alas, will become tears of sorrow! For know, O Son of Adam, (and Son of Lucifer, with that accursed ambition of thine,) that they are all a delusion and piece of de monic necromancy, these same auroral splendours, enchantments and Memnon's tones! The thing thou as mortal wantest is equilibrium, (what is called rest or peace) which, God knows, thou wilt never get so. Happy they that find it without such searching. But in some twenty-three months more, of blazing solar splendour and conflagration, this Mirabeau will be ashes; and lie opaque, in the Pantheon of great men (or say, French-Pantheon of considerable, or even of considered, and small-noisy men,)—at rest nowhere, save There goes some foolish story of Mirabeau on the lap of his mother earth. There are to having now opened a cloth-shop in Marseilles, whom the gods, in their bounty, give glory: to ingratiate himself with the Third Estate; but far oftener it is given in wrath, as a curse whereat we have often laughed. The image and a poison; disturbing the whole inner of Mirabeau measuring out drapery to man-health and industry of the man; leading onkind, and deftly snipping at tailors' measures, ward through dizzy staggerings and tarantula has something pleasant for the mind. So, that jiggings, towards no saint's shrine. Truly, though there is not a shadow of truth in this if Death did not intervene; or still more hapstory, the very lie may justly sustain itself for pily, if Life and the Public were not a blocka while, in the character of lie. Far other-head, and sudden unreasonable oblivion were wise was the reality there: "voluntary guard not to follow that sudden unreasonable glory, of a hundred men;" Provence crowding by and beneficently, though most painfully, damp the ten thousand round his chariot wheels; it down,-one sees not where many a poor explosions of rejoicing musketry, heaven-glorious man, still more many a poor glorious rending acclamation; "people paying two woman, (for it falls harder on the distinlouis for a place at the window!" Hunger guished-female,) could terminate,-far short itself (very considerable in those days) he of Bedlam. ean pacify by speech. Violent meal mobs at Marseilles and at Aix, unmanageable by fire-arms and governors, he smooths down by the word of his mouth; the governor soliciting him, though unloved. It is as a Roman Triumph, and more. He is chosen deputy for two places; has to decline Marseilles, and honour Aix. Let his enemies look and won On the 4th day of May, 1789, Madame de Staël, looking from a window in the main street of Versailles, amid an assembled world, as the Deputies walked in procession from the church of Nôtre-Dame to that of Saint Louis, to hear High Mass, and be constituted StatesGeneral, saw this: "Among these Nobles who |