say; "The Brow of Brass, behold how it has got all unlackered; these Pinchbeck lips can lie no more! Eheu! Ohoo!"—and he burst into unstanchable blubbering of tears; and sobbing out the moanfullest broken howl, sank down in swoon; to be put to bed by De Launay and others.

Enoch. No! Behold has not thy Jesuit whither? By-standers wag their heads, and Familiar his Scouts dim-flying over the deep of human things? Cleared art thou of crime, save that, of fixed-idea; weepest, a repentant exile, in the Mountains of Auvergne. Neither shall the Red Fire-sea itself consume thee; only consume thy Gig, and, instead of Gig (O rich exchange!) restore thy Self. Safe beyond the Rhine-stream, thou livest peaceful days; savest many from the fire, and anointest their smarting burns. Sleep finally, in thy mother's bosom, in a good old age!"-The Cardinal gave a sort of guttural murmur, or gurgle, which ended in a long sigh.

"O Horrors, as ye shall be called," again burst forth the Quack, "why have ye missed | the Sieur de Lamotte; why not of him, too, made gallows-carrion? Will spear, or swordstick, thrust at him, (or supposed to be thrust,) through window of hackney-coach, in Piccadilly of the Babylon of Fog, where he jolts disconsolate, not let out the imprisoned animal existence? Is he poisoned, too?"* Poison will not kill the Sieur Lamotte; nor steel, nor massacres. Let him drag his utterly superfluous life to a second and a third generation; and even admit the not too judicious Historian to see his face before he die.

But, ha!” cried he, and stood wide-staring, horror struck, as if some Cribb's fist had knocked the wind out of him: "O horror of "O horror of horrors! Is it not Myself I see? Roman Inquisition! Long months of cruel baiting! Life of Giuseppe Balsamo! Cagliostro's Body still lying in St. Leo Castle, his Self fled

Thus spoke (or thus might have spoken) and prophesied, the Arch-quack Cagliostro; and truly much better than he ever else did: for not a jot or tittle of it (save only that_of our promised Interview with Nestor de Lamotte, which looks unlikelier than ever, for we have not heard of him, dead or living, since 1826,) but he has turned out to be literally true. As, indeed, in all his History, one jot or title of untruth, that we could render true, is, perhaps, not discoverable; much as the distrustful reader may have disbelieved.

Here, then, our little labour ends. The Necklace was, and is no more: the stones of it again "circulate in commerce" (some of them perhaps, in Rundle's at this hour;) may give rise to what other Histories we know not. The Conquerors of it, every one that trafficked in it, have they not all had their due, which was Death?

This little Business, like a little cloud, bodied itself forth in skies clear to the unobservant: but with servant: but with such hues of deep-tinted villany, dissoluteness, and general delirium, as to the observant, betokened it electric; and wise men (a Goethe, for example) boded Earthquakes. Has not the Earthquakes come?

MEMOIRS OF MIRABEAU.*

[LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, 1837.

A PROVERB says, "The house that is abuilding looks not as the house that is built," Environed with rubbish and mortar-heaps with scaffold-poles, hodmen, dust-clouds, some rudiments only of that thing that is to be, can, to the most observant, disclose themselves through the mean tumult of the thing that hitherto is. How true is this same with regard to all works and facts whatsoever in our world; emphatically true in regard to the highest fact and

* See Lamotte's Narrative, (Mémoires Justificatifs.) + Lamotte, after his wife's death, had returned to Paris; and been arrested-not for building churches. The Sentence of the old Parlement against him, in regard to the Necklace business, he gets annulled by the new Courts; but is, nevertheless, retained in confinement," (Moniteur Newspaper, 7th August, 1782.) He was still in Prison at the time the September Massacre broke out. From Maton de la Varenne we cite the foliowing grim passage: Maton is in La Force Prison.

"At one in the morning," (of Monday, September 3,) writes Maton, "the grate that led to our quarter was again opened. Four men in uniform, holding each a naked sabre and blazing torch, mounted to our corridor; a turnkey showing the way; and entered a room close on ours, to investigate a box, which they broke open. This done, they halted in the gallery; and began inter- | rogating one Cuissa, to know where Lamotte was; who, they said, under a pretext of finding a treasure, which they should share in, had swindled one of them

out of 300 livres, having asked him to dinner for that purpose. The wretched Cuissa, whom they had in their power, and who lost his life that night, answered, all trembling, that he remembered the fact well, but could not say what had become of the prisoner. Resolute to find this Lamotte and confront him with Cuissa, they ascended into other rooms, and made further rummaging there; but apparently without effect, for I heard them say to one another : "Come, search among the corpses, then for, Nom de Dieu! we must know what is become of him." (Ma Resurrection, par Maton de la Varenne; reprinted in the Histoire Parlementaire, xviii. 142.)-Lamotte lay in the Bicêtre Prison; but had got out, precisely in the nick of time,— and dived beyond soundings.

* Mémoires biographiques, littéraires, et politiques, de Mirabeau; écrits par lui-même, par son Père Oncle, et son Fils Adoptif (Memoirs, biographical, literary, and political, of Mirabeau: written by himself, by his Father, his Uncle, and his Adopted Son.) 8vols. 8vo, Paris, 1834-36.

the sum of its strength, its sacred "property for ever," whereby it upholds itself, and steers forward better or worse, through the yet undiscovered deep of Time. All knowledge, all art, all beautiful or precious possession of exist

this. Science itself, is it not, under one of its most interesting aspects, Biography; is it not the Record of the Work which an original man, still named by us, or not now named, was blessed by the heavens to do? That Sphereand-cylinder is the monument and abbreviated history of the man Archimedes; not to be forgotten, probably, till the world itself vanish. Of Poets, and what they have done, and how the world loves them, let us, in these days, very singular in respect of that Art, say nothing, or next to nothing. The greatest modern of the poetic guild has already said: "Nay if thou wilt have it, who but the poet first formed gods for us, brought them down to us, raised us up to them?"

he is drawing continually towards him, in continual succession and variation, the materials of his structure, nay, his very plan of it, from the whole realm of accident, you may say, and from the whole realm of free-will: he is building his life together in this manner; a guessence, is, in the long run, this, or connected with and a problem as yet, not to others only but to himself. Hence such criticism by the bystanders; loud no-knowledge, loud misknowledge! It is like the opening of the Fisherman's Casket in the Arabian Tale, this beginning and growing-up of a life: vague smoke wavering hither and thither; some features of a Genie looming through; of the ultimate shape of which no fisherman or man can judge. And yet, as we say, men do judge, and pass provisional sentence, being forced to it; you can predict with what accuracy! "Look at the audience in a theatre," says one: "the life of a man is there compressed within five hours' duration; is transacted on an open stage, with lighted lamps, and what the fittest words and art of genius can do to make the spirit of it Another remark, on a lower scale, not unclear; yet listen, when the curtain falls, what worthy of notice, is by Jean Paul: that, "as in a discerning public will say of that! And now, art, so in conduct, or what we call morals, beif the drama extended over three-score and ten fore there can be an Aristotle, with his critical years; and were enacted, not with a view to canons, there must be a Homer, many Homers clearness, but rather indeed with a view to with their heroic performances." In plainer concealment, often in the deepest attainable words, the original man is the true creator (or involution of obscurity; and your discerning call him revealer) of Morals too: it is from his public occupied otherwise, cast its eye on the example that precepts enough are derived, business now here for a moment, and then there and written down in books and systems: he profor a moment?" Wo to him, answer we, who perly is the Thing; all that follows after is has no court of appeal against the world's judg- but talk about the thing, better or worse interment! He is a doomed man: doomed by con-pretation of it, more or less wearisome and inviction to hard penalties; nay, purchasing acquittal (too probably) by a still harder penalty, that of being a trivialty, superficialty, self-advertiser, and partial or total quack, which is the hardest penalty of all.

But suppose farther, that the man, as we said, was an original man; that his life-drama would not and could not be measured by the three unities alone, but partly by a rule of its own too: still farther, that the transactions he had mingled in were great and world-dividing; that of all his judges there were not one who had not something to love him for unduly, to hate him for unduly! Alas! is it not precisely in this case, where the whole world is promptest to judge, that the whole world is likeliest to be wrong: natural opacity being so doubly and trebly darkened by accidental difficulty and perversion? The crabbed moralist had some show of reason who said: "To judge of an original contemporary man, you must, in general, reverse the world's judgment about him; the world is not only wrong on that matter, but cannot on any such matter be right.".

One comfort is, that the world is ever working itself righter and righter on such matters; that a continual revisal and rectification of the world's first judgment on them is inevitably going on. For, after all, the world loves its original men, and can in no wise forget them; not till after a long while; sometimes not till after thousands of years. Forgetting them, what indeed, should it remember? The world's wealth is its original men; by these and their works it is a world and not a waste: the memory and record of what MEN it bore-this is

effectual discourse of logic on it. A remark, this of Jean Paul's which, well meditated, may seem one of the most pregnant lately written on these matters. If any man had the ambition of building a new system of morals, (not a promising enterprise, at this time of day,) there is no remark known to us which might better serve him as a chief corner-stone, whereon to found, and to build, high enough, nothing doubting;-high, for instance, as the Christian Gospel itself. And to whatever other heights man's destiny may yet carry him! Consider whether it was not, from the first, by example, or say rather by human exemplars, and such reverent imitation or abhorrent aversion and avoidance as these gave rise to, that man's duties were made indubitable to him? Also, if it is not yet, in these last days, by very much the same means, (example, precept, prohibition, "force of public opinion," and other forcings and inducings,) that the like result is brought about; and, from the Woolsack down to the Treadmill, from Almack's to Chalk Farm and the west-end of Newgate, the incongruous whirlpool of life is forced and induced to whirl with some attempt at regularity? The two Mosaic Tables were of simple limited stone; no logic appended to them: we, in our days, are privileged with Logic-Systems of Morals, Professors of Moral Philosophy, Theories of Moral Sentiment, Utilities, Sympathies, Moral Senses, not a few; useful for those that feel comfort in them. But to the observant eye, is it not still plain that the rule of man's life rests not very steadily on logic (rather carries logic unsteadily resting on it, as an excuse, an ex

position, or ornamental solacement to oneself | plosion and new creation of the world;" but and others;) that ever, as of old, the thing a the actors in it, that went buzzing about him, man will do is the thing he feels commanded to a "handvoll mücken, handful of flies."* And to do; of which command, again, the origin and reasonableness remains often as good as indemonstrable by logic; and, indeed, lies mainly in this, that it has been demonstrated otherwise and better by experiment; namely, that an experimental (what we name original) man has already done it, and we have seen it to be good and reasonable, and now know it to be so once and for evermore?-Enough of this.

yet, one may add, this same explosion of a world was their work; the work of theseflies? The truth is, neither Forster nor any man can see a French Revolution; it is like seeing the ocean: poor Charles Lamb complained that he could not see the multitudinous ocean at all, but only some insignificant fraction of it from the deck of the Margate hoy. It must be owned, however, (urge these severe critics,) that examples of rabid triviality abound, in the French Revolution, to a lamentable extent. 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 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, seagreen objects, ever whirled aloft in that manner, in any country, to his own swift destruction, and the world's long wonder!

He were a sanguine individual, surely, that should turn to the French Revolution for new rules of conduct and creators or exemplars of morality, except, indeed, exemplars of the gibbetted, in-terrorem sort. A greater work, it is often said, was never done in the world's history by men so small. Twenty-five millions (say these severe critics) are hurled forth out of all their old habitudes, arrangements, harnessings, and garnitures, into the new, quite void arena and career of Sansculottism; there to show what originality is in them. Fanfaronading and gesticulation, vehemence, effervescence, heroic desperation, they do show in abundance; but of what one can call originality, invention, natural stuff or character, amazingly little. Their heroic desperation, such as it was, we will honour and even venerate, as a new document (call it rather a renewal of that primeval ineffaceable document and charter) of the manhood of man. But, for the rest, there were Federations; there were Festivals of Fraternity, "the Statute of Nature pouring water from her two mammelles," and the august Deputies all drink- So argue these severe critics of the French ing of it from the same iron saucer: Weights | Revolution: with whom we argue not here; and Measures were attempted to be changed; the Months of the Year became Pluviose, Thermidor, Messidor (till Napoleon said, I faudra se débarrasser de se Messidor, One must get this Messidor sent about its business :) also Mrs. Momoro and others rode prosperous, as Goddesses of Reason; and then, these being mostly guillotined, Mahomet Robespierre did, with bouquet in hand, and in new nankeen trowsers, in front of the Tuileries, pronounce the scraggiest of prophetic discourses on the Etre Suprême, and set fire to much emblematic pasteboard:-all this, and an immensity of such, the twenty-five millions did devise and accomplish; but (apart from their heroic desperation, which was no miracle either, beside that of the old Dutch, for instance) this, and the like of this, was almost all. Their arena of Sansculottism was the most original arena opened to man for above a thousand years; and they, at bottom, were unexpectedly common-place in it. Exaggerated common-place, triviality run distracted, and a kind of universal " Frenzy of John Dennis," is the figure they exhibit. The brave Forster,-sinking slowly of broken heart, in the midst of that volcanic chaos of the Reign of Terror, and clinging still to the cause, which, though now bloody and terrible, he believed to be the highest, and for which he had sacrificed all, country, kindred, fortune, friends, and life,compares the Revolution, indeed, to "an ex

but remark rather, what is more to the purpose, that the French Revolution did disclose original men: among the twenty-five millions, at least one or two units. Some reckon, in the present stage of the business, as many as three: Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau. Whether more will come to light, or of what sort, when the computation is quite liquidated, one cannot say: meanwhile let the world be thankful for these three;-as, indeed, the world is; loving original men, without limit, were they never so questionable, well knowing how rare they are! To us, accordingly, it is rather interesting to observe how on these three also, questionable as they surely are, the old process is repeating itself; how these also are getting known in their true likeness. A second generation, relieved in some measure from the spectral hallucinations, hysterical ophthalmia, and natural panic-delirium of the first contemporary one, is gradually coming to discern and measure what its predecessor could only execrate and shriek over: for, as our Proverb said, the dust is sinking, the rubbish-heaps disappear; the built house, such as it is, and was appointed to be, stands visible, better or worse.

Of Napoleon Bonaparte, what with so many bulletins, and such self-proclamation from artillery and battle-thunder, loud enough to

* Forster's Briefe und Nachlass.