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Cornell University Library 
 D 210.W74 
 
 Studies of modern mind & character at se 
 
 3 1924 028 040 446 
 
The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028040446 
 
STUDIES 
 
 MODERN MIND AND CHARACTEE 
 
I OS DON 1 PBIMTHD BY 
 
 gPOTTISWOO'JB AMD CO., HEW-BTRBET SQUARK 
 
 AND PABLIAMEBT STIIKET 
 
STUDIES 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN MIND AND CHARACTER 
 
 AT SEVERAL EUROPEAN EPOCHS 
 
 JOHN WILSON 
 
 LONDON 
 LONGMANS, GEEEK AND CO. 
 
 1881 
 
 IT 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 ^s ^ U BRARV 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 The gkeatbr number of the ' studies ' contained in the 
 present volume originally appeared in the shape of contribu- 
 tions to periodicals. Other portions of them are now 
 published for the first time. As regards the reprints, if an 
 apology seems required for their reappearance, the following 
 may perhaps be accepted as sufficient, from the pen of the 
 late John Stuaet Mill: — 
 
 ' The republication, in a more durable form, of papers 
 originally contributed to periodicals, has grown into so 
 common a practice as scarcely to need an apology ; and I 
 follow this practice the more willingly, as I hold it to be 
 decidedly a beneficial one. It would be well if all frequent 
 writers in periodicals looked forward, as far as the case 
 admitted, to this reappearance of their productions. The 
 prospect might be some guarantee against the crudity in 
 the formation of opinions, and carelessness in their ex- 
 pression, which are the besetting sins of writings put forth 
 under the screen of anonymousness, to be read only during 
 the next few weeks or months, if so long, and the defects 
 of which it is seldom probable that anyone will think it 
 worth while to expose.'— Pre/ace to ' Disseetations and 
 ■Discussions.' 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. GUICCIAKDINI AND HIS ' GOLDKN MAXIMS ' . .1 
 
 II. Giordano Bruno and Galilbo 30 
 in. Jonathan Swift . 69 
 
 Iv. Junius and Francis . 117 
 
 V. Voltaire . . . ui 
 
 VI. The Old Regime in France, and its Fall . 193 
 VII. The Reign of Terror and its Secret Police . . 232 
 
 VIII. Through Anarchy to C^isarism — Napoleon the Uncle 273 
 
 IX. Monsieur Guizot's ' Own Time ' ... 307 
 
 X. CiESAHiSM IN France Resurgent — Napoleon the Nebhbw 327 
 
 XI. The Napoleonic Augustan Age in Paris . 347 
 
 XII. The Land Question in France (1870). . . 359 
 
 XIII. Peevost-Paeadol and the Franco-German War 395 
 
 XIV. Bismarck, Prussia, and Pan-Tbutonism . 423 
 
STUDIES 
 
 OP 
 
 MODERN MIND. 
 
 I. 
 
 GUIQCIARBini AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 Oxyere, Inedite di Francesco ChAcdardini Illustrate da Giuseppe CanestHni e 
 Piiblicate per cwra dei Conti Piero e Luigi Gmccia/i'dini. Volume Primo, 
 Eicordi Politici e Civili. — Volume Decimo, Ricordi di Famiglia, Eicordi 
 Autobiografici. Firenze, 1857-1"867.> 
 
 The family and autobiographical ' Ricordi ' of Guicciardini 
 vividly reproduce in some of its last living examples, at the 
 opening of the modern era, that singular type of merchant 
 statesmanship which formed so important and predominant 
 an element in mediaeval Italian republican politics. They 
 afford us the same sort of vivid conception of that type as 
 the ' Lives of the Norths ' do of the race of political lawyers 
 and men of business who rose into eminence in the per- 
 turbed politics of the last Stuart reigns in England. The 
 alternately conflicting and mingling aristocratical and 
 commercial elements in Italian public life had produced 
 between them something of the like sort of mixed character 
 as they afterwards did in England. Even in the iron age 
 of the Sforzas and Borgias, eminently respectable private 
 and public characters were often the growth of the mingled 
 influences which affected public life, so long as public life 
 
 ' From the Quarterly Beviem, October 1871. 
 B 
 
2 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEPT MAXIMS.' 
 
 was not yet stamped out in Italy. What was mucli more 
 rare was anything approaching the heroic type in Italian 
 public men. That type is rare indeed in all ages, but in the 
 age and country of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as in the 
 succeeding age of Lord Keeper Guilford and Sir Dudley 
 North in England, all aspirations after it, as well as all 
 approach to it, seemed to have in a manner ceased. 
 
 The sixteenth century in Italy was an age of transition 
 from spirited if ill-organised autonomy to a dull level of 
 spiritual and secular despotism. It presents the spectacle 
 of a country foremost in the opening of the march of modern 
 civilisation suddenly finding itself the helpless object of rival 
 rapacity to ruder but stronger states ; its leading men, whose 
 minds and characters had been formed in the liberal school 
 of world-wide commerce and uncontrolled self-government, 
 suddenly compelled to transfer their political activity, if they 
 were still bent on exerting it, from the councils of their 
 country to the courts and cabinets of overbearing native or 
 foreign princes. 
 
 The habit of writing ' Ricordi ' — for which the English 
 word ' Records ' is not an exact equivalent — of noting down, 
 not for immediate nor even ultimate publication, whatever, 
 from day to day, seemed noteworthy in private or public, 
 domestic or foreign transactions, was practised more method- 
 ically and systematically by the Italian public men of the 
 fourteenth, fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth 
 century, than perhaps it has been by those of any other age 
 or country. It was a habit which came, as it were, natur- 
 ally to those merchant-statesmen. These so-called ' Ricordi ' 
 had no more literary design or pretension about them than 
 any of the other business entries in their day-books or 
 ledgers, amongst which, indeed, they were very commonly 
 interspersed and intercalated, being made, like the rest for 
 use and not for show, and forming, in fact, as observed by 
 the editor of the volumes before us, a civil and domestic 
 autobiographic chronicle, often begemmed with moral 
 maxims and sentences, and Scripture texts. Some of these 
 ' Ricordi,' including those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 3 
 
 including, in tlieir integrity, those before us, have first seen 
 the light in recent times. 
 
 ' The Italian historians,' says Disraeli the Elder, in his 
 ' Curiosities of Literature,' ' have proved themselves to be an 
 extraordinary race, for they have devoted their days to the 
 composition of historical works which they were certain 
 could not see the light during their lives.' 
 
 If that indefatigable literary chiffonnier had had before 
 him these ten volumes of remains of the most eminent of 
 Italian historians, he might have found additional reason 
 for ascribing an extraordinary character to that race of men 
 which had in Guicciardini its most memorable representa- 
 tive. No part of the biographical or autobiographical matter 
 contained in these volumes was designed, in the ordinary 
 sense of this publishing age, to see the light at all, but 
 simply to be preserved in the fa.mily archives of the Casa 
 Guicciardini for the private instruction of the descendants 
 of that house. 'As I shall in these family memorials,' says 
 their author, ' tell the truth, I pray our descendants, into whose 
 hands they will come, not to show them to anyone out of 
 the family, but keep them for their own use, since I have 
 written them solely for that end, as one who desires two 
 things more than any other things in the world — first, the 
 perpetual exaltation of this city [Florence] and of its liberty ; 
 secondly, the glory of our house, not during my own life 
 only, but in perpetuity. May it please God to preserve and 
 increase both one and the other ! ' 
 
 The present representatives of the house of Guicciardini, 
 by whom these volumes are published, slightly apologise 
 for revealing family secrets which had been kept for three 
 centuries. Truly we know not any party in this nineteenth 
 century, unless that of the Temporal Papacy, likely to feel 
 scandalised at the publication of these imperii arcana of a 
 bygone age. There is, indeed, enough in this long-deferred 
 posthumous publication of the confidential communications 
 of the favoured civil and military minister of two successive 
 Popes to claim a place in the Papal index, if the present 
 conductors of that organ of ecclesiastical criticism can 
 
 B 2 
 
4 GUICCIARDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 summon up courage to put it there. If they do, they will 
 only give additional prominence to the fact that one of 
 the most trusted and trustworthy servants of the Papacy, at 
 the greatest ecclesiastical crisis, till that of our own times, 
 confessed that, but for his personal position, he should have 
 heartily wished Martin Luther all success against the 
 ' scellerati preti.' 
 
 Guicciardini opens his ' Ricordi di Pamiglia' by saying 
 that he had been able to acquire no certain knowledge as to 
 the origin of his family, but tha,t the first notice he finds of 
 it in Florence is as taking part in the exercise of the magis- 
 tracy called the priorato about a.d. 1300. ' Our house,' he 
 says, ' remained for a good while, that is to say, about eighty 
 years afterwards, in a middling condition, and might be 
 described, according to the common way of speaking, as 
 huoni popolani. Prom that time it has grown so much in 
 wealth and station, that it has become, and still continues at 
 this day, one of the first families of the city, and has shared 
 abundantly in all its honours and dignities.' 
 
 The first of his ancestors named by Guicciardini, Piero, 
 assumed the rank of knighthood; by whom or on what 
 account conferred his descendant could not tell. He acquired 
 wealth in the management of large estates of a Neapolitan 
 noble in Tuscany, and acquired, moreover, in the sharp eyes 
 of the Church, the character of an usurer, since his son Luigi, 
 on the death of his father, was compelled, for fear his body 
 should be seized at the suit of the bishop, to come to a com- 
 position with that holy inquisitor, and to tax himself on a 
 conjectural estimate of the so-called usurious gains of the 
 deceased ; which done, he was fully assured by an Augus- 
 tinian friar — a grandissimo teologo— that the satisfaction thus 
 given was sufficient etiam inforo conscientiw. Luicri became 
 afterwards a very rich man, arrived at high dio-nities and 
 was several times employed in important embassies to the 
 Pope, to Giovanni Galeazzo Duke of Milan, and to Louis 
 Duke of Anjou, when he entered Italy to contest the crown 
 of Naples with King Charles of Arragon. He was three 
 times Gonfalionere of Justice, and in that capacity would 
 
GUICCIARDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 5 
 
 seem to have cut rather a poor figure, on occasion of a 
 serious popular tumult, in the course of which the Gon- 
 falionere got driven from the palace or Town Hall — the seat 
 of municipal administration — ousted from his office, and his 
 house demolished, the invariable accompaniment of popular 
 triumph over parties in power in Italy of the olden time 
 (revived under citizen Assi's Italianising auspices against the 
 house of M. Thiers) as torture was the invariable accompani- 
 ment of the first proceedings against anyone accused of 
 political crimes or misdemeanours. Besides being bullied 
 (and afterwards invested with hnighthood) by the populace 
 and their leaders, he was continually getting surcharged in 
 his taxes by the popular magistrates, and the greatest and 
 most constant trouble of his life was in seeking redress from 
 these fiscal surcharges. He died, says his descendant, to the 
 great concern of the people, who seem to have found him a 
 good easy executive functionary, a diplomatist disposed for 
 peace at all price, and fiscally a good milch cow ; a man of 
 good property, on whom the municipal democracy found it 
 convenient to throw more than his share of the public 
 burthens. 
 
 It is a noticeable fact of family character or fortune, that 
 wise or foolish, magnanimous or pusillanimous, well or less 
 well governed in life and conversation, the Guicciardini family 
 seem to have possessed the feline faculty of always falling 
 upon their feet, and always adding something to that ad- 
 vance in substance and station which their famous de- 
 scendant states them to have continued making down to his 
 own time. Piero, second son of the last-named ancestor, 
 had been, from his youth till the death of his father, disobe- 
 dient and devious in his courses to such a degree that his 
 father always prophesied he would end badly, and, having 
 been robbed of certain sums of money and articles of value 
 in his house, never could be persuaded, while the culprit re- 
 mained undetected, that the culprit was not his son Piero. 
 This scapegrace of the family was nearly becoming its 
 scapegoat; since Piero, having set out against his father's 
 will, in the suite of some embassy, was captured on his route 
 
6 GUICCIAHDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 by the free company of a certain Otto Buonterzo of Parma, 
 and, while the others were suffered to proceed on their 
 journey, was alone detained for ransom, on the strength of 
 his father's reputation for riches. The ransom of Piero was 
 set at so high a rate that his father delayed paying it, 
 hoping that, in course of time, a less sum would be exacted. 
 However, in his last illness he could think of no one but his 
 son Piero, and gave orders that he should be redeemed from 
 captivity forthwith, at the cost of three thousand ducats. 
 Returning to Florence, Piero's next achievement within the 
 year was a mercantile failure, mainly owing, says our his- 
 torian, to his being a ' magnificent man,' and never looking 
 into his accounts. Adversity, however, brought out the 
 bright side of his nature, for, in his arrangements with his 
 creditors, he stuck firmly to paying twenty shillings in the 
 pound [solidi venti per lira] , only asking for time, and at the 
 time agreed upon actually paid up the full amount by means 
 of sales of his property. This high and generous nature of 
 his recommended him to the friendship of men of rank and 
 distinction, and he attained all the public honours and dig- 
 nities his city had to give. 
 
 Thus aft a ragged cowte's been known 
 To mak' a noble aiver. 
 
 The formerly suspected domestic thief was notably free from 
 all taint of pecuniary rapacity or corruption ; and if he had 
 not ' put off the old man ' altogether, his failings were in a 
 different direction. He was rather high and rather short- 
 tempered, and even in his old age, when he got angry with 
 anyone, was quite capable of proceeding from words to 
 blows. Even in his old age he was vecchio lussurioso efemi- 
 nacciolo forte, leaving lots of love-letters, exchanged with 
 the last mistress of his mature affections. 
 
 Another hereditary quality in the Guicciardini family 
 may be considered as connected with that feline faculty, 
 already noticed in them, of always falling upon their feet ; the 
 quality, namely, which we find, modified by individual differ- 
 ences, in our historian's paternal grandfather, his father 
 
GUICCIARDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 7 
 
 and himself, of marked aversion from extreme counsels and 
 extreme courses. In the grandfather, Jacopo Guicciardini, 
 born in 1422, this quality shows itself in very amiable as 
 well as statesmanlike shape. 
 
 ' Among his other properties,' says his grandson, the 
 historian, ' he had that of saying freely what he thought ; 
 for which Lorenzo (de' Medici) sometimes manifested anger 
 towards him, but most times bore with him, as knowing that 
 it proceeded from goodness of nature. One of the public 
 functions in Florence, of which he held many in succession, 
 was that of Gonfalionere of Justice, in the earlier period 
 of Lorenzo's real though dissembled sovereignty. In that 
 capacity he had to lend his formal and ministerial offices to 
 carry through the new law regarding testaments, passed at 
 the instance of Lorenzo de' Medici — a law which was in 
 effect in the nature of a privilegium, solely designed to re- 
 press the ambition by crippling the means of his formidable 
 rivals the Pazzi family. Jacopo Guicciardini, says his grand- 
 son, acted in this matter much against his own will, and had 
 strongly dissuaded the passing of any such law, ' not only as 
 a friend of the Pazzi family, but because the process seemed 
 to him dishonest in itself, and likely to sow the seeds of 
 mischief — as the event proved.' After the explosion of the 
 conspiracy of the Pazzi, and the tra.gical fate of all who had 
 taken part in it and some who had taken no part in it, 
 Lorenzo, says our historian, being mercilessly disposed 
 against the whole family, either from natural temper or 
 exasperation at the violent death of his brother, the wound 
 he had himself received, and the narrow escape he had him- 
 self made from destruction, had thrown into prison the inno- 
 cent sons of the Pazzi, who had no complicity in the plot ; and 
 had decreed that their daughters, who were left with small 
 dowries, should form no matrimonial connections in Flo- 
 rence. Jacopo Guicciardini was incessant in his solicitations 
 to Lorenzo to release these innocent youths, and at the 
 utmost to ' confine ' them, as it was called, from entering 
 Florentine territory, and to relieve the daughters from 
 the prohibition of marrying in their own country. After 
 
8 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS^ 
 
 some years lie finally persuaded Lorenzo to yield on both . 
 points. 
 
 The singular combination of mercantile with public busi- 
 ness which occupied the active life of most of the statesmen 
 of the Italian republics was remarkably exemplified in Jacopo 
 Guieciardini, of whom his grandson says that, though he 
 started on a small patrimony, he received a considerable 
 dowry with his wife, which he turned to good account as 
 commercial capital, as appears from a book kept by him, in 
 which the net results of all his commercial transactions are 
 briefly noted, as well as of all legitimate emoluments derived 
 from his diplomatic and other public appointments, which, 
 with his gains from commerce, made up, says his grandson, 
 ' to a quattrino ' the amount of property which he left be- 
 hind him at his death, and made it manifest that he had 
 abused none of his official opportunities to usurp the property 
 of others or to procure for himself exemptions from public 
 taxation. He acted as captain of a commercial galley of his 
 own in a voyage to the Levant, and as military commander, 
 at a pinch, in the little wars of the Florentine Eepublic. It 
 is added that he always applied his best efforts to disperse 
 ill-humours in the commonwealth, and never chose to play 
 the part of public informer or State inquisitor. His de- 
 scendant adds, for the edification of the Guieciardini family 
 of the future, that he was exceedingly well endowed by 
 nature, being tall, fair and handsome — as fine a man as any 
 of his time in Florence. The only drawbacks from his 
 natural and acquired good gifts were that he was totally illi- 
 terate ; we must understand our historian to mean in the 
 'humane letters' of universities, since Jacopo Guieciardini 
 must have had work-day letters enough at least to keep his 
 ledgers and carry on correspondence with his employers in 
 his vai-ious missions. His good natural capacity, his coura- 
 geous, liberal, friendly, and serviceable spirit, seem to have 
 fully compensated with his contemporaries for his lack of 
 polite literature ; and his freedom from all malignant vices 
 made them wink hard at certain dulcia vitia which did attach 
 to him. According to his grandson's unreserved testimony. 
 
GUICCIARDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 9 
 
 he was somewhat more licentious in his amours, and, more- 
 over, somewhat more studious of his eating and drinking, 
 than might have been expected of a man of his otherwise 
 distinguished qualities. 
 
 Piero, the father of our historian, sustained the character 
 of the Guicciardini family, though rather in a negative than 
 positive manner, for sagacity and sound judgment in affairs 
 private or public, and avoidance of all extreme parts, which 
 led him to the other extreme of taking no part at all. 
 Whether, says his son, he was so formed by nature, or 
 whether the course of events, which indeed was violent and 
 extraordinary in the times he lived in, seemed to require cor- 
 responding caution and circumspection, so it was that he 
 proceeded in his affairs with little spirit and much suspicious- 
 ness, undertaking few enterprises, acting in the affairs of 
 State with great slowness and deliberation, and never, ex- 
 cept when constrained by conscience or necessity, distinctly 
 declaring his sentiments on matters of importance. Hence 
 it happened that, never putting himself forward as the head 
 of a party or any new movement, he did not keep himself so 
 currently as he might have done in the mouths of the many. 
 His son, however, admits that this mode of action or inaction 
 served one purpose at least : that through all the turbulent 
 movements which took place in his time he preserved his 
 dignity and tranquillity, more fortunate in that respect than 
 any other man of his standing and eminence, all of whom 
 incurred in those times dangers either of life or property. 
 
 Our historian says for himself that he wished to enter 
 the Church, not to participate, ' like most other priests,' in 
 its fat slumbers, but because he calculated, with great colour 
 of reason, that a young man like himself, well grounded by 
 study and practice in jurisprudence (a species of lore then 
 much more in request at the Court of Eome than theology), 
 had a fair foundation for rising high in the Church, and 
 might very well hope to be one day a Cardinal. His father, 
 however, was conscientiously indisposed to see any of his 
 sons in the priesthood, ' though,' says our historian, with a 
 touch of pathos, ' he had five sons ' — ' considering the dis- 
 
10 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 ordered condition of the Church in those times ' — and pre- 
 tei-red to sacrifice the present profit of rich benefices, as well 
 as the future prospect of seeing a son of his in high rank in 
 the Church, rather than soil his conscience by making that 
 son a priest from motives of cupidity or ambition. ' Such,' 
 says our historian, ' was the real cause which decided him ; 
 and I had to content myself the best 1 could with his de- 
 cision.' 
 
 It may be thought that our historian here makes posterity 
 as much the confidants of the character of his own ambition 
 as of his father's conscience. His youth had no dreams — or 
 rather the one dream of his youth was advancement in pub- 
 lic life, under whatever auspices, an advancement which he 
 attained in early manhood, and lost, when public life itself 
 was lost in Italy. Guiceiardini's practical political motto 
 throughout his public career was ' I serve.' His best apo- 
 logy is that the sword in his day in Italy no longer gave 
 place to the gown, and that independent public action had 
 ceased to be possible in Italian public affairs. To have any 
 hand in the administration of those affairs it had become 
 necessary to have some footing in the Courts of Popes or 
 Princes. It is curious to observe how, in a different form 
 and by a circuitous course, Guiceiardini's young ambition to 
 mix himself with ecclesiastical politics was at length grati- 
 fied. If he had dutifully submitted to exclusion by paternal 
 authority from the prospect of himself becoming one day a 
 Cardinal — perhaps a Pope — he did the next best thing for 
 himself, in his keen pursuit of the main chance in politics, 
 by attaching himself to the political service of Popes and 
 Cardinals. 
 
 To the young Guicciardini — who seems, in the sense of 
 romance or sentiment, never to have been young — his choice 
 of a consort was as mere a selection of a stepping-stone for 
 ambition as had been his choice of a profession. Any con- 
 sideration of personal preference seems to have had as little 
 weight with him in that matter as with his father. In this 
 instance, however, as concerned money at least, the son had 
 more elevated views than the father. His ambition was that 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 11 
 
 of eminence, not mere wealth, and lie did not allow paternal 
 authority to dissuade him from fixing his choice on a family 
 (the lady seems to have been a quite immaterial element in 
 the transaction) whose head was a personage of political im- 
 portance in the Florentine commonwealth, and might be 
 able to push forward his son-in-law in the path of promo- 
 tion. This consideration was paramount with him over his 
 father's prudential suggestions that a larger dowry would be 
 desirable, and could be had with other damsels of good 
 houses. Perhaps such suggestions might have had more 
 weight with the son, if he could have foreseen the disap- 
 pointment, by the premature death of his father-in-law, of 
 the hopes he had formed of getting a start in public life by 
 the connection. Our historian concludes his ingenuous 
 narrative of his matrimonial doings in the following strain 
 of evidently sincere if not refined piety : ' Please God the 
 affair may have been for the health of my soul and body, 
 and God pardon me if I have used too much importunity 
 with Piero [his father] in the matter, since though as yet I 
 am satisfied with having made the connection, I cannot help 
 some scruple and doubt whether I may not have offended 
 God, especially considering the qualities of a father such as 
 mine is.' 
 
 Guicciardini's ' Eicordi Politici e Civili ' are now for the 
 first time published, as the present editor states, in their 
 original integrity, free from additions or mutilations. Alloyed 
 and clipped as they had been by the timidity or iU-taste of 
 previous editors, Guicciardini's civil and political 'yv&f/.ai, 
 first published about the middle of the sixteenth century, 
 under the title of ' Avverfcimenti di Messer Francesco Guic- 
 ciardini,' had won the epithet ' aurei ' from subsequent 
 Italian writers. Signor Canestrini, the present editor, says 
 of them 'that these "Eicordi" appear truly marvellous, 
 whether by the incomparable acuteness of the sentences on 
 men and things, the vast learning, or the elegantissima sim- 
 plicity and natural spontaneity of the style.' Without 
 echoing Italian superlatives, we may be able to show by our 
 extracts that the praise of simplicity and spontaneity is well 
 
12 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 deserved by the style of Guicciardini in undress, and that 
 the natural acuteness and acquired knowledge exhibited in 
 his estimates of events and persons deserve no less ungrudg- 
 ing, if less enthusiastic, recognition than that accorded them 
 by the editor of the volumes before us. 
 
 The first of these ' Eicordi ' which occurs for citation 
 has reference to those earlier yeais of their author, some 
 characteristic traits of which have already been placed 
 before our readers, and curiously completes our idea of that 
 very marked trait of character, the constant aim at advance- 
 ment, rather than at any sort of pleasure or acquirement, 
 for its own sake. There is a remark recorded in Lady 
 Minto's 'Memoirs of Hugh Elliot,' that, while continental 
 nations (the writer of the remark had been conversant 
 mostly with Germans and Italians) seek social intercourse 
 chiefly for the pleasure it affords, the English cultivate 
 society chiefly with a view to advantage in one shape or 
 other. Exactly in a like spirit we find Guieciardinij the 
 man, regretting that Guicciardini, the youth, had not be- 
 stowed more attention on the amusing and social accom- 
 plishments of his age : — 
 
 I made light when I was young of knowing how to play, dance, 
 sing, and other like levities — or of writing well, riding well, dressing 
 well, and all such things which seem to give men more of ornament 
 than substance. I have since, however, wished it had been otherwise, 
 since if indeed it is inconvenient that youths should lose too much 
 time on such things, I have seen nevertheless by experience that these 
 ornaments, and the knowing how to do everything well, add dignity 
 and reputation to men even otherwise well qualified, so that it may 
 be said that he who lacks them lacks something. Besides which, 
 abounding in all such accomplishments opens the way to favour with 
 princes, and is sometimes the principle or source of great profit and 
 exaltation — the world and princes not being constituted as they should 
 be, but as they are.' 
 
 Guicciardini's first important public employment was his 
 embassy to Spain from the Florentine Eepublic in 1512, 
 when he had only attained the age of twenty-eight, that is, 
 two years short of the age prescribed by law in that republic 
 for diplomatic appointments. This embassy was not the 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 13 
 
 first inevitably fruitless mission of the tottering Florentine 
 democracy to that astute monarch Ferdinand the Catholic, 
 whose character the young diplomatist appreciated with 
 equal astuteness, and has placed vividly on record. Two 
 ' orators ' from Florence had been commissioned to Ferdi- 
 nand and Isabella in 1498 to justify their Government for 
 not having entered into the league formed three years pre- 
 viously between the Pope, the Venetians, and the Emperor 
 Maximilian against Charles VIII. of France, and to defend 
 it from the charge of espousing the cause of France in Italy 
 against Spain. At both epochs the defence was necessarily 
 a lame one, since at both the charge was so far well-founded, 
 that the Florentine democracy, at first under the influence 
 of the fervid and enthusiastic eloquence of Savonarola, and 
 afterwards under the feebly popular administration of Sode- 
 rini, clung persistently to the French alliance in preference 
 to that of Spain, Venice, and the Pope, and refused to join 
 the so-called santissima lega formed under their auspices. 
 The Florentine democracy played its cards so badly as never 
 to oblige France sufficiently by its adhesion to obtain any 
 equivalent support from that power, while it disobliged the 
 Italian powers in league with Spain sufficiently to incur 
 their more than probable hostility. This hostility it was 
 Gaicciardini's Spanish mission to avert ' by art and pru- 
 dence ; ' but as he came empty-handed of powers to conclude 
 any convention whatever with King Ferdinand, he could 
 naturally expect nothing but good words in exchange for 
 those he brought. The following passage from Guicciar- 
 dini's ' Eicordi ' has pointed reference to the fatal policy of 
 the Florentine Government in this respect at the time 
 when it sent him on his first fruitless diplomatic mission : — 
 
 Neutrality in the wars of others is good for him who is powerful 
 in such a degree that he has nothing to fear from the one who remains 
 superior, since he preserves himself without trouble, and may hope 
 for gain from the disorders of others. Otherwise it is inconsiderate 
 and injurious, since he remains the prey of the conqueror or the con- 
 quered. And worst of all is that which is preserved not by judgment 
 but by irresolution — that is to say, when, without coming to a reso- 
 
14 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 lution whether you will be neutral or no, you conduct yourself in such 
 a manner that you do not satisfy even that party who would be con- 
 tent at the time if you would assure him that you would be neutral. 
 And into this last species of neutrality republics are more apt to fall 
 than princes, since it often proceeds from those being divided who 
 have to deliberate ; so that, one counselling this, another that, enough 
 of them never agree together to eifect a decision for one opinion any 
 more than another — and this was just the case with the Plorentine 
 Government of 1512. 
 
 Tlie following remarks, which Guicciardini was led to 
 mate by his observation of Ferdinand's character, be- 
 queathed at least one result, for the instruction of after 
 ages, of his otherwise resultless mission to that reputed 
 paragon of kingcraft: — 
 
 Even if one has the name of a dissembler and deceiver, it is seen 
 nevertheless that sometimes his deceits find dupes. It seems strange 
 to say so, and yet it is very true and within my own memory, that the 
 Catholic King Ferdinand of Spain was beyond all other men of that 
 reputed character, and yet in his artifices he never wanted those who 
 believed him more than he deserved, and it needs must be that this 
 proceeds either from men's simplicity or cupidity — some being duped 
 by easily believing what they desire, others by lack of knowledge. 
 
 I observed when I was ambassador in Spain to King Ferdinand of 
 Arragon, a wise and glorious prince, that, whenever he desired to en- 
 gage in a new enterprise, or other affair of importance, he did not first 
 publish and then justify his intention, but he governed himself just 
 contrariwise, artfully contriving in such a manner that, before it was 
 understood publicly what he had in his mind, it was published that 
 the king ought to do such a thing for such or such reasons, and 
 therefore when it was afterwards published that he intended to do 
 that which had first been made to appear to every one to be just and 
 necessary, it is incredible with what favour and what praise his 
 decisions were received. 
 
 We make the following citation from Guicciardini's editor 
 and apologist : — 
 
 The prudence and ability of which Guicciardini had given proof 
 in his Spanish legation opened the way for him to higher posts of 
 trust and honour. He was appointed, shortly after, a councillor and 
 minister of Pope Leo X., and afterwards of Clement VII., who 
 entrusted to him affairs and offices of the highest importance such as 
 
GUICCIAUDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 15 
 
 thie governments of Modena and Eeggio, and afterwards of Parma, 
 the presidency of Romagna, and the vice-papal administration of 
 Bologna. During this period the free government of Florence fell ; 
 and that republic having been subjected by the conventions between 
 Charles Y. and Clement YII. to the tyranny of Alexander de' Medici, 
 Guicciardini, with the hope and intent — continues his apologist — of 
 mitigating the ills of his country, accepted the oiKce of councillor, not 
 only of Alexander, but of his successor Duke Cosmo, a tyrant not 
 indeed milder, but more cautious and more dexterous. And it must 
 be supposed [we are still citing Signer Canestrini] that he served and 
 supported each in succession with the view of preserving the nominal 
 autonomy at least of Florence under native princes at a time when 
 the agents, ministers, and general of Charles V. were aiming at 
 nothing short of occupying and governing in the name of the emperor 
 all the hitherto independent states and cities of Italy. 
 
 There was a less elevated and more matter-of-fact reason 
 why Gruicciardini took service under the restored Medici, 
 now finally rendered avowedly absolnte over his native city 
 Florence. In the total eclipse of Medicean power and pres- 
 tige at its Papal head-quarters ensuing upon the capture 
 and sack of Rome in 1527, the Florentines, who seized the 
 opportunity to re-establish democracy, not only would neither 
 trust nor employ Guicciardini, whom two successive Popes 
 had employed and trusted, but pursued him with the most 
 palpably groundless charges of pecuniary malversation. 
 This fact, if it was known to Sismondi, might have miti- 
 gated the severity of the terms in which he took notice of 
 Guicciardini's desertion to the opposite camp,' and may 
 qualify, on the other hand, our credence of his purely 
 patriotic inducements for attaching himself to the only one 
 of the two contending parties who would accept his adhe- 
 sion. ' The vulgar,' says Signor Canestrini, ' ever exagge- 
 rating, and never discriminating in its judgments, when a 
 once powerful administrator of public affairs falls into dis- 
 grace or loses office, is wont with one voice to accuse him, 
 not of his real sins of commission or omission, but of public 
 robberies, rapines, and malversations, from which his known 
 character stands high above all suspicion.' There is the 
 ' Bigtoire des BepulUques ItaUennes, vol. xvi., p. 105. 
 
16 GUICGIARDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 strongest evidence in Guicciardini's writings, oflBcial and 
 autobiographical, that here, at least, was not the weak point 
 in his panoply. We may cite, as bearing on it, the following 
 passage which occurs in the ' Ricordi ': — 
 
 It is not possible to take sucli precautions as that ministers shall 
 not plunder. I have myself been perfectly pure, and have had 
 governors and other ministers under me, and with all the diligence I 
 have used and all the example I have given them, I have never been 
 able to provide sufficiently against this. The reason is that money 
 serves for everything, and that, in the present mode of living, a rich 
 man is more esteemed than a good one. What still more causes it, 
 is the ignorance or ingratitude of princes, who bear with the bad, and 
 give no better treatment to him who has served well than to him who 
 has done just the contra r'y. 
 
 We have already cited the unreserved expression of 
 Guicciardini's intimate sentiment respecting the service, 
 to which nevertheless he devoted the entire prime of his 
 public life. That expression recurs again and again in his 
 ' Ricordi ' :— 
 
 ' I desire,' he says, ' to see three things before my deatb, but I 
 doubt, however long I live, if I shall see any one of them — a well- 
 ordered republican regimen in our city — Italy liberated from all the 
 Barbarians — and the world liberated from the wicked tyranny of 
 priests.' 
 
 Of the duty of good citizens in States which have lost 
 their liberties, we find written, not without self-reference, as 
 follows : — 
 
 I believe it to be the duty of good citizens, when their country 
 falls into the hands of tyrants, to seek to have influence with them, in 
 order to persuade them to good and against evil. And certainly it 
 cannot but be the interest of a city that at all times good men should 
 have authority; and although the ignorant and passionate people in 
 Florence have always understood it otherwise, even they must perceive 
 how pestiferous would be the government of the Medici if they had 
 nobody about them but fools and knaves. 
 
 Guicciardini was no whit more favourable to popular than 
 to priestly or monarchical tyranny. He writes of it, as usual, 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 17 
 
 from experience — that of Florentine democracy in its intole- 
 rance of all superiorities whatsoever : — 
 
 Who names a people names truly a fool, a monster full of con- 
 fusions and errors, and whose vain opinions are as far remote from the 
 truth of things as, according to Ptolemy, Spain is from the Indies ! . . . . 
 He -who would live at Florence with the favour of the people must 
 avoid the reputation of ambition, and every indication of wishing to 
 appear even in the smallest details of daily life greater, more splendid, 
 or more delicate than others. For in a polity which is wholly founded 
 on equality and full of envy, it follows of necessity that every one ■ 
 becomes odious who falls under the suspicion of not willing to be on 
 a footing of equality with others, or who seeks to distinguish himself 
 from the common mode of livins:. 
 
 Guicciardini's wisdom, it must be admitted, was of that 
 sort which sounds the depths rather than soars to the heights 
 of moral and social existence. His apology must be that in 
 his age were more depths to sound than heights to soar to. 
 How keen his insight into the weaknesses and vices of men 
 the following lines may testify : — 
 
 It is observed that old men are more avaricious than young ones, 
 whereas it should be the contrary, because having less time to live, 
 less will suffice them. The reason is said to be because they are more 
 timid. I do not believe that this is the true reason, because I see 
 many of them much more cruel, more licentious, if not in act, in desire, 
 more abhorrent from death than young men. The reason I believe to 
 be that the longer one lives, the more one gets a habit of living, and 
 the more men attach themselves to the things of the world, the more 
 affection they have for them, and the more they are moved by them. 
 
 The following is no new precept of worldly wisdom, but 
 has a somewhat shrewd codicil annexed to it : — 
 
 Observe carefully in yoiu- conversation never without necessity to 
 say' things which reported may displease others, since often, in times 
 and modes which are not thought of, these greatly hurt yourselves : 
 observe this I say carefully, since many even prudent men err in it, 
 and it is difficult to abstain from so erring ; but if the difficulty is 
 great, much greater is the fruit which results from thence to him who 
 knows how to do it. If, however, necessity or anger induce you to 
 speak injuriously to another, take care at least to say things offensive 
 only to him ; for example, if you wish to injure an individual, do not 
 
 C 
 
18 GUICCIARDINI AND HLS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 speak evil of his country, family, or parentage ; since it is great folly, 
 when you only wish to offend one, to speak injuriously of many. 
 
 The following passage occurs in Lord Campbell's ' Life of 
 Brougham,' which may serve as a negative illustration of the 
 above politic precept : — 
 
 He had always great delight in laughing at briefless barristers, a 
 class to which at some periods of his life he was himself in great danger 
 of belonging. He was very incautious in attacking bodies of men, 
 and thus sometimes excited more ill-will than by a personal quarrel 
 which might be soon appeased. Having flattered some of the bishops 
 by asking them to name incumbents for small livings in his gift, he 
 offended them all by saying in their absence, when they had left the 
 House to go to dinner, ' that their god was their belly.' 
 
 The following excellent rule of life for those in respon- 
 sible functions is applicable to all kinds and all stations : — 
 
 Do not make more account of having favour than of having repu- 
 tation ; since, reputation being lost, the benevolence of others is lost 
 with it, in place of which succeeds slight esteem ; but he who main- 
 tains his reputation finds no want of friends, favour, and benevolence. 
 
 To the like effect :— 
 
 You cannot have a greater virtue than to keep account of honour, 
 since he who does so fears no dangers, and does no base actions. 
 Hold this point fast therefore, and it will be almost impossible that 
 everything should not succeed well with you. — Expertus loquor. 
 
 It is only fair to suppose that in his more elevated, as in 
 his less elevated utterances, Guicciardini set down for his 
 descendants the real results, as he himself viewed them, of 
 his own personal experience. These he sets forth more 
 specifically as follows : — 
 
 I have been for eleven successive years employed in Governments 
 of the Church, and have enjoyed so much favour with my sviperiors 
 and the people as well, that I was likely to have remained long in 
 those employments, but for the events which happened in 1527 in 
 Rome and Florence. And I found nothing which established me 
 in them more firmly than proceeding as if 1 did not care to keep 
 them, since resting on this foundation 1 did without respect or sub- 
 mission whatever properly belonged to the charge 1 held, which gave 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 19 
 
 me a reputation that favoured me more, and witli more dignity, than 
 any insinuation, interest, or industry I could have used. 
 
 All the evidence derivable froai tlie official correspondence, 
 which forms a large part of the publication before us, goes 
 to verify the character Guicciardini here claims for himself 
 of having carried into servitude itself the spirit of an honour- 
 able, if not exalted freedom. In his several and successive 
 vicegerencies for the Vicegerent of Heaven he stoutly con- 
 tested the abusive privileges and exemptions of ecclesiastics 
 from lay jurisdiction. And he always addressed the Popes 
 he successively served in the language of independent 
 counsel. 
 
 The following more general political observations bear 
 the stamp of experience, and, like many of our author's, are 
 true for all time : — 
 
 Things doomed to fall not by force but exhaustion, go on much 
 longer than would have been believed at first, as well because the 
 motions are slower than is supposed, as because men, when they are 
 obstinately resolved to endure the worst, do and suffer much more 
 than would have been believed possible. Thus we have seen that a 
 war which was calculated to come to an end by famine, by hardship, 
 by want of money, and the like, has lasted longer than would have 
 been believed beforehand. Thus the life of a consumptive patient 
 always prolongs itself beyond the opinion doctors and bystanders 
 have had of it ; and a merchant, before he fails by being eaten up 
 with usury, keeps moving longer than was expected. 
 
 Things probable probably false. 
 
 I am slow in believing, till I have sure authority, news which are 
 in themselves probable ; because, being already in men's conjecture, 
 someone is easily found to forge them ; and therefore when I receive 
 any such without a certain author, I suspend belief of them, more 
 than of others of an opposite kind. 
 
 Things universally desired seldom accomplished. 
 
 The Marquis of Pescara said to me on the election of Pope 
 Clement VII., that the things which were universally desired were 
 hardly ever accomplished. The reason of this may be that it is the 
 few and not the many that commonly pull the wires which set in 
 motion the affairs of this world, and the ends those have in view are 
 
 c 2 
 
20 GUICCIARUINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 almost always different from the ends of the many, and accordingly 
 produce different effects from those which the many desire. 
 
 In the multitude of counsellors there is no safety/. 
 
 Messer Antonio da Venafra was wont to say, and said well — Put 
 seven or eight wise men together, they become so many fools ; since 
 not agreeing they rather bring things into dispute than to a con- 
 clusion. 
 
 Sloio decision good — slow execution bad. 
 
 Men cannot be blamed for being a long time in resolving them- 
 selves, since, if conjunctures take place at which it is necessary to 
 decide promptly, yet in general he who decides quickly errs rather 
 than he who decides slowly. But what is to be blamed mightily is 
 slowness of execution after a resolution is taken, since it may be said 
 that always hurts and never helps unless by accident. 
 
 Why conspiracies are generally detected. 
 
 He who will take notice of the course of combinations and con- 
 spiracies may observe that nothing is more ruinous to them than the 
 desire to carry them on too securely, since by this more time is inter- 
 posed, more men implicated, and more things mixed up with them, 
 which is a cause why practices of that sort are brought to detection. 
 Moreover, it may be believed that Fortune, under whose dominion 
 such things are placed, is angry with those who wish to liberate and 
 secure themselves from her power. I conclude, therefore, that it is 
 safer to execute them with some risk than with much precaution. 
 
 What men ought to do— what they probably will do. 
 
 In discourses of State T have often seen men make mistakes of 
 judgment ; because they set themselves to examine what this or that 
 prince reasonably ought to do, and not what he is likely to do accord- 
 ing to his nature and degree of understanding. He who would judge 
 what, for example, the King of France will do, should have less 
 regard to what a prudent man ought to do than to what may be 
 expected from the nature and habit of a Frenchman . 
 
 Do not let yourself be thrown out of play. 
 
 He who would be a man of action should not let himself be thrown 
 out of the current of affairs, since out of one arises another, as well by 
 the access which the first gives to the second, as by the reputation 
 which being engaged in affairs brings you. To this also may be well 
 applied the proverb — Di cosa nasce cosa. 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 21 
 
 It has always been disputed how far the sinister precepts 
 of policy, branded as Machiavellian, are to be charged to the 
 character of the Great Florentine Secretary or to that of his 
 age — in what degi-ee the maxims stigmatised by that name 
 were accepted or reprobated by the better-reputed authori- 
 ties of those times. Machiavelli and Guicciardini were con- 
 temporary politicians, private correspondents, and personal 
 friends, notwithstanding the most marked contrast of cha- 
 racter, and thence of career. It may be afllrmed on the 
 evidence of the volumes before us that the latter had no 
 disposition to countenance the cool atrocity of the wholesale 
 recipes for extirpating enemies by foul or fair means, which 
 the former generalised, with such shocking unconcern, from 
 the prevalent practices of his age. In an elaborate criti- 
 cism of Machiavelli's ' Discourses on Livy,' now first pub- 
 lished in these volumes, Guicciardini remarks that extraor- 
 dinary and violent political remedies always beyond measure 
 please his author [Machiavelli]. It would be difficult to 
 conceive the former looking on, as the latter seems to have 
 done, in his mission from the Florentine Eepublic to Caesar 
 Borgia, at the preparations making for the immortally in- 
 famous surprise and slaughter of Sinigaglia. But it never- 
 theless appears, on the evidence of the ' Ricordi ' before us, 
 that one of the most respectable administrators and authors 
 of his age, as Guicciardini certainly was, was considerably 
 infected, albeit in a milder form, with what this age terms 
 Machiavellism. The following sentences from the source 
 above cited sufficiently establish that fact. 
 
 MachiaveUic maxim of politic falsehood. 
 
 Make a practice of denying wtat you do not wish to be known, or 
 affirming what you wish to be believed, since, whatever probabilities, 
 or whatever certainties there may be to the contrary, a bold affirma- 
 tive or negative often puts him who hears you off the scent. 
 
 MachiaveUic m,axi/m of goverv/ment. 
 
 The government of States cannot be carried on according to con- 
 science, because to anyone who considers their origin they have all 
 been founded on violence — with the exception of republics in their 
 own country, and not elsewhere. I do not except from this rule the 
 
22 GUICCIARDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 Emperor, and still less the priests, whose violence is double, as they 
 coerce you at once with arms temporal and spiritual. 
 
 Machiavellic maxim of affected reticence. 
 
 A prince, or he who is engaged in great affairs, not only should 
 keep secret things which it is well should not be known, but should 
 besides caution himself and his ministers to keep silence on things 
 even the least, and seemingly the least, important, except those which 
 it is well should be knoivn. Thus your acts and intentions not being 
 known to those about you, or to your subjects, men stand ever iu 
 suspense and as it were amazed, and every little motion and step of 
 yours is observed. 
 
 Machiavellic maxim of fair public pretexts. 
 
 One of the greatest good fortunes men can have is to have fair 
 occasion to show that they have been moved by pure regard to the 
 public weal in those things which they do to promote their own 
 proper interest. It was that which made glorious the enterprises of 
 the Catholic King which — while they were all entered on for his 
 own grandeur or security — often seemed engaged in either for the 
 extension of the Christian faith or for the defence of the Church. 
 
 Machiavellic maxim of ' Bide your time' 
 
 A governor of nations should guard as much as possible against 
 showing hatred to anyone, or taking vengeance of any displeasure 
 done to him, since it brings too much odium on him to employ the 
 public arm against private injuries. Let him only take patience and 
 bide his time, since it is impossible that he should not frequently find 
 occasion to effect the same end justifiably and without imputation of 
 rancour. 
 
 Machiavellic maxim to be observed by princes. 
 
 Let princes take care not to lead their subjects into the next 
 degree to liberty, since men naturally desire to be free, and no one 
 ordinarily continues content with his position, but every one always 
 seeks to advance beyond that in which he finds himself, and these 
 appetites have more power with men in general than the memory of 
 the goodfellowship that prince has shown them, or the benefits re- 
 ceived at his hands. 
 
 The painstaking and patriotic editor of the volumes 
 before us indulges largely, in his introductory chapters, iu 
 
GTJICCIAEDIKI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 23 
 
 elaborate parallels between the two last public men of Italy 
 in the sixteenth century — Machiavelli and Guicciardini — 
 who could properly be called so, as still speaking the lan- 
 guage of Italian public sentiment. And very curious are 
 some of the parallels he finds for them in ancient history. 
 ' To Guicciardini,' he says, ' must be conceded the primacy 
 of profound political intuition ; to Machiavelli subtle pene- 
 tration into the arcana imperii, and vital forces of States, as 
 well as into the no less intricate mysteries of the human 
 heart. The former concentrated all his faculties upon one 
 focus ; he might be entitled, by no fanciful analogy, the 
 Cato of writers, as the latter might be designated as the 
 Alcibiades.' 
 
 Neither Alcibiades nor Gato, so far as history tells of 
 them, can well be conceived by any but a modern Italian 
 imagination to have furnished parallels on any one point of 
 character to Machiavelli and Guicciardini — unless it should 
 be said that the loose morality of the Athenian Eupatrid 
 might, in some measure, be attributed to the life and writings 
 of the Florentine popolano. But Guicciardini and Cato ! 
 Which Cato ? Not that one, at any rate, by whom the proud 
 memorial was merited — 
 
 Yictrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni. 
 
 All the pains taken by our editor (who also edited, some 
 years back, such of the official and other writings of Machia- 
 velli as had remained unpublished) to wash perfectly white 
 the political ethics of both are pains utterly thrown away. 
 If he had urged that Machiavelli merely generalised his 
 maxims of politics from an unexaggerated induction of the 
 most successful strokes of State-craft and State-crime — that 
 Guicciardini had no other course open to his ardour for 
 action and advancement than to spend his last years in the 
 service of bad masters, to whom he tendered as good counsel 
 as they would take— he would have pleaded fair excuse for 
 their shortcomings of the more elevated moral standards set 
 up in later times ; though, in truth, later times have not 
 always been entitled to write ' Anti-Machiavels,' especially 
 
24 GUICCIARDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 when royal fingers held the pen. And the Parisian dis- 
 pensers of European reputation, in the days of Trederick 
 and Catherine, never flattered more grossly sovereigns whose 
 ways of acquiring or extending power would assuredly have 
 taxed Machiavellic cynicism to excuse them — even in 
 Machiavelli's age — than by ascribing to them pure and 
 exalted abhorrence of Machiavellic doctrine. 
 
 In point of style, the perfect unaffectedness and direct- 
 ness of thought and utterance certainly may be admitted to 
 set the antique classic stamp on Machiavelli's writings. It 
 is the -Trapprjo-la of old Greece transferred to the troubled and 
 lurid dawn of modern Italy. For the rest, it must be 
 acknowledged that the main scope of Machiavelli's public 
 acts and writings was that of Italian independence by Italian 
 arms under Italian leadership. Small blame to an Italian 
 patriot who had seen the soil of Italy twice overrun and 
 twice soaked in the blood of its sons by foreign invasion, if 
 he gave precedence, as a first political necessity, to arms over 
 laws — or rather was ready to afiBrm that the conditions of 
 success ui arms were the best criterion of national laws as 
 suited to national needs of first urgency. The native mili- 
 tary organisation which, with good beginnings of efficiency, 
 his practical measures as well as theoretical tractates were 
 framed to restore to Florence — nay, the despotic power 
 which, in his writings, the most obnoxious to moral censure, 
 he was content to offer to any Italian prince who wonld but 
 take the lead in overthrowing questo barbaro dominio, might 
 fairly be said to form parts of one system, conceived, with 
 whatever alloy of moral obliquity or personal ambition, in 
 one clearly-discerned and consistently-pursued public inte- 
 rest. It is indeed undeniable that in the ' Prince ' — which 
 is howevei', in this respect, no fair sample of his political 
 writings at large — the sole moral of Machiavelli's doctrine of 
 princely policy is, ' If you want to hold your own, or usurp 
 what is not your own, at this day in Italy, you must not be 
 too particular about observing the established distinctions 
 between virtue and vice, good faith and ill faith, mercy 
 and cruelty, &c., &c. ; though you must take care, at the 
 
GTJICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 25 
 
 same time, to keep as much credit as you can for those 
 virtues which in politics you cannot always afford to exer- 
 cise.' Now, this was only telling the great men of his 
 age what they knew before, and what the great men of 
 that age, and ages before and after, needed no rules to teach 
 them. Nor was the policy of princely and diplomatic plots 
 and perfidies exclusively Italian in those ages, however Lord 
 Macaulay might please himself and his readers with his 
 trenchant and telling contrasts between Northern rude 
 valonr and Southern polished artifice. The policy of the 
 Borgias and the Medici might be more shameless in some 
 traits, but could scarcely be more coolly or deliberately per- 
 fidious or, on occasion, mui'derous than the Tudor policy 
 which fomented anarchy in Scotland, or the Spanish policy 
 which kindled revolt in the Netherlands. Nor, at an earlier 
 period, had a Ferdinand the Catholic of Spain, or a good 
 King Louis XIT. of France, anything to learn from Machia- 
 vellian doctrine in the line of perfidy ; nay, it was precisely 
 from the practices of such potentates, cismontane or trans- 
 montane, that Machiavelli deduced the maxims which 
 shocked the world when set before it in the abstract, though 
 in the concrete they had escaped especial censure, as tacitly 
 understood necessities of king-craft or pope-craft. What 
 was characteristic of Machiavelli was his vehement earnest- 
 ness of purpose and straightforward explicitness of expres- 
 sion, not his perfidy. That was the sinister stamp of the 
 whole State policy of the sixteenth century. 
 
 Guicciardini himself wrote of his Florentine compatriot, 
 not that his public ends were ambiguous, but that his temper 
 naturally ran to extremes in the choice of means. This was 
 a reproach he himself was in no danger of incurring. It was 
 not in his nature to take extreme views, nor, indeed, was it 
 in his nature to postpone his personal success as a statesman 
 to any general views whatever. All Guicciardini's thoughts 
 and feelings, when unreservedly expressed, as in the ' Ricordi ' 
 before us, are imbued with a strong and pervading tinge of 
 his own personality. His views of life and politics are always 
 taken from the central point of his own family or individual 
 
26 GUICCIABDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 interest — using the word ' interest,' however, not in any low 
 or sordid sense. The habitually and naively self-regarding 
 temper, generated too naturally by such times as those in 
 which his lot was cast, is curiously illustrated in the follow- 
 ing passage of his ' Eicordi ' : — 
 
 All cities, all States, all kingdoms are mortal ; everything either 
 by nature or accident terminates and finishes some time or other. A 
 citizen, therefore, who finds himself doomed to survive his country, 
 need not so much grieve at its downfall and deplore its ill-fortune as 
 his own, since that has happened to his country which necessarily 
 had to happen ; but the special misfortune is his to whom it falls to 
 be born in an age when that catastrophe had to take place. 
 
 The final extinction of Florentine liberties drew after it 
 the shelving of Guicciardini the statesman — the making of 
 Guicciardini the historian. He owed to his last year or two 
 of retirement the reputation his name retains with posterity. 
 When Duke Cosmo's jealous tyranny honoured by excluding 
 from public trust and employment all whose political habits 
 had been formed in less servile times, the discarded states- 
 man had no " Majesty's Opposition ' to fall back upon — save 
 the silent closet opposition of the historian, with posterity 
 for audience. There is a sense of worth indicated in the 
 worthy employment of years of enforced leisure ; that sense 
 must be recognised in Guicciardini, as it must in Clarendon, 
 whatever exceptions may be taken by criticism or party to 
 the self-estimate of either. 
 
 Our motive for selecting a comparatively small portion 
 of the voluminous publication before us for our special 
 subject has been that these family, autobiographical, and 
 political 'Eicordi' are the portion of that publication in 
 which Guicciardini is, for the first time, presented in undress 
 to posterity, divested of the ,style academique of his more 
 elaborate writings. If the plain unvarnished self-portraiture 
 of the man and statesman is to be found anywhere in his 
 writings, it is to be found here. We have here direct from 
 the fountain-head those judgments of the men and things of 
 his day which are elsewhere diffused and diluted in studied 
 sentences, or set speeches put in the mouths of leading cha- 
 
GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 27 
 
 racters. We have waded ' witli honest anguish and an aching 
 head ' through the awful tedium of the formal pleadings and 
 discourses, pro and con, in these ten volumes, on all those 
 questions and transactions in which the great historian was 
 implicated — as through a series, long drawn out, of ' Suasoriee ' 
 and ' Controversise,' on the model of Seneca Ehetor.^ These, 
 with diplomatic and official despatches, swell out the bulk of 
 the work, we think, disproportionately to their present value. 
 An exception must be made in favour of the two books of 
 Dialogues ' Del Eeggimento di Firenze,' which will be found 
 in the second volume, and which testify to the author's sincere 
 public spirit, however dashed with self-seeking. The inter- 
 locutors of these imaginary conversations are four of the most 
 eminent public men of the last period of Florentine freedom 
 — Bernardo del Nero, Piero Capponi, Pagolantonio Soderini, 
 and Piero Guicciardini, the father of our historian. Each of 
 them supports his genuine character as speaker or listener, 
 and the air of freedom still breathes through their unre- 
 strained utterances. Bernardo del Nero in these Dialogues 
 signalises that source of weakness and danger to Florence 
 which Machiavelli devoted his best efforts to remedy. ' Our 
 city,' says Bernardo, ' as every one knows, was once armed — 
 once carried on all her military enterprises by aid of the arms 
 of her own subjects — by aid of these won many victories and 
 had many successes, which should have seemed to invite her 
 rather to devote herself entirely to military exercises, than to 
 disarm, as she has done, and make use in her wars of hired 
 soldiers. The cause for this change must either have been 
 the jealous exclusion from command by the people of the 
 
 ' Guiooiardini's full-dress tendency to a certain formal prolixity has been 
 quaintly illustrated by the preference expressed by Boccalini's Lacedmmonian, 
 for condemnation to galley-rowing for life, building up between two walls, 
 and finally flaying alive, rather than reading the interminable tall talk and 
 little wars between Florence and Pisa. 
 
 ' Instantissimamente supplicS che per tutti gl' anni della sua vita lo con- 
 dannassero a remare in una galea, che lo murassero tr^ due mura, e che per 
 misericordia fino lo scorticassero vivo; perche il legger quei Disoorsi senza 
 fine, quei Consigli tanto tediosi, quelle freddissime Concioni, fatte nella presa 
 d' ogni vil colombaia, era crepacuore che superava tutti 1' aculei Inglesi, cfec.'— 
 Boeealini, RaguagU di Pwi-nasso, Cent. I. Rag. VI. 
 
28 GUICCIARDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 
 
 nobles wlio had military rank and reputation [this was the 
 main cause alleged by Machiavelli to have enfeebled Florence] , 
 or from the people addicting themselves too exclusively to arts 
 and merchandise. However this may have been, the mode of 
 making war by mercenaries has been most pernicious, and 
 during the long period it has already prevailed in Florence 
 has led her citizens into ways of life, and made them contract 
 habits so contrary to martial enterprise, that now, if any 
 youth talks of going to the wars, he becomes in a manner 
 infamous.' 
 
 Another exception to the charge of tediousness which, not 
 having the fear of Italian readers before our eyes, we have 
 ventured to bring against good part of the ' stuffing' of the 
 ten volumes before us, must be made in favour of the ' Storia 
 Fiorentina,' which fills the third volume, and which may be 
 considered as forming a sequel (though written earlier) to 
 Machiavelli's ' Storie Florentine,' and an introduction to 
 Guicciardini's great work, the famous (and tedious) ' Istoria 
 d'ltalia.' Of the style of this hitherto unpublished prelude 
 to his larger history it may be enough to say that, like that 
 of his ' Eicordi,' it has none of the conventional dignity of 
 history. In this respect Guicciardini here stands in contrast 
 with his later self, as arrayed in the ample academical robes 
 of the classic historian. In the political doctrine deducible 
 from his Florentine history he so far contrasts with Machia- 
 velli that, while Guicciardini, as Signer Canestrini remarks, 
 confined his desires to a better regulated government for 
 Florence, and freedom for Italy, Machiavelli invoked the 
 intervention of a Prince, an all-powerful Dictatoi", who, by 
 whatever means — so they were efficacious — should succeed in 
 the great enterprise of expelling the strangers who were 
 tearing Italy in pieces. Guicciardini's historical style, in his 
 ' first manner,' differs from Machiavelli's in that indescribable 
 quality in which the prose of minds all-prosaic differs from 
 the prose of poets. Guicciardini was an acknowledged master 
 of prose — Machiavelli may rank with poets — and it would be 
 difficult to find in the highest-wrought tragic descriptions of 
 the historian such vivid images of the misery of the times 
 
GUICOIARDINI AND HIS 'GOLDEN MAXIMS.' 29 
 
 whicli saw the sack of Home, as in the following six lines of 
 Machiavelli's ' Capitolo dell' Ambizione.' 
 
 Sempre son le lor facce orrende e scure, 
 A guisa d' uom, che sbigot-tito ammiri 
 Per nuovi danni, o subite paure. 
 Dovunche le occhi tu rivolgi e giri, 
 Di lacrime la terra e sangue h pi-egna ; 
 E r aria d' urli, singulti e sospii-i. 
 
 We have given credit for painstaking as well as for 
 patriotism to the experienced editor of these volumes. But 
 there is one particular in which he fails to satisfy the fair 
 and reasonable requirements of modern readers. He has 
 neither favoured them with full tables of contents to each 
 volume, nor with a general index to all the ten volumes. 
 These are omissions too familiar in Italian as in German 
 publications of bulk and weight. Signer Canestrini sends 
 his readers voyaging through whole volumes without rudder 
 or compass to find the passages he has thought worth noticing 
 in his Preface. We have been tempted, in executing our 
 critical function on this occasion, to wish that editorial de- 
 linquencies of this description could be visited with some of 
 those severities of mediseval political justice so frequent in 
 Florentine history. Qualche tratto di fune would be no more 
 than condign punishment for the neglect of editors to pro- 
 vide readers with those mere mechanical facilities for finding 
 what they want in voluminous works like these, which no 
 French and no judicious English editor ever fails to furnish. 
 
30 
 
 II. 
 
 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 1. JorcLano Bruno. Par Christian Ifartolmfess. 2 vols. Paris, 1846. 
 
 2. Mia di Gim'dano Bruno da Nola. Scritta da Domenico Berti. Firenze, 
 
 1868. 
 
 3. Galilee, Us Droits do la Science, et la MHhode des Sciences Physiques. Par 
 
 Th. Henri Martin. Paris, 1868. 
 
 4. II Processo Originale di Galileo Galilei. Pubblioato per la prima volta da 
 
 Domenico Berti. Eoma, 1876. 
 
 5. Galileo Galilei und die Romisclie Owrie. Naok den autlientischeii Qiiellen. 
 
 Von Karl von Gebler. Stuttgart, 1876. 
 
 6. Les Pieces du Proc'es de Galilee. Precedees d\in Avant-propos. Par Henri 
 
 de I'Epinois. Home — Paris, 1877. 
 
 7. Die Acten des GalileVschen Processes. Nacli der Vatioaiiisclieti Handschrift 
 
 herausgegehen. Von Karl von Gebler. Stuttgart, 1877.' 
 
 No two characters in history invite a Plutarchian comparison 
 and contrast more naturally than those of Giordano Bruno, 
 the ' knight-errant of philosophy,' as he was nicknamed in 
 his ov?n time, and Galileo Galilei, the genuine martyr of 
 exact science. 
 
 Bruno and Galileo were the first conspicuous champions 
 of the Copernican or Modern Astronomy, and the former 
 first awakened towards it the ominous attention of the Holy 
 Roman Inquisition. The Nolan philosopher-errant had un- 
 luckily preceded the Pisan professor in the popular exposi- 
 tion of the Copernican system, and he purposely placed that 
 system in the light necessarily most obnoxious to ecclesias- 
 tical prejudices, by including in his view of it the unhesi- 
 tating assumption of a plurality of inhabited worlds, peopled 
 similarly to our earth. From that assumption he explicitly 
 drew those heretical inferences which were afterwards fast- 
 ened gratuitously on Galileo. Neither Copernicus before 
 ' From the Quarterly Review, April 1878. 
 
GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 31 
 
 liirn, nor Galileo after him, hazarded any such speculations 
 as to the manner in which the other planets of our system, 
 or of other systems, might or might not be peopled. But 
 Bruno revelled in them, and made them the main ground of 
 his argument against the creed of Christendom and for the 
 necessity of a new religion harmonising with the new astro- 
 nomy. It was much as if Voltaire had preceded Newton, 
 and had so treated astronomical questions as to create an 
 inseparable association in the clerical and common mind 
 between a revolution in science and a revolution in religion 
 and morals. 
 
 Galileo has been accused by all the apologists of his eccle- 
 siastical persecutors of having gratuitously mixed up ques- 
 tions of science with questions of religion ; and his imputed 
 invasion of a province, which he had no legitimate motive 
 to meddle with, has been described as having provoked that 
 Papal crusade against modern astronomy which has damned 
 Urban VIII. and his Holy Office to everlasting fame. 
 
 Not a word of all this is true of Galileo. Every word of 
 it is true of Giordano Bruno. Unlike as were the characters 
 and careers of Bruno and Galileo — in every respect but irre- 
 pressible intellectual activity, however differently directed — 
 it is difficult to avoid the impression that the destinies of 
 the former may have very considerably and unhappily in- 
 fluenced those of the latter. The Roman Inquisition suc- 
 cessively pounced on both, though not, it must be admitted, 
 with equal excess of severity. It burned Bruno, and never 
 certainly had it lighted on human fuel more manifestly pre- 
 destined, in that age, to burning. It only intimidated 
 Galileo into solemn and deliberate perjury, into abjuration 
 of truths he had clearly demonstrated and continued to 
 hold, which his persecutors perfectly well knew that he con- 
 tinued to hold, and therefore, by extorting verbal abjuration 
 of them from a harassed and infirm old man, made them- 
 selves mainly responsible for the hollow and hypocritical 
 performance of what can only be designated as a most im- 
 pious and sacrilegious farce. 
 
 Giordano Bruno's is one of those names which, in the 
 
32 GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 course of centuries, have gathered round them a sort of 
 smoky glory. If he had fallen upon another age and 
 another country — instead of being burnt a.t Rome, he might 
 have shone brightly, as a professor of transcendental philo- 
 sophy, at Berlin or Munich. He might have lectured, like 
 Schelling, on ' The Absolute,' and ' The Point of Indifference 
 between Extremes ' — a position identical with the coinci- 
 dentia oppositorum of Bruno — or, like Hegel, on ' The Unity 
 of Existence and Thought,' and ' The Perpetual Evolution of 
 the Idea.' 
 
 It is mentioned amongst the multifarious mental occu- 
 pations of the late Baron Bunsen, that he had studied Gior- 
 dano Bruno with peculiar interest and with deep sympathy. 
 ' The work of Bartolmess of Strasburg,' he said, ' gave me 
 occasion of becoming more nearly acquainted with that 
 strange, erratic, comet-like spirit, marked by genius, but a 
 Neapolitan, whose life was but a fiery fragment.' ' 
 
 A fiery fragment, literally consumed in fire at last. Not 
 the less characteristic of that unparalleled era of intellectual 
 renascence in Italy, which commenced in classicism, was 
 closed by Jesuitism ; which was cradled in the Platonic 
 academy founded at Florence by the first illustrious chiefs of 
 the Medicean line, and was entombed in the Holy Ofiice 
 instituted at Rome by Pope Paul III. ; which had for its first 
 martyr of modern philosophy Giordano Bruno, for its second 
 Galileo. • 
 
 The character and career of Giordano Bruno furnish the 
 most signal example of all that was irregular and anarchical 
 in that immense intellectual as well as aesthetic movement, 
 the transitory glory of the sixteenth century in Italy. The 
 character and career of Galileo exemplify all that was 
 genuinely scientific, and really religious in that movement. 
 We should be disposed to regard the unbridled license on 
 all subjects which so singularly and strangely distinguished 
 Bruno as a natural reaction, on the one hand, against the 
 complete self-prostration of intellect dogmatically demanded 
 by the Church of Rome, and, on the other, as a natural 
 
 ' Memoirs of Baron Bunseji, vol. ii. p. 254. 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 33 
 
 product of the entire emancipation of intellect practically 
 encouraged bj the universities in those free disputations de 
 omnibus rebus et quihusdam aliis which were thrown open by 
 time-honoured usage to all academic speakers and all hearers. 
 It was only on submissive minds that monastic discipline 
 produced its designed effects; the reaction therefrom, in 
 restless and inquisitive spirits like Bruno's, could scarcely 
 fail to drive them from implicit acceptance of unreasoned 
 rule to indiscriminate revolt from all rule. What the 
 Church had afterwards to condemn she may seem to have 
 herself generated. Bruno was the natural child of Domini- 
 canism, as Voltaire of Jesuitism. He may be said to have 
 anticipated the most ' advanced ' solutions of all questions 
 which he chose to consider open. And he chose to consider 
 all questions open. He may be looked upon as the last of 
 those stray philosophers, in quest of fame and of bread, who 
 had formed, in the Middle Ages, a sort of international 
 republic of letters, whereof all the universities of Europe 
 were recognised as component parts, graduation in one of 
 which opened all the rest to lectures and disputations de 
 omni re scibili by their itinerant members. 
 
 But let us begin at the beginning of the wayward and 
 erratic career of the first of those representatives of the 
 nascent modern mind in Italy, whom M. Berti has made the 
 subjects of his successive studies. 
 
 Whether Giordano Bruno, who was boi-n about 1560 and 
 baptised by the name of Philip — but, on entering a religious 
 order, followed the usual ecclesiastical etiquette of giving 
 himself a new name — was of high or low descent (he himself 
 claimed the former) seems not very clearly ascertained. So 
 much, however, is clear, that he was of rather poor parent- 
 age, and, during the whole course of his errant exercise of 
 philosophy, he had to live upon his wits — on the money con- 
 tributed by the auditors attracted to his disputations and 
 lectures. He had donned the religious dress at the age of 
 fifteen, in the Dominican convent at Naples, and before the 
 expiration of his novitiate he had expressed himself slight- 
 ingly to a fellow-novice about a mystical manual, which he 
 
 D 
 
34 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 found Mm reading, on the subject of the seven beatitudes 
 of the Virgin. ' What ! ' he asked, ' would you not find the 
 reading of the hves of the Holy Fathers more edifying ? ' 
 Young Bruno had, moreover, cleared out his cell, by giving 
 away all the images it contained of saints, male and female, 
 keeping only a crucifix. Upon these indications the ' master 
 of the novices ' commenced formal proceedings against the 
 boy heretic, but had the good sense or good feeling to drop 
 them. Bruno's next outbreaking, however, in the like direc- 
 tion was followed by more serious consequences. Before he 
 was eighteen, says his biographer, he had begun to doubt of 
 the principal dogmas which the Church imposes on the belief 
 of the faithful. Finally, after taking orders, at twenty-three 
 he gave still fuller and more unbridled scope to his heterodox 
 opinions. Thus, at each successive stage of outward eccle- 
 siastical progression, he developed and disclosed an inward 
 state of mind at variance with it. Proceedings were again 
 taken against the young Giordano, this time by higher 
 authority ; and there could be no doubt about the peril of 
 the position iu which he had placed himself. He took flight 
 from Naples, and found a temporary halting-place at the 
 Dominican convent of the Minerva at Rome ; but soon, find- 
 ing that the charges brought against him at Naples had been 
 duly forwarded to Rome, he took flight from thence also, 
 throwing dff his monastic habit, and went forth into the 
 world, as the fairy tales say, to seek his fortune. 
 
 On escaping from Rome, our philosopher-errant had re- 
 sumed his baptismal name of Philip, and, as we have already 
 stated, had cast off his garb of Dominican monk. With his 
 usual inconsistency of conduct, he very soon resumed that 
 garb, but without any further attempt to re-enter the Order. 
 In those times this was nothing new or unusual. Botta, the 
 historian of Italy, states that there were then some forty 
 thousand Italian raonks living outside the walls and rules of 
 their convents. On his arrival at Geneva, after experiments 
 of living in Italy, which seem to have all failed, Bruno was 
 counselled by a distinguished Italian refugee once more to 
 divest himself of his monastic habits, these being quite 
 
GIOEDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 35 
 
 out of fashion in the city of Calvin. Accordingly he con- 
 verted portions of them into hose, and his Italian fellow- 
 refugees gave him a hat and cloak. Those refugees had, 
 some years previously, espoused the creed of the Evangelical 
 Church ; and their recognised leader, who had first accosted 
 Bruno on his arrival at Geneva, bore one of the highest 
 patrician names of Naples. This was Galeazzo Caracciolo, 
 Marquis of Vico, and nephew of Pope Paul IV., who, to 
 the deep disgust of his family, had embraced the creed of 
 Calvin. 
 
 But Bruno had shot far past Calvin and Beza in his views 
 of a new theology. And, as he avowed afterwards in his 
 examinations before the Inquisitions of Venice and Rome, he 
 could neither adopt a religion the basis of which was faith 
 without works, nor reconcile to his mind a scheme of Church 
 ■government which empowered the State to punish with the 
 sword all who dared to avow dissent from its doctrines. 
 Formularies and confessions of faith were then the prevailing 
 fashion, whether at Rome or Geneva. The Italian refugees 
 had been compelled (much against their philosophical con- 
 science, their leanings having been commonly Arian) to sub- 
 scribe a rigidly Calvinistic confession. There was no rest or 
 place for religious revolters from Rome who would not re- 
 strict themselves within the rigid bounds of the theology of 
 Geneva ; and revolters, like Bruno, from one theocracy could 
 not bring themselves to acquiesce in another. ' Lutheranism,' 
 observes our biographer, ' was, in this respect, more to their 
 minds than Calvinism.' Bruno, in particular, very soon 
 found that there was as much wood for burning heretics at 
 Geneva as at Rome and Naples. 
 
 At Geneva our philosopher-errant was treading on ground 
 which had shortly before been strewn with the ashes of Ser- 
 vetus. At Toulouse — where he obtained a professorship, 
 notwithstanding his antecedents (which were perhaps un- 
 known), and lectured on Aristotle's three books 'On the 
 Soul '— he was again treading on ground shortly afterwards 
 to be strewn with the ashes of Vanini. During two years 
 and a half (for him an unusual interval of repose) there must 
 
 D 2 
 
36 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 have been either a lull in the intolerant spirit of his 
 audiences, or a pause in the indulgence of his own heretical 
 impulses. It was during that interval that he held some 
 conferences, which came to nothing, like those he afterwards 
 held with the Papal nuncio at Paris, as to what means could 
 be used to enable him to re-enter the Order he had quitted. 
 But it was fated that poor Bruno's Dominican frock never 
 should be put on again, save to be stripped off, as preliminary 
 to its wearer being burned at the stake. 
 
 ' Our Giordano,' says M. Berti, in relating his first so- 
 journ and lectures in Paris, ' was the true type and ideal of 
 the free professor of those times. In Toulouse, in Paris, in 
 London, in Oxford, in Wittemberg, in Prague, in Zurich, in 
 Frankfort, he took the professor's chair, and gave lectures, 
 without seeking protection or favour in any quarter. He 
 migrates from university to university, opens school against 
 school, and when he encounters any opposition or obstacle he 
 turns his steps elsewhere.' In his examination before the 
 Venetian Inquisition, Bruno says of himself, ' I went to Paris, 
 where I set to work lecturing to make myself known.' The 
 substance of his teaching seems to have had for a main in- 
 gredient the LuUian art of memory, mixed up with the 
 physical, metaphysical, and astrouomical novelties which he 
 never failed of introducing in all his lectures, and which 
 never failed to produce scandal and to create a disturbance. 
 On every subject his powers of improvisation carried his 
 hearers by storm. ' He promised,' says his biographer, ' great 
 things in vague and mysterious language, well calculated to 
 excite curiosity and attention in his audience. Whatever in 
 his utterances was not purposely obscure, was clear, fluent, 
 and impassioned. Whatever the intrinsic value of his 
 lectures, they gained him great fame in delivery.' Everyone 
 would like to be shown a royal road to knowledge ; and 
 royalty itself, in the person of Henry III. of Prance, showed 
 a desire, which seems to have been not less fleeting than his 
 other caprices, to make acquaintance with this all-promising 
 professor of occult science. Bruno, as he was seldom sparine 
 of invectives on opponents, so failed not to repay in flattery 
 
GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 37 
 
 the capricious favours of a patron so far from respectable as 
 tlie Frencli King of the minions, by extolling him to the 
 skies as ' the magnanimous, great, and potent prince, the 
 echoes of whose fame extended to the ends of the earth.' 
 
 The first, and it might he said the last, real and substan- 
 tial patronage (except that of the worthy Frankfort book- 
 sellers) ever obtained by poor Bruno was that which hfi en- 
 joyed in the family of the French ambassador in London, 
 Castelnau de Mauvissiere, whose military and political 
 Memoirs have made him known to posterity. About 1583 
 Bruno had brought royal letters of introduction to that im- 
 portant personage, whose house furnished him, for the first 
 time, an easy and tranquil resting-place after all the 
 troublous storms which had tossed his private state, and had 
 rendered literary leisure unattainable, if not ' life unsweet ' — 
 for he seems to have rather liked living in hot water. All 
 Bruno's best works were written on the banks of the Thames, 
 under the hospitable roof and liberal protection of the French 
 ambassador — the more truly liberal, as M. de Mauvissiere 
 was a devout Roman Catholic, and had no sort of sympathy 
 with Bruno's free-thinking and heretical proclivities. There 
 must have been, after all, something that attracted personal 
 regard to our poor philosopher-errant, or he could not have 
 made himself an acceptable inmate in the house of an ex- 
 perienced soldier and statesman, with an accomplished wife 
 and a cultivated and amiable family. Bruno was excused 
 from attending daily mass in the ambassador's house, on the 
 plea that, for the present, he regarded himself as excommuni- 
 cated ; and he must certainly have restrained his polemical 
 and profane sallies in the house of a man who emphatically 
 disapproved the theological Conferences held aboijt that time, 
 in France and elsewhere, with the forlorn hope of putting an 
 end to religious differences. Eeligion, said M. de Mauvis- 
 siere, ' ne se peut bien entendre que par la foy et par humilite,' 
 and it was therefore not likely to be learned by disputation. 
 
 Bruno liked London little, with its mud, mobs, and 
 'prentices — Oxford less. If he presented himself to the 
 notice of the heads of that royally endowed university in his 
 
38 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 hose, already commemorated, stitclied together out of his old 
 Dominican habits, and in the charitably contributed hat and 
 cloak which completed his outfit at Geneva, he must have 
 made a figure anything rather than recommendatory to an 
 honorary degree in the eyes of the magnificent dons of that 
 day, whom he describes as follows : — 
 
 Men arrayed in long robes, attired in velvet, with hands most 
 precious for the number of rings on their fingers, which look as if 
 they could belong only to the richest of jewellers, and with manners 
 as void of courtesy as a cowherd's. 
 
 To these maligned magnates, however, Bruno addressed 
 a letter, through their Vice-Chancellor, in which he announced 
 himself as teacher of ' a theology more exquisite, and a phi- 
 losophy more refined, than any that had commonly been pro- 
 fessed or delivered.' He added, in language not less vain- 
 glorious, that he was ' the awakener of the slumbering, and 
 the effectual tamer of stubborn and presumptuous ignorance.'- 
 He attained his object of getting the gates of the sanctuary 
 of science on the banks of the Isis thrown open to him for the 
 delivery of a course of lectures on the ' Immortality of the 
 Soul ' and the ' Quintuple Sphere.' His lectures obtained 
 their usual success of scandal, and soon had to be closed. 
 Bruno's report of Oxford students {lucus a non lucendo) was 
 not more favourable than of the Oxford dons of his day. 
 
 ' The scholars,' he says, ' were idle, ignorant, unmannered, 
 undevout ; occupied in no studies but drinking and duelling, toasting 
 in alehouses and country inns, or graduating in the noble science 
 of defence. In short, they took their ease everywhere, whether in 
 lecture rooms or in taverns.' 
 
 The Oxford masters and scholars, whom Bruno encoun- 
 tered on the banks of the Isis, are contrasted with the 
 English gentlemen he met on the banks of the Thames : — 
 
 Men loyal, frank, well-mannered, well versed in liberal studies, 
 men who may bear comparison for gentilezza with the flower of the 
 best educated Italians [of course, according to Bruno, the natives of 
 his beloved Naples], reared under the softest skies, amidst the most 
 smiling scenery and richest nature of the world. 
 
GIOEDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 39 
 
 Tlie ladies of England came in for their share of honour 
 from the Nolan philosopher, though not for that ardent 
 homage which had lately been lavished on their gracious 
 attractions by Erasmus. Such fervours were reserved by 
 Bruno for Copernicus, Raymond Lully, and Albertus Mag- 
 nus. Though he sometimes boasted of his honnes fortunes, 
 as of most other things, he had not much of the troubadour 
 or votary of the Court of Love in his composition, and he 
 betrayed some scorn of the Tuscan poet lauguishing for 
 his Laura on the banks of the Sorgue. Yet he had lyri- 
 cal tributes for some of those English ladies, ' the honour 
 of the female sex, all-compact of celestial substance.' By 
 Erasmus those nymphce divinis vultihus, Mandce, /aciZes, had 
 been much more warmly extolled, especially for a fashion 
 now only observed on extraordinary and solemn occasions, or 
 under the mistletoe. 
 
 ' Always and everywhere,' wrote Erasmus, ' they receive you with 
 kisses. They kiss you when you meet them, when you part with 
 them, when you return. If you come back, the sweet kisses begin 
 again ; if they leave you, there is a fresh distribution of kisses. 
 Whichever way you turn, you will find everything embellished by 
 their tender commerce. Faustus, if you had once tasted the 
 delicate perfume of their presence, you would wish to travel — I do 
 not say ten years, as Solon did — but all your life, and to travel 
 always in England ! ' 
 
 Bruno's ' Wanderjahre ' may be said to have comprised 
 all the years of his active life — if a life can be called active 
 which was passed wholly in talking and writing — in teaching 
 Raymond Lully's boasted science of discoursing on all sub- 
 jects without having studied any. It was the science of the 
 old Athenian sophists all over again. Such a situation, with 
 his natural independence of spirit and fiery temper, threw 
 him only too frequently on the dire necessities of quackery. 
 He had to blow his own trumpet wherever he went, myste- 
 riously to adumbrate arcana to be more fully imparted only to 
 the initiated, and to start paradoxes chiefly aimed at astonish- 
 ing the ears of the groundlings. The worst fate that could 
 have befallen his paradoxes would have been to have scanda- 
 
40 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 lised nobody. ' Wliat did the learned world say to your para- 
 doxes ? ' asked the Vicar of Wakefield of George Primrose. 
 ' Sir, the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes — noth- 
 ing at all. Sir ! ' The learned world were less unkind to 
 Giordano Bruno. The university-world especially said a 
 good deal to his paradoxes, though not much to their ad- 
 Tantage. Wherever he lectured, or wherever he challenged 
 disputations, he could always boast at least of a success of 
 scandal. He made successively Geneva, Paris, London, 
 Oxford, Wittemberg, Helmstadt, Prague, Padua, and Venice, 
 too hot to hold him. 
 
 Poor Giordano courted the favour of certainly a curious 
 succession of patrons : Henry III. of France, who asked 
 him whether the art of memory professed by him was an 
 art practised by the aid of nature or of magic ; Queen 
 Elizabeth of England ; Sir Philip Sidney ; the Catholic 
 University of Prague ; the Protestant University of Wittem- 
 berg ; the booksellers of Erankfort-on-the-Main, a city which 
 he found friendly and hospitable, and where he would have 
 done well to have stayed, had he been capable of staying 
 quietly anywhere ; and finally, a young patrician of Venice, 
 Giovanni Mocenigo, who seems to have combined strong 
 intellectual ambition with weak intellectual capacity, and 
 with moral stamina still weaker. Having read one of Bruno's 
 mysterious treatises on his occult science, this idle young 
 nobleman could not be content without luring to his palace 
 in Venice the possessor of all those boasted secrets of the 
 LuUian art of memory which formed the charlatan part of 
 poor Bruno's philosophical stock in trade. Teacher and 
 pupil soon got tired of each other ; the former failed to 
 teach, and the latter to learn, an universal science which 
 had little else than a merely chimerical existence. Bruno, 
 besides, while he made a great mystery of his occult science, 
 made no mystery at all of his open and scoffing heterodoxy. 
 Mocenigo's conscience became alarmed by his confessor, when 
 he exhorted his penitent — who was ready enough to obey 
 the injunction — to denounce the teacher, of whom he was 
 tired, to the Inquisition. 
 
GIOEDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 41 
 
 'Even independently of his heresy of inhabited worlds innu- 
 merable,' observes M. Berti, ' sentence of death would have been 
 passed upon Giordano Bruno. He came before the Holy Office 
 charged with far graver crimes than Paleario, who was strangled and 
 burned for denying the doctrine of Purgatory, disapproving burial in 
 churches, satirising his fellow-monbs, and attributing justification to 
 faith alone. Giordano Bruno was condemned as an apostate, having 
 deserted the order in which he had been consecrated priest — as re- 
 lapsed, having been the subject of repeated procedures, without having 
 been thereby reclaimed to a religious life. The relapsed, even when 
 they had shown signs of repentance, were nevertheless delivered over 
 to the secular arm, and were almost always sentenced to perpetual im- 
 prisonment ; even such of them as had performed acts of penitence were 
 sometimes condemned capitally. Bruno besides was chargeable with 
 the heaviest of all crimes — that of impenitence — almost always 
 punished with fire. The obstinate heretic, whom no office of Christian 
 charity has availed to lead to conversion, shall not only [say the 
 text-books on the subject] be given over to the secular arm, but burnt 
 alive. It was added, " Quando isti pertinaces vivo igne cremantur, 
 eoruin lingua alliganda est, ne, si libere loqui possint, astantes inipiis 
 blasphemiis offendant."'^ 
 
 Everytliing conspired with Bruno's audacity of temper 
 and recklessness of that conduct in life, which could alone 
 have enabled him to steer safely through the seas of re- 
 ligious discord, to prepare for him the fate which he had 
 voluntarily returned to his country to meet. He was an 
 enthusiastic Platonist at a period when Aristotelianism was 
 the sole saving faith in the eyes alike of dogmatic ortho- 
 doxy and alarmed sacerdotalism. ' A Platonist in an Aristo- 
 telian atmosphere,' as Mr. Leslie Stephen says of William 
 Law, ' can no more flourish than an Alpine plant trans- 
 planted to the Lowlands.' ^ The rampant Aristotelians of 
 Bruno's days would have no Platonic plants in their Low- 
 lands ; or, if any such came there, were presently minded 
 to make firewood of them. 'It will he remembered,' says 
 M. Bartolmess, ' under what circumstances Bruno's death 
 took place. It was in the midst of an epoch of reaction 
 against Plato and Copernicus — an epoch when Cardinal 
 
 ' Arsenate o Pratioa del Sanf Offizio. 
 
 ' English Tlumght in the Eighteenth Centnry, vol. i. p. 158. 
 
42 GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 Bellarmine supplicated Clement VIII. not to tolerate the 
 teaching of Platonic philosophy in the Church. 'That 
 philosophy,' said the learned Cardinal, ' has too much ana- 
 logy with Christianity not to excite fear lest some minds 
 may be alienated from our religion and attach themselves to 
 Platonism.' 
 
 The sixteenth century in Italymaybe divided pretty equally 
 into two halves ; the first of which preserved the Platonic 
 traditions of the Florentine Academy, and the second stiff- 
 ened into exclusive Aristotelianism and intolerant orthodoxy. 
 In the latter there was an ecclesiastical retrogression into 
 mediEBval Scholasticism, under the double influence of the 
 new zeal for internal reform in the Church of Rome, and of 
 the external pressure of Spanish preponderance over the 
 Italian Governments, which, as in Spain itself, worked mainly 
 through the established ecclesiastical machinery. At the 
 opening of the century, the cultivated mind of Italy, in the 
 highest places of Church and State, had become all philoso- 
 phic and more than half heathen. Cardinals wrote plays, 
 and patronised pictorial and poetic art on any rather than 
 sacred subjects. Nay, Clement VII. and his Court sat out 
 the performance of MaehiaveUi's ' Mandragola,' the last scene 
 of which (the midnight soliloquy of a priestly pander) is the 
 keenest and bitterest satire ever penned by the wit of man 
 on sacerdotal hypocrisy or self-delusion at its highest and 
 most comic pitch. All that was changed, however, as far, 
 at least, as appearances went, when the Church had to set 
 her house in order against Luther and Calvin. 
 
 ' The anger of the elder Cato against the Greek philosophers was 
 even exceeded,' says M. Bartolmfess, 'by the exasperation of the new 
 censors against free thought. The degree of independence which 
 had been enjoyed by Cusa and Pomponatio was refused to Oampa- 
 nella and Vanini. Cosmo III. of Florence prohibited the printing 
 of the fine translation of Lucretius by Alexander Marchetti, as an 
 impure manual of Epicureanism. What science demanded was to 
 march unshackled, to live and speak unconstrained. The Church, on 
 the other hand, dreading lest dogma should be sapped by science, 
 naturally strove to suppress it. Thus arose a combat d, outrance 
 between two interests alike dear to man, but equallj^ exasperated 
 
GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 43 
 
 against each other. But for that fatal conflict, to what an elevation 
 might not Italian philosophy have attained ! Accordingly, these two 
 half-centuries exhibit a complete contrast. In the career of Bruno 
 that contrast manifests itself from the most various sides. That 
 imprudent speaker and writer carried on to the close of the century 
 those traditions of free utterance which had enjoyed tolerance and 
 even protection at its commencement.' 
 
 It must be admitted that Bruno used and abused to the 
 utmost a 'liberty of prophesying,' the most moderate ex- 
 ercise of which had ceased to be safe in Italy. What Vol- 
 taire -wrote of Vanini was equally true of Bruno : ' II voyagea 
 pour faire fortune et pour disputer ; mais malheureusement 
 la dispute est le chemin oppose a la fortune ; on se fait 
 autant d'ennemis irreconciliableg qu'on trouve de savants ou 
 de pedants contre lesquels on argumente.' ' 
 
 But Bruno's crowning imprudence was his habit of satire 
 and invective on the Church to which he still considered 
 himself as in some shape belonging, and which, unfortu- 
 nately, still considered him as belonging to it, at least for 
 penal animadversion. Bruno had not only been baptised a 
 Catholic but ordained a priest, and he was thus doubly 
 amenable to Church discipline, when, in his comedy, ' II 
 Candelaio,' he indulged his ribald humour on the most 
 cherished objects of Italian popular veneration : ' Chi vuole 
 agnus Dei, chi vuol granelli henedetti ? ' &c., &c., together with 
 a burlesque catalogue of Catholic relics of saints, which our 
 Protestant decorum forbids our reprinting. 
 
 ' Bruno,' says M. Bartolmtes, ' at Wittemberg could not but make 
 his obeisance to the statue of Luther. But did he forget that Catholic 
 Ingolstadt was but a few miles distant 1 His paneg)Tric on Luther 
 was meant for publication, and, without reflecting on the conse- 
 quences, he seems to have striven to surpass, in expressions of con- 
 tempt and hatred for the Papacy, the most passionate and the most 
 unmeasured utterances of Luther himself. " Who is he ?" demanded 
 Bruno, " whose name I have hitherto passed in silence ? The vicar of 
 the tyrant of hell, at once fox and lion, armed with keys and sword, 
 with fraud and force, hypocrisy and ferocity — infecting the universe 
 with a superstitious worship and an ignorance worse than brutal ! 
 
 ' DictionnaA/re PAiUsojihique, article ' Ath6isme,' sect. iii. 
 
44 GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 None dare d oppose themselves to that devouring beast when a new 
 Alcides arose to restore this fallen age, this degraded Europe, to a 
 purer and happier state." ' 
 
 And it was this same Bruno vyho, in the last years of his 
 life which he spent at liberty, proposed to lay his revised 
 and corrected works at the feet of his Holiness Clement 
 VIII., who, as he says, he has heard loves li virtuosi t to 
 lay before him his case, and seek to obtain absolution at his 
 hands for his past excesses, and permission to resume his 
 clerical habits without returning under regular religious 
 discipline ! 
 
 It would be unjust to the memory of the unfortunate 
 Nolan precursor of Galileo to leave the impression on those 
 who have not read his writings (and who in England has ?) 
 of a mere itinerant, esurient, and irreverent, not to say 
 scurrilous and blasphemous sophist. Such injustice (since 
 Bayle) Giordano Bruno has not suffered from continental 
 critics. Germany has given him no undistinguished place 
 in her voluminous histories of philosophy, and German philo- 
 sophy itself has owed some of its rapidly and incessantly dis- 
 solving views to his writings. Bruno's distinguishing faculty, 
 as a child of the southern Italian sun, was imagination. 
 That faculty, in the sixteenth century, in Italy, had matter 
 to work upon unequalled in after times, but which, in 
 Bruno's time, proved perilous stuff for philosophic handling. 
 And Bruno's imagination was rather that of a poet than of 
 a philosopher. He carried all sail and no ballast : little 
 wonder if he made shipwreck. His sympathetic but dis- 
 criminating biographer, M. Bartolmess, draws his character 
 in very impartial traits as follows : — 
 
 Endowed with a talent essentially spontaneous, Bruno seems to 
 lose his power and be thrown off his balance on all occasions where 
 patient and silent meditation is indispensable ; where the main point 
 is to ascertain, to verify, to demonstrate — not merely to affirm con- 
 fidently and conclude precipitately. Though highly instructed, he 
 was audacious rather than studious, speculative rather than obser- 
 vant ; prone rather to draw on his own ideal stock and deal in ct priori 
 reasonings, than to collect data for well-grounded conclusions from 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 45 
 
 experience, and from these, with due circumspection, deduce rules and 
 principles. He did not always care to confront the results of his 
 speculations with the observable phenomena which compose the 
 history of nature and society. He draaded, or rather disdained, to 
 apply to his own speculations that severe criticism, that unsparing 
 revision, without which the most prolific brains produce in philosophy 
 only ephemeral opinions. Science proiits by the Lights struck out — 
 the sallies hazarded — by geniuses of that kind, but cannot be said to 
 owe to them its substantial and permanent acquisitions. The most 
 solid and real service such a genius as Bruno can render is to inflame 
 the soul with a generous ardour for ideal truth. 
 
 It is a noticeable coincidence that the same Doge of 
 Venice, Pasquale Cicogna, who signed the decree, on the 
 part of the Venetian Government, for the extradition of 
 Giordano Bruno to that of Rome, had signed, a few months 
 before, the appointment of Galileo Galilei as Professor of 
 Mathenaatics in the University of Padua. Neither signature, 
 at the time it was affixed, might seem of much moment ; 
 but the proceedings which were taken against Bruno by the 
 Roman Inquisition paved the way for those afterwards taken 
 by the same tribunal against Galileo. One and the same 
 principle was involved in both cases : that principle was 
 the assumed right of the Church to control the march of 
 Science. And certainly never was science laid more open to 
 censure by its imperfectly qualified representative than in 
 the case of Bruno. So far as burning Bruno went, the 
 Church proved its power. Rome proved her power a second 
 time by condemning the Copernican doctrine in the un- 
 exceptionable shape in which that doctrine was presented 
 by Galileo. But by so doing, she discredited for ever her 
 authority in the domain of intellect by the despotic abuse of 
 that authority at the dawn of an era which would no longer 
 confound articles of faith with laws of science. 
 
 Giordano Bruno had been burnt at Rome in the sight of 
 the multitude flocking to the Eternal City from all parts of 
 Europe to celebrate the jubilee year 1600. Thirty-two years 
 afterwards Galileo was forced from under the feeble protec- 
 tion of the young Grand Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany before 
 the Roman Holy Office, to answer for his stubborn adherence 
 
46 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 to the discoveries of modern Astronomy, by which that 
 tribunal told him he had made himself vehemently suspected 
 of heresy. The treatment of Bruno, as we have already seen, 
 had been, in a manner, provoked (if that Could ha,ve justified 
 it) by the multiplied indiscretions of the Nolan knight-errant 
 of philosophy. Of the treatment of Galileo Rome herself 
 has become ashamed. 
 
 For more than two centuries ' the starry Galileo, with his 
 woes,' has engaged the world's sympathies; yet it is only 
 within the last few years that proper pains have been taken 
 to place before 'general readers the plain tale of his trials. 
 
 The most impartial review of the relations of Galileo with 
 Rome is found in the pages of his thoroughly conscientious 
 and liberal Roman Catholic biographer, Henri Martin, to 
 whom we are also indebted for the fullest estimate of the 
 scientific labours of his life. 'If Bacon,' says Sir David 
 Brewster,' 'had never lived, the student of nature would 
 have found in the writings and labours of Galileo not only 
 the boasted principles of the inductive philosophy, but also 
 their practical application to the highest ejBForts of invention 
 and discovery.' 
 
 Galileo's great glory was his resolute rebellion from time- 
 honoured tradition, and his signal inauguration of the spirit 
 and methods of modern science. 
 
 ' Galileo,' says M. Henri Martin, ' laid it down as a principle 
 always to ascend from exact and mathematically precise observation 
 of effects to positive knowledge of causes and laws. Long before 1637 
 [the date of Descartes' 'Discours de la M^thode'], long before 1620 
 [the date of Bacon's ' Novum Organon Scientiarum '], Galileo had 
 introduced by precept and example this complete and definitive 
 method of the physical sciences. He had, in so doing, to struggle 
 against the modem Peripatetics, against the d, priori method, handed 
 down from Aristotle, in the study of nature. In his " Saggiatore " 
 [Assayer], in his " Dialogues on the Two Principal Systems of the 
 World," and more especially ia his "Dialogues on the New Sciences" 
 — his last and most finished work — Galileo, in demonstrating the 
 legitimacy and efficacy of his method, lays special stress on that part 
 of it which Bacon had neglected, and without which that method 
 ' Martyrs of Science. 
 
GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 47 
 
 wovild have been impotent to regenerate the study of physical science. 
 This indispensable part of the experimental observation of physical 
 facts is the measure of quantities. 
 
 'Galileo knew that all physical objects are extended, a,nd conse- 
 quently by their nature and essence measurable, though they may 
 not always be measurable by the methods and instruments we possess ; 
 — that all physical phenomena take place in periods susceptible of 
 measure— that physical phenomena must be reducible to movements, 
 some perceptible, others inappreciable by our senses. As regarded 
 all these phenomena, he held that the right method was to measure 
 all that was measurable, and to endeavour to render measurable all 
 that was not already directly so. All who have proceeded d, priori, 
 from Aristotle to Descartes downward, have arrived at results the 
 falsity of which suffices to condemn their method. Neither ancients, 
 indeed, nor moderns made any mistake about the first principles of 
 pure mathematics, since those first principles, being necessary and 
 evident of themselves, have nothing to fear from any correction in 
 apphcation. But those who have sought to arrive at the first truths 
 of mechanics by the & priori instead of the inductive method, have 
 always deceived themselves with regard to many of those truths.' 
 
 In a letter addressed, but not sent, to the Peripatetic 
 professor, Portunio Lieeti, dictated by G-alileo at the age of 
 seventy- seven, the year before his death, he observed (and 
 the observation comprises the whole substance of his own 
 scientific teaching) : — 
 
 If the true philosophy were that which is contained in the books 
 of Aristotle, you would, in my mind, be the fii'st philosopher in the 
 world, since you seem to have every passage of that author at your 
 fingers' ends. But I verily think that the book of philosophy is the 
 book of Nature, a book which always Hes open before our eyes. 
 
 The real cause of quarrel between Galileo and the 
 authorities of his age was, that the latter sought their 
 philosophy in books, while he sought his in- facts. A blind 
 faith in Aristotle deprived men of the use of their own eyes. 
 Certain ultra-Aristotelians went the length of affirming that 
 Galileo's telescopes were so constructed as to show things 
 which in reality had no existence. He offered a reward of 
 10,000 scudi to anyone who could make such clever glasses 
 as those. Some stubbornly refused to look through his 
 
48 GIORDANO BETJNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 telescopes at all, assured as they were beforehand that they 
 never, by their aid, should see anything that Aristotle had 
 said a word about. And it was not only a few Peripatetic 
 philosophers, unversed in astronomy, who talked in this way. 
 Such language was repeated by the able astronomer Magini, 
 Professor at Bologna, and at first, also, by the learned 
 Father Clavio, who died at Rome in 1610, but died con- 
 verted to the faith (by sight) of Jupiter's satellites, the 
 phases of Venus, and the inequalities of the moon's surface. 
 Cremonini at Padua, and Libri at Pisa, refused all credence 
 to Galileo's discoveries, demonstrated as those discoveries 
 were by his telescopes. Libri died at Pisa without having 
 ceased to protest against Galileo's absurdities, or deigned to 
 look through Galileo's telescopes ; upon which the latter 
 wrote (December 10, 1610) that, as the deceased professor 
 would not look at Jupiter's satellites here, he might, perhaps, 
 take a view of them in his way to heaven. 
 
 It has often been asked — it was asked, indeed, by Galileo 
 himself — how it happened that a storm of imputations of 
 constructive heresy burst on his head after having left un- 
 visited that of the first great founder of modern astronomy, 
 Copernicus. Galileo could not, as he said, anticipate that 
 it would be believed at Rome- — as it seemed to be believed 
 by Monsignor Gherardini, Bishop of Fiesole — that the 
 doctrine of the earth's motion had been first started by a 
 living Florentine, not by a Polish canon who had been dead 
 seventy years, whose book liad been published by special 
 desire of Cardinal Schomberg, and dedicated by express per- 
 mission to Pope Paul III. But it is not diflBcult to discern 
 the causes of the different reception, by the reigning philo- 
 sophical and ecclesiastical authorities at successive epochs, 
 of identically the same scientific truths. Copernicus lay 
 already paralysed on his death-bed when his work was in- 
 trusted to Osiander for publication, and he was therefore in 
 no condition to overrule the timid precautions which his 
 above-named pupil thought requisite in order to avert the 
 wrath of the orthodox theologians and Peripatetic philo- 
 sophers of the day. Osiander's anonymous preface in no 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO, 49 
 
 manner expressed the mind of his master, who was convinced 
 as firmly, as was afterwards his illustrious Florentine suc- 
 cessor, of the solid foundation of his system in the facts of 
 the natural universe, and who would probably have been no 
 more disposed than Galileo was to handle it as a mere work- 
 ing hypothesis, which need not be received as true, or even 
 probable, but as framed solely to facilitate the calculation of 
 astronomical phenomena. The subterfuge was a childish 
 one, but it passed muster with those childish minds of 
 mature growth then occupying Papal or professorial chairs 
 and pulpits. Had Copernicus lived to wield the powers of 
 Galileo's telescope, he, instead of Galileo, might have stood 
 forth the protagonist, and have suffered as the protomartyr, 
 of modern astronomy. The conflict with the spiritual power, 
 which Galileo did not court, but found forced on him, was 
 the ' unshunned consequence ' of the scientific revolution 
 effected by aid of his telescopic discoveries. The question 
 between the two world-systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, 
 as Herr von Gebler justly remarks, had hitherto been ex- 
 clusively one for the schools. Neither the less known pre- 
 cursors of Copernicus nor Copernicus himself had ever 
 adventured openly to declare war against the Aristotelian 
 philosophy, or to overthrow, by the unanswerable evidence of 
 observed facts, the hollow fabric of physical science founded 
 on that philosophy. 
 
 They had fought with the same weapons as the Ptolemaic doctors — 
 those of the school logic. They did not possess direct evidence of 
 astronomical facts, as they did not yet possess the telescope. But 
 Galileo with his system of demonstration founded on ocular evidence 
 of the actual facts of Nature, was too formidable an antagonist to obtain 
 tolerance, from the schoolmen. The Peripatetic philosophers had no 
 armour of proof to parry the blows of arguments addressed to the 
 understanding on the direct evidence of the senses ; and their ad- 
 herents accordingly, if they would not give up their cause as lost, 
 must call in aid other allies than those of the schools. They caught 
 accordingly at the readiest means within reach. To reinforce the 
 tottering authority of Aristotle, they invoked the unassailable authority 
 
 of Scripture. 
 
 We must not ascribe this mainly to mere party spirit, or mere 
 
 E 
 
50 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 personal malevolence. The bulk of tlie learned class, which still ad- 
 hered to the old-world system, and had hitherto carelessly regarded 
 Copernicus, with his new theory apparently unsupported by visible 
 proofs, as a mere dreaming speculator, now stood aghast at Galileo's 
 telescopic discoveries, which apparently threatened to overthrow all 
 that had hitherto been believed. The learned, and still more the 
 half-learned, world of Italy felt the solid ground shaking beneath 
 their feet, and the threatened downfall of Aristotle's authority of 
 three thousand years must, it seemed to them, draw after it the over- 
 throw from the very foundation of all that had hitherto been held as 
 truth in physics, mathematics, philosophy, and religion. 
 
 If Gralileo had been content with making a mere raree- 
 show of his telescopes, or a mere lucrative trade in them, he 
 might have been petted and patronised to the end of the 
 chapter at Rome, as he had been at Venice and Florence. 
 He need have incurred no risk of persecution for truths he 
 might have forborne to enunciate. Bat he would have missed 
 the main scope of his life, which was simply to demonstrate 
 those truths. What Galileo's critics really make matter of 
 reproach is his manly frankness and sincerity. Having a 
 plain tale to tell, he saw no reason why he should not plainly 
 tell it. Having no 'heretical pravity' to conceal, he too 
 sanguinely anticipated that he could engage the Roman 
 hierarchy in the pure interest of scientific truth. 
 
 It was ecclesiastical rather than philosophical favour 
 that Galileo felt he had most need to conciliate. It was 
 the opinion which might be formed at Rome of his views of 
 the Copernican system about which he was most solicitous ; 
 for, should Rome prove hostile, he knew too well that it 
 would be difficult or impossible for him to exercise with 
 freedom the function of an expounder of those views in 
 Italy. 
 
 ' Belisario Viuta, secretary of the Grand Duke' [of Tuscany], says 
 M. Berti, ' wrote to Galileo, that so soon as the truth of his specu- 
 lations on the Medicean planets [the satellites of Jupiter, which 
 Galileo had so named in compliment to his Tuscan patrons] should 
 be confirmed at Rome, the new constitution of the universe might be 
 said to be established for all the world, and would be assured of 
 obtaining the concurrence of all mathematicians and all astrologers. 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 61 
 
 This assent of Rome Galileo felt to be of such moment, that he was 
 prepared to make every effort to obtain it. He assiduously cultivated 
 friendly relations with the cardinals, the monsignori, the prelates. 
 But the quarter where he chiefly aimed to conquer opinion was the 
 CoUegio Romano, as well because there were amongst its members 
 not a few men well versed in science, as because it constituted a sort 
 of theologico-philosophical tribunal.' 
 
 The prospects of success for tlie new science at the metro- 
 polis of Latin Christendom seemed at first promising. 
 
 ' "Would we form an idea,' says M. Berti, ' how Galileo was appre- 
 ciated and courted at Rome, we must figure him to ourselves in the 
 vigour of life, at the age of forty-seven, with ample forehead, grave 
 countenance, expressive of profound thought, fine figure and very 
 distinguished manners, clear, elegant, and pleasing, and at times 
 imaginative and vivid' in discourse. The letters of the time super- 
 abound in his praise. Cardinals, patricians, and other persons in 
 authority, vied with each other for the honour of having him in their 
 houses, and hearing him discourse. A choice society of men, eminent 
 for learning or high public ofiice, were in the habit of assembling 
 round Cardinal Bandini in the palace of the Qairinal. In the gardens 
 of that palace, which commanded a great part of the city of Rome, and 
 the view from which extends over a vast horizon, Galileo, in the 
 fine evenings of April, exhibited through his telescope the satellites 
 of Jupiter, and discoursed on the subject of his discoveries. It seems 
 that some of the Fathers of the Collegio Romano came also to these 
 meetings ; and by day Galileo, in these and other places, directed 
 observation to the spots in the sun. Federico Cesi, the young presi- 
 dent of the Academy of the Lincei [lynx-eyed], lavished on him the 
 most affectionate tokens of esteem and friendship. Contemporary 
 writers relate with admiration the sumptuous dinner given by Cesi to 
 Galileo at his villa of Malvasia, on the summit of the Janiculum, not 
 far from the gate of St. Pancrazio, and at which the most distinguished 
 persons in Rome were present. Towards the end of dinner, Galileo 
 having pointed his telescope in the direction of St. John Lateran, the 
 guests were enabled to read the inscription over the portico, three 
 [Italian] miles off", and then, turniug the telescope to heaven, they 
 descried to their full satisfaction the satellites of Jupiter, with other 
 celestial marvels. On that occasion, Galileo, to satisfy the curiosity 
 of the guests, took the telescope to pieces, and allowed every one at 
 discretion to examine the construction, and to take the measure of the 
 lenses. 
 
 ' A number of eminent men in learning and science used to assemble 
 
 E 2 
 
52 GIOEDANO BKUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 nightly at the Tuscan ambassador's, where Galileo at that time 
 resided, to look through bis telescope at Venus and the "tricorporal " 
 Saturn. One evening, when the clouds interrupted their view of the 
 stars, they began disputing, as their nightly wont was, on the subject 
 of light. Galileo said to Lagalla, that he would let himself be 
 immersed in ever so dark a dungeon, and kept there ever so long a 
 time on bread and water, if only, on coming out, it were granted him 
 to understand the nature of light.' 
 
 TMs conversation, and others of the like description, are 
 recorded in contemporary narratives of the first sojoarn of 
 Galileo in the Eternal City, in 1611. He was to revisit it 
 on four later occasions — in 1615, 1624, 1630, and 1633 — the 
 first three of these latter visits being voluntary, the last 
 compulsory, on the peremptory and reiterated summons of 
 Pope Urban VIII. to present himself in person for examina- 
 tion before the Holy Inquisition. 
 
 Amongst the figures w^hich we find crossing the stage 
 during Galileo's first visit to Rome, was that of Cardinal 
 Bellarmine, then full of years and honours. On April 19, 
 1611, Bellarmine wrote to the Reverend Fathers of the 
 Collegio Romano, to ask if in any manner there had been 
 brought under their cognisance the celestial observations, 
 which an able mathematician had been making by means of 
 an instrument called cannone or occhiale, by which means he 
 [Bellarmine] himself had seen some marvellous sights in the 
 Moon and Venus. Clavio, a recent and zealous convert to 
 Copernicanism, Griemberger, Oddo Malcotio, and Paolo Lem- 
 bio, replied officially, on the 24th of the same month, that 
 they had themselves verified all the celestial marvels to which 
 his letter referred. 
 
 ' Although,' says M. Berti, ' we are ignorant for what reason 
 Bellarmine addressed that question to the College, we shall probably 
 not be far from the truth in supposing that the reply requested in such 
 solemn form, and in writing, was not asked of the College solely for 
 his own information, but for that of his colleagues of the Inquisition.' 
 
 What, we may ask on our part, had Galileo come to Rome 
 for, but to get the stamp of authority put by the Collegio 
 Romano on his virtual adhesion to the Copernican system in 
 
aiOEDANO BEUNO AND GAIilLEO. 63 
 
 his Nunzio Sidereo ? The ' able mathematiciaii ' had been 
 desirous of bringing his new and strange views especially 
 before that college, as containing other able mathematicians, 
 who could speak from chairs of authority. And this end, 
 which Galileo had expressly aimed at, he fully attained. 
 The favourable answer returned by the CoUegio Romano to 
 the demand thus made of them was no sooner published than 
 Galileo's friends at Rome hastened to make it known farther, 
 exulting in the belief that the stamp of orthodoxy had now 
 been set authentically upon the master's most startling astro- 
 nomical innovations, and that they might henceforth freely 
 discuss his discoveries and the questions raised by them. 
 Monsignor Dini confidentially intimated to Cosimo Sassetti 
 that the Jesuits were great friends of Galileo. The Tuscan 
 ' Orator ' [Ambassador] at Rome presented Galileo to the 
 Pope [Paul v.], who received him most graciously, not suffer- 
 ing him to say a word before him in a kneeling posture. 
 Encouraged by these favourable indications, and taking 
 occasion from the opposition to his discoveries stirred up by 
 some Perugian monks, Galileo addressed a letter to Monsignor 
 Dini, not only exposing with all the force of logic, and all 
 the keenness of sarcasm, the fallacy of the argumentations 
 attempted by his monkish opponents, but putting in the 
 clearest light the principles of criticism in their application 
 to science. From Galileo's highly obnoxious proposition, 
 that the Earth was a, planet, his simple or subtle opponents 
 sought to fasten on him the gratuitous inference that all the 
 other planets must be inhabited by beings of our own species. 
 It was then asked whether these had descended from Adam, 
 and whether they had embarked with Noah. 
 
 The first open war on Galileo's astronomical innovations 
 was declared by monkish ignorance. The irregular-regular 
 monastic militia of Papacy were the first to beat the ' drum 
 ecclesiastic,' and essay to rally round them the great army 
 of blockheads in a new crusade against light and knowledge. 
 On the fourth Sunday of Advent, 1614, Oaccini, a Dominican 
 monk, preached a sermon in the church of Santa Maria 
 Novella, at Florence, on the astronomical miracle of Joshua, 
 
54 GIOKDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 taking his text from the Vulgate — ' Viri Galilwi, quid statis 
 aspicientes in caelum ? ' This punning text was followed by a 
 furious sermon against all mathematics, which the preacher 
 declared were an invention of the devil, and against all 
 mathematicians, who, he said, should be excluded from all 
 Christian States. Father Maraffi, a Dominican friend and 
 admirer of Galileo, immediately wrote to him to express his 
 disgust at this abuse of the pulpit — the more so, he said, as 
 its author was a brother of his own order, and he should 
 have to share the responsibility of all the stupidities {tutte le 
 hestialita) which might be, and were, committed by thirty or 
 forty thousand monks. 
 
 Father Caccini, instead of being censured or punished, 
 was invited to Eome, as master and bachelor at the convent 
 of Santa Maria della Minerva ; and another brother of the 
 same order, Father Lorini, secretly wrote to the Roman Holy 
 Ofi&ce, not expressly naming Galileo, but denouncing the 
 Galileists, who affirm that the earth moves and the sun stands 
 still. Father Lorini declares that the Galileists therein 
 assert an opinion visibly contrary on all points to Holy 
 Scripture, that they trample under foot the entire philosophy 
 of Aristotle, and vent a thousand impertinences only to show 
 their wit. He concludes by quoting the sermon of Caccini 
 against ' the Galilseans,' which was the sure way to get the 
 Father summoned as a witness before the Holy Office — as he 
 accordingly was, and added a quantity of second and third- 
 hand hearsay, the greater part of which was too worthless 
 to find favour even with an Inquisitorial tribunal, and the 
 rest irrelevant to the charges in course of collection against 
 Galileo by the underground agencies of the Holy Office of 
 Eome. 
 
 M. Henri Martin here abruptly asks — 'What was it 
 these Cardinals of the Inquisition really meant ? ' MafPeo 
 Barberino, Del Monte, Bellarmine, were well-wishers to 
 Galileo personally. They meant, in a word, to spare the 
 man while stifling the system. This was not, however, 
 what Galileo wanted, or would willingly submit to. In 
 letters to Monsignor Dini, he avowed that the earth's double 
 
GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 66 
 
 movement was for him, as it had been for Copernicus, a 
 serious and positive doctrine, not a mere hypothesis, which 
 might be regarded as false or indifferent. In a justification 
 of himself, drawn up by Galileo at the period before us, not 
 for publicity, but for communication ' to some wise and just 
 persons,' he asks — 
 
 What could be expected to be the consequeBce of an authoritative 
 condemnation of the Copernican system'} Such a condemnation 
 would not convince men of learning and science, who do not feel 
 themselves at liberty to believe the contrary of those truths of Nature 
 which observation and experiment enable them, in a manner, to see 
 with their eyes and touch with their hands. It would, therefore, be 
 necessary to prohibit all study whatever of astronomical science — thAt 
 is to say, all study of those works of Nature in which the power and 
 wisdom of God display themselves with most magnificence. 
 
 It has been assumed in some quarters, and the assumption 
 is endorsed byM. Martin, that G-alileo's second visit to Eome 
 (at the close of 1616) was not quite voluntary, as had been 
 his first in 1611. According to these reports, he had been 
 secretly summoned to present himself before the Inquisition. 
 Galileo's own account, given to the Inquisitors themselves in 
 1633, as well as in all his letters to his friends, was, that this 
 second visit, like his first, was made by him entirely of his 
 own accord. Now, setting aside for the moment all reliance 
 on Galileo's habitual frankness and veracity, is it credible 
 that he should make a false statement on such a point to his 
 judges, who had immediate means of checking it by referring 
 to the records of their own ofSce? It is not improbable, 
 however, that he may have been invited by his friends in the 
 congregation to come to Eome to defend his writings in 
 person against the more serious of the charges which were 
 brought against them. We may here remark that it was 
 always on the provocation and challenge of his assailants 
 that Galileo meddled at all with theological controversy. 
 What excited their anger was, not that he was heterodox in 
 theology, but that he warned off theology from ground which 
 was not properly her domain. His counsels to Theology to 
 leave Science unmolested were precisely such as might be 
 
56 GIOKDANO BEUKO AND GALILEO. 
 
 addressed, in our own age, by rational believers to irrational 
 zealots. Unfortunately, the sincere or pretended zealots in 
 tlie days of Galileo, when Aristotle was cited witli such 
 grotesque audacity in support of Scripture, were too strong 
 for the small minority of enlightened students of Nature, 
 whose religion was scientific, and whose science was religious. 
 Galileo's second visit to Rome appeared afterwards to 
 have been the crisis of his fate, the turning-point of all his 
 after-life from prosperous to adverse fortunes. The great 
 mistake he made did not consist, as the late Sir David 
 Brewster would have it, in any wanton disregard or defiance 
 of ' the laws of the Church,' nor ' bold and inconsiderate 
 expression of his opinions ' through the channel of the press 
 (the two documents, addressed, the one to Father Castelli, 
 the other to the Dowager Grand Duchess of Tuscany, which 
 gave his enemies the first handle taken against him, were 
 not printed at all) ; — his great mistake was his too sanguine 
 persuasion that he could get those who wielded the highest 
 powers of the Church at that epoch to see that neither her 
 laws nor her honest interests were concerned in the question 
 whether the sun moved round the earth, or the earth round 
 the sun. Such was Galileo's own intimate and sincere con- 
 viction ; and it was his sublime confidence in the force of 
 truth that inspired his efforts to bring round Popes and 
 Cardinals, who had other objects in view, to share that con- 
 viction. Sir David Brewster, following Mallet Du-Pan, and 
 other such untrustworthy authorities, and taking no note of 
 the facts, which were not then in their entirety before the 
 world, affirms that Galileo, to be safe, needed but to have 
 abstained from turning a philosophical into a theological 
 question ; and that, had he concluded his ' system of the 
 world' with the sage peroration of his apologist Campanella, 
 and dedicated it to the Pope, it might have stood in the 
 library of the Vatican beside the cherished, though equally 
 heretical, volume of Copernicus. 
 
 ' The cherished, though equally heretical, volume of 
 Copernicus ! ' Why, the volume of Copernicus was put on 
 the Eoman Index by a decree dated March 5, 1616, and 
 
aiORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 67 
 
 remained on the Index till August 16, 1820 ! The doctrine 
 contained in that work, of the sun being the centre, and the 
 earth not being the centre of our system— the mobility of 
 the latter and fixity of the former in that system— had been 
 declared, in February 1616, by the Cardinals of the Eoman 
 Inquisition to be ' absurd, heretical, and contrary to Holy 
 Scripture.' That was the position on which Rome took her 
 stand at the epoch of Galileo's second visit. No other 
 ground could be assigned for any admonitory (not to say 
 penal) procedure against Galileo, than the ground laid in 
 the secret passing of that decree of the Inquisition, since no 
 other offence could be imputed to him than that he had 
 founded his theory, in his recently published Letters on the 
 Spots in the Sun, on that of Copernicus. With similar 
 secrecy, the decree of the Inquisition condemning the Coper- 
 nican doctrine was communicated to Galileo by Cardinal 
 Bellarmine, and a promise was exacted from him that he 
 would, in future, neither hold nor teach that doctrine in any 
 shape. Bellarmine himself, and Maffeo Barberini, after- 
 wards Pope Urban VIII., were personal friends of Galileo ; 
 they had no sympathy with the ignorant or hypocritical 
 zealotry of the Caccinis and Lorinis ; and, at the time we 
 are speaking of, they inspired the Inquisition with their 
 own friendly dispositions, so far as regarded the person of 
 the philosopher who had alarmed their orthodoxy. Accord- 
 ingly, Galileo's name was not even mentioned in its decree 
 condemning Copernicus, and Cardinal Barberini afterwards, 
 when Pope, in 1633, complained vehemently of ill-usage and 
 ingratitude on the part of Galileo after he had helped him, 
 as he said, out of his scrape in 1616. That Galileo could 
 not be content to hold his tongue, petted and pensioned as 
 he was both by a Pope and by a Grand Duke, was a mystery 
 of iniquity and perversity that his too gracious Holiness 
 could not have anticipated, and could not be expected to 
 pardon. 
 
 Those who censure Galileo for failing to keep his secret 
 promise to Bellarmine, seem to forget that, for sixteen or 
 seventeen years, he kept as much of that promise as could 
 
58 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 well be expected — that is to say, lie forbore, tliougli it was 
 pain and grief to him, from further publications on the 
 obnoxious and tabooed subject. It was not till his friend, 
 MafiFeo Barberini, had climbed to the highest place in the 
 Roman hierarchy with a diplomatic dexterity only equalled 
 by his autocratical arrogance when he had once reached it, 
 that Galileo, by a second sanguine mistake, supposed he 
 might give himself license to evade the inhibition which had 
 secretly been laid on him at so great a distance of time. 
 He had hastened to Rome, on the urgent advice of his friend 
 Prince Cesi, the President of the Lyncsean Academy, to con- 
 gratulate MafFeo Barberini on his elevation to the Papal 
 chair, and was received by the new Pope with an eager 
 cordiality which might well inspire confidence. The Floren- 
 tine philosopher, in his single-minded devotion to his main 
 object in life, had not sufficiently studied the character of 
 the man he had now to deal with. Everything depended 
 with Urban on hitting his humour or caprice of the moment. 
 'No Pope,' says Eanke,' 'ever raised such arrogant claims to 
 personal respect.' And nothing that he could deem dis- 
 respect to aught he had ever dictated was likely to be viewed 
 by the new Pontiff in any other light than that of ' contempt 
 of court' — and of himself as the supreme head of that court 
 — to which, and to whom, were to be submitted with implicit 
 deference all matters bearing on its sovereign spiritual 
 authority, whether directly or indirectly. Pope Urban had 
 said to Cardinal HohenzoUer — who repeated to Gralileo — 
 that the Church had not condemned this system (the Coper- 
 nican system), and that it should not be condemned as here- 
 tical, but only as rash ; and he added that ' there was no 
 fear of anyone undertaking to prove that it must neces- 
 sarily be true.' 
 
 In half-a-dozen audiences, which his Holiness had vouch- 
 safed to grant Galileo, this very subject of the Copernican 
 system had been discussed between them with perfect free- 
 dom ; and it was natural to infer from the Pope's expressions 
 to HohenzoUer, that he would be disposed to tolerate the 
 ' Eanke's History of the Popes, vol. ii. p. 559. 
 
GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 59 
 
 like freedom of discussion in print, provided it were pushed 
 to no positive or decisive conclusion. Upon that hint 
 Galileo wrote and printed. Papal vengeance pursued him to 
 the last hour of his life. 
 
 If Galileo misunderstood his patron, it is only charitable 
 to believe that Urban understood no better his protege, soon 
 to become his victim. How, indeed, should they have 
 understood each other ? The personal characters and aims 
 were as widely different as the personal positions of the two 
 men who came thus suddenly and unexpectedly in collision. 
 Galileo was solely intent on extending the empire of science 
 — Urban on asserting the authority and enlarging the 
 estates of the Church. While the former sought worldly 
 means so far only as they were indispensable to obtain 
 leisure for his researches, the latter mainly (that we may 
 not say solely) made use of his spiritual power and prestige to 
 promote the temporal aggrandisement of his See and his 
 family, which had indeed become the all but exclusive object 
 of the Popes for two centuries. 
 
 It has been supposed that Urban took personal offence 
 at the imagined application to himself of the name of Sim- 
 plicio, which Galileo had given to the Ptolemaic champion 
 in his Dialogues on 'The Two Principal Systems of the 
 World.' The other two interlocutors bore real names — those 
 of the Florentine Salviati and the Venetian Sangredo, friends 
 of Galileo, the former of whom personates the true {i.e. 
 Copernican) philosopher in the discussion, and the latter 
 intervenes as an umpire between the combatants. The 
 Pope had, indeed, sycophants enough about him, capable of 
 suggesting the injurious idea that the third Ptolemaic inter- 
 locutor was meant for himself. But he would have well 
 deserved the name of Simplicio if he could really have 
 believed this when he found leisure, which was probably not 
 at first, to read the Dialogues. What was, however, true, and 
 scarcely less calculated to exasperate his imperious Holiness, 
 was that Galileo had put — and could not help putting— into 
 the mouth of Simplicio arguments which Urban had held to 
 himself in apology for the old astronomy. Galileo had, how- 
 
60 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 ever, carefully guarded against seeming to give tbose argu- 
 ments as Simplicio's, but made him cite them as those of 
 ' a man of great learning and of high eminence.' Personal 
 offence there was none in such a citation ; but offence to 
 Papal infallibility, and to the rules of good courtiership, 
 there certainly was in the fact that, instead of accepting 
 Urban's arguments as unanswerable, G-alileo made his Sal- 
 viati answer them. Hinc illw irce. Urban VIII. was no 
 stiff Aristotelian. A Pope who had ' forced the songs and 
 apophthegms of the Old and the New Testament into 
 Horatian metres, the song of praise of the aged Simeon into 
 Sapphic strophes," certainly was not chargeable with taking 
 grave matters in too solemn earnest. And, it must be added, 
 such matters, whether theological or philosophical, were 
 those which formed the smallest portion of his mental con- 
 cerns either before or after his elevation to the Papal chair. 
 He was, while rising to power, above all an accomplished 
 coui'tier and diplomatist ; when he had reached its summit, 
 he was the most imperious and unscrupulous of priestly 
 princes. What was true he had little or no leisure to inves- 
 tigate ; what was expedient he regarded solely from a secular 
 point of view. Maffeo Barberini's stepping-stone to Papal 
 sovereignty had been through the Court of France ; his policy 
 as Pope was framed on the model of Richelieu's, and was no 
 less cynically indifferent to Catholic interests than that of 
 his great master. It is impossible to credit him with any 
 other species or semblance of zeal for the Church than that 
 which consisted in flaunting her banners and parading her 
 cause while fighting his own battles. ' His favourite notion,' 
 says Eanke,^ ' was that the States of the Church must be 
 secured by fortifications and become formidable by their own 
 arms.' This was the man whom Galileo had hoped to inte- 
 rest in scientific star-gazing, and to find open to conviction 
 on points he had once determined, not by thought, but by 
 will. 
 
 The Pope, it is said, did not immediately get a copy of 
 
 ' Ranke, History of the Popes, vol. ii. p. 558. 
 ^ History of the Popes, vol. ii. p. 554. 
 
GIOEDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 61 
 
 in 
 
 the new-published ' Dialogues,' which had been printed 
 Florence by a stroke of something like Machiavellic diplo- 
 macy, after the Eoman censorship had been coaxed or cajoled 
 into an imprimatur. It may be doubted whether he im- 
 mediately found time to read them. But he saw at once, or 
 was made to see by those round him, an affront to his au- 
 thority in the attempt, in any shape, at any further discussion 
 of a subject on which he considered Galileo, by his promise 
 to Bellarmine, as having, in a manner, been bound over to 
 keep the peace. His indignation, says M. Berti, was aroused 
 so strongly, 'that the book and its author would both have 
 been brought without delay before the Holy Office, if the 
 intercession of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the urgent 
 representations of his " Orator " at Eome, had not prevailed 
 with Urban to nominate, in the first instance, a special 
 commission to examine and report on the book before taking 
 further proceedings.' But le diahle n'y perdait rien. The 
 Commission, of course carefully packed, made a report soon 
 after to his Holiness, in which it accumulated all the matters 
 of charge that could be brought against Galileo, as well for 
 the act of publication of the obnoxious ' Dialogues,' as for 
 the manner in which the questions broached therein were 
 handled. On receiving this report. Urban lost no time in 
 ordering the Inquisition of Florence to intimate his Holi- 
 ness's command to Galileo to appear in person not later than 
 the month of October (the rescript was issued in Septem- 
 ber) before the commissary-general of the Holy OfSce in 
 Home. 
 
 This imperious summons struck Galileo with consterna- 
 tion, and was highly displeasing to the young Grand Duke 
 Ferdinand, who had just succeeded Galileo's old patron 
 Cosmo. The Venetian Republic would have opposed a firm 
 front to Rome on such a demand ; but Ferdinand was young 
 and irresolute, and the Duchess and Dowager Duchess had 
 been thoroughly indoctrinated by their spiritual directors 
 against all ' vain knowledge and false philosophy.' Galileo's 
 infirm health had furnished excuse for delay in obeying the 
 Papal mandate ; but that mandate was repeated in still more 
 
62 GIOKDANO BEUNO A"ND GALILEO. 
 
 peremptory terms, and finally the Pope sent orders to th.e 
 Inquisitor of Florence that, so soon as Galileo's physical con- 
 dition permitted, he was to be brought in irons to Rome. 
 Ferdinand wrote to him from Pisa on January 11, 1633, that 
 it had become necessary for him to obey the Papal summons, 
 but that he would place at his disposal one of the grand- 
 ducal litters and a trustworthy guide, and would allow him 
 to take up his residence at the Tuscan embassy in Rome. No 
 Italian prince of that period, says Herr Gebler, would have 
 acted otherwise. No one of them would have had the 
 courage or independence to meet with a veto the Pope's 
 demand for the extradition of an eminent subject. Venice 
 alone would have acted on the axiom laid down by Paul Sarpi 
 on the sovereign power of the State, and would have asserted 
 that power against all sacerdotal pretensions to set that of 
 the Church over it, and to execute ecclesiastical justice on 
 the subject of an independent dominion. 
 
 There was a sad contrast between Galileo's first and last 
 visit to Rome — the first a triumph, the last a torture, moral 
 if not physical. There was a sad contrast, within a much 
 briefer period, between the countenance turned towards him 
 by Urban on his accession, and that of the same pontiff so 
 soon averted in implacable wrath on the first umbrage given 
 by the philosopher to the Pontiff's pride of power and of 
 wisdom more than human. 
 
 The truth appears to be that Urban VIII., in the per- 
 sistent animosity he showed against Galileo (while professing 
 all the while to retain friendly sentiments towards him), was 
 a good deal moved as well by the instigations of intolerant 
 councillors as by the consciousness of having gone too far 
 previously in the direction of tolerance. He had lavished 
 his most ostentatious patronage on the Florentine philoso- 
 pher. He had expressed his opinion that the Copernican 
 system could not be condemned as heretical, but only as rash. 
 And now he found the representative man of that rash system 
 again rushing with redoubled rashness into print, sub- 
 stantially, though not avowedly, as its apologist. 
 
 In the mean time, those who had the Pope's ear had per- 
 
GIOEDAJSTO ■ BEUNO AND GALILEO. 63 
 
 suaded him that its propagation was in a high degree perilous 
 to the Church. Urban VIII., like a priestly Louis XIV., 
 was ready at any moment to exclaim ' L'Eglise, c'est moi ! ' 
 Eanke states that, ' if it was proposed to him to take coun- 
 sel of the college, he replied that he understood more than 
 an the cardinals put together.' i He had, however, precluded 
 himself from proceeding by direct means against Galileo as 
 an offender against the laws of the Church. He had him- 
 self conceded that the Copernican system could not be con- 
 demned as heretical. The very work, which and whose 
 author he had now resolved to crush, had received the im- 
 primatur of his own censors of the press at Eome. The only 
 course open to him was to employ his dmes damnSes of the 
 Inquisition to say and do for him all that he deemed necessary 
 to be said and done to intimidate Galileo and his Copernican 
 sectaries into submission and silence. Accordingly, as we 
 have seen, he summoned Galileo to appear before the Holy 
 OflB.ee, but took care not to affix his Papal signature to any 
 of their proceedings, though he presided in person at several 
 of their sittings. No wonder if, among the ten men selected 
 to do this dirty work for him, three — amongst them the Pope's 
 nephew, Francesco Barberini — withheld their signatures 
 from the sentence. That sentence, as a specimen of the sup- 
 pressio veri and suggedio falsi, is perhaps unparalleled even in 
 Roman ecclesiastical Latin. It is given in extenso at page 
 143 of M. Berti's Appendix, and sums up as follows : — 
 
 ' Dicimus, pronunciamus, judicamus et declaramus, te Galilseum 
 supradictum, ob ea quse dediicta sunt in prooessu scripturse, et quae tu 
 confessus es ut supra, te ipsum reddidisse huic Sancto Officio vehementer 
 suspectum de hceresi, hoc est quod credideris et tenueris dootrinam 
 falsam et contrariam Sacris ac Divinis Scripturis, Solem videlicet esse 
 centrum orbis terrse, et eum non moveri ab Oriente ad Occidentem, et 
 Ten-am moveri, nee esse centrum Mundi, et posse teneri ac defendi 
 tanquam, probabUem opinionem aliquam, postquam declarata ac de- 
 finitafuerit contraria Sacra Scripturm ; et consequenter te incurrisse 
 omnes censuras et poenas a Sacris Canonibus et aliis Constitutionibus 
 generalibus et particularibus contra bujusmodi delinquentes statutas 
 et promulgatas.' 
 
 1 Sistory of the Popes, vol. ii. p. 556. 
 
6|. GIORDANO BEUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 It is cliaracteristic of Inquisitorial justice in all ages, that 
 ' vehement suspicion of heresy ' is here regarded as equiva- 
 lent to proof of heresy ; and that Galileo, having been stated 
 to have come under that suspicion, should be assumed to 
 have ' incurred all the censures and punishments appointed 
 and proclaimed against such delinquents.' Without dwelling 
 on that assumption, by whom, may we ask, had the Coperni- 
 can theory been declared and defined to be contrary to Holy 
 Scripture ? ' By the Pope, speaking ex cathedra for the 
 Church Universal ? No such thing ; but by the Congrega- 
 tion of the Inquisition — a body incompetent to 'declare or 
 define anything of the sort. 
 
 It was Pope Urban throughout that urged the Inquisition 
 to exercise its utmost rigour against Galileo. He was not 
 more intent on seizing with the secular arms of horse, foot, 
 and artillery the territories of his neighbours to enrich his 
 nephews, than on stretching his spiritual authority to the 
 utmost to frighten or coerce a defenceless philosopher into 
 restoring the sun's motion and arresting the earth's — so far 
 as words could do it. Much has been said, with something 
 less than justice, about the abjectness of Galileo's abjuration. 
 His Roman Catholic biographer, M. Henri Martin, handles 
 the matter, in our judgment, more equitably. We make no 
 apology for rather a long extract : — 
 
 The submissive language and attitude of Galileo before the Inqui- 
 sition were enjoined upon him by his feeble protector, the Grand 
 Duke of Tuscany, and were likewise counselled by all his friends, 
 of whom we have letters. Niccolini, the friendly Tuscan ambassador 
 at Home, relates in his correspondence with his court the prolonged 
 and deep dejection in which Galileo was plunged, after reluctantly 
 giving his promise to comply with these counsels. We may add 
 that in the submissive attitude he assumed throughout his trial, he 
 conformed also to the counsels of the Venetian Fra Micanzio, the friend 
 and successor of Fra Paolo Sarpi. Such was the pliability of the 
 firmest characters in Italy of the seventeenth century. 
 
 Far from imagining with Sir Brewster that the danger for Galileo 
 lay in submission, we must not suppose that he yielded to a vain fear. 
 He knew how two condemned heretics had been treated at Rome, the 
 one only thu-ty-two years, the other only eight years before his trial. 
 
GIOEDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 65 
 
 He must have had in recollection Giordano Bruno, burned alive at 
 Rome under Clement VIII. in 1600, and Marco Antonio de Dominis, 
 ■who died in imprisonment before trial in the Castle of St. Angelo, 
 bvit was condemned after death, and whose exhumed body was burned 
 with his writings at Rome under Urban VIII., in 1624. Galileo was 
 no heretic like Bruno, an ex-Dominican monk, who had openly re- 
 nounced Catholicism at Geneva, and had publicly taught not only the 
 system of Copernicus and the plurality of worlds inhabited by men, 
 but the doctrine of metempsychosis and a sort of pantheism. Galileo 
 was not a relapsed heretic like the learned mathematician and physical 
 philosopher Dominis, ex- Archbishop of Spalatro, and afterwards Pro- 
 testant canon at Windsor, who returned to the Catholic Church, but 
 was again accused of Protestant doctrine. Nevertheless, the sentence 
 passed in 1633 against Galileo, without exactly giving him, as a 
 ground of condemnation, the designation of a relapsed heretic, implied 
 that designation in the preamble of the sentence and in the act of 
 abjuration ; so as, in effect, to stigmatise Galileo's doctrine as a 
 heresy, declared such in 1616, and Galileo himself by consequence as 
 a heretic, who had received a secret personal warning in 1616, had 
 relapsed afterwards into heresy in 1632, and was now pardoned solely 
 on condition of abjuration and penance. If Galileo had refused to 
 abjure a doctrine thus described as heretical, he would have had 
 to fear that the designation of relapsed and impenitent heretic would 
 have been applied in his case as in that of Bruno, drawing like conse- 
 quences after it. I am convinced, indeed, that he would not have 
 undergone the last punishment for his pretended crime; neither 
 Urban VIII. nor his inquisitors would have gone quite that length. 
 But he would have been shut up for all the rest of his life, as a 
 dangerous and incorrigible innovator, in the prisons of the Holy 
 Office. 
 
 The illusory pardon vouchsafed by Rome to Galileo, in 
 consideration of his not less illusory abjuration, is described 
 in all its detail of petty and minute vexations in the several 
 works before us, each of which is, in its own way, worth 
 study. What Rome did to Galileo is now before the world 
 in its minutest circumstances. Let her have full credit for 
 what, by special grace and favour, she left undone. An 
 infirm old man of seventy, stricken with grievous maladies, 
 whose labours and discoveries h3,d done honour to Italy in 
 every realm of Europe, was neither burned at the stake, nor 
 thrown into the dungeons of the Holy Office, nor stretched 
 on its rack. In other respects, the sentence of condemnation 
 
66 GIORDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 
 
 passed on Galileo formed no exception to the rule again laid 
 down in principle by the Infallible Head of the Infallible 
 Church in the age we live in,' and only not now carried into 
 execution by its secular arm, because the secular arm is no 
 longer now at Rome's disposal. 
 
 The nine years of life which remained for Galileo after 
 his abjuration were employed to good purpose in bringing 
 out his ' Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze,' which has been 
 generally considered, as it was by himself, his chef-d^ ceume, 
 though keeping entirely oif the vexed question of his great 
 astronomical discoveries. Watched as he was by all the eyes 
 of Papal espionage till his own were closed in total blind- 
 ness, Galileo contrived to effect the republication, in Holland 
 and Germany, of those condemned discoveries which Rome 
 had done her best, or worst, to suppress, but of which she 
 only, for the moment, succeeded in robbing Italy of the full 
 honour, though to Italy belonged the genius that made them. 
 Galileo lived to his last hour a Martyr, that is to say, an 
 unceasing and unresting Witness to Science ; and Rome may 
 be thankful that he did not directly die her martyr. But 
 she brought his grey hairs with sorrow to the grave, pursued 
 him to death, and after death, with the vindictive vigilance 
 of her Inquisitorial emissaries ; and only did not, because 
 she could not arrest, while life remained, the workings of 
 that indomitable and irrepressible intellect. 
 
 We cannot conclude without some brief notice of the 
 two most recent transcripts of the Vatican MSS. containing 
 the successive procedures in the case of Galileo, which have 
 been published since the preceding pages were written. 
 These transcripts were made in the course of last year, 
 almost simultaneously, but without concert — apparently, 
 indeed, without the one writer having distinct knowledge of 
 what the other was doing — by M. Henri de I'Epinois, who 
 was first in the field in the independent investigation of 
 these documents, so far back as 1867, and by Herr von Geb- 
 
 • The foregoing observations were written before the accession of the 
 present Pope, and refer, of course, to the too notorious Encyclicals of his 
 predecessor. 
 
GIOEDANO BRUNO AND GALILEO. 67 
 
 ler, to whose previous publication, entitled ' Galileo Galilei 
 und die Eomische Curie,' we have been indebted for much 
 valuable material on the subject of our present review. 
 
 The recent history of these Vatican MSS. is- curious. 
 Early in the present century, during the French occupation 
 of Eome under the first Napoleon, they were abstracted from 
 the secret archives of the Vatican, and brought to Paris, 
 where they remained (to borrow M. Berti's ultra-classic style) 
 ' for eight lustres and more '—that is to say, for nearly half 
 a century. The French autocrat at first intended to print 
 them, but he either changed his mind from some motive 
 connected with the tangled web of his policy towards the 
 Holy See, or else he adopted the opinion expressed by the 
 historian Denina, that they contained nothing worth print- 
 ing. After the Bourbon Restoration, Pius VII. commissioned 
 the late Monsignor Marini to reclaim these MSS. as Papal 
 property ; but he had to return to Rome empty-handed, and 
 without having been even able to ascertain where the docu- 
 ments were deposited. Under Louis-Philippe, and just 
 after the accession of Pius IX. to the Papal chair, a more 
 skilful or more successful diplomatist, Pellegrino Rossi, who 
 enjoyed equally the favour of the courts of Rome and of 
 France, and whose assassination, some two years afterwards, 
 cast so deep a stain on the ephemeral Roman Republic of 
 184&, procured the restoration of the precious MSS. to the 
 Vatican archives. The first use made of the restored docu- 
 ments in the way of publication (their publication having 
 been promised to the French Government) was made by the 
 late Monsignor Marini, their custodian, who produced, in 
 1850, a little brochure, entitled ' Galileo e 1' Inquisizione 
 Eomana. Memorie storico-critiche.' This was a piece of 
 mere ex-parte pleading, composed for the purpose of showing 
 that the Holy Office had condemned — not the Copernican 
 doctrine — but the theological notions which Galileo had 
 mixed up with its exposition. Such an assertion was a rare 
 specimen of effrontery, the documents being in their falsi- 
 fier's hands, and staring him in the face. If Monsignor 
 Marini supposed that the secret archives of the Vatican 
 
 F 3 
 
68 GIORDANO BEUNO AND GAXILEO. 
 
 would never be opened to any one more studious of the truth 
 of history than himself, he reckoned without his host. The 
 Papal Government subsequently allowed access to those 
 archives, first to a French author, M. Henri de I'Epinois, 
 who published at Paris, in 1867, in the ' Eevue des questions 
 historiques,' an essay entitled ' Galileo, son proces, sa con- 
 damnation, d'apres des documents inedits,' secondly to M. 
 Berti, whom Father Theiner, the late learned and liberal 
 archivist of the Vatican, allowed to consult and take copies 
 of them. A third restorer of the text of the proceedings 
 against Galileo is Herr von Gebler, who, like M. de I'Epinois 
 and M. Berti, has been allowed free access to the MSS. 
 
 The three writers above cited, who have now placed before 
 the public each his own transcript of the of&cial records of 
 this too famous procedure, have played the part of inquisitors 
 over each other, in a sort of emulation of the Holy Office. 
 M. Berti took the lead by criticising the first partial repro- 
 duction of the original documents which had been made in 
 the earlier essay of M. de I'Epinois. M. de I'Epinois rejoined 
 by acknowledging and accounting for the imperfections of 
 his own previous publication, and supplying a fresh transcript 
 of those documents, with critical comments on the errors 
 and inaccuracies of M. Berti's edition. And Herr von Gebler 
 brings out a third, with corrections of both the others. 
 One result, at least, of the researches of all three critical 
 inspectors and copyists, who have taken so much pains to be 
 right, and to set their rivals right where wrong, will be to 
 render impossible the exercise of any pious frauds for the 
 future in disguising or distorting any of the main facts of 
 the case. As to the manner in which those facts should be 
 regarded, modern opinion has unanimously pronounced 
 already ; and M. de I'Epinois, who, following after M. Henri 
 Martin, labours to reconcile the fair and full exposition of the 
 case of Galileo with the vindication of the character of his 
 Church against the ' attacks of ignorance,' adduces no facts 
 or arguments of any force to alter that opinion. 
 
69 
 
 III. 
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 Tlie Life of Jonathan Swift. By John Forster. Volume the First. 1667-1711. 
 London, 1875.' 
 
 OuE old friend Christoplier North, in one of his convivial 
 sallies, altogether disclaimed being ' that faultless monster 
 whom the world ne'er saw,' and claimed, on the contrary, 
 to be a fanlty monster seen by all the world. That faulty 
 monster Swift will now, we hope, be shown to all the world 
 in his true dimensions, though he cannot be washed exactly 
 white. Mr. Porster has some more than ordinary qualifica- 
 tions for the task he has set himself. He is not 'suspect' 
 of Toryism, nor consumed with the zeal of retrospective 
 Whiggism to the pitch of regarding apostacy from Godol- 
 phin to Harley, in the days of Queen A.nne, as deserving a 
 political auto da fe in those of Queen Victoria. He has 
 spared neither time nor pains in research of documents and 
 materials from all quarters ; and brings in his present volume 
 much fresh information on Swift's career and character.^ 
 And finally, he has that 'hearty liking' and 'generous ad- 
 miration ' for his subject which he justly attributes to his 
 great precursor Scott, and which are indispensably requisite 
 to render biography a labour of love. That Swift was, in 
 his sane and manly years, loveable, seems sufaciently proved 
 by the fact that he was more or less loved, or liked, by every 
 woman of intelligence and every man of genius with whom 
 
 ' From the Qucurterly Review, January 1876. 
 
 2 Mr. Forster 's death unfortunately followed soon after the publication of 
 the first volume of his lAfe of Sivift. 
 
70 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 he came in personal contact and intercourse. He was loved 
 in tragic earnest by poor Esther Johnson and poor Hester 
 Vanhomrigh. He was loved by Pope, Gay, Steele, Con- 
 greve, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot, Addison; and lastly, and 
 posthumously, his memory is loved by Mr. Forster.' 
 
 Independently of ' evil times and evil tongues,' the 
 sources of Swift's doubtful reputation, from his own days to 
 ours, may be said to have been, in a manner, identical with 
 those of his glory. His ' Tale of a Tub ' was a declaration 
 of war against half Christendom, and his ' Gulliver's Travels ' 
 little short of an indictment against all mankind. His po- 
 litical trophies were the depopularisation of Marlborough, 
 the preparation of the public mind for the Peace of Utrecht, 
 and the exasperation of Irish patriotism against English 
 halfpence. A new Prometheus, he must be owned to have 
 brought upon earth more heat than light, and his final 
 misanthropy purveyed his own vultures for his own heart in 
 exile.^ It is, indeed, a passion which, if it does not begin in 
 madness, almost certainly ends there. 
 
 The late great French critic, Sainte-Beuve, laid down, 
 with immediate reference to Chateaubriand, the following 
 canon of criticism, which is not less applicable to our present 
 subject : — 
 
 For me, literary production is not distinct — is, at any rate, not 
 separable — from the producer, the man himself, and his individual 
 organisation. I may find pleasure in a work, but it is difficult for 
 
 ' Mr. Courtenay, in his Memoirs of Sir William Temple (vol. ii. p. 2i3), 
 drew from very narrow premisses very "broad conclusions as to the general 
 tin,poj>V'lcmty of Swift's manners with women. ' Of the offensive manners of 
 Swift,' he says, 'and Ms consequent unpopularity with the ladies of the 
 families m which he was intimate ' [we will trouble any one to be intimate in 
 families where he is unpopular with the ladies I], ' we can speak upon the 
 authority of a daughter of his friend, the first Lord Bathurst : this lady was 
 particularly disgusted with his habit of swearing. 
 
 The occasional irusqverie and eccentricity of Swift's manners, especially 
 in his later years, is not denied in any quarter. He could make himself dis- 
 agreeable, but he could make himself exceedingly agreeable, both to men and 
 to women. See Mr. Forster's volume, p. 226, and in other places, for the 
 extraordinary social charm possessed by Swift in his better years. 
 
 ^ Swift always regarded his Dublin deanery as an exile, and always refused 
 to regard Ireland as his country, merely because he was ' dropped ' there. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 71 
 
 me to pronounce a judgment on it, independently of all knowledge of 
 the writer. I should be disposed to say-^Such as the tree, such the 
 fruit. 
 
 In order to know a man — that is to say, to know something more 
 about him than pure spirit — one cannot go to work in too many ways, 
 or from too many sides. Till one has asked and answered to oneself 
 a certain number of questions about an author, one is never sui-e of 
 having completely seized his character. What were his religious 
 views ? How was he affected by natural scenery 1 What was Ms 
 behaviour toiuards women ? — what in money matters ? Was he rich ? 
 was he poor 1 What was his regimen, his mode of living 1 Finally, 
 what was his vice or weakness ? since every man has one. None of 
 the answers to these questions are immaterial in forming a judgment 
 of an author, or even of his book, — unless, indeed, that book is a 
 treatise of pure geometry. 
 
 In no instance more distinctly than in that of our present 
 subject is the character of the author traceable, in its main 
 lines, to the character of the man. It might be said of Jona- 
 than Swift as of John Bunyan-^whom, by the way, he prized 
 more highly than theologians of higher pretensions — that it 
 was because he was such a man as he was he wrote as he did. 
 What set the stamp of permanence on the writings of both 
 was no study of form, no care of composition, but downright 
 force of expression prompted by strength of purpose, Bunyan 
 became a great author without tnowing it, because he had a 
 faith to propagate. Swift became a great author without 
 caring about it, because he had passions to wreak, ambitions 
 to gratify, and insights into life, character, and opinion to 
 bring out in forms which, however fantastic, however fre- 
 quently repulsive, have won for themselves a permanent place 
 in the modern mind, which they will no more lose with any 
 generation of intelligent readers than the world will ' willingly 
 let die ' Pantagruel's history, or the Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 In applying to Swift Sainte-Beuve's personal and, as he 
 conceived it, physiological method of criticism, it would be 
 necessary to start with the subject from birth, or even before 
 it. A posthumous child, born of a mother labouring under 
 a load of anxieties, much that was otherwise inexplicably 
 morbid in Swift may be traceable to congenital sources, and 
 
72 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 the painfully dependent circumstances of his boyhood and 
 youth. 
 
 His brief autobiography, reproduced in Mr. Forster's first 
 chapter, and which stops at the epoch of Swift's final settle- 
 ment in Ireland, begins by stating that the family of the 
 Swifts are ancient in Yorkshire. After commemorating one 
 or two notable members of that family, the writer comes to 
 his paternal grandfather, Thomas Swift, whose services and 
 sufferings in the cause of the First Charles obtained recog- 
 nition and promise of preferment from the Second, then in 
 exile, ' if ever God should restore him.' Thomas Swift's life 
 ended, however, before Charles's exile, and ' Mr. Swift's merit,' 
 observes his grandson, ' died with hiui.' 
 
 His father's marriage is recorded as follows by Swift, with 
 a curious and characteristic mixture of pride in his mother's 
 remote ancestry, and regret for his father's ' indiscreet ' 
 marriage : — 
 
 He married Mrs. Abigail Erick, of Leicestershii'e, descended from 
 the most ancient family of the Ericks, who derive their lineage 
 from Erick the forester, a great commander, who raised an army to 
 oppose the invasion of William the Conqueror .... This marriage 
 was on both sides very indiscreet, for his wife brought her husband 
 little or no fortune ; and his death happening suddenly, before he 
 could make a sufficient provision for his family, his son, not then 
 born [Swift himself], has often been heard to say, that he felt the 
 consequences of that marriage, not only through the whole course of 
 his education, but during the greatest part of his life. 
 
 Swift's only prosperous relative settled in Ireland was an 
 uncle, Grodwin Swift, to whom, says Mr. Forster, as the 
 acknowledged head of the family, Jonathan's [his father's] 
 widow had turned naturally in her trouble. With exception 
 of a small annuity of twenty pounds, which her husband had 
 been enabled to purchase at their marriage, she was wholly 
 dependent on this supposed wealthy relative, who took on 
 himself the charge of the young Jonathan's schooling, and 
 defrayed it in what seemed a niggard and grudging manner, 
 which was never forgiven by the distinguished object of his 
 reluctant bounty. Four marriages, however, had provided 
 
JONATHAJSI SWIFT. 73 
 
 Uncle Godwin with fifteen children, and he left at his death 
 a crippled estate, altogether inadequate for his survivors. 
 Swift says of himself that 
 
 By the ill-treatment of his nearest relations [meaning chiefly 
 Uncle Godwin], he was so discouraged and sunk in his spirit, that 
 he too much neglected his academic studies, for some parts of which 
 he had no great relish by nature, and turned himself to reading 
 history and poetry ; so that when the time came for taking his degree 
 of Bachelor of Arts, although he had lived with great regularity and 
 due observance of the statutes, he was stopped of his degree for dul- 
 ness and insufficiency; and at last hardly admitted, in a manner 
 little to his credit, which is called in that college [Trinity College, 
 Dublin] speciali gratid, on the 15th February, 1685, with four more 
 on the same footing. 
 
 ' These autobiographical records,' observes Mr. Forster, 
 * show not only the sense of worldly disadvantage that even 
 during childhood and at school marred his enjoyment and 
 chilled exertion, but the temperament which at a later 
 time fitted him as little to receive obligation as to endure 
 dependence.' 
 
 Dr. Barrett [we stUl quote Mr. Forster] taxes all his energies to 
 establish that after his bachelorship Swift became reckless of hall or 
 lecture-room, violent and quarrelsome, a stranger to the chapel, a 
 lounger in the town, and for ever falling under fine or censure. 
 Walter Scott not inaptly remembered, when he came to this picture 
 by Barrett, how Johnson described his Oxford life to Boswell. ' Ah, 
 sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness that they mistook for 
 frolic. I was miserably poor, and thought to fight my way by my 
 hterature and my wit ; so I disregarded all power and all authority.' 
 But there was a written sentence of Johnson more nobly applicable 
 both to Swift and to himself, when, in the life of the Dean, he said, 
 that the years of labour by which studies had been retrieved which 
 were alleged to have been recklessly or negligently lost, ' afforded use- 
 ful admonition and powerful encouragement to men whose abilities 
 have been made for a time useless by their passions or pleasures, and 
 who, having lost one part of life in idleness, are tempted to throw 
 away the remainder in despair.' 
 
 Swift's mother, notwithstanding the ' indiscreet ' marriage, 
 at which the black drop in her son's blood, when tinging his 
 thoughts, made him repine chieBy because it had brought 
 
74 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 himself into being, appears always to have been regarded by 
 that son with affection and admiration. ' Character, humour, 
 uprightness, and independence,' says Mr. Forster, ' are in all 
 the traditions respecting her.' During her life, which lasted 
 twenty-two years after he left college, Swift rarely missed 
 visiting her once a year at least at Leicester, where she had 
 finally fixed her home — travelling by waggon or on foot in 
 his poorer, by coach in his more opulent days. In his earlier 
 journeys to and from that place — when, seeing written over 
 a door ' Lodgings for a penny,' he would hire a bed, giving 
 an additional sixpence for clean sheets — he had opportunities 
 of observing the ways and speech of the common people, 
 which must have much helped to form his popular style and 
 turn of thought. 
 
 ' Swift,' says Mr. Forster, ' was little more than two 
 months past his twenty-first birthday when Tyrconnel let 
 loose the Celtic population on the English settlers in Dublin ; 
 and quitting the college with a crowd of other fugitives, he 
 found his way to his mother's house in England.' His visit 
 to Leicester on this occasion lasted some months, and his 
 watchful parent became alarmed on his account ' because of 
 the daughters of Heth ' — one Betty Jones in particular, 
 who afterwards married ' a rogue of an innkeeper ' at Lough- 
 borough. 
 
 ' Hardly had he escaped this Betty Jones,' says Mr. Forster, 
 ' when there began to be talk of another ; and long before the " some 
 months'' passed which he describes as the duration of this visit to 
 Leicester, his mother must have been convinced of the truth of what 
 her son already had been told by " a person of great honour in 
 Ireland," who was " pleased to stoop so low as to look into my mind ; 
 and used to tell me that it was hke a conjured spirit, that would do 
 mischief if I would not give it employment." ' 
 
 Under these circumstances, it was his mother's suggestion 
 that he should apply to Sir William Temple. Lady Temple 
 was a relation of hers, and was still living when Swift's appli- 
 cation for admission to Sir William Temple's house and 
 patronage was made and received favourably. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 75 
 
 ' He joined,' says Mr. Forster, ' the retired statesman at Moor 
 Park, near Parnham, before the close of 1689, and continued with 
 him, not without intervals of absence, until just before Lady Temple's 
 death in 1694. These five years are to be regarded as the first resi- 
 dence with Temple.' 
 
 Swift's great intellectual development, especiallj^ in the 
 direction of politics, may be dated from the period of his two 
 protracted sojourns under the roof of a veteran statesman of 
 such experience and capacity as Temple. We ourselves have 
 no doubt that Swift's moral character, so far as still pliable, 
 must also have been improved by having set before him so 
 accomplished a model of qualities which he could not but 
 respect, albeit he could not emulate — his own natural temper 
 being not less restless and ambitious than Temple's was the 
 reverse. 
 
 If the pen of Swift, at a later period, inflicted the first 
 defeat of Marlborough in the battle-field of English public 
 opinion ; if the pen of Swift first taught Ireland to ' ad- 
 venture resurrection,' and commenced and carried to a 
 triumphant issue the first successful Irish agitation, the 
 school in which he learned to wield such a pen was Temple's 
 house at Moor Park. 
 
 ' Every judicious reader,' says Lord Macaulay, ' must be struck by 
 the peculiarities which distinguish Swift's political tracts from all 
 similar works produced by mere men of letters. Let any person 
 compare, for example, the " Conduct of the Alhes," or the " Letter to 
 the October Club," with Johnson's " False Alarm," or " Taxation no 
 Tyranny," and he will be at once struck by the difierence of which 
 we speak. He may possibly think Johnson a greater man than 
 Swift. He may possibly prefer Johnson's style to Swift's. But he 
 will at once acknowledge that Johnson writes like a man who has 
 never been out of his study. Swift writes like a man who has passed 
 his whole life in the midst of public business. It is impossible to 
 doubt that the superiority of Swift is to be, in a great measure, attri- 
 buted to his long and close connection with Temple.' ' 
 
 It is curious to remark that the man whose pen so 
 powerfully and efi'ectively contributed to bring to a 'most 
 ' Macaulay's Essays, vol. iii. p. 96. 
 
76 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 lame and impotent conclusion ' that great European league 
 against France— tlie foundations of which had been first 
 laid by Temple — was Temple's political pupil. It is not 
 too much to say that the long struggle with Louis XIV., 
 in which the dauntless persistency of William of Orange 
 engaged England and Europe — which was carried on with 
 such triumphant success by Marlborough, and closed, if not 
 too soon, yet too regardlessly of national and European 
 interests, by Harley and St. John, at the Peace of Utrecht 
 — might have been averted at the outset by honest adherence 
 on the part of England to the policy of the Triple Alliance, 
 concluded by Temple between England, Holland, and Sweden 
 in 1668. De Witt, the other wise and honest man employed 
 in forming that alliance, relied on the continued adherence 
 of England to its objects and policy, because he relied on 
 England continuing to see her own interest in them. What 
 he did not know, or, at any rate, did not sufficiently take 
 into account, was that the Lady England had then a Lord, 
 whom the most frivolous and adulterous counter-interest too 
 easily seduced at any time from that of his lawful spouse. 
 The temptress France came with gold in her hand — with 
 Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans (sister of Charles II.), for 
 emissary, who opened her batteries against the Anglo-Dutch 
 alliance by unmerciful ridicule of the insular cut of English 
 vests.^ Without notice — without pretext or provocation — 
 
 ' The Duchess of Orleans, according to the author or authors of the 
 Character of a Trimmer (of which lively and telling political tract the credit 
 of authorship is divided between Sir "William Coventry and the Marquis of 
 Halifax), ' was a very welcome guest here ; and her own charms and dexterity, 
 joined, with other adva)itages that wight help her persuasions, gave her such an 
 ascendant that she could hardly fail of success. One of the preliminaries of 
 her treaty, though a trivial thing in itself, yet was considerable in the conse- 
 quence, as very small circumstances often are in relation to the government 
 of the world. About this time a general humour, in opposition to France, had 
 made us throw ofi their fashion and put on vests, that we might look more 
 like a distinct people, and not be under the servility of imitation, which ever 
 pays a greater deference to the original than is consistent with the equality all 
 independent nations should pretend to. France did Bot like this small begin- 
 ning of ill-humour, at least of emulation, wisely considering that it is a 
 natural introduction first to make the world their apes, that they may be 
 afterwards their slaves. It was thought that one of the instructions Madam 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 77 
 
 Charles and his shameless councillors of the ' Cabal ' rushed 
 at once from alliance with Holland, in resistance to the en- 
 croachments of France, to war on Holland, in improvised 
 alliance with France. The suddenness of the witch-brewed 
 hurricane threw the Dutch Eepublic on its beam-ends, and 
 precipitated a revolution in its federal democracy in favour 
 of Orange and fatal to De Witt, as a similar revolution in 
 the preceding generation had been to Barneveldt. But the 
 storm of perfidiously-planned hostilities against Holland 
 subsided as suddenly as it had risen. She sought refuge 
 in brave despair, and found succour in fresh alliances. The 
 sole permanent product of the shamelessly treacherous 
 league between Charles and Louis was the life-long direc- 
 tion of the policy of William of Orange in antagonism to 
 France. And the sole result which the Grand Monarque 
 reaped at last from the costly and corrupt purchase of two 
 English monarchs was the accession, by grace of Revolution, 
 of a third and true monarch, whose policy prepared — if it 
 left for another reign to consummate — the most crushing 
 overthrows the arms of France had sustained since Crepy 
 and Agincourt. 
 
 Lord Macaulay, who, while doing full justice to Temple's 
 intrepid and patriotic diplomacy, seemed, in his ' Essay on 
 Temple,' to have got tired of hearing Aristides always called 
 'The Just,' describes him in that essay as having 'trans- 
 ferred to the new settlement after the Revolution the same 
 languid sort of loyalty which he had felt for his former 
 master ' — Charles II. How, may we ask, could any honest 
 man have felt more for such a master than a very languid 
 sort of loyalty ? ' In spite,' the great historian goes on to 
 say, ' of the most pressing solicitations, he refused to become 
 Secretary of State. The refusal evidently proceeded only 
 from the dislike of trouble and danger.' Might it not have 
 partly proceeded from Temple's sixty years, well told, and 
 
 brought along with her was to laugh us out of these rests, which she per- 
 formed so effectually, that in a moment, like so many footmen who had 
 quitted their masters' livery, we all took it again, and returned to our old 
 service.' 
 
78 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 his gout? Lord Macaulay himself states that William was 
 in the habit of consulting Temple in his Surrey retreat on 
 all political emergencies. On one important occasion, the 
 King having sent to ask his opinion on the Triennial Bill, 
 which he was very reluctant to pass, Temple's confidential 
 secretary, Jonathan Swift, had the honour to be made the 
 mouthpiece of the veteran statesman's prudent counsel to 
 the monarch. 
 
 ' The sequel,' says Mr. Forster, ' may be told by Swift himself. 
 What had weighed heavily with William was that Charles I. had 
 passed such a Bill. But Swift explained that Charles's ruin was not 
 owing to his passing a Bill which did not hinder him from dissolving 
 any Parliament, but to the passing another Bill which put it out of 
 his power to dissolve the Parliament then in being without its own 
 consent. " Mr. Swift, who was well versed in English history [here 
 the autobiography is quoted], gave the king a short account of the 
 matter, and a more large one to the Earl of Portland, but all in vain ; 
 for the King, by ill-advisers, was prevailed upon to refuse passing 
 the Bill. This was the first time that Mr. Swift had ever any con- 
 verse with courts, and he told his friends it was the first incident 
 that helped to cure him of vanity.'' One may guess from this, the 
 confidence iu himself with which the young scholar had stepped into 
 the closet of the King.' 
 
 When Swift first became an inmate at Moor Park, Esther 
 Johnson (Stella) was living i,here under the same roof with 
 her mother, whom Macaulay degrades into a waiting-woman, 
 and whom Scott and Mr. Forster describe as a governess or 
 companion of Temple's sister. Lady Giifard, with whom she 
 continued in that connection tiU the death of Temple. 
 Esther Johnson was then a little girl in a pinafore. ' I 
 knew her,' says Swift, ' from six years old, and had some 
 share in her education, by directing what books she should 
 read, and perpetually instructing her in the principles of 
 honour and virtue, from which she never swerved in any one 
 action or moment of her life.' Contrast this simple state- 
 ment, placed in a perfectly clear light by Mr. Forster, with 
 the following broad caricature by Lord Macaulay : — 
 
 An eccentric, uncouth, disagreeable young Irishman, who had 
 narrowly escaped plucking at Dublin, attended Sir William as an 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 79 
 
 amanuensis for board and 201. a-year, dined at tte second table, 
 wrote bad verses in praise of his employer, and made love to a very 
 pretty, darJc-eyed young girl who waited on Lady Giffard. 
 
 This ' very pretty, dark-eyed young girl ' was a poor little 
 thing of six or seven years old, of whom Swift relates that 
 ' she was sickly from her childhood until about the age of 
 fifteen,' and of whom he installed himself as the early in- 
 structor in reading and writing — self-evidently without the 
 remotest possible motive of making love to her. Many years 
 afterwards Swift writes to Esther Johnson : — 
 
 I met Mr. Harley in the Court of Requests, and he asked me how 
 long I had learnt the trick of writing to myself. He had seen your 
 letter through the glass case at the coffee-house, and would swear it 
 was my hand ; and Mr. Ford, who took and sent it me, was of the 
 same mind. I remember others have formerly said so too. I think 
 I was little M. D.'s writing-master} 
 
 In his History, Macaulay returned to the charge on 
 Swift's position at Moor Park. The temptation recurred 
 irresistibly to wield his usual weapons — hyperbole and 
 contrast. The lower he could make the degradation of 
 Swift in his years of dependence, the more striking the 
 effect of contrasting that degradation with his after-eminence. 
 It was a trick of style, and Macaulay's immense success has 
 been a snare to lesser men. 
 
 It was in the interval between his first and second sojourn 
 with Temple that Swift took orders ; and he would seem to 
 have done so in despair of his patron ever getting him any 
 lay promotion worth taking. Temple, indeed, as we have 
 seen, had put him in personal communication with King 
 William III., and William had obligingly offered him a 
 troop of horse. Afterwards there was some promise, which 
 was never fulfilled, of the first prebend that might fall vacant. 
 It must be remembered that so great a gulf was not fixed 
 
 ■ M D (My Dear) was part of the ' little language ' which Swift adopted 
 in his correspondence with Esther Johnson, who, as Mr. Forster observes, is 
 usually designated by those initials, though they occasionally comprise 
 Mrs. Dingley as well. 
 
80 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 between clerical and secular functions before as since the 
 HanoYerian succession. 'Important diplomatic service,' 
 says Mr. Forster, ' was still rendered by Churchmen ; 
 secretaries' places were often at their disposal ; a bishop 
 held a cabinet office in the succeeding reign; and when 
 the rumour went abroad, during Anne's last ministry, that 
 St. John was going to Holland, Swift was generally named 
 to accompany him in that employment.' We may add to 
 these instances of the then hot unusual employment of 
 clergymen in secular offices, that one of the plenipoten- 
 tiaries nominated to conclude the Peace of Utrecht was 
 the Bishop of Bristol — the last instance, we believe, of an 
 ostensible position in diplomacy or politics being held by an 
 ecclesiastic in England. 
 
 The death of Sir WiUiam Temple in 1698-9 'closed,' 
 says Mr. Forster, ' what without doubt may be called Swift's 
 quietest and happiest time.' 
 
 In the three peaceful years of that second residence lie had made 
 full acquaintance -with his own powers, unconscious yet of anything 
 but felicity and freshness in their exercise; and the kindliest side 
 of his nature had found gi-owth and encouragement. The soil had 
 favoured in an equal degree his intellect and his affections. More 
 than one feeling of this description, we may be sure, contributed to 
 his pathetic mention of the day and hour of Temple's death. ' He 
 died at one o'clock this morning, the 27th of January, 1698-9, and 
 with him all that was good and amiable among men.' There was 
 afterwards some natural disappointment at the smallness of the legacy 
 left for editing the writings, but it never coloured unfavourably any 
 other of his allusions to Temple. The opinion now expressed he 
 never changed. He continued, speaking rather with affection than 
 judgment, to characterise him as a statesman who deserved more 
 from his country, by his eminent public services, than any man 
 before or since, and as the most accomplished writer of his time. 
 
 To the studious leisure of Swift's years at Moor Park is 
 due the production of two of his works most written about, 
 if not, both of them, most read, the 'Battle of the Books' 
 and the ' Tale of a Tub ; ' the latter of which was not pub- 
 lished, however, till some years afterwards. The ' Battle of 
 the Books ' was a fiece de circonstance, having for its main 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 81 
 
 motive to come to the aid of Sir William Temple and his 
 Oxford allies against Wotton and Bentley (himself a host) 
 in the obsolete controversy on the comparative merits of 
 ancients and moderns. Swift's patron does not seem to 
 have shown himself particularly obliged to him for turning 
 a matter of absurd gravity into grotesque satire. Authors 
 are seldom very grateful to volunteer auxiliaries who make 
 fun of their earnest. Addison gave Pope no thanks for his 
 ' Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis.' He probably 
 felt, as Temple had probably felt towards Swift, that his 
 volunteer champion had more gall for others than balm for 
 him. Swift was more intent on decrying Dryden than on 
 defending Temple, and Pope on wounding Dennis than on 
 shielding Addison. The '^ Battle of the Books' is a piece 
 which we confess we have never had much pleasure in read- 
 ing, though we are not disposed to question the intensity of 
 mind and meaning which Mr. Porster finds in its apparent 
 absurdity and extravagance. 
 
 Swift described himself, shortly after the epoch of his 
 taking orders, as ' a Whig and one who wears a gown.' His 
 gown, however, which he donned in the last resort about the 
 age of twenty-seven, seemed fated to bring him no satisfac- 
 tory amount of Whig preferment. He went to Ireland in 
 1699 with Lord Berkeley, who was appointed one of the 
 Lords Justices of that kingdom, in the double capacity 
 during the journey of chaplain and private secretary, but 
 was soon superseded, on the Earl's arrival in Dublin, in the 
 latter of those offices by ' another person [we quote his auto- 
 biography] who had insinuated himself into the Earl's favour 
 by telling him that the ]30st of secretary was not fit for a 
 clergyman.' 
 
 In some months the deanery of Derry fell vacant, and it was the 
 Earl of Berkeley's turn to dispose of it. Yet things were so ordered, 
 that the secretary having received a bribe, the deanery was disposed 
 of to another, and Mr. Swift was pnt off with some other church 
 livings, not worth above a third part of that rich deanery. The 
 excuse pretended was his being too young, although he was then 
 thirty years old. 
 
 G 
 
82 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 This second passe-droit (for so Swift considered it) put 
 him in a towering passion, and Sheridan has preserved for 
 posterity his very unclerical apostrojjhe thereon, meant for 
 the Earl and secretary — ' . . . confound you both for a 
 couple of scoundrels ! ' ' Not till he had gibbeted both in 
 some satirical verses,' says Mr. Forster, ' did his anger begin 
 to subside.' He had formed what proved a life-long intimacy 
 at the Castle with the Countess of Berkeley and her daughters. 
 One of these — the lively Lady Betty, afterwards Lady 
 Elizabeth Germaine, who continued a correspondent of 
 Swift till old age. — had picked up in the chaplain's room 
 some unfinished verses of his, descriptive of the card-playing 
 and other ponderous levities of the Castle, and straightway 
 put the following tack to them, which had more of truth 
 than of poetry : — 
 
 With these is Parson Swift, 
 
 Not knowing bow to spend his time, 
 
 Does make a wretched shift 
 
 To deafen them with puns and rhyme. 
 
 Punning became an inveterate habit of Swift's, much 
 aggravated by his intercourse with a subsequent Lord- 
 Lieutenant, Lord Pembroke, and of which his tract, entitled 
 ' God's Eevenge against Punning,' was but a mock expiation. 
 
 Not many weeks after the explosion of wrath which has 
 just been narrated, and probably not without female in- 
 fluences to bring him back to the Castle (which he had 
 momentarily quitted in disgust). Swift— as his autobiography 
 above intimates — discontentedly accepted the vicarage of 
 Laracor, the new Dean of Derry being required to resign 
 to him this and the other livings which had previously been 
 held with the deanery. 
 
 ' Swift,' says Mr. Forster, ' increased the glebe from one acre to 
 twenty, and endowed the vicarage with tithes which he had himself 
 bought, and which by his will he settled on all future incumbents 
 subject to one condition. Language more eloquent than mine may be 
 here interposed. " When Swift was made Vicar of Laracor," said 
 Mr. Gladstone to the House of Commons in March 1869, "he went 
 into a glebe-house with one acre, and he left it with twenty acres 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 83 
 
 improved and decorated in many ways. He also endowed the vicarage 
 ■with tithes purchased by him for the purpose of so bequeathing them, 
 and I am not aware if it be generally known that a curious question 
 arises on this bequest. This extraordinary man, even at the time 
 when he wrote that the Irish Catholics were so down-trodden and 
 insignificant that no possible change could briag them into a position 
 of importance, appears to have foreseen the day when the ecclesiastical 
 arrangements of Ireland would be called to account, for he proceeds 
 to provide for a time when the episcopal religion might be no longer 
 the national religion of the country. By some secret intimation he 
 foresaw the shortness of its existence as an establishment, and left the 
 property subject to a condition that in such case it should be admi - 
 nistered for the benefit of the poor." Not quite so. The incumbents 
 were to have the tithes for as long as the existing Church should be 
 established ; and Mr. Gladstone having withdrawn that condition, the 
 living loses the tithes. But it is "whenever any other form of 
 Christian religion shall become the established faith in this king- 
 dom " that the condition arises handing them over to the poor, 
 securing that their profits shall be given in a weekly proportion 
 " by such other officers as may then have the power of distributing 
 charities to the parish," and excluding from this benefit Jews, 
 Atheists, and infidels. 
 
 'It is a bequest which certainly raises a " curious question," 
 whether we regard it with Scott as a mere stroke of Swift's peculiar 
 humour, or with Mr. Gladstone as a quasi-forethought for the " down- 
 trodden " Irish Catholics. 
 
 ' Shortly after his institution to Laracor, Swift received from the 
 Archbishop of Dublin (then Marsh, the founder of the Library) the 
 Prebend of Dunlavin in St. Patrick's Cathedral, entitling him to a 
 seat in the chapter ; and a few months later, on the 16th February, 
 1700-1701, he took his Doctor's Degree in Dublin University. At 
 the beginning of April, he set sail with the Berkeleys for England, 
 where for the present, notwithstanding his professional preferments, 
 the most memorable portion of his life is to be passed. But let the 
 reader disposed to be severe on such abandonment of clerical duties 
 remember always what the Irish Church then was, and that when the 
 Vicar of Laracor turned his back on Ireland he left behind him 
 "a parish with an audience of half-a-score." ' 
 
 The one insurmountable obstacle to Swift's professional 
 promotion was raised by himself. He published anony- 
 mously in 1704 the ' Tale of a Tub,' which appears to have 
 lain some half-dozen years in MS. The credit of joint 
 
 G 2 
 
84 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 authorship of this celebrated tale seems to have been claimed 
 by Thomas Swift, whom he used to call his 'little parson 
 cousin,' and who, at the time of its composition, was an in- 
 mate along with Jonathan at Moor Park, and very possibly 
 may have rendered him some slight assistance on points of 
 scholastic detail. It was the sort of masterpiece, however, 
 which inevitably afQliated itself on the right parent, and 
 Swift, observes Mr. Porster, though he never adventured to 
 put his own name to it, took very good care that no one else 
 should put Jds. 
 
 Atterbnry, after saying- that nothing could please more 
 than the book did in London, added the shrewd remark that 
 
 if hie tas guessed the man rightly who wrote it, he has reason to 
 continue to conceal himself, because its profane strokes would be 
 more likely to do harm to his reputation and interest in the world 
 than its wit could do him good. 
 
 But when did wit ever put his candle under a bushel on 
 such cool calculation ? Swift never did ; and then he mar- 
 velled that his friends at Court, whether Whig or Tory, 
 never could contrive to make him a bishop — even an Irish 
 bishop. Somers accordingly came under the secret lash of 
 his pen as ' a false, deceitful rascal,' and Wharton as ' the 
 most universal villain he ever knew.' Wharton's was a 
 character to which no license of invective could do much in- 
 justice. But it was precisely his profligacy that rendered 
 more intensely exasperating the exceptional scruples he is 
 said to have pleaded, when Lord-Lieutenant of Ix-eland, 
 against admitting Swift's claims to the highest church pre- 
 ferment. He was reported to have said that the Whig 
 party had no character to spare, and could not afford to 
 make such an appointment to an Irish bishopric : — 
 
 Says Clarinda, though tears it may cost, 
 
 'Tis high time we should part, my dear Sue ! 
 
 For your character's totally lost — 
 And I've not got sufficient for two. 
 
 To be assigned the part of ' Sue ' by such a ' Clarinda ' 
 would have provoked a saint. How much more must it have 
 provoked a Swift ! 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 85 
 
 The 'Tale of a Tub' is, in its main drift, with many 
 digressions, a ' show up ' of superstition and fanaticism, as 
 embodied to Swift's eyes in Eomish Catholicism and Eng- 
 lish and Scottish Puritanism. Voltaire gave Swift the palm 
 over Rabelais, and styled him ' Eabelais dans son bon sens, 
 et vivant en bonne compagnie.' Good company, in our 
 days, would object to a good deal in the ' Tale of a Tub,' if 
 indeed it were much in the habit of looking there for its 
 ideas of what Mr, Gladstone rechristens ' Vaticanism.' The 
 age has certainly gained in delicacy, though perhaps not in 
 vigour, since Swift gave so piquant an air of originality to 
 so old an apologue as that of the father with three sons, and 
 his last bequests to each. Swift was not so ordurous as 
 Rabelais, but he could not plead Eabelais' excuse for 
 wrapping up grave meanings in grotesque and disgusting 
 disguises. The cure of Meudon might have risked vivi-cre- 
 mationhad he made perfectly plain what he meant with his 
 ' He Sonnante,' his ' Papegaux,' ' Papimanes,' and the rest. 
 The Vicar of Laracor only risked getting a deanery instead 
 of a bishopric. In this unparalleled satire, as in everything 
 Swift wrote, every stroke told. Lord Peter's ' purchase of a 
 large continent, lately said to have been discovered in terra 
 australis incognita' — his 'sovereign remedy for the worms ' 
 " — his ' erecting of a whispering office for the public good ' — 
 his 'famous universal pickle ' and ' powder pimperlimpimp ' 
 — his roaring and rapacious bulls — his ' abominable faculty of 
 telling huge palpable lies on all occasions,' and invoking 
 ' the D — 1 to broil them eternally that will not believe me' 
 — all these traits hit the humour of the Protestant public in 
 the days of Queeu Anne ; Popeiy, only some sixteen years 
 before, having been pulled off the throne, and the loaves and 
 fishes of the Church snatched from its greedy grasp. Again, 
 Swift's description of ' The Almighty North,' a Deity ' whose 
 peculiar habitation was situated in a certain region, well- 
 known to the ancient Greeks, by them called XkotIu, or the 
 land of darkness ' — of the origin of tub-preaching — of Bro- 
 ther Jack's bibliolatry and predestinarianism — of his affected 
 differences in habit and behaviour from the rest of Christen- 
 
86 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 dom — ' in winter he always went loose and unbuttoned, and 
 clad as thin as possible, to let in the ambient heat ; and in 
 summer lapped himself close and thick to keep it out ' — of 
 his ' tongue so musculous and subtile that he could twist it 
 up into his nose, and deliver a strange kind of speech from 
 thence' — of a disease of which he was troubled, 'reverse to 
 that called the stinging of the tarantula,' so that he ' would . 
 run mad at the noise of music' — of his fearing no colours, 
 but mortally hating all, and bearing, ' upon that account, a 
 cruel aversion against painters ; insomuch that, in his 
 paroxysms, as he walked the streets, he would have his 
 pockets loaded with stones to pelt at the signs ' — above all, 
 of the provoking involuntary resemblance Jack retained to 
 Peter, though he had torn his coat to rags to get off the 
 embroidery, on purpose to remove every vestige of such re- 
 semblance — all this could not but be read with keen relish in 
 all quarters where English Churchmen's kibes had so lately 
 been galled by Scotch Presbyterianism, revenging with rival 
 bigotry the hard usage it had had at their hands under the 
 last Stuarts. 
 
 It may here be remarked that Swift was equally master 
 of three different prose styles — that of Broad Rabelaisian 
 burlesque ; that of dry and bitter irony ; and that of sober 
 and serious public instruction or public business. Of his 
 pulpit style, expressly as such, we should hesitate to accept, 
 without reservation, Dr. Johnson's favourable opinion. There 
 is an old story of his Satanic Majesty, once on a time, having 
 delivered a most harrowing sermon, in the garb of a monk, 
 on the eternity and intensity of hell torments. Some fami- 
 liar asked him how he could think of preaching so dead 
 against the interests of his own establishment. ' You are 
 quite mistaken,' replied the sable party addressed. 'Did 
 you not observe that there was no unction in my sermon ?' 
 To our humble thinking there is in Swift's sermons no unc- 
 tion. He himself acknowledged that, from the time of his 
 political controversies, he could only preach pamphlets. 
 
 Amongst the foremost examples of Swift's three prose 
 styles are those successively published during the years of 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 87 
 
 liis residence (and non -residence) at Laracor. Three or 
 four years after his Rabelaisian escapade — this ' Tale of a 
 Tub ' — appeared his gravely-ironical ' Argument against the 
 Abolishing of Christianity.' Shortly after followed, appa- 
 rently by way of atonement, two perfectly serious tracts, 
 ' The Sentiments of a Church of England Man with respect 
 to Religion and Government,' and the ' Project for the Ad- 
 vancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners.' 
 Amongst the proposals put forth in this latter tract, written 
 in 1 709, and published, after the fashion of that age, as ' By 
 a Person of Quality,' was the appointment of ' itinerary com- 
 missioners to inspect everywhere throughout the kingdom 
 into the conduct at least of men in office, with respect to 
 their morals and religion.' Under ' so excellent a Princess 
 as the present Queen,' and under ' a ministry where every 
 single person was of distinguished piety, the empire of vice 
 and irreligion,' according to Swift, ' would be soon destroyed 
 in this great metropolis, and receive a terrible blow through- 
 out the whole island.' Swift proposes, amongst other things, 
 that clergymen should be dispensed from wearing their 
 clerical habits, unless at those seasons when they are doing 
 the business of their function, as ' whoever happens to see a 
 scoundrel in a gown reeling home at midnight (a sight 
 neither frequent nor miraculous) is apt to entertain an ill 
 idea of the whole order, and at the same time to be ex- 
 tremely comforted in his own vices.' He observes ' that the 
 corruptions of the theatre, peculiar to our age and nation 
 [since Charles II.], need continue no longer than while the 
 Court is content to connive at or neglect them.' He pro- 
 poses (and the legislation and police of our orderly age have 
 bettered the instruction) that ' all taverns and ale-houses 
 should be obliged to dismiss their company at twelve at 
 night,' and complains of ' so little care taken for the build- 
 ing of churches, particularly here in London, that five parts 
 in six of the people are absolutely hindered from hearing 
 divine service.' This complaint of Swift gave the first im- 
 pulse to raising the fund for building Queen Anne's fifty 
 new churches in the metropolis. 
 
88 JONATHAN SVi'IFT. 
 
 If the ' Tale of a Tub ' did Swift harm with Queen Anne 
 and her ecclesiastical councillors, it did him honour with 
 the ' little senate ' of wits which sat at Will's, and took laws 
 from Addison. ' Swift's note-books,' says Mr. Forster, ' fix 
 the year 1705 as the beginning, not of his acquaintance, but 
 of his more intimate intercourse with Addison. The most 
 pleasing of writers and zealous of Whigs, who was next year 
 to have his party reward by appointment as Under- Secretary 
 of State, had this year (1705) published his ' Travels in 
 Italy ;' and I possess a large paper presentation-copy with 
 an inscription in Addison's hand, which is itself an emphatic 
 memorial of one of the most famous of literary friendships.' 
 
 TO DE. JONATHAN SWIFT, 
 
 THE MOST AaEEBABLE COMPANIOSf 
 
 THE TECTEST TKIEND 
 
 AND THE GKEATEST GENIUS OE HIS AGE 
 
 THIS BOOK IS PKESENTED BY HIS MOST 
 
 HITMBLE SERVANT THE AITTHOtrE. 
 
 During the five years intervening betweea the date 
 above given and the accession of (and Swift's accession to) 
 the Tory ministry of 1710, his intimacy with Addison, 
 Steele, and the other Whig wits continued close and con- 
 vivial. That it suffered interruption from Swift's change of 
 party colours was against his will and wish, and in spite of 
 his efforts to serve such of his old friends (Steele for ex- 
 ample) as needed to be served by his good offices with the 
 new ministry. These intervening five years were, indeed, a 
 lustre of sparks struck from wits warmed by wine, for wher- 
 ever Addison was, wine was, notwithstanding his well-sus- 
 tained reputation for morality and piety. 
 
 ' Swift's note book,' says Mr. Forster, ' contains entries of dinners 
 to or with them all, and of frequent coaches to the houses of Halifax 
 in New Palace Yard or at Hampton Court. We trace them dining at 
 the " George,'' with Addison for host, at the " Fountain " with Steele, 
 and at the " St. James's," where Wortley Montagu entertains. Nor 
 did they fail to see each other frequently even in such intervals of 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 89 
 
 their not coming together as are mentioned by Swift to Ambrose 
 Philips. " The triumvirate of Addison, Steele, and me, come to- 
 gether as seldom as the sun, moon, and -earth ; but I often see each of 
 them, and each of them me and each other." Just before March, 
 Swift had launched his joke against the astrological almanac-makers; 
 and all the town was now laughing over the relation of the accom- 
 plishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff's predictions.' 
 
 Biekerstaii' was a name Swift had happened to see over a 
 loctsmith's shop, and wliicli he assumed, writing in Steele's 
 ' Tatler,' in the character of a genuine astrologer, against 
 the chief offender amongst vulgar almanac-makers, John 
 Partridge, bred originally a cobbler. Mr. Bickerstaff's first 
 gravely-worded prediction was that of the death of Par- 
 tridge at a speciEed day and hour — followed next day by a 
 most circumstantial narrative of the fulfilment of that pre- 
 diction within a few minutes of the exact time specified. 
 
 Partridge, vrho had no mind to have his ill-gotten gains 
 as an almanac- maker consigned with him to the tomb, iii 
 putting forth his almanac for 1709 informed his loving 
 countrymen that — 
 
 Squire Bickerstaif was a sham name assumed by a lying, im- 
 pudent fellow, and that, blessed be God, John Partridge was still 
 living, and in health, and all were knaves who reported otherwise. 
 To this Mr. Bickerstaif lost no time in retorting with a ' Vindica- 
 tion ' more diverting than either of its precursors, rebuking Mr. 
 Partridge's scurrility as very indecent from one gentleman to another 
 for differing from him on a point merely speculative. This point 
 was, as he went on to explain, whether or not Mr. Partridge was alive; 
 and with all brevit}', perspicuity, and calmness he proceeded to the 
 discussion. First he pointed out that about a thousand gentlemen 
 having bought Mr. Partridge's almanac for the year merely to find 
 what he said against Mr. Bickerstaflf, had been seen and heard lifting 
 up their eyes and crying out at every line they read ' they were sure 
 no man alive ever writ such damned stuff as this ! ' But the proof 
 that no man alive wrote it appeared in his own very language of 
 denial, that ' he is not only now alive, but was also alive upon that 
 very 29th of March which it was foretold he should die on ' ; whereby 
 his opinion was plainly announced that a man may he alive now who 
 was not alive twelve months ago. And here lay in truth the whole 
 sophistry of his argument. ' He dares not assert he was ahve ever 
 
90 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 since tlie 29th of March, but that " he is now alive and was so on that 
 day." I grant the latter; for he did not die till night, as appears by 
 the priated account of his death, in a letter to a lord ; and whether 
 he be since revived, I leave the world to judge.' 
 
 'The jest,' continued Mr. Forster, 'had by this time 
 diffused itself into so wide a popularity that all the wits 
 became eager to take part in it; Eowe, Steele, Addison, 
 and Prior contributed to it in divers amusing ways, and 
 Congreve described, under Partridge's name, the distresses 
 and reproaches Squire Bickerstaff had exposed him to, inso- 
 much that he could not leave his door without some- 
 body twitting him for sneaking about without paying his 
 funeral expenses. The poor astrologer himself, meanwhile, 
 was continually advertising that he was not dead ; ' and 
 advertising in vain. The Stationers' Company, it is added, 
 applied for an injunction against the continued publication 
 of almanacs put forth under the name of a dead man ; and 
 Sir Paul Methuen wrote to Swift that Mr. Bickerstaff's pre- 
 dictions had been condemned to the flames by the Portu- 
 guese Inquisition. 
 
 Mr. Porster cites the following amusing illustration 
 which Young gave to Spence of Swift's figure and person 
 (it might be added, and humour) in the latter years of his 
 Whig connection, when Swift had reached about the sober 
 meridian of forty : — 
 
 Mentioning that Ambrose Philips was a neat dresser and very 
 vain (Pope laughed at him for wearing red stockings), he says that in 
 a company where Philips, Congreve, Swift, and others were, the talk 
 turned on Julius Csesar. ' And what sort of person,' said Ambrose, 
 did they suppose him to be ? ' To which someone replying that the 
 coins gave the impression of a small, thin-faced man, ' Yes,' rejoined 
 Philips, proceeding to give an exact likeness of himself, ' for my part 
 I should take him to have been of a lean make, pale complexion, 
 extremely neat in his dress, and five feet seven inches high.' Swift 
 made no sign till he had quite done, and then with the utmost gravity 
 said, ' And I, Mr. Philips, should take him to have been a plump 
 man, just five feet eight inches and a half high, not very neatly 
 dressed, in a black gown with pudding sleeves.' 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 91 
 
 Among the interesting discoveries made by Mr. Forster 
 at Narford, tlie family seat of Mr. Andi'ew Fountaine, de- 
 scendant of Swift's friend, Sir Andrew Fountaine, is the 
 first draft of Swift's well-known and most amusing modern 
 version of the ancient legend of Baucis and Philemon, im- 
 mortalised by Ovid. This little poem Swift made ' beauti- 
 fully less,' at Addison's suggestion ; and the un-authorlike 
 facility with which he struck out, added, or altered, just as 
 Addison decreed, is a fine trait of carelessness of his literary 
 offspring, which Mr. Forster contrasts with Pope's sensitive 
 and suspicious vanity on a like occasion. 
 
 We must hasten on to the epoch of Swift's change of 
 party, upon which rest the charges that have weighed most 
 heavily against his memory. We do not find it possible to 
 ascribe that change to pure public principle. Such purity 
 of principle was scarcely to be met with in the politics or 
 politicians of Queen Anne's reign. ' I am afraid,' says 
 Bolingbroke, in his well-known ' Letter to Sir William 
 Windham' (referred to by Mr. Forster), 
 
 that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have 
 done ; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the govern- 
 ment of the State in our hands; that our principal views were the 
 conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and 
 great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us, 
 and of hurting those who stood ia opposition to us. It is, however, 
 true, that with these considerations of private and party interest, 
 there were others intermingled which had for their ohject the public 
 good of the nation, at least what we took to be such. 
 
 We find pretty much the same mixture of motives (the 
 personal, it must be owned, predominating) in Swift's ad- 
 hesion, to the Harley St. John ministry, as in Bolingbroke's 
 account of his own part in its formation. The personal 
 neglect with which he had found, or fancied, himself treated 
 by the Whigs was— his letters to Stella leave not the 
 slightest doubt— the main source of Swift's readiness to 
 transfer his talents, thus, as he thought, undervalued, to 
 Tory service. But it is not less evident that his political 
 sagacity, clerical professional bias, and pronounced prefer- 
 
92 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 ence of the la.nded to the moneyed interest (which, at the 
 epocli before us, was rejoicing in war and war loans), inter- 
 mingled in his case, as in St. John's, considerations of public 
 good with those personal views and personal resentments 
 whicli were avowed by both, with about equal frankness, as 
 i,he principal spring of their actions. 
 
 The belligerent Whig cause, according to so good a 
 Queen Anne's Whig authority as Lord Stanhope, turned 
 from right to wrong when the High Allies, in 1709, refused 
 to accept from Louis XIV. terms of peace which really in- 
 cluded all the 'legitimate objects of the war. At the con- 
 ferences of Gertrnydenberg, Torcy, in the name of Louis, 
 and much swayed by the wise counsels of Marlborough, 
 went — we quote Lord Stanhope — 
 
 to the farthest limits of his powers to obtain a peace. He was 
 wiUing to admit the several demands of England. He was willing 
 to give up ten fortresses in Flanders as a barrier to the Dutch. He 
 was willing to yield Luxemburg, Steasbubg, and Brisach to the 
 Empire ; and, moreover (subject to further instructions), Exiles and 
 Fenestrelles to the Duke of Savoy. Above all, he consented to 
 relinquish the whole of the vast inheritance of Spain. But he paused 
 at the further demand, that Louis should promise or enforce abdica- 
 tion of the Spanish crown by his grandson. He could only promise 
 to withhold every succour of men and money, and leave Philip to his 
 fate.' 
 
 But the party of war, or peace on the hardest terms, was 
 still ascendant at the Hague ; a.nd Marlborough — who, like 
 other great English commanders, was no passionate partisan 
 of war — was overruled in his dispositions for peace by his 
 instructions from England. Upon the Whig ministry, 
 therefore, in 1709, and their continental allies, rests, ac- 
 cording to the unimpeachable authority of Lord Stanhope, 
 the grave charge of protracting a bloody and costly conflict, 
 which, even in the judgment of the great general who con- 
 ducted it, might then have been brought on fair terms to a 
 close. ' The High Allies have been the ruin of us,' exclaimed 
 Swift, two years before the date of his alleged apostasy from 
 
 ' Histm-y of the Reign of Queen Anne, p. 385. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 93 
 
 Whig to Tory principles. If Lord Stanhope, as above cited, 
 is right, wherein was Swift wrong? And how, may we ask 
 with unfeigned respect for the lamented historian,' could 
 Lord Stanhope, in his ' History of England from the Peace 
 of Utrecht,' say of Swift that — 
 
 bred as a "Whig, under Sir Wilham Temple ; patronised as a Whig 
 by Lord Somers ; boasting of himself as a Whig in his writings ; 
 without a pretence of principle, without the slightest charge against 
 his friends on public grounds, and merely on an allegation of personal 
 neglect, he turned round to the Tory leaders at the very moment when 
 those leaders were coming into office, and having evidently no better 
 reason for deserting his cause than that he thought it in danger. 
 
 What cause ? The cause of war a outrance with France ? 
 Swift thought, as we have seen Lord Stanhope also thinks, 
 that cause a bad one. The cause of Whig Cliurch politics ? 
 Swifb had stated to Lord Somers, and set forth in print, 
 two or three years before the fall of the Whig ministry, his 
 reasons for taking exception to those politics. So early as 
 1708 he had told the Whig ministry plainly that they 
 might have carried the majority of the clergy with them 
 if they would but have veiled or bridled their contempt of 
 the claims and sentiments of the clerical order, and shown 
 the Churoh as a body the same respect and consideration as 
 they showed its eminent members individually. Whatever 
 may be thought of that view at the present day, in Queen 
 Anne's time its emphatic expression by Swift rang true. 
 
 On the accession of the Tory ministry of 1710, the scene 
 instantly changed for Swift, as well as for his Irish ecclesi- 
 
 ' As these pages are passing through the press, we have to lament the 
 death of the accomplished historian. This is neither the time nor the place 
 to pay a fitting tribute to the important services which Lord Stanhope rendered 
 to literature, not only by his various historical and biographical works, but 
 also by his advocacy in public of the claims of literature, and by his kindness 
 in private to men of letters. But it may be permitted us to mark our sense 
 of the loss which this Review has sustained by the death of one of its warmest 
 friends and most valued writers. His first contribution was an article on 
 'The French Revolution,' which appeared as long ago as March 1833; and 
 from that time to our last number he continued to take a lively interest in the 
 Bmiem, constantly giving us the benefit of his advice, and frequently contri- 
 buting some of the most valuable articles to our pages. 
 
94 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 astical constituents — that is, for the authorities of the Irish 
 Church, who had entrusted him with the advocacy at Court 
 of the claims of that Church to the remission of ' First-Fruits ' 
 which the good Queen Anne had lately remitted in England, 
 thus affording ground for hope that her piety would extend 
 the same boon to Ireland. Harley at once saw the impor- 
 tance of securing to the side of the ministry such a political 
 proselyte and literary auxiliary as Swift. He writes to 
 Esther Johnson of the First Minister : ' I am told by all 
 hands he has a mind to gain me over.' At his first inter- 
 view with Harley, the latter listened patiently to the Vicar 
 of Laracor's whole history of the Irish First-Fruits' grievance, 
 which Swift had pressed to no purpose on the Whigs, and 
 when he had heard it through, promised to do the business 
 at once with the Queen, and kept his word. He should 
 bring Swift and the Secretary of State, Mr. St. John, ac- 
 quainted ; he called him by his Christian name, Jonathan ; 
 and he ' spoke so many things of personal kindness and 
 esteem,' that the other was half inclined to believe what 
 some friends had told him, that the ministers were ' ready 
 and eager to do anything to bring him over.' 
 
 Upon Swift's first dinner with Mr. Secretary St. John, 
 better known to fame in after years as Bolingbroke, he 
 writes to Esther Johnson : — 
 
 I am thinking what a veneration we iised to have for Sir William 
 Temple, because he might have been Secretary of State at fifty ; and 
 here is a young fellow, hardly thirty, in that employment. His 
 father is a man of pleasure, that walks the Mall, and frequents St. 
 James's Coffee-house and the chocolate-houses ; and the youn<^ son 
 is principal Secretary of State. Is there not something very odd in 
 that? 
 
 Swift informs his correspondent that, when he supposed 
 the ' First-Fruits ' business to be finally settled, he told the 
 minister that he would very shortly be intending for Ireland • 
 on which Harley frankly told him that 
 
 his friends and himself knew very well how usefully he had written 
 against measures proposed by the late ministry, to which on prin- 
 ciple he had been opposed; and this had convinced them that -he 
 
JOMATHAN SWIFT. 95 
 
 would not feel bound to continue to favour their cause simply becau.se 
 of his personal esteem for several among them. There was now 
 .entirely a new scene; but the difficulty to those who directed it was 
 the want of some good men to keep up the spirit raised in the people, 
 to assert the principles and justify the proceedings of the new 
 ministers. He then fell into some personal civilities which it will 
 not become me to repeat, and closed by saying that it should be his 
 particular care to represent me to the Queen as a person they could 
 not be without. I promised to do my endeavour in that way for 
 some few months. To which he replied, that he expected no more, 
 and that he had other and greater occasions for me. 
 
 ' One thing,' adds Mr. Forster, ' the First Minister had 
 not said, but Swift knew it very well, and St. John after- 
 wards characteristically confessed it to him. ' We were de- 
 termined to have you,' he said. ' You were the only one we 
 were afraid of.' 
 
 If it were necessary to say anything more in extenuation 
 of Swift's so-called political apostasy, we might ask, as 
 Swift himself asked in one of the first ' Examiners ' he wrote 
 for the Harley ministry — how certain great men of the late 
 ministry (Marlborough and Godolphin) came to be Whigs ; 
 and by what figure of speech certain others, put lately into 
 great employments (Shrewsbury and Somerset), were to be 
 termed Tories? What, indeed, was Marlborough himself 
 but a military convert from Toryism caught by the baits 
 held out to his love of fame and love of money by a Whig 
 Government, and who now gave some signs of being willing 
 enough to apostatise back again to his original party, if 
 they would have kept him in possession of that supreme 
 command of the army which he had endeavoured in vain, 
 under the late Administration, to get granted him by royal 
 patent for life ? What was Harley but a politician of early 
 Whig antecedents, who took, chameleon-like, any colours 
 which promised best at the moment to serve his turn ? 
 Political leaders who wavered in their allegiance, as Marl- 
 borough and Godolphin did between two dynasties, could 
 scarcely be entitled to throw the first stone at political 
 writers who carried theirs from one to the other of two 
 
96 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 parties. In reviewing an epoch, of wliicli ' Nusquam tuta 
 fides ' migM have been the motto and cognisance, where is 
 the political justice of singling out for special animadversion 
 one individual instance, like Swift's, of alleged literary faith- 
 lessness ? Faithlessness, we again ask, to what cause ? If 
 to the cause of war with France till her ruin as a first-rate 
 Power was accomplished, to persist in lavish expense of 
 blood and treasure to effect such an end was no wiser than 
 the effort of one eye of Europe to put out the other. Again, 
 if the principle represented by Whig colours in 1710 was 
 the principle of religious equality in the eye of the law, that 
 principle was not adhered to by any party as regarded at 
 least one communion, and, besides, was not a principle to 
 which Swift had ever pledged himself, but the contrary. 
 
 At this epoch Mr. Forster says very truly of the subject 
 of his biography : — 
 
 He had nothing in him of the hired scribe, and was never at any 
 time in any one's pay. The minister he supported had to hold him 
 by other ties. He might fairly look to future preferment, but the 
 immediate condition of his party service was to ' grow domestic ' 
 with those he served, exacting from them increased personal con- 
 sideration. His famiUar footing with the leading men alike of Whig 
 and Tory, and his exception to the ' unconversable ' Somers, have 
 in this their explanation ; and what in later Hfe he laughingly wrote 
 to Pope was not without its gravity of meaning. ' I will tell you 
 that all my endeavours from a boy to distinguish myself were only 
 for want of a great title and fortune, that I might be used like a 
 lord by those who have an opinion of my parts ; whether right or 
 wrong is no great matter : and so the reputation of great learning 
 does the office of a blue ribbon, or of a coach and six horses.' 
 
 Queen Anne had only one public principle, that of zeal 
 for the Church, and adhered to it with a tenacity which 
 must be regarded as honourable. That one principle 
 Godolphin had clumsily contrived to array in opposition to 
 the Whig ministry of which he was chief, by the impolitic 
 solemnity he chose to give to the trial of Dr. Sacheverell. 
 Harley and St. John, for whom that impolicy had furnished 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 97 
 
 the first stepping-stone to power, were, it must be admitted, 
 rather curious representatives of Church principles. They 
 had both received their early education amongst the Dis- 
 senters, and the two were pretty much on a par in sincere 
 Churchmanship. But the really decisive motive with Queen 
 Anne for changing her confidential councillors would seem 
 to have been the intolerable temper and tyranny of the 
 Duchess of Marlborough — the ' dear Mrs. Freeman ' of her 
 ' unfortunate faithful Morle3\' The Queen had been suffi- 
 ciently alarmed already by the Duke's insistance on his 
 captain-generalship for life ; but she was daily disgusted 
 by the overbearing advantage taken by his shrew of a 
 wife of her own weak spirits and apparently inexhaustible 
 patience. There needed only au adroit waiting- woman, and 
 a crafty councillor brought up the back-stairs, to instruct 
 her Majesty how to shake herself free at once from domestic 
 and political thraldom. And the pusillanimous temper of 
 the Prime Minister Godolphin conspired for the overthrow 
 of his own party, with the new-born self-assertion of the 
 sovereign. ' If Lord Treasurer can but be persuaded to 
 act like a man ! ' wrote Sunderland to Marlborough. But 
 Godolphin and his colleagues tamely suffered the Queen to 
 break up their cabinet one by one, like the old man's bundle 
 of sticks in the fable. And the Duchess of Marlborough's 
 violence and insolence completed the ruin of her party, by 
 finally exasperating her long-suffering mistress against her- 
 self. 
 
 Our life-like acquaintance with the Harley-Bolingbroke 
 ministry we owe entirely to Swift's Journal to Stella : — 
 
 ' That wonderful journal,' says Mr. Forster, ' that unrivalled 
 picture of the time, in which he set down day by day the incidents of 
 three momentous years ; which received every hope, fear, or fancy in 
 its undress as it rose to him ; which was written for one person's 
 private pleasure, and has had indestructible attractiveness for every 
 one since; which has no parallel in literature for the historic im- 
 portance of the men and the events that move along its pages, or the 
 homely vividness of the language that describes them ; and of which 
 the loves and hates, the joys and griefs, the expectations and dis- 
 appomtments, the gi'eat and little in closest neighbourhood, the 
 
98 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 alternating tenderness and bitterness, and, above all, the sense and 
 nonsense in marvellous mixture and profusion, remain a perfect 
 microcosm of human life.' 
 
 Where would Swift now be, as a liviog memory among 
 men, but for his Journal to Stella ? It may be too much to 
 say where Johnson would have been bat for Boswell's ' Life .' 
 Captain Gulliver would have sufficiently secured his creator 
 from oblivion, as Robinson Crusoe did Defoe. But what man- 
 ner of man Swift was individually, as well as in relation to his 
 most distinguished contemporaries, must have been gathered 
 from sources of very imperfect or very untrustworthy informa- 
 tion, had he not himself put on record, for sympathetic eyes, 
 in the minutest detail, his daily life in London at an epoch 
 of intense interest as well for himself as the public. The 
 curious thing is, that Mr. Eorster has made the discovery 
 that the Journal to Stella has no right to be called the 
 Journal to Stella, though it be so entitled in every edition 
 of Swift hitherto published. 'At the time when the letters 
 composing that journal were addressed to Esther Johnson 
 and her companion, the name which eternally connects her 
 with Swift had not been applied to her. Most certainly 
 it was not used in any part of the letters themselves, nor 
 had been previously in any known piece of writing concern- 
 ing her.' 
 
 Another meritorious feat of Mr. Forster is the discovery 
 of the origin of the ' little language ' which forms so large 
 and whimsical an ingredient in Swift's letters to Esther 
 Johnson, and the restoration in his Appendix of the pas- 
 sages written in that language, so far as recoverable from 
 the partially preserved original MSS. of those letters in the 
 British Museum. ' There can be no doubt,' says Mr. Forster, 
 'that what he called "our own little language," hitherto all 
 but suppressed by those who have supplied the materials 
 for his biography existing in his journals, began at Moor 
 Park, and began in the man's imitation of a child's im- 
 perfect speech. The loving playfulness expressed by the 
 " little language " had dated from Esther Johnson's child- 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 99 
 
 hood; it in some way satisfied wants of his own nature, or he 
 would not have continued so lavishly to indulge it.' 
 
 Amongst the earlier entries in what we must crave leave 
 still to call the 'Journal to Stella,' we find the following 
 minute item ■ to satisfy the curiosity of his correspondent 
 ahout his London lodgings : — 
 
 I lodge in Bury Street, where I removed a week ago. I have the 
 first floor, a dining-room and bed-chamber, at eight shillings a week ; 
 plaguy deep, but I spend nothiug for eating, never go to a tavern, 
 and very seldom in a coach ; yet, after all, it will be expensive. 
 
 Presently he writes : — 
 
 You must know it is fatal to me [I am fated] to be a scoundrel 
 and a prince the same day ; for being to see him [Harley] at four, I 
 could not engage myself to dine at any friend's ; so I went to Tooke 
 [his publisher], to give him a ballad and dine with him ; but he was 
 not at home, so I was forced to go to a blind chophouse, and dine for 
 ten pence upon gill ale, bad broth, and three chops of mutton ; and 
 then go reeking from thence to the First Minister of State. 
 
 Another specimen of the small economies of Swift's ' Life 
 in Loudon ' : — 
 
 I have gotten half a bushel of coals, and Patrick, the extravagant 
 whelp, had a fire ready for me ; but I picked ofi" the coals before I 
 went to bed. 
 
 It is only due to Swift to say that he was not less minutely 
 attentive to prudential calculation for others than he was 
 for himself : — 
 
 To-day I was all about St. Paul's, and up at top, like a fool, with 
 Sir Andrew Fountaine and two more, and spent seven shillings for 
 my dinner, Uke a puppy : this is the second time he has served me so ; 
 but I will never do it again, though all mankind should persuade me ; 
 unconsidering puppies ! There is a young fellow here in town we 
 are all fond of, about a year or two come from the University,— one 
 Harrison, a pretty little fellow, with a great deal of wit, good sense, 
 and good nature ; has written some mighty pretty things. He has 
 nothing to live on but being governor of one of the Duke of Queens- 
 berry's sons for forty pounds a-year. The fine fellows are always 
 inviting him to the tavern, and make him pay his dub. A colonel 
 
 H 2 
 
100 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 and a lord were at him and me the same way to-night. I absolutely- 
 refused, and made Harrison lag behind, and persuaded him not to go 
 to them. I tell you this, because I find all rich fellows have that 
 humour of iising all people without any consideration of their fortunes ; 
 but I will see them rot before they shall serve me so. Lord Halifax 
 is always teasing me to go down to his country house, which will 
 cost me a guinea to his servants, and twelve shillings coach hire ; and 
 he shall be hanged first. Is not this a plaguy silly story ? But I 
 am vexed at the heart, for I love the young fellow, and am resolved 
 to stir up people to do something for him : he is a Whig, and I will 
 put him upon some of my cast Whigs, for I have done with them, 
 and they have, 1 hope, done with this kingdom for our time. 
 
 cwcas hominum mentes ! In little more than three years 
 the Whigs were back again in power, and the Tories the 
 proscribed party under a new dynasty. 
 
 The ' little language ' of infantine and affectionate jargon 
 in Swift's Journal to Stella contrasts rather piquantly with 
 what we may call the large language, also to be found in 
 that journal, of opprobrious epithets on all who thwarted 
 his humour or crossed his personal purposes. ' Grave mis- 
 takes,' says Mr. Forster, 'have been made by giving im- 
 portance to such chance words as these, which are as frequent 
 as they are meaningless in the speech of Swift.' Mr. Fors- 
 ter instances Swift's description of the Duke of Ormond's 
 daughters, when he met them in London in 1710, as 'inso- 
 lent drabs, coming up to his very mouth to salute him ' — 
 'the epithet of course meaning nothing but that, being 
 fond of them, he was free to call them what he pleased.' 
 In like manner, he writes to Stella tha,t he had ' supped with 
 " the raniblingest lying rogue on earth," as with a not un- 
 loving familiarity he calls Lord Peterborough.' We cannot, 
 however, go along with Mr. Forster in saying that when 
 Swift calls ' the Irish bishops insolent, ungrateful rascals, 
 and Lord Somers himself a rascal, the words ought not to be 
 credited with meanings such as would be given them in 
 present ordinary use.' We are, for our part, of opinion that 
 when Swift called Lord Somers ' a false, deceitful rascal,' 
 and said of the Whigs collectively, ' Rot them for ungrateful 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 101 
 
 dogs ! ' — he quite meant what he said. He meant to express 
 a bitter sense of having been ill-used by them, and put off 
 with fair words instead of buttered parsnips. In his age of 
 unpublished debates in Parliament, literary services were 
 more indispensable to public men and political parties than 
 they are at present, and Swift had seen Addison paid for his, 
 not with empty praise, but with the solid pudding of an 
 Under-Secretaryship. But Swift had made the mistake of 
 entering a profession whose graver members were scan- 
 dalised by the satires he penned in its cause. A priest 
 without vocation, a politician loaded with (derical odium, 
 what can be said but ' Que diable allait-il fairs dayis cette 
 galere ? ' 
 
 That Swift was in earnest in abusing all who failed to 
 help him forward, we cannot ourselves doubt. But perhaps 
 it is hardly enough remembered that his large language 
 about them chiefly occurs in his confidential letters to Stella, 
 and in his marginal notes to his copy of Burnet's ' History 
 of his Own Time.' Those of his readers who are most dis- 
 posed to inveigh against Swift's invectives may take blame 
 to themselves as parties to the publicity of those invectives — 
 so far as participating in that insatiable curiosity for every- 
 thing that dropped from that prolific and careless pen, 
 which his successive editors, from Mr. Deane Swift to Mr. 
 Fors.ter, have done their utmost to satisfy. But for that 
 curiosity, Swift's most exorbitant epithets on foes and false 
 friends might have met no other eyes than those they were 
 meant to meet, or, at most, no others than of those who 
 might come into possession of his copy of Burnet. 
 
 Much less easily excusable than Swift's conduct to parties 
 was his conduct to women. Upon the general judgment to 
 be passed on that conduct we shall have more to say pre- 
 sently. Meanwhile we may remark, in closing the chapter 
 of his connection with English politics, that as Swift sinned 
 most signally against two women — poor Stella and Vanessa 
 —so by two women — the Queen and the Duchess of Somerset 
 —he was most signally punished. The same wayward temper 
 which marked his personal relations with the sex prompted 
 
102 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 tis public attack, in the interest of his Tory patrons, on the 
 one woman in England of whom he himself said, in a lucid 
 interval, that she had more personal credit than all the 
 Queen's servants put together. In the ' Windsor Prophecy,' 
 which Lady Masham's prudence just withheld him from pub- 
 lishing, but which his own prudence did not withhold him from 
 distributing printed copies of among the sixteen symposiac 
 members of the October Club, Swift, in the coarsest terms the 
 language would afford him, charged the Duchess of Somerset, 
 the Queen's new Whig favourite (whom she seems to have 
 chosen, with the policy of conscious weakness, to maintain a 
 balance of power in her closet against her Tory one), with two 
 crimes — the having been privy to the murder of her second 
 husband, and the having red hair. The first charge was the 
 mere reckless fabrication of party malice ; the second musb 
 have sunk deeper because it was true. The consequences to 
 Swift are recorded in rhyme by himself as follows : — 
 
 Now angry Somerset her vengeance vows 
 On Swift's reproaches for her murder'd spouse : 
 From her red locks her mouth with venom fills, 
 And thence into the royal ear distils. 
 
 It is certain that Harley and Bolingbroke, if agreed in 
 nothing else, were agreed in the desire to keep Swift in 
 England, and therefore to make his position in England 
 tenable in point of personal dignity. Not less certainly some 
 superior power or influence withstood their wishes, so that 
 Swift's patrons, in an age when Cabinets were compelled to 
 bow submissively to Court influences, found themselves un- 
 able to provide, even by a prebend at Windsor, for their 
 most politically effective and most personally valued partisan. 
 To the very last, he confesses, he thought the ministry would 
 not have parted with him, and could only conclude that they 
 had not the option of making a suitable provision for him in 
 England. In order to vacate the Deanery of St. Patrick's 
 Dublin, for Swift, the Prime Minister, who had now been 
 raised to the peerage by the title of Earl of Oxford, with the 
 concurrence of the Duke of Ormond, then Lord-Lieutenant 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 103 
 
 of Ireland, procured the removal of Swift's friend Dr. Sterne 
 from that deanery by appointment to the bishopric of Dro- 
 more. ' Sterne,' says Sir Walter Scott, ' had no apparent 
 interest of his own, and was rather obnoxious to the Duke 
 of Ormond. The circumstance, therefore, of his being pro- 
 moted to the higher dignity, while Swift, with all his in- 
 fluence, only gained that from which Sterne was removed, 
 indicates a sort of compromise between the Queen and her 
 ministers ; ' the former remaining resolute not to put a mitre 
 — even an Irish mitre— on the head of Swift. ' This affair,' 
 he says in one of his last letters to Stella, ' was carried with 
 great difficulty, which vexes me. But they say here [in 
 London] it is much to my reputation that I have made a 
 bishop, in spite of all the world, to get the best deanery in 
 Ireland.' 
 
 In Jeffrey's Essay on Swift, republished from the ' Edin- 
 burgh Review,' some good indignation is expended on the 
 monstrous greed of the new Dean of St. Patrick's importun- 
 ing a ministry whom his writings had first floated, and kept 
 afloat for years, in English public opinion, to pay the expenses 
 (which he found would amount to about 1,000Z.) incurred on 
 his induction into his Irish deanery — the discharge of which, 
 if thrown (as they were) on Swift himself, must involve 
 him in debt, of which he had always a wise horror. We 
 are reminded of the impeachment of the Ass, in the fable, 
 before the High Court of Beasts, for having indulged — 
 not, like the Beasts of high degree, in wholesale ovicide, but 
 in a single sacrilegious nibble at the parson's glebe-grass. 
 
 It is a pleasing trait in the character of Addison, and a 
 strong testimony to the personal qualities of Swift, that at 
 the epoch of definitive Tory prosti'ation and Whig triumph, 
 on the accession of George I., Addison, whom that sudden 
 shifting of the political scene replaced in office, hastened to 
 intimate, through the Bishop of Derry, to Swift his wish to 
 renew with him those former friendly relations which had 
 been cooled to some considerable degree.by party warfare. 
 Swift met his old friend's overture in the spirit in which it 
 was made, and, congratulating Addison on his new-fledged 
 
104 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 honours as Secretary of State, added, ' Three or four more 
 such choices would gain more hearts in three weeks than 
 the harsher measures of Groveniment in as many years.' 
 Had Swift's change of party colours under the Tory ministry 
 dishonoured him personally in the eyes of contemporaries, can 
 it appear probable to candid readers that Addison, of all men, 
 would have volunteered renewing their old habits of friendly 
 correspondence ? ' 
 
 The unfortunate manner in which the opposite fates of 
 Swift and Addison put and kept, in each instance, the wrong 
 man in the wrong place was well hit off in the following few 
 words of Sir James Mackintosh, ' What a good exchange of 
 stations might have been made by Swift and Addison ! Ad- 
 dison would have made an excellent Dean, and Swift an 
 admirable Secretary of State.' 
 
 In the career of the two great clerico-political humorists 
 of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — Jonathan Swift 
 and Sydney Smith — there are traits of resemblance worth 
 noting. Of these the most salient one is that both wanted 
 to be bishops, and that neither could ever completely realise 
 what malign influence frustrated him of a mitre.^ 
 
 However little Swift's enemies, lay or clerical, might be 
 disposed to recognise his title to be considered a good Chris- 
 tian, he placed beyond doubt his title to boast himself a good 
 Churchman. His ecclesiastical politics, notwithstanding (or 
 including) his 'Tale of a Tub,' were, from first to last, those 
 of a staunch and somewhat (politically) intolerant Anglican. 
 His methods, indeed, of serving, or saving, the sacred institu- 
 
 ' ' The death of Addison,' says Sir W. Scott, in his Memoir of Swift, ' broke 
 oS their renewed correspondence, after some kind letters had been exchanged. 
 Swift found a valuable successor in Tickell, the poet, surviving friend and 
 literary executor of Addison. He was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ire- 
 laud, an office of high trust, and he often employed the interest which it gave 
 him in compliance with Swift's recommendations.' 
 
 ' The late Lord Holland wrote to Sydney Smith in 1809, ' I did not fail 
 to remind Lord Grenville, that the only author to whom we both thought 
 " Peter Plymley " could be compared in English, lost a bishopric for his 
 wittiest performance ; and I hoped that if we could discover the author, and 
 had ever a bishopric in our gift, me should prove that Whigs were both inore 
 grateful amd more liberal than Tories' Mitres came to be in Whig gift, but 
 not one for Peter Plymley. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 105 
 
 tion, with whose interests he had come to identify those of 
 his own ambition, might naturally be regarded by a religious 
 queen, or represented to her by less religious councillors, as 
 disqualifying Swift for the highest dignities of the Church. 
 But in all his ecclesiastical politics, whether English or Ii-ish, 
 his efforts were bond fide devoted to ecclesiastical interests. 
 Here, again, is a striking point of resemblance between the 
 great Dean of St. Patrick's, in the eighteenth century, and 
 the scarce less renowned, in his Anj and generation. Canon 
 of St. Paul's, in the nineteenth. Each of them took up the 
 cudgels for the Church in his different age and fashion, with 
 a thoroughly congenial spirit of antagonism against its im- 
 mediate assailants, the worst assailants being by each 
 regarded as within its own pale. And to each (both being 
 frustrate of mitres) these appeared naturally to be the re- 
 forming or rapacious members of the Irish or English Epis- 
 copal bench. Swift's, like Sydney Smith's, tracts on ecclesi- 
 astical subjects were mainly devoted to the defence of the 
 inferior clergy against episcopal encroachments. Some 
 passages in his ' Considerations,' written in 1 731, on two bills 
 carried by the Irish bishops through the (Irish) Upper House, 
 but defeated (mainly by Swift's exposure of them) in the 
 Commons, are such exact prototypes of Sydney Smith's 
 ' Letters to Archdeacon Singleton,' directed against the 
 doings of the Ecclesiastical Commission of Ms day, that we 
 cannot resist the temptation of placing them in juxtaposition. 
 Swift's vehement deprecation of measures for multiplying a 
 poor clergy, and his description {in terrorem of Irish landlords 
 and farmers) of the ' little, hedge, contemptible, illiterate 
 vicar, from twenty to fifty pounds a-year, the son of a weaver, 
 pedlar, tailor, or miller,' at once recall to recollection Sydney 
 Smith's portraiture of the parson of the future after the 
 carrying out of the Church reform scheme of Bishop Blom- 
 field and the Ecclesiastical Commission of 1840. He painted 
 that parson in unforgettable traits, as 
 
 obese, dumpy, neither ill-natured nor good-natured, neither learned 
 nor ignorant, striding over the stiles to church, dusty and deliquescent, 
 
106 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 with a second-rate wife and four parochial children, full of catechism 
 and bread-and-butter. 
 
 But Swift's following suggestion is still more curiously 
 anticipatory of tlie sarcastic incisiveness of our later humoris- 
 tical Church champion : — 
 
 Another clause should be that none of these twenty, thirty, forty, 
 or fifty pounders may be suffered to marry, under the penalty of imme- 
 diate deprivation, their marriages declared null, and their children 
 bastards; for some desponding people take the kingdom to be in no 
 condition of encouraging so nvimerous a breed of beggars.' 
 
 Others would add a clause of indulgence, that these reduced 
 divines may be permitted to follow any lawful ways of living, which 
 will not call them too often or too far from their spiritual offices. 
 For example: they may be lappers of linen, bailiffs of the'manor; 
 they may let blood, or apply plasters for three miles round ; they may 
 get a dispensation to hold the clerkship and sextonship of their own 
 parish in commendam. Their wives and daughters may make shirts 
 for the neighbourhood; or, if a barrack be near, for the soldiers; in 
 linen counties they may card and spin, and keep a few looms in the 
 house ; they may let lodgings, and sell a pot of ale without doors, 
 but not at home, unless to sober company, and at regular hours. 
 
 Compare the above-cited passage of Swift with the follow- 
 ing extract from Sydney Smith's Third Letter to Archdeacon 
 Singleton : — 
 
 The whole plan of the Bishop of London is a ptochogony — a 
 generation of beggars. He purposes out of the spoils of the Cathedral 
 to create a thousand livings, and to give to the thousand clergymen 
 1301. per annum each. A Christian bishop proposing, in cold blood, 
 to create a thousand livings of 130Z. per annum each ! — to call into 
 existence a thousand of the most unhappy men on the face of the 
 earth — the sons of the poor, without hope, without the assistance of 
 private fortune, chained to the soil, ashamed to live with their 
 inferiors, unfit for the society of the better class, and dragging 
 about the English curse of poverty, without the smallest hope that 
 they can ever shake it off! At present such livings are filled by 
 young men who have better hopes — who have reason to expect good 
 property — who look forward to a college or a family living — who are 
 the sons of men of some substance, and hope to pass on to something 
 better- — who exist under the delusion of being hereafter Deans and 
 Prebendaries — who are paid once by money and three times by hope. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 107 
 
 Will the Bishop of London promise to the progeny of any of these 
 thousand Tictims of the Holy Innovation that, if they behave well, 
 one of them shall have his butler's place ; another take care of the 
 cedars and hyssops of his garden ? Will he take their daughters for 
 his nursery-maids 1 and may some of the sons of these ' labourers of 
 the vineyard ' hope one day to ride the leaders from St. James's to 
 Fulham'! Here is hope — here is room for ambition— a field for 
 genius, and a ray of amelioration ! If these beautiful feelings of 
 compassion are throbbing under the cassock of the bishop, he ought 
 in common justice to himself to make them known. 
 
 It is due alike to Swift and Sydney Smith to say that 
 both were exemplary in the performance of the duties annexed 
 to their ecclesiastical dignities, and that both considered 
 those duties to include something more than mere formal 
 observances. Swift appears to have given much attention 
 to the business of his cathedral, and at length to have sur- 
 mounted the prejudices of his Archbishop (King) and the 
 resistance of his Chapter, ' as the rectitude of his intentions, 
 and his disinterested zeal for the Church, became more and 
 more evident. He soon,' adds Sir Walter Scott, ' obtained 
 such authority that what he proposed was seldom disputed.' 
 To the like effect the late Dean Milman testifies with regard 
 to Sydney Smith at St. Paul's : ' I find traces of him in 
 every particular of Chapter affairs ; and on every occasion 
 when his hand appears, I find stronger reason for respecting 
 his sound judgment, knowledge of business, and activity of 
 mind ; above all, the perfect fidelity of his stewardship.' Both 
 Swift and Sydney Smith were large in their charities, though 
 both (Swift to an extreme point of parsimony) strict in their 
 economy. The source of that economy was the same in both 
 — a determined spirit of independence, struggling, at the 
 outset, with narrow and adverse circumstances. Both were 
 capable of acts of rare generosity, and both, as regarded 
 personal bearing and oratorical powers, would have detracted 
 nothing from the dignity of the episcopal bench had they 
 attained that object of their equal ambition. All this is in- 
 contestable ; yet, when all has been said, the 'Tale of a Tub ' 
 and the ' Letters of Peter Plyraley ' somehow don't read 
 
108 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 episcopal. But we cannot doubt that many less worthy than 
 Jonathan Swift or Sydney Smith to wear mitres have ' ex- 
 alted their mitred fronts in courts and parliaments,' whether 
 in England or Ireland. 
 
 ' Sydney Smith,' says Lord Houghton, in his pleasant 
 little volume of ' Monographs,' ' often spoke with much bitter- 
 ness of the growing belief in three Sexes of Humanity — men, 
 women, and clergymen ; but for his part, he would not sur- 
 render his rightful share of interference in all the great 
 human interests of his time.' 
 
 ' It needs,' says Lord Houghton, ' no argument to prove that 
 susceptibilities on the score of irreverence increase in proportion to 
 the prevalence of doubt and scepticism. When essential facts cease 
 to be incontrovertible, they are no longer safe for the humour of 
 contrasts and analogies. It is thus that the secular use of scriptural 
 allusion was moie frequent in the days of simple belief in inspiration 
 than in our times of linguistic and historical criticism. Phrases and 
 figures were then taken as freely out of sacred as out of classical 
 literature, and even characters as gross and ludicrous as some of 
 Fielding's clergy were not looked upon as a satire against the 
 Church. Thus when Sydney Smith illustrated his objections to 
 always living in the country by saying that "he was in the position of 
 the personage who, when he entered a village, straightway he found 
 an ass," — or described the future condition of Mr. Croker as " dis- 
 puting with the recording Angel as to the dates of his sins'' — or 
 drew a pictvu'e of Sir George Cornewall Lewis in Hades, " for ever 
 and ever book-less, essay-less, pamphlet-less, grammar-less, in vain 
 imploring the Bishop of London, seated aloft, for one little treatise 
 on the Greek article — one smallest dissertation on the verb in lu," 
 ■ — it never occurred to him that he was doing anything more than 
 taking the most vivid and familiar images as vehicles of his humour.' 
 
 There can be no question that ' the prevalence of doubt 
 and scepticism ' constrains the defenders of positive creeds to 
 close their ranks, and desist from friendly chaffing at out- 
 posts with vedettes of the enemy. But is there not sometimes 
 another effect of ' the prevalence of doubt and scepticism ' ? 
 When these are in the air, are they not apt to infect, to a 
 greater or less extent, the livelier spirits among the con- 
 secrated champions of orthodoxy ? Voltaire calls Swift ' le 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 109 
 
 Rabelais de I'Angleterre,' and says of him, ' Tl a I'lionneur 
 d'etre pretre, et de se moquer de tout, comme lui.' The in- 
 comparable irony of Swift's ' Argument against Abolishing 
 Christianity ' could only have found scope at a period when 
 the audacity of unbelief might be considered as legitimatising 
 the audacity of irony with which Swift encountered it. But 
 it may be questioned whether a good deal of the spirit of 
 the assailants does not animate such defenders, and whether 
 the popular instinct is not, after all, right which, even on 
 the plea of saving the Ark from falling, will not have it so 
 handled. 
 
 One remaining marked resemblance between Swift and 
 Sydney Smith was that each in his time stood forth a cleri- 
 cal champion of the political cause of Ireland. That cause 
 in Swift's time included no recognition of even the existence 
 of two millions, or thereabouts, of Irish Roman Catholic 
 population ; and that non-recognition has most absurdly 
 been numbered amongst the political sins of Swift. But in 
 Swift's day Irish Roman Catholics had no existence as a 
 factor in English politics. James II. and Tyrconnel had 
 annihilated for generations to come all chance of civil equa- 
 lity for Roman Catholics, whether in Ireland or England, by 
 their insane conspiracy to use the wild Irish as armed auxi- 
 liaries against English Protestant liberties. Swift stood 
 forward as champion of parliamentary and administrative 
 autonomy for 'the English settled in Ireland,' drawing a 
 hard and fast line of demarcation between them and the native 
 ' Papists,' whom he described ' as being as inconsiderable in 
 point of power as the women and children.' Not the less 
 did the publication of his ' Drapier's Letters ' raise for all 
 Irishmen the first standard of self-assertion against mere 
 Helot subjection to the selfish sway of English politicians 
 and monopolists. Swift did not call the Irish Roman Ca.tho- 
 lics to his side ; but they came without calling. The popu- 
 lace of Dublin were as warmly his allies as the parliamentary 
 patriots of Stephen's Green. The ostensible cause of quarrel 
 with Walpole's administral;ion — Wood's halfpence — was, in- 
 deed, a trumpery one. But a Government which could im- 
 
110 JONATHAN SWIF-T. 
 
 pose even a new copper coinage on its Irish subjects without 
 consulting their representative and administrative authori- 
 ties, could impose anything else. That was the substantial 
 and, in the later '^ Drapier's Letters,' the avowed ground of 
 Swift's resistance to Walpole in the name of the constitu- 
 tional rights of Irish subjects. And the cause that tri- 
 umphed in 1724 by the sole power of Swift's pen was the 
 cause that again triumphed in 1782, when backed by 
 the whole formidable armed force of the Irish volunteers. 
 Alike at both epochs the rights and wrongs of Irish Roman 
 Catholics, as such, were left altogether out of account. But 
 not the less was the Irish Roman Catholic cause indirectly 
 included in what appeared the exclusively Protestant agita- 
 tions of the eighteenth century. And the first successful 
 Irish agitator was Swift. No Irishman, by his own avowal, 
 though born in Ireland, but not the less an idolised Irish 
 popular leader. No advocate of ' Catholic emancipation ' 
 (such advocacy would have been an anachronism), but not 
 the less a precursor of Sydney Smith and Daniel O'Connell. 
 And now, what are we finally to say of Swift, the Writer 
 and the Man, so far as the materials at present in our hands 
 will carry us ? 
 
 The first of Swift's critics whose judgment is of weight 
 — Johnson in his ' Lives of the Poets ' — while more lenient 
 than some of those who have followed to his character as a 
 man, appreciates less adequately his distinctive qualities as a 
 writer. Boswell remarks that his ' guide, philosopher, and 
 friend ' showed also some disposition to depreciate Swift 
 in conversation ; and suggests as a possible, perhaps un- 
 conscious, source of prejudice against him, that Swift failed 
 to exert, or at least exert successfully, his influence to obtain 
 for Johnson an honorary degree of Master of Arts from Dub- 
 lin University, when he was seeking, in his early struggles, 
 an appointment as the head of a school. However that may 
 have been, his inadequate appreciation of Swift seems sufii- 
 ciently accounted for by the genius of the two men having 
 had more points of mutual repulsion than attraction. Johnson 
 finds Swift's distinguishing quality to have been good sense 
 
JONATHAJSr SWIFT. Ill 
 
 rather tlian wit, humour, poetical fancy, or imagination ! 
 Such was his own distinguishing quality, and Swift doubtless 
 also possessed it in large measure. But the wit and'humour — 
 we may add, the fancy and imagination — which Johnson 
 was himself deficient in, he seems to have been unable ade- ' 
 quately to appreciate in another. Swift never would have made 
 (as Goldsmith said Johnson would have done) his 'little fishes 
 talk like great whales ; ' and Johnson, who spoke slightingly 
 of ' Gulliver's Travels,' as if their main merit consisted in 
 having hit on the idea of little men and big men, would have 
 been incapable of carrying out that idea, had he himself hit 
 on it, with that curious felicity which imparts such truth to 
 fiction in the minute touches of Swift. . There was not much 
 more of poetry in Johnson's soul than of humour. His 
 verse, vigorous as it was, might be described as rhetoric in 
 rhyme. 
 
 A biographer with far other power of sympathy (as being 
 himself a poet) with the poetical sides of Swift's genius was 
 Scott. There is a tradition that Dryden, who was a kins- 
 man of Swift, once said to him on some early attempts of 
 his at high Pindaric flights, ' Cousin Swift, you will never be 
 a poet ! ' One can imagine Rubens saying to his pupil, the 
 elder Teniers, ere the latter deserted ' high art ' and devoted 
 himself to ' Dutch drolleries : ' ' Pupil David, you will never 
 be a painter ! ' But David made himself and his son into 
 most effective painters, though neither of them painted fleshy 
 Flemish Madonnas or fleshy Flemish chivalry. Swift could 
 not have written ' Alexander's Feast ; ' granted. Could 
 Dryden have written ' Cadenus and Vanessa,' or the ' Humble 
 Petition of Frances Harris ' ? Had Swift stuck to Pindaric 
 odes, and panegyrics in pompous rhyme on Sir William 
 Temple, it may be admitted that he never would have been 
 a poet. When he struck into his own peculiar vein of fancy 
 and humour, he became one. It is not the choice of sub- 
 jects familiar or elevated that confers the title of poet ; it is 
 the inspiration of the poetical breath of life into the subjects 
 chosen, whatsoever they may be. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott suggests the only possible circumstance 
 
112 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 whicli, ' as at present advised,' we can conceive admissible in 
 part excuse of Swift's conduct to women. He suggests that 
 disease, rather than selfishness, may have been, partly at 
 least, to blame for that conduct. ' The continual recurrence 
 of a distressing vertigo was gradually undermining his health. 
 .... He might seek the society of Yanessa without the 
 apprehension of exciting passions to which he was himself 
 insensible ; and his separation from Stella after marriage 
 might be a matter equally of choice or of necessity.' 
 
 It may here be observed that Scott assumes the fact of 
 Swift's marriage to Stella. Mr. Forster sees no evidence for 
 that marriage, and Scott admits that there is no direct evi- 
 dence of it. AH the evidence is circumstantial and tradi- 
 tionary. For our own part, we attach less importance to 
 the fact, as hitherto accredited, of a merely formal marriage, 
 than to the question of motive of Swift's entire conduct to- 
 wards the other party — and a third party concerned — pre- 
 viously and subsequently to that supposed event. We are 
 not amongst those who regard marriage as an imperative 
 part of the whole duty of man. But we are amongst those 
 who think that men who abstain from marrying should ab- 
 stain from philandering.^ Had Swift been a Roman Catholic 
 priest, his role, as regarded women, would have been easier. 
 Some Spanish or Italian mother (we forget at this moment 
 who) said to her son that, ' if he remained a layman, he must 
 beware of women ; if he became a priest, they must beware 
 of him.' Swift sought to cumulate the priestly privilege 
 with the lay license. Not license in the sense of profligacy, 
 but, as we have said, of philandering. It was a license he 
 had allowed himself from early manhood. Following out 
 Sainte-Beuve's personal and physiological method of criti- 
 cism, we should say that Swift's ' vice or weakness ' (the great 
 French critic adds, ' every man has such ') was the not un- 
 
 or 
 out- of- 
 
 ' We must admit that ' philander ' is a verb unrecognised by Johnson 
 Webster. We turned, therefore, for it to a quarter where the most out-,^^ 
 the- way English words are sure to be found— an English-German Dictionary. 
 In Fliigel's Dictionary, ' to philander ' is Germanised as ' Den Sohafer spielen, 
 liebeln, den VeHrauten machen ' — precisely the ways with women of which we 
 complain in Swift. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 113 
 
 common one of a self-indulgent propensity to engage female 
 sympathy, without making the return for that sympathy 
 demanded by female affection. And on that point, habemus 
 confitentem reum. In a letter written before he took orders 
 Swift replied as follows to some advice of a Leicester clergy- 
 man, whom he calls his ' good cousin,' referring to certain 
 recent passages of love-making with one of his female 
 acquaintances there. He wrote that 
 
 As to marriage, he does not belong to the kind of persons, of 
 whom he has known a great number, that ruin themselves by it. A 
 thousand hoiisehold thoughts always drive matrimony out of his mind 
 whenever it chances to come there ; and his own cold temper and un- 
 confined humour are of themselves a greater hindrance than any fear 
 of that which is the subject of his friend's letter. ' T am naturally 
 temperate ; and never engaged in the contrary, which usually pro- 
 duces those effects.' At the same time he admits he has failings 
 that might lead people, in regard to such matters, to suppose him 
 serious, while he had no other design other than to entertain himself 
 when idle, or when something went amiss in his affairs ; a thing, 
 indeed, so common with him, that he could remember twenty wonnen in 
 his life to whom he had behaved himself just the same way. ' I shall 
 speak plainly to you,' he added. And then came words which cer- 
 tainly foreshadow, if they do not make intelligible, the fate that was 
 to join his name so strangely, through all future time, to that of her 
 who then lived under the same roof with him, a child of ten years 
 old. ' The very ordiuary observations I made with going half a 
 mile beyond the University have taught me experience enough not 
 to think of marriage till I settle my fortune in the world, which 
 I am sure will not be in some years ; and even then I am so hard 
 to please myself, that T suppose I shall put it off to the other 
 world. ' ' 
 
 That habit of indecisive, inconclusive gallantry to amuse 
 idle time — which, as we have seen, Swift wrote that ' should 
 he enter the Church, he would not find it hard to lay down 
 in the porch ' — he did not lay down in the porch, but carried 
 into years of mature clerical manhood, when it had lost the 
 excuse — whatever that might be worth — of thoughtlessness. 
 Swift, like Goethe, was exceedingly susceptible of female 
 influences, but, like Goethe, reserved an interior self, which 
 ' Forater's Life,, pp. 64-, 6^. 
 I 
 
114 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 remained impassible to them. Each exerted the powers of 
 pleasing which each possessed to attract female affections, 
 which neither was prepared to reciprocate to the extent of 
 undivided devotion to one object ; and the result in both 
 cases was what we must call tragical. Swift had to com- 
 plain, in his later joyless years, that his female friends had 
 forsaken him,' and G-oethe — after tearing himself loose from 
 an honourable love on very small motives — suffered a woman 
 every way his inferior, whom he himself acknowledged to be 
 a ' poor creature,' to throw herself into his arms uncondi- 
 tionally, and fasten for life her vulgarity on the ultra-refine- 
 ment of his studiously composed existence.^ Such were the 
 fruits, in each case, of over-calculation or over-fastidiousness 
 — in short, selfishness. In Swift's case there is still an 
 element of mystery, for the solution of which, if any more 
 complete solution is possible, we have some right to look, 
 and shall look with curiosity and interest, to the sequel of 
 Mr. Forster's vigorous and sympathetic Apologia for the 
 genius and character of the extraordinary man he has made 
 his subject. 
 
 In the meanwhile let us just remind those who, while 
 enjoying Swift the writer, are unmeasured in their denun- 
 ciations of Swift the man, that had not the man been what 
 he was, the world never would have possessed the writer. If 
 Swift had been a model of clerical decorum, the ' Tale of a 
 Tub ' must have remained unwritten ; as, for that matter, 
 so must ' Gulliver's Travels,' had Swift continued a staunch 
 
 ■ In one of Swift's later letters to Pope (February 7, 1736) we find the 
 following passage, which is not without its pathos :— 'What vexes me most 
 is, that my female friends, who could bear me very well a dozen of years ago, 
 have now forsaken me, although I am not so old in proportion to them as I 
 formerly was; which I can prove by arithmetic, for then I was double their 
 age, which now I am not.' 
 
 2 Of all who have written, and written well on Goethe's relations to 
 women, the only one we have met with who performs fearlessly the whole 
 moral anatomy of the man is Mr. E. H. Hutton, in his Literary Essays, 
 Mr. Hutton is of opinion that Goethe really loved Christiane Vulpius, whom, 
 after cohabiting with her seventeen years, he married. If he did love her it 
 was a love compatible with slight esteem, and with tolerance of slight esteem 
 of others for its object. 
 
JONATHAN SWIFT. 116 
 
 and satisfied Whig. . Tlie popular resurrection of Ireland 
 would not hare dated from the ' Drapier's Letters,' liad not 
 Walpole held Swift, like Bolingbroke, at arm's length, under 
 the first Georges. ' Prince Posterity ' must take the lot 
 with all faults, and perhaps has no bad bargain. 
 
 "We may say in conclusion, that Mr. Forster is almost the 
 first of Swift's biographers or critics who takes real pains to 
 explore all the sources of fresh information on his subject 
 which have been opened to him by others, or which personal 
 research and inquiry have opened for himself. Johnson 
 slighted Mr. Deane Swift's offer to aid him wibh family 
 traditions and documents. Scott worked up very readably 
 into his short Memoir all the materials which came readily 
 to hand, but does not seem to have thought it worth while 
 to look far afield for more matter than he could briug within 
 the compass of that Memoir. Jeffrey, in his essay on Swift, 
 which he twice reprinted from his Eeview, did his worst to 
 wash on again the party blacking which he thought Scott 
 had been rather too disposed to wash off the character of a 
 Whig convert to T6ryism. Macaulay and Thackeray had 
 their own political and literary humours to vent at Swift's 
 expense ; and both, as regarded facts, were content with 
 that a-peu-pres which was Sainte-Beuve's special horror, 
 and with which, we may add, Mr. Forster is much too 
 thorough-going in his championship of Swift's good fame to 
 content himself. We must refer our readers to the preface 
 of his present volume for the long list of tributaries, noble, 
 reverend, collegiate, lettered, and bibliopolic from whom 
 Mr. Forster acknowledges aids, or access to aids, in the 
 shape of original documents illustrative of his subject which 
 had hitherto been buried from the public eye in private 
 repositories. 
 
 Swift has undergone the fate of all men whose characters 
 have exhibited very pronounced features, rendered more 
 pronounced and more unpleasing by age. He has been 
 viewed at his worst. After his death, as before it, his genius 
 has suffered sorrowful eclipse in misanthropy and mania. 
 There seems to have been something the matter with his 
 
 I 2 
 
116 JONATHAN SWIFT. 
 
 head almost all through his life ; and the final autopsy 
 revealed hydrocephalus. But, as inveterate readers of Svyift, 
 we are grateful to Mr. Forster for reminding the world that 
 in Swift's better days he had something else than water on 
 the brain, or misanthropy in the heart. Swift, the author, 
 must ever rank amongst the perennial honours of English 
 literature ; and the work before us, when completed, will, we 
 are confident, place Swift the man — if not on so lofty a 
 moral pedestal as seems designed for him by his biographer 
 —at least in a position to engage a larger share of human 
 sympathy than has hitherto been accorded him by the 
 common run of readers, a generation of whom it may be 
 said, at the present day, that they know not Jonathan. 
 
117 
 
 IV. 
 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 1. Tlie Identity of Jmiim rvitli a, distinguisTied Living Character Estallislied 
 
 Including the Supplement, consisting of Facsimiles of Handwriting and 
 other Illustrations. By John Tatloe. Second Edition. Corrected 
 and Enlarged. London, 1818. 
 
 2. Memovrs of Sir PMlvp Francis, K. C.S. With Correspondence and Jowrnals. 
 
 Commenced by the late Joseph Paekbs, Esq. Completed and Edited 
 by Hbeman Mbrivale, M.A. In two Vols. London, 1867. 
 
 3. Mm-e about Juniios. The Franciscan Theory unsound. By A. Hattwaed, 
 
 Esq., Q.C. 
 
 4. Tlie Handmriting of Junius Professionally Investigated. By Mr. Charles 
 
 Chabot, Expert. With Preface and Collateral Evidence. By the Hon. 
 Edwaed Twislbton. London, 1871 . 
 
 5. Tlie Last Pliase in the Jvmius Controversy. By Hbeman Mbeivale. 
 
 Cornhill Magazine, June 1871.' 
 
 [Mk. Geokge Tbevbltan, in the lively and interesting first 
 instalment of his new ' History of Fox,' refers with just 
 appreciation to the late Mr. Herman Merivale as ' an author 
 who has written only too little and too unambitionsly,' and 
 whose completion of the memoirs of Sir Philip Francis, com- 
 menced by the late Joseph Partes, ' has virtually set at rest 
 the [Junian] controversy, that once threatened to be eternal.' 
 In view of any yet possible galvanic resurrection of that 
 controversy, it may not be useless, and cannot now be in- 
 discreet, to extract the following observations from a private 
 letter addressed by Mr. Merivale to the present writer so 
 long back as April 1868. 
 
 ' The real case for Francis consists in the extraordinary multitude 
 of coincidences, not in the strength of each. 
 
 If I said that the committer of a crime as to which I was giving 
 evidence had black hair, it would prove nothing ; that he had one 
 eye, not much ; that he spoke Irish, but httle; that he Hmped — that 
 ' Erom the Westminster Review, October 1871. 
 
118 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 he stooped— small matters; but if it was shown that a black-haired, 
 one-eyed, stooping, limping Irishman was in the way at the time, it 
 would go very hard with the said Irishman. And so with Francis. 
 
 As to Smith's ' Temple ' theory, I have always regarded the fol- 
 lowing as a certain ' mark ' in the controversy. The style of Junius 
 is stiff and unnatural, but it is very masterly. Ergo, it is not of a 
 conclusive order of proof to compare it with the natural styles of other 
 men. Many good writers might perhaps have written Junius. Even 
 inferior writers (in their natural style) might have done so. But 
 no very had writer could possibly have written Junius. Now if any 
 one, with these canons in his mind, will look at a few of Lord 
 Temple's letters at the end of vol. iv. of the Grenville Correspondence, 
 I think he will say at once that the theory of Lord Temple is impos- 
 sible. The same course of reasoning makes Lord G. Sackville 
 impossible. On the other hand, the Duke of Richmond might have 
 written Junius, and he almost alone of the noble lords of the time. 
 And strange to say, there are more quaint coincidences in favour of 
 the Duke of Richmond than of any other high-placed candidate, 
 though he has never been publicly suggested.'] 
 
 It really seems high time the ghost of Junius were finally 
 laid, and the perturbed spirit of Francis consigned to such rest 
 as it can be conceived capable of enjoying in any sphere. The 
 lapse of a century is rather trying to the surviving interest 
 in any reputation, political or literary, not of the very first 
 class. When Mr. John Taylor, the first discoverer and pro- 
 mulgator of the ' Franciscan theory,' addressed himself to 
 the subject, rather better than half a century back, the 
 question of the authorship of ' Junius ' had a living political 
 interest, and the author, then first disinterred from his self- 
 dug sepulchre, was a living, though retired public man. ISTo 
 one now looks back to the politics of the last century with the 
 sort or degree of interest which was still felt in those 
 politics fifty or sixty years back. No one now expects 
 to see 'Junius Identified with a Distinguished Living 
 Character.' Half a century hence, the question of the 
 identity of Junius with any person whatever will, in all 
 probability, have ceased to excite any other than antiquarian 
 curiosity. The general reader will no more think it due to 
 his character to show himself well up in the topics of the 
 ' Letters of Junius ' than he cares now to do in those of 
 Addison's 'Freeholders,' or Bolingbroke's 'Craftsmen.' 
 
JUNIUS AND FEANCIS. 119 
 
 As yet, however, the final solution of the Junian mystery is 
 a subject which has not wholly lost its attractiveness, at least 
 to students of political history and literature. 
 
 When all the pros and cons of a long-vexed question 
 have seemed fairly exhausted, some minute point may 
 happen to strike the critical eye as of more decisive import 
 than the greater portion of the entire mass of previous 
 evidence which had hitherto failed to bring the controversy 
 to a close. Such a point, which we have not seen singled 
 out for notice in any previous handling of this controversy, 
 has caught our eye, and irresistibly riveted our attention, 
 in running over the private letters (which were first published 
 in the Chatham Correspondence) from Calcraft to Lord 
 Chatham in 1771. A couple of very singularly-worded 
 sentences contained in those letters— collated with a couple 
 of strangely coincident sentences in a letter of Junius of 
 later date, and read by the light of a not less remarkable 
 passage latel}' published by Mr. Merivale in the Appendix to 
 the first volume of the ' Memoirs of Sir Philip Francis,' go 
 farther, in our judgment, than much of the evidence besides 
 brought to bear on the question to identify the writer of 
 the private communications to Chatham with the writer of 
 the published Letter of Junius above referred to, and to 
 identify both with Francis. But we must crave our readers'- 
 patience for some brief introduction of this hitherto un- 
 noticed piece of evidence. 
 
 The difficulty of conceiving how the 'Junius' secret 
 should have beer, kept so long of course increases in propor- 
 tion to the degree of prominence and importance in public 
 life of whatever person it might be proposed to fix with the 
 authorship. There is, on the other hand, an almost equal 
 difficulty in supposing the author not to have been a man of 
 some mark in politics ; because it is difficult, on that suppo- 
 sition, to account for his extensive and minute political 
 knowledge. ' The peculiar position,' observes Mr. Merivale, 
 ' of Francis as a subordinate official, in close connection with 
 the higher world, unknown himself and knowing much, cer- 
 tainly does much towards evading the cogency of this di- 
 lemma.' 
 
120 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 Francis and Junius, we think, can plainly be shown to 
 have both been political adventurers, whose hopes of political 
 fortune were embarked, at a particular point of time, in the 
 same bottom, and led both strenuously to exert themselves 
 for the overthrow of the Grafton ministry of 1768. As an 
 anticipated consequence of that overthrow, Francis and 
 Junius can both be shown to have speculated on the restora- 
 tion of Lord Chatham to power, in renewed alliance with his 
 family connections, the ' Grenville Brothers.' 
 
 Philip Francis in his earlier youth had for a short time 
 acted as amanuensis of Lord Chatham (then Mr. Pitt) . At 
 the point of time we are now about to refer to, from 1768 
 to 1771, Junius was delivering his tremendous broadsides 
 against the Grafton ministry. Francis, we shall see, was 
 building on Lord Chatham's anticipated triumphant return 
 to power ambitious hopes of rising from a clerkship in the 
 , War Office to some higher position under the patronage of 
 the great Earl, who was then heading the Opposition in 
 renewed alliance with the ' Granville Brothers.' We shall 
 presently find proofs in Junius's private letters to Lord 
 Chatham and Mr. George Grenville that he too was actuated 
 with similar hopes from the same quarters. 
 
 ' The gout and the Grenvilles ' (to borrow a phrase from 
 Lord Stanhope's History) may be said without exaggera- 
 tion to have been the main Marplots in the politics of the 
 first decade of the Third George's reign. The stubborn 
 adherence of Lord Temple to what might be termed the 
 Grenville ' family compact ' had prevented Pitt — then the 
 Great Commoner — from returning to the head of the Govern- 
 ment upon George Grenville's first enforced resignation in 
 1765. And when, the year after, Pitt (first choosing to put 
 a coronet on his head) acted on the view of policy bluntly 
 articulated by Lord Camden, 'Let him fling off the Grenvilles, 
 and save the nation without them ' — the ex-Great Commoner 
 was unhappily no longer in a condition to save the nation ; 
 not because he had changed his popular name, and left his 
 popular arena, the House of Commons, but because that for- 
 midable factor, suppressed gout, had come in to perplex all 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 121 
 
 calculations on his political ascendency. For a year and a 
 half that mysterious malady entirely suspended his personal 
 action in the cabinet formed by himself, kept him wholly 
 withdrawn from all business whatever, and rendered him in- 
 capable even of the effort of will required for resigning the 
 power he was utterly impotent for the time to wield. The 
 Duke of Grafton's premiership, which his own temporary in- 
 capacity to hold the helm had rendered (by his own avowal 
 and advice to the King) the only pilotage at the helm avail- 
 able for the time being, soon became as much a stumbling- 
 block and rock of offence to the elder Pitt as, thirty years 
 afterwards, the Addington ministry became to the younger, 
 when he found it stopping too effectually (in the Eoyal 
 mind at least) the gap made by his absence. The vigour the 
 great Earl had utterly lost in power he completely regained 
 in opposition. The weak Grafton ministry was soon over- 
 thrown by the strong combination formed against it, but was 
 replaced, not by the restored ascendency of Lord Chatham, 
 but by the formation of a new ministry under Lord North, 
 which proved more lasting than was expected either by its 
 friends or enemies. 
 
 The medium through whom Francis was brought in close 
 though indirect rapport with Lord Chatham, at the epoch 
 above mentioned, was Calcraft. Calcraft was a pushing 
 subaltern politician of that day, who had a seat in Parliament, 
 mixed politics with money-lending transactions, army con- 
 tracting, and fast life about town ; ' and — at the epoch when 
 
 ' We extract, the following curious and amusing particulars respecting 
 Calcraft from Mr. Parkes's first clia.pter of tlie Memoirs of Sir Philip 
 Francis : — 
 
 ' Mr. John Calcraft, though placed early in life in the civil service, and 
 filling secondary offices in different administrations, could not be considered 
 as a leading political man of his time. But his experience in public life, his 
 early acquired wealth, his natural sagacity, and great borough interest 
 Invested him with a considerable share of personal influence and power, 
 especially as he sat successively in several Parliaments. . . He ultimately 
 gave up office to form an army agency and quasi-banking establishment. 
 Noblemen of the highest raiik consulted him on their private and domestic 
 affairs ; and he was liberal in giving temporary accommodat;ion to all his 
 connections in need of pecuniary aid. . . . "Whatever his earlier political 
 relations to parties (he had been a confidential partisan of Henry Fox, the 
 
122 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 Chatham openly assumed in the Upper House the lead of 
 the Opposition to his previous creatures and colleagues of 
 the Grafton ministry — took on himself the part of jackal or 
 lion's provider of political intelligence to the great Earl in 
 his intervals of Achillean seclusion. As Calcraft was lion's 
 provider to Chatham, so Francis was jackal's provider to 
 Calcraft. And the young jackal's provider, as we shall pre- 
 sently see, was not less eager than the old jackal — nay, more 
 so, as he had the fabric of his fortune to raise from the 
 ground — to lend his hand — an anonymous hand in all its 
 lendings — for the overthrow of the Grafton and the eleva- 
 tion of a new Chatham Cabinet on its ruins. Junius was 
 working with all his might at the same time to the same 
 purpose. And that the great unknown was working from, 
 the same motive as the little unknown, is to our eyes not less 
 evident from the anonymous letters privately sent by Junius 
 to Lord Chatham and Mr. George Grenville. 
 
 We extract from a very curious and characteristic 
 ' Fragment of Autobiography,' printed by Mr. Merivale in 
 the Appendix to the first volume of the Memoirs of Francis, 
 
 first Lord Holland, when minister), he attached liimself lastly to Lord 
 Chatham in opposition ; he reconciled that passionate and haughty nobleman 
 to his brother-in-law. Lord Temple ; and his last votes were, after 1770, 
 invariably given in favour of the liberty of the subject and Parliamentary 
 Keform ; he publicly bailed the victims of a persecuted press when a crusade 
 was preached against political publishers ; and his purse was always at their 
 service for defence.' 
 
 Mr. Calcraft cumulated the character of active politician with that of fine 
 gentleman — according to the acceptation of that title in those times. 
 
 ' In middle and after life he was in " gay " society a gallant, and fre- 
 quented the green-rooms. He was behind the scenes not only of Downing 
 Street but of the London theatres, and celebrated in scandalous chronicles as 
 for some time one of the " protectors " of the celebrated George Anne Bel- 
 lamy, one of the most attractive and popular actresses of her day. Her 
 extravagant expense and debts, however, compelled Mr. Calcraft to separate 
 from her, and the lady had her revenge in the publication of her so-called 
 Memoirs. For some time this lady did the honours of Mr. Calcraft's table, 
 his " good dinners " being frequented by many leading political and literary 
 men. Dr. Francis was frequently one of the guests, as was occasionally his 
 son. The Doctor, as a divine, and intimate friend of Mr. Calcraft, received 
 his share of abuse in the Memoirs. The actress had played the principal 
 female characters in Dr. Francis's unsuccessful tragedies, and therefore she 
 had materials for her abuse and ridicule of the reputed author.' 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS, 123 
 
 the following paragraphs, which throw a perfectly clear light 
 on Francis's personal views, and his active co-operation 
 with Calcraft at the epoch above described. 
 
 ' I had no hope of advancement,' says Francis, ' but on the line of 
 Opposition. I was sincere, though mistaken in my politics, and was 
 convinced the (Grafton) ministry could never stand the consequences 
 of the Middlesex election. As soon as there was the prospect of a 
 rupture between Lord Chatham and the Duke of Grafton, Calcraft 
 made it his business to reconcile the Brothers (George Grenville and 
 Lord Temple), and effected his purpose by convincing them that their 
 mutual interests required it ... To his industry and activity the 
 Opposition were in some measure indebted for the formidable appear- 
 ance they made in the beginning of the year 1770, when Chatham, 
 Camden, and Granby resigned, when York put an end to his life, 
 when Grafton abandoned the Government, and North succeeded to 
 what I believe he himself and every man in the kingdom at that 
 time thought a forlorn hope. 
 
 ' Notwithstanding the famous protest of forty-two lay lords and all 
 Chatham's eloquence, Calcraft and I soon saw that the game was lost 
 with respect to Opposition in general, but we still thought it possible 
 that Chatham might be sent for alone. On the approach of a rupture 
 with Spain about the Falkland Islands, these hopes revived. Chat- 
 ham came forward again, and attacked the ministry with wonderful 
 eloquence. I took down from memory the famous speech he made on 
 the 22nd of November, 1770, and had it published in a few days. It 
 had a great effect abroad, and alarmed or offended the ministry so 
 much that they determined to shut the doors of the House of Lords 
 against all strangers, even members of the other House . . . Still, 
 however, we thought a Spanish war inevitable, and that Lord Chat- 
 ham must be employed. Lord Weymouth in that conviction re- 
 signed the Secretary of State's office, mid I lost 500?. in the stocks. 
 The Convention with Spain sunk me and my hopes to a lower state 
 than ever. If Lord Chatham had come in I might have commanded 
 anything, and could not but have risen under his protection.' 
 
 The passages in Calcraft's letters to Lord Chatham at 
 this crisis, which are printed in the ' Chatham Correspon- 
 dence '' within inverted commas, indicate intelligence and 
 
 ' The traceable connection of some parts of the Chatham Correspondence 
 (published in 1838-40) with the Jnnian mystery was remarked by the editor 
 of the Grenville Papers (published in 18.52-3), but remarked only in fanciful 
 reference to Lord Temple, to whom that editor thought he saw reason to 
 
124 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 suggestions forwarded by him to Lord Chatham not as his 
 own, but as supphed to him by an anonymous correspondent 
 in the background. Now every concurrent circumstance 
 points to Francis as that anonymous correspondent. He 
 has himself told us of his active co-operation with Calcraft, 
 which could only, it would seem, be exercised in some such 
 channel of covert communication. He has told us how he 
 busied himself in reporting Lord Chatham, and there cannot 
 be a doubt, from his indefatigable use of the pen, that he 
 equally busied himself in reporting to Lord Chatham what- 
 ever could furnish the great Earl with the most telling topics 
 of Opposition. Indeed, he has himself further told us in 
 another passage of his autobiography, that, on one occasion, 
 he drew up a legal argument on an Opposition topic of the 
 day, and sent it to Calcraft, desiring him to transmit it to 
 his friend. ' Within three days after,' adds Francis, ' I heard 
 the great Earl of Chatham repeat my letter verbatim in the 
 House of Lords, not only following the argument exactly, 
 but dressing it in the same expressions that I had done. His 
 speech the next day flamed in the newspapers, and ran 
 through the kingdom.' 
 
 Amongst these anonymous communications made at this 
 crisis through Calcraft to Lord Chatham, and which all the 
 circumstances concur to indicate as having been made by 
 Francis, there occur the following singularly worded sen- 
 tences on a question on which the Opposition built sanguine 
 hopes of overthrowing the Ministry (and on which, as we 
 have seen, Francis lost 500Z. by gambling in the funds), the 
 question, namely, of the rights and wrongs of Spain and 
 England in the matter of the Falkland Islands imbroglio. 
 
 If there had been one sparh of shame, a single atom of honour in 
 the composition of our ministry, war was inevitable. Look to your- 
 
 ascribe the famous Junius Letters. The following citation is made from the 
 Introductory Notes to the third volume of those papers : — 
 
 ' A continual interchange of very intimate correspondence and communi- 
 cation was kept up during the years 1769, 1770, and 1771, between Mr. Cal- 
 craft, Lord and Lady Chatham, and Lord Temple, and it will appewr tlmt in 
 •many instances the information eonveyed in this cm-resyondence coincided with 
 that used hy Junivs in Ms p-uMio letters, as well as in his private notes to 
 Woodfali: 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 125 
 
 selves, you gentlemen who have something to lose ! The ministry 
 have views of conquest, though not over the enemies of England. 
 
 These remarkable sentences were transmitted by Calcraft 
 to Lord Chatham, as from a private anonymous hand, on 
 January 21, 1771. Nine days after the date of this private 
 communication to Chatham, on January 30, 1771, appeared 
 a letter of Junius, containing the following extraordinarily 
 exact coincidences with it in sentiment and expression. 
 
 In his royal breast there is no room left for resentment, no 
 place for hostile sentiments against the natural enemies of his crown. 
 No, sir, if any ideas of strife and hostility have entered the royal 
 mind, they have a very different dii-ection. The enemies of England 
 have nothing to fear from them. 
 
 I mean to violate all the laws of probability, when I suppose that 
 this imaginary king, after having voluntarily disgraced himseK in 
 the eyes of his subjects, might return to a sense of his dishonour — 
 that he might perceive the snare laid for him by his ministers, and 
 feel a spark of shame kindling in his breast. 
 
 It would seem inconceivable that such exact coincidences 
 of sentiment and expression could proceed from two different 
 pens — from two different minds — separately and indepen- 
 dently employed on the same subject. It would seem that 
 whoever was the writer of the private communication to 
 Chatham, must also have been the writer of the published 
 letters of Junius. An unbiassed literary detective, stumbling 
 on two such passages, could scarcely fail to regard them as 
 products of one mind and of one hand. Now to what mind 
 and to what hand are these anonymous communications to 
 Chatham traceable with anything like an equal degree of 
 probability as to those of Francis ? 
 
 ' That Junius,' says Mr. Merivale, ' can only be desci-ibed with 
 truth as a political adventurer there is no doubt. It is plain enough 
 that his personal success in life was involved in that of the party 
 whose cause he adopted, or, to speak still more accurately, in the fall 
 of the party which he attacked. And it is equally true that Jie was 
 utterly unscrupulous in the use of means ; that his sincerity, even 
 when he was sincere, was apt to assume the form of the most ignoble 
 rancour : and that no ties of friendship, or party, or connection seem 
 
126 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS., 
 
 to have restrained his virulence. All this is but too deducible from 
 the published anonymous writings only. And the conclusions to 
 which the sentiments and conduct of Francis would lead us, as evinced 
 in his manuscript remains, are assuredly much the same.' 
 
 Two private letters, signed only vrith. the initial ' C ' — 
 addressed by the writer of the ' Letters of Junius ' to Lord 
 Chatham, and three private letters addressed by the same 
 writer to Mr. George Grenville — have been laid before the 
 public — in the ' Chatham Correspondence ' and the ' Greu- 
 ville Papers ' — since the date of Mr. Taylor's inquiry as to 
 the 'Junius' authorship. These letters indicate — firstly, 
 the same predilection for George Grenville's policy, especially 
 as regarded the question of the principle — first raised under 
 his ministry — of imperial authority over the colonies in fiscal 
 as in all other matters ; and secondly, the same desire to pro- 
 mote — in opposition to the supposed secret councils of the' 
 royal closet, and the supposed ' something behind the throne, 
 greater than the throne itself — either a Grenville combina-- 
 tion or a Chatham autocracy, which are manifested either 
 directly or indirectly in Junius's published letters of the 
 succeeding years, and which, as we have seen, coincided with 
 the objects of Opposition contemplated by Philip Francis. 
 
 The secret and confidential communications above-men- 
 tioned made by the Great Anonymous to two public men 
 connected by family ties, and likely to be connected again 
 by political ties in the future as they had been in the past, 
 bear every mark of the hand of an upward-struggling political 
 aspirant, seeking to recommend himself to public men whose 
 future patronage might raise him out of some comparatively 
 humble and obscure position, in recompense of services 
 rendered in the press and zeal manifested by the pen. From 
 the whole complexion of Junius's first letter to George Gren- 
 ville, Mr. Parkes drew the natural inference that the writer 
 -was calculating on Mr. Grenville's early return to office and 
 that, ' besides the conscientious advocacy of the ex- Premier's 
 political interest, the writer was not unnaturally laying claim 
 to participation in the future sweets of some secondary office 
 or official berth better than the one he may have then en- 
 joyed.' 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. ■ 127 
 
 The editor of the Grrenville Papers indeed, Mr. W. J. 
 Smith, in his zeal to vindicate for Lord Temple the equivocal 
 honour of the authorship of the Junius Letters, has laboured 
 to show that that cantankerous politician, writing privately 
 and anonymously to 7m brother, George Grenville, might have 
 adopted the style of an obscure candidate for political favour 
 with a view of putting him off the scent of the fraternal 
 source of the published Letters. To cap the climax of ab- 
 surdity in his zealous identification of Junius with Lord 
 Temple, Mr. Smith further sought to identify the hand- 
 writing of Junius with Lady Temple's, thereby incurring the 
 further improbability that letters sent to near relatives, to 
 divert suspicion of anonymous authorship from the Lord, 
 should have been sent to those near relatives in the recog- 
 nisable handwriting of his Lady. The closest parallel to 
 this rare device for preserving secrecy seems that of the 
 conspirators in Canning's ' Rovers,' who seek to conceal 
 themselves by singing a patriotic song in full chorus. 
 
 We should ourselves have the greatest diflBculty in be- 
 lieving that Junius was any man of habits of aristocratic 
 fastidiousness or indolence — habits less likely to have 
 prompted or sustained the activity of his restless and reck- 
 less pen than to have suggested the employment for patri- 
 cian ends of the plebeian pens of others. Whoever Junius 
 was, it may, with strong probability, be affirmed that he was 
 not the man of lofty independence of character and position 
 — of mature age and experience — he thought fit to affect to 
 be, with laboured and ostentatious frequency, in his Letters. 
 It is astonishing how an affectation so transparent — a literary 
 artifice so hackneyed — should have imposed on so many suc- 
 cessive investigators of the - Junian mystery.' This is still 
 more astonishing since the publication of the Chatham and 
 Grenville Papers. 
 
 The latest, and it must be added, most formidable ira- 
 pugner of ' the Franciscan theory,' Mr. Hayward, strongly 
 insists on the improbability that Calcraft and Lord Barring- 
 ton — both attacked by Junius — should either of them have 
 been attacked by Francis, who owed to both very great 
 
128 JUNIUS AND FEANCIS. 
 
 personal obligations. Now it must be admitted that tliere 
 is a real difficulty on tliis point with rega.rd to Calcraft. It 
 is, on the one hand, difficult to conceive how, if Francis were 
 Junius, Calcraft should have been kept in ignorance of the 
 fact ; or how, on the other hand, supposing Calcraft cognisant 
 of his protege's authorship, that protege should have ventured 
 to touch, as Junius did, some of the tenderest points in his 
 patron's character and position, albeit he only touched those 
 points in passing.' Mr. Merivale meets as follows this prima 
 facie strong objection to the Franciscan theory. 
 
 The abuse of Calcraft by Junius was probably a blind as regards 
 the public, though, as it happens, it expressed the inmost sentiments 
 of Francis [vide on this point the ungrateful commemoration of Cal- 
 craft in the ' Fragment of Autobiography '], who must have felt that 
 pecuUar joy which none but the private lampooner knows, in finding 
 that his associate received as a pretence what was meant in spiteful 
 earnest. But the supposition remains a supposition only — nothing 
 left by Calcraft, nothing left by Francis, exists to confirm it ; and one 
 other hypothesis is certainly concr-ivable, namely, that Francis pro- 
 fessed to Calcraft that he knew the author of Junius, but was bound 
 not to divulge his name, and that Calcraft acquiesced from not wish- 
 ing to lose the services of so valuable an auxiliary. 
 
 Either of the above-cited suppositions derives probability 
 from the mingled daring and dissimulation that belonged to 
 Francis's character. And it may be worth noting that pre- 
 cisely the like apparent inconsistency is to be found between 
 Junius's public attacks on Lord Chatham and Junius's private 
 communications to the great Earl — the last of which was 
 signed with that redoubtable nom de guerre which Lord 
 Chatham could not but associate with previous by no means 
 measured and by no means flattering animadversions on him- 
 self. Very subtle men seem sometimes, through very subtlety, 
 insensible to their own moral contradictions. And a writer 
 
 ' Take the following specimen cited by Mr. Hayward from Junius's letter 
 to the printer of the PiiHic Advertiser of October 5, 1771 : — ' I willingly 
 accept of a sarcasm from Colonel Barre, or a simile from Mr. Burke. Even 
 the silent vote of Mr. Calcraft is worth reckoning in a division. What though 
 he riots in the plunder of the army (Calcraft was an army contractor), and 
 has only determined to be a patriot when he could not be a peer.' 
 
JUNIUS AND FEAffCIS. 129 
 
 like Junius— we may add, a writer lilse Francis — in the vari- 
 ableness of his own feelings towards eminent public person- 
 ages, may not have always taken into due account the 
 retentiveness of their memories. 
 
 As regards Lord Barrington, it seems to us that the whole 
 difficulty is created by a confusion of dates. Mr. Hayward 
 cites friendly letters from Lord Barrington, addressed to 
 Francis in India in 1777 — i.e., four or five years after Lord 
 Barrington had helped Francis to his Indian appointment. 
 But the disgust which Francis, if identical with Junius, must 
 be supposed to have conceived, from some cause or other, 
 against Lord Barrington was of more than five years earlier 
 date, at a time when Lord Barrington, in the opinion of Cal- 
 craft (presumably therefore also in that of Francis), had in- 
 flicted on the latter what he could not fail to have felt at the 
 moment as a mortifying jsasse-cZroii in War Office promotion.' 
 
 The Deputy Secretaryship of War, to which an outsider, 
 
 ' With reference to this incident, which turned out of decisive conse- 
 quence to the whole of Francis's subsequent career, Francis and Junius are 
 brought in striking, but as it seems to us natural juxtaposition in the following 
 note of the editor of the Chatham Co?'respond,ence (Vol. iv. p. 195.) 
 
 ' On the 10th January 1772, Junius announced -in the PiMio Advertiser, 
 that Mr. D'Oyley had resigned his post as Under-Secretary at War, and that 
 till a proper person belonging to the junto could be spared, Mr. Bradshaw 
 was to be stationed in the War Office. On the 12th, Mr. Calcraft wrote to 
 
 Almon " If you put in paragraphs, put that Mr. Francis is appointed Deputy 
 
 Secretary at War. It will tease the worthy Secretary, and oblige me." And 
 again on the 18th — " I luisrv Francis mas not Deputy, but mished him to lie so 
 and to cram the newspaper.^ with paa-agraplis that lie mas so ; for lie is very 
 
 deserving." On the ^hWa., Junius privately informs Woodf all that " the 
 
 Barrington has just appointed Ghamier, a French broker, his Deputy, for 
 
 no reason but his relationship to Bradshaw." On the 20th March, Mr. Francis 
 was removed from (qu. resigned) his situation in the War Office, and on the 
 same day Mr. Calcraft added a codicil to his will, bequeathing him the sum of 
 1,000?., and an annuity of 250?. for life to Mrs. Francis. On the 23rd March^ 
 Junius, Tinder the signature of " Veteran," says, " I desire you will inform the 
 public that the worthy Lord Barrington, not contented with having driven 
 Mr. D'Oyley out of the War Office, has at last contrived to expel Mr. Francis.'' 
 In May, Jimius dropped all correspondence, public and private, with Wood- 
 fall, until January 1773. In May, Mr. Francis left England, on a continental 
 tour, from which he returned early in January 1773, on the 19th of which 
 month is dated the last private letter of Junius to Woodfall. Mr. Francis 
 was shortly after appointed a member of the Supreme Council in Bengal^ 
 with a salary of 10,000/!. a year, and in the spring of 1774 sailed for India.' 
 
 K 
 
130 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 Mr. Chamier, was appointed over his head, seems to have 
 been a promotion to vrhioh Francis thought himself entitled 
 from his ef&cient services as First Clerk in that office ; and 
 nothing but a feeling of disgust and hopelessness on being 
 passed over in the filling up of that appointment can, it 
 would seem, account for his sudden retirement from a post 
 which, subordinate as it was, was his sole bread-winner for a 
 young and increasing family. Francis, indeed, affected to 
 write on the occasion to a relative in Ireland that he had 
 been offered the Deputy Secretaryship by Lord Barrington; 
 but there was enough of pride and enough of dissimulation 
 in Francis's character to justify us in taking that assertion cum 
 grano sails. He may fairly be suspected of taking a bit of a 
 leaf from his friend and patron's book, and pretending an 
 offer where Cal craft, as we have seen, had roundly affirmed an 
 appointment. Whether or no Lord Barrington had any sus- 
 picion of the identity of his new assailant in the press (since 
 identified with Junius, but who cautiously published his fierce 
 attacks on the War Secretary for the ' expulsion ' of D'Oyley 
 and Francis under the alias of ' Veteran ') with his late effec- 
 tive and estranged subordinate at the War Office, can only 
 be matter for conjecture. What is however certain is, that 
 Francis, on accidentally hearing that one of the appointments 
 to the Council of Bengal, under Lord North's new Indian 
 Regulation Act, was 'going a begging,' at once applied 
 himself, with that 'healthy hardihood' which on no occasion 
 of life ever failed him, to his late chief at the War Office — 
 the ' silken courtier,' the ' bloody Barrington,' of Junius and 
 ' Veteran '■ — to solicit his powerful official interest for the 
 new appointment. The circumstances and results of this 
 application are described as follows in his Autobiographical 
 Fragment : — 
 
 It was in vain that I shut my eyes to my situation. Wherever I 
 went, or whatever I did, the spectre haunted and pursued me. Mr. 
 Alexander Macrabie (Francis's brother-in-law) was lately returned 
 from America. He had purchased a thousand acres for me in Penn- 
 sylvania, where I meant to secure a retreat for myself and my family 
 if ever England should cease to be the seat of freedom. The question 
 now seriously agitated in my mind was whether I ought not to trans- 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 131 
 
 plant myself at once, and take possession of this establishment, before 
 my little capital was exhausted. This was actually the subject of a 
 dismal conversation between Macrabie and me on the fourth of June, 
 when we accidentally met with a gentleman in the Park, who informed 
 me that John Cholwell, one of the intended Commissioners for India, 
 had declined the nomination. I immediately went to D'Oyley, who 
 wrote to Grey Cooper. It was the King's birthday, and Barrington 
 was gone to Court. I saw him the next morning. As soon as I had 
 explained everything to him, he wrote the handsomest and strongest 
 letter imaginable in my favour to Lord North. Other interests 
 contributed, but I owe my success to Lord Barrington. It was re- 
 markably fortunate for me that Cholwell had deferred his resignation 
 to so late a day. The Registration Bill had been for some days 
 before the House of Commons. If the Minister had had more time 
 to look about him I should probably have been defeated by some 
 superior interest. 
 
 Too mucli, perhaps, has been made of the ' mysterj'' ' of 
 this Indian appointment of Francis. Lord Barrington, with- 
 out exploring the source of the attacks made on him in the 
 press, may have been rendered sensible by them of having 
 done Francis some injustice, and the more ready therefore 
 to respond to the personal application of his late subordinate, 
 for his interest with the Prime Minister for the Indian ap- 
 pointment. Fortune favours the bold, and Francis's intrepid 
 solicitation for that appointment, just at the nick of time, 
 when the exigency had become pressing to fill it up, was 
 amongst those chances of which the French proverb holds 
 good — ' Ces hasards sent pour ceux qui jouent Men.' 
 
 ' One of the strongest reasons,' said Lord Macaulay, in 
 his essay on Warren Hastings, ' for believing that Francis 
 was Junius, is the moral resemblance between the two 
 characters.' It is surely a coincidence somewhat strongly 
 confirmatory of all the other coincidences between those two 
 characters, or double manifestations of one character, that 
 so soon after the one political meteor sunk below the horizon 
 in London, the other rose above the horizon at Calcutta. As 
 Junius had for years been ' with fear of change perplexing 
 monarchs ' and ministers, so Francis was for years with fear 
 of change to perplex viceroys and their satellites. The labor 
 ■jmpr-o&MS— vehement and pertinacious pursuit of a determined 
 
 K 2 
 
132 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 object — vigour of purpose and vice of temper were the same 
 in both spheres and in both characters. There was the same 
 element of public spirit in both, but of public spirit alloyed 
 with private animosity and personal interest. The first period 
 of Francis's active life had closed just when Junius's letters 
 ■ closed, with the final disappointment of a somewhat low- 
 pitched ambition, which had nourished the hope of rising by 
 aid of exalted patronage. During its second period, Francis 
 was struggling in his own strength, and in his own name, 
 for an object of higher ambition, no less indeed than the 
 viceroyal sway of India. The same fierce impulse to wage 
 war d outrance with office-holders, and take power by storm, 
 which had animated Junius against the Grafton ministry, 
 fired Francis against the Indian autocracy of Warren 
 Hastings. From the second theatre of that lifelong war with 
 power (and/or power), which seemed a necessity of his nature 
 from early manhood to advanced age, Francis had to retire 
 with no other immediate result of his six years' incessant 
 Indian conflict than a bullet through his body from the 
 dhelling pistol of Hastings, after the fashion of political 
 satisfaction in those days. He had to bide his time for 
 another unsatisfying satisfaction, as it turned out in the end 
 — the parliamentary impeachment of his returning enemy.' 
 
 ' There was an incident of Francis's private life in India, given in detail 
 by Mr. Merivale, in which he came ofi not less damaged in purse and moral 
 repute than he afterwards did in person from Hastings's pistol. This was an 
 intrigue, which Francis himself refers to in his private correspondence as a 
 ' wretched business,' with a fair lady of East Indian birth, afterwards married 
 (though Papal sanction was refused the marriage) to the famous ex-episcopal 
 statesman and diplomatist, Talleyrand. That not even scandal— not even 
 scandal judicially attested— is immortal, is curiously exemplified by the fact 
 that Lady Brownlow, in hej recently published Reminiscences, showed total 
 unacquaintanoe with this frail dame's Indian antecedents anij adventures 
 and spoke of her as 'Mrs. Grant, an American lady.' ' 
 
 Madame Grand (not Mrs. Grant) was not an American lady, but a native 
 of the French East Indian settlement of Pondicherry. She came to Calcutta 
 as wife of a Swiss gentleman, M. Grand, whose business transactions brought 
 him to that city, where Francis was at that time fighting his long battle for 
 power in India with Hastings. The lady, it seems, was only sixteen when 
 married, very beautiful and v«ry stupid. (Talleyrand in after years described 
 her to Citizen Director Barras, in order to rescue her from imprisonment at 
 Pans as a suspected spy-as ' the person in Europe the least capable and the 
 
JUNIUS AND FEANCIS. 133 
 
 To mate out completely tlie moral identification of Francis 
 with Junius, it should be shown that the characters coincide 
 in individual peculiarities as well as in general aims. It 
 has been said that the boy is father to the man. Let us 
 see how far the man Junius can be affiliated on the boy 
 Francis. 
 
 We have before us in the first portion of the Memoirs of 
 Francis, edited by Mr. Parkes, some specimens of epistolary 
 intercourse of the elder Francis with his son Philip, during 
 the school-days of the latter — some traits of precocious quick- 
 ness of young Francis, as well as some notices of his unusually 
 early self-devotion to that sort of study which might be 
 turned to political or diplomatic use. His father was an Irish 
 clergyman of the convivial type of the last century — as little 
 of a genuine ecclesiastic indeed as a gentleman in priest's 
 orders well could be, consistently with any decent degree of 
 fitness to take such preferment as friends at court might give 
 him. He was best known by his extra-professional works, as 
 the translator of Horace, Demosthenes, and ^schines, author 
 of the tragedies of ' Eugenia' and ' Constantine,' and of a variety 
 of pamphlets written in the political interest of his patrons 
 under the later governments of George II. and the earlier of 
 George III. In 1 740, the year of the birth of Sir Philip 
 Francis, his father was settled in a Dublin curacy, and was 
 engaged on the political press in the ' Castle ' interest. When 
 young Philip was about ten years of age his father opened 
 a ' select academy for young gentlemen,' where his son re- 
 ceived his first schooling for a year or two, and was then 
 sent to St. Paul's School in London, which, enjoyed the ad- 
 vantage at that time of having a good Greek and Latin 
 scholar for second master, and also a traditional distinction 
 
 least disposed for meddling with any affair whatever.' . . ' C'est une In- 
 dienne bien belle, bien paresseuse, la plus d&occup^e de toutes les femmes 
 que j'aie jamais rencontr^es.') Francis was caught by M. Grand one night in 
 his house ; and on the domestic explosion which ensued, the lady threw her- 
 self on the protection of the man who had thus compromised her reputation- 
 The Supreme Court at Calcutta— under the presidency, hostile to Francis, of 
 Sir Elij ah Impey— awarded M. Grand 50,000 sicca rupees damages, with costs, 
 for Francis's nocturnal trespass on his premises and domestic peace. The 
 lady left India— it is said, under other protection— before her seducer. 
 
134 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 ofteacliing legible handwriting, an accomplishment which, 
 whether Francis was Junius or no, stood him in good stead 
 through a life unusually addicted to sedulous scribbling. It 
 is curious to contrast the cast of character earnestly, and 
 evidently sincerely, inculcated in the epistolary effusions of 
 the father with that which the son must already have been 
 forming in his school years, and which afterwai'ds ripened 
 into such crabbed fruit. ' Be it your lot, my dear boy,' writes 
 Dr. Francis to young Philip, 'to be amiable rather than ad- 
 mired, envied, and hated.' At a later date (of young Francis's 
 appointment to a clerkship at the War OflBce), 'My dear 
 Phil,' writes his father, ' be generous, candid, humane, and 
 above all, good-natured.' This extraordinary stress laid on 
 good-nature might perhaps be accounted for somewhat in 
 the same way as Lord Chesterfield's incessant inculcation of 
 polite manners on his son. Each father did Ms best, and 
 with about equal success, to strengthen the point of character 
 which each knew to be the weak one. 
 
 Whoever Junius was, he was a man of classical education, 
 and subsequent self-education in Eiwlijli and international 
 law and history ; of more th.i3ii an outsider's femiliarity with 
 the forms of official and dicicniitic business, with a certain 
 tincture of Irish rhetoric ir, >t;yle. and some traits of early 
 Irish training and ass^^iaSi<ot'5 — traits which occasioned 
 Junius, for a time, to be ratter currently identified with 
 Edmund Burke, notwithstandiuiT infinite moral and intel- 
 lectual incongruities — notwithstanding also Burke's spon- 
 taneous and distinct disavowal. Now we have seen that 
 Francis was educated the first years of his life in Ireland. In 
 1756, that is to say, at sixteen years of age, he was appointed 
 to a jimior clerkship in the Secretary of State 's Office, through 
 the interest of the first Lord Holland, his father s patron. In 
 1760 young Francis was appointed secretary to Lord Kin- 
 noul's special embassy to Lisbon, where he passed some 
 months. After an interval devoted to a course of classical 
 and constitutional reading, and after acting for a short time, 
 as we have already stated, as occasional amanuensis to the 
 first Pitt, he was appointed, in 1762, First Clerk in the War 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 135 
 
 Office, the Secretary at War being Mr. Welbore Ellis, who 
 was succeeded in 1766 by Lord Barrington. 
 
 Mr. Hayward makes the remark that all the earlier 
 pamphlets and newspaper letters (of the pre-Junian period) 
 ascribed to Francis by Mr. Parkes, ' were in acrimonious 
 opposition to the policy of his benefactors and friends.' He 
 repeats the same remark with reference to the letters of 
 Junius, considered as the work of Francis. ' He is repre- 
 sented as systematically writing against every friend, bene- 
 factor, and patron in succession, without a rational motive or 
 an intelligible cause.' 
 
 We may observe in the first place, with reference to the 
 writings of the pre-Junian period, that we think it very likely 
 Mr. Parkes, in his enthusiasm of investigation, may have 
 ascribed letters and pamphlets to Junius which were not his, 
 and which it is no concern of ours to claim either for Junius 
 or Francis. With reference to the acknowledged letters of 
 Junius, there are at least two very eminent exceptions to this 
 alleged general rule of acrimonious attack upon the friends, 
 benefactors, and patrons of Francis. First, Lord Holland, 
 whom his father long regarded as his patron, and to whom 
 young Francis owed his first official appointment, — Junius 
 pointedly waived very tempting opportunities of attack on 
 that vulnerable statesman. Secondly, Mr. George Grenville, 
 under whose Premiership Francis became First Clerk at the 
 War Office, and to whose return to power in alliance with 
 Lord Chatham we have seen that Francis and Junius both 
 looked with ambitious hopes. 
 
 ' Of all the political characters of the day,' says Mr. Taylor in his 
 ' Junius Identified,' ' Mr. Grenville appears to have been our 
 author's favourite. No man was more open to censure in many 
 parts of his conduct, but he is never censured ; whUe, on the con- 
 trary, he is extolled whenever an opportunity offers.' 
 
 We may add that no one can read the self-revelations 
 published from the Francis papers by Messrs. Parkes and 
 Merivale without acquiring the conviction that the political 
 gratitude of Francis was of that Walpolean description, 
 which required to be sustained by a lively presentiment of 
 
136 JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 
 
 future favours, and was liable to be converted into the most 
 unmeasured resentment whenever his ambitious hopes were 
 disappointed. Calcraft did much for him, but the provisions 
 of Calcraft's will fell short of his expectations, and accor- 
 dingly Calcraft's memory fares no better in the Autobiogra- 
 phical Fragment than in ' Junius.' He had an angry sense, 
 too, which he was by no means mealy-mouthed in expressing, 
 that his father had been left heinously unprovided for by his 
 great friends. It is only fair to add that the father's early 
 affection was requited in later years by the son, whose filial 
 feelings stand on record among the few strong sympathies 
 of his nature, as a set-off to his many strong and often 
 unreasonable antipathies. After reading Francis's Memoirs, 
 and the extensive and very curious additions to his previously 
 published correspondence given to the world, in fac-simile 
 from the original MSS., for the first time, in the monuiaental 
 quarto raised to the memory of Francis and Junius by Messrs. 
 Chabot and Twisleton, one feels to have become better ac- 
 quainted, and we may perhaps add, more in charity with 
 both. To learn to know a man, his antecedents, surround- 
 ings, and probable main moving springs of action is, in most 
 cases, to learn to make pretty large allowances for what is 
 erratic in his conduct and singular in his character. 
 
 Wlioever Junius was, he was a man of unresting political 
 activity and personal ambition, outrageous arrogance, prompt 
 resentments, and enduring vindictiveness, coupled with 
 habits rarely combined with such a character, of cautious 
 reserve and concealment. Whoever he was, he assuredly 
 had in the highest degree that esprit desapprohateur which 
 Montesquieu congratulated himself on not having. On all 
 these points, from all the attainable evidence, just such a 
 man was Francis. 
 
 Lord Byron once said that the cause of his quarrel with 
 his wife, or his wife's quarrel with him, was so simple that 
 it never would be made out by anybody. 
 
 The reason why Junius so long remained unidentified 
 with any known public personage is so simple that it should 
 have been self-evident to everybody. It is, in short, that, as 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 137 
 
 tile success of ' Junius ' was a succes de scandale, so the 
 authorship of ' Junius ' could not but fix on any man less of 
 fame than infamy. No man living could afford to be known 
 to have wielded that assassin pen — no man, with a name 
 otherwise decently reputed to leave behind him, would choose 
 to leave it distinctly identified with the outrages of that 
 arch-libeller. ' Why,' asks Mr. Hay ward, ' did contemporary 
 opinion altogether overlook, or dismiss as untenable, the 
 coincidences on which so much stress has recently been laid 
 as bringing the authorship home to Francis, so that his name 
 was never so much as mentioned in connection with the 
 authorship of " Junius " till 1812 ? ' For the simple reason, 
 because these coincidences were carefully kept out of view by 
 Junius and his original publisher, the elder Woodfall, at the 
 time of the first appearance of the famous Letters. It was 
 not till the publication of the edition of 1812 by the younger 
 Woodfall that it was discovered how much Junius had writ- 
 ten under other signatures and to private persons — and that 
 the clue was given which led Mr. Taylor, and so many good 
 judges since, to the moral certitude that Junius could be no 
 other than Francis. 
 
 When the first propounder of the ' Franciscan theory,' 
 Mr. John Taylor, addressed himself to the study of ' Junius ' 
 in 'the then recently published Woodfall edition of 1812, he 
 so addressed himself, as he tells us, ' simply with the design 
 of profiting from the study of what has been long deemed 
 an English classic' Whatever indications Mr. Taylor found 
 of authorship he found in the ' Private Letters ' of Junius 
 to his publisher and other personages of his day, and in the 
 'Miscellaneous Letters,' first added to the edition of 1812, 
 as authentically proceeding from the pen of Junius. 
 
 The outrageous violence of the language in which Junius, 
 under the alias of ' Veteran,' resented the ' expulsion ' of so 
 obscure a person as Francis then was (1772) from a subor- 
 dinate position in a public office, and the virulence of sarcasm, 
 in every possible form, with which the same Great Anony- 
 mous pursued the fortunate person (Mr. Chamier) who had 
 stepped over Francis's head into the Deputy Secretaryship 
 
138 JUNIUS AND FEANCIS. 
 
 of War, gave Mr. Taylor his first clue for the identification 
 of Junius with Francis. How, indeed, could it be possible 
 to suppose that Junius would go out of his way — studiously 
 shunning detection as Junius in so doing — to raise such a 
 storm in a puddle as he did under the alias of ' Veteran ' on 
 an occasion of so infinite si m ally little public interest or 
 importance as the removal or resignation, whether more or 
 less voluntary, of a couple of clerks in the War Office? That, 
 on so slight provocation — supposing him personally unin- 
 terested in the affair — he should lose all command of temper, 
 all measure in language — should perform day after day, on 
 such a theme, every possible fantastic variation, and inde- 
 fatigably pour forth on the head of an obscure rival of obscure 
 of&cial subalterns all the vials of his wrath and all the 
 vitriol of his sarcasm ! Unless on the supposition of some 
 motive intensely personal, it was indeed inconceivable that 
 the Great Unknown should feel so strong an interest in the 
 personal grievances — if grievances there were — of a pair of 
 Little Unknowns in a public office, and show such savage 
 resentment at the promotion over their heads of a third 
 Little Unknown from outside that office ! But the suspicion, 
 once aroused, of the personal concern of Junius in the for- 
 tunes of Francis, gave Mr. Taylor the first suggestion of the 
 Franciscan solution of the Junian mystery. 
 
 That clue had been missed by the editors of the Woodfall 
 edition of 1812, and missed apparently because, with rather 
 edifying simplicity, they took Junius at his word as to the 
 character he thought fit to assume in the ' Letters,' of lofty 
 personal independence, as well as mature age and experience. 
 Whether that assumption had imposed equally on his original 
 editor and publisher may perhaps be doubted. The elder 
 Woodfall had sufficient motives for simulated unconsciousness 
 of the real authorship of the ' Letters ' to render it probable 
 that he would readily simulate such unconsciousness. The 
 letters of Junius were, for several years, a mine of wealth to 
 him. Woodfall well knew — had been pointedly made to 
 know — that to the continued working of that mine secrecy 
 was an essential and indispensable condition. He offered, 
 
JUNIUS AND FRANCIS. 139 
 
 and Junius prudently declined, a share in the profits of the 
 first reprint of the Letters. As a tradesman, Woodfall must 
 have been too good a judge to run the risk of killing, by 
 indiscreet curiosity, the goose that laid the golden eggs. As 
 an old friend, and St. Paul's schoolfellow (if he recognised 
 Junius as such), he must have felt an honourable obligation 
 to keep the secret as long as his author wished it kept — that 
 is to say, longer than the elder Woodfall lived to reveal it. 
 The identity of Junius witb Francis may afford a natural 
 explanation why Junius — in general as little disposed as 
 Francis to the melting mood — should show so much of 
 friendly feeling, beyond mere business relations, towards his 
 publisher ; and why Woodfall — having once emphatically 
 been made to perceive that disclosure would to his corre- 
 spondent be ruin — should have forborne from any attempt to 
 verify whatever suspicions he may have entertained — or from 
 communicating to his family anything he may have known, 
 or guessed, as to the authorship of the ' Letters.' 
 
 Considering these circumstances, it cannot, we think, 
 appear surprising that the ' Franciscan theory ' of the au- 
 thorship of 'Junius ' did not take its origin from any tradition 
 handed down in the Woodfall family. There will be found 
 in the Appendix to the first volume of Francis's Memoirs an 
 account by Mr. Parkes of a conversation held by him in 1857 
 with Miss Woodfall, the only surviving offspring (set. 89) of 
 Junius's publisher, H. S. Woodfall. That old lady said ' she 
 had heard discussions before her father on the mystery of the 
 Junius authorship, and the claims of divers public men dis- 
 cussed by him or by others in his company, but she feels 
 confident that her father had no preponderating suspicion of 
 the real author, though he may at different times have con- 
 sidered that circumstances and evidence pointed strongly or 
 weakly to this public or literary man or the other.' It is 
 obvious to remark that, if H. S. Woodfall was in firm though 
 tacit league with Francis to keep the secret as to the author- 
 ship of the famous Letters, he would be no more likely to 
 allow himself to betray his knowledge of that secret to his 
 family than in any other third quarter. Miss Woodfall con- 
 
140 JUNIUS AND FEANCIS. 
 
 eluded by expressing ' lier opinion that tlie different members 
 of ber family never bad any more knowledge of tbe mystery 
 of tbe true autborsbip of Junius tban tbe public' 
 
 Tbe double character, which we have sought to exhibit 
 incarnated in a single person, bad a redeeming element 
 equally in its avowed and anonymous manifestations ; the 
 element, namely, of public spirit working, with whatever 
 persona] obliquities, towards public ends since realised. 
 
 ' Freedom of the press,' says Mr. Merivale, ' and the personal 
 freedom of the subject, owe probably more to the writings of Junius 
 than to tbe eloquence of Chatham or Burke, the law of Camden and 
 Dunning. It is not too much to say that, after the appearance of 
 those writings, a new tone on these great subjects is found to prevail 
 in our political literature. Doctrines which had previously met with 
 almost general consent became exploded ; truths which up to that 
 time had been only timidly .propounded were placed, in post-Junian 
 times, on the order of the day.' 
 
 Tbe same judicious editor observes on the eventual fruits 
 of Francis's stormy and abruptly closed career in India, that 
 — as ' Junius bad laid, by bold generalisation, the foundation 
 of modern doctrines of freedom of the person and the press, 
 when very few were disposed to follow out his theories, except 
 mere demagogues, who could not really understand, and 
 merely abused them,' so ' Francis may be said, with equal 
 truth, to have sketched the outlines of the system of Indian 
 government which now prevails ; although many years passed 
 before bis views were appreciated, and nearly a century before 
 they were adopted.' 
 
141 
 
 V. 
 
 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 1. Voltaire et la Societe au XVIII'^' Siicle. Par Gustave Desnoiresterreg. 
 
 Vol. I. La Jeunesfe de Voltaire. Vol. II. Voltavi-e a Cirey. Vol. III. 
 Voltaire a la Cour. Vol. IV. Voltaire et Frederic. Vol. V. Voltaire 
 aux Beliees. Paris, 1871-3. 
 
 2. Voltaire. Sechs VortrSge von David Friedrich Strauss. Leipzig, 1870. 
 
 3. Voltaire in Franlifmi am Main, 1753. Denkwiirdigkeiten von K. A, Varn- 
 
 hagen von Ense. Aohter Band. Leipzig, 1859. 
 i. Jean Calas et sa Famille. Etude Tiistorique d'aprh les Documents originaux, 
 
 .luivie de Pieces jnstificativcs et des Lettres de la Sisur A. -J. Fraisse de la 
 
 Visitation. Par Athanase Goquerel fils. Seconde Edition, refaite svir de 
 
 nouveaux documents. Paris, 1869. 
 5. Voltaire. By John Morley. London, 1872.> 
 
 M. Gustave Desnoibestbkebs' five volumes,^ tlie last of 
 which brings Voltaire to the end of his personal demeles 
 with ' thrones and dominations,' and to the beginning of the 
 period facetiously distinguished as that of his Ferney Patri- 
 archate, are distinguished in a remarkable degree by minute 
 research and exact citation of every accessible document 
 that can throw fresh light on his subject. They are not 
 less distinguished by the skilful mise en scene of the motley 
 Voltairian drama which kept Europe amused or scandalised 
 during its whole performance, and in which the author 
 successively brings on the stage the minor actors in due 
 relation and subordination to the chief performer. The 
 recently published Voltaire readings to the Princess Louis 
 of Hesse (alas !) and a select circle of hearers, by Dr. David 
 Friedrich Strauss (the general tone of which provokes little 
 recollection of the graver and more questionable antecedents 
 
 ' From the QvMi-terly Review, October 1873. 
 2 Three more have been published since. 
 
142 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of the veteran controversialist), condense so much of the. 
 results of M. Desnoiresterres' previous labours as could be 
 brought within one small volume ; and supply, in addition, 
 a complete and entertaining narrative of the twenty years of 
 Voltaire's Ferney Patriarchate, and a critique of his philo- 
 sophical and theological writings, which appears to us itself 
 open to criticism. M. Athanase Coquerel fils, who has figured 
 lately as M. Guizot's ' Liberal ' antagonist in the debates of 
 the Synod of the French Eeforrned Church, contributes very 
 usefully, in his volume on ' Jean Calas et sa Famille,' to the 
 authentic illustration of the most creditable and not least 
 characteristic episode of Voltaire's later life — his persevering 
 and successful efforts for the reversal of an atrocious sentence, 
 and the rescue from ruin of the ijinocent family of an equally 
 innocent and legally murdered parent. And, finally, Mr. 
 John Morley, last, not least, brings up the rear of recent 
 Voltaire literature. His Apology for Voltaire vividly exhibits 
 the character, if it exaggerates the enduring effects, of his 
 irregular onslaughts on the creed of Christendom. 
 
 Biographers have differed as to both the place and the 
 precise time of Voltaire's birth, and he himself has assigned 
 different dates to it at different periods. As if the spirit of 
 scepticism had been destined to beset his life from the begin- 
 ning, the first exercise of it has been made at the expense 
 of his baptismal register, which bears date November 22, 
 1694, and certifies his birth as having taken place on the 
 day previous. M. Desnoiresterres' researches iave fixed his 
 birthplace at Paris about the date given by the register; 
 and there is no reason whatever for crediting by preference 
 any of the various fancy dates scattered about in his corre- 
 spondence. The older he made himself, the less he imagined 
 would the authorities dare to persecute him. ' Don't say, I 
 beg of you,' he writes to D'Argental, in January 1777 (the 
 year before his death), ' that I am only eighty-two ; it is a 
 cruel calumny. Even were it true, according to a cursed 
 haptismal register, that I was born in November 1694, it 
 must still be granted me that I am in my eighty-third year..' 
 Francois Marie Arouet (we shall see in the sequel how 
 
VOLTAIEE. 143 
 
 olr'l? f'"*^ ^" *^" "^""^ °^ *'^^*^' ^"d.i* ^« «-<i, was 
 ondoye (the term employed for informal sprinkling with water 
 
 at home), lest there might be no time for the ecclesiastical 
 rite He was all his life, or always said he was, on the point 
 ot dying, and was resolved, all the while, to live as long as 
 he could— and longer. 
 
 Voltaire owed much that afterwards peculiarly distin- 
 guished hun to his Jesuit college training, notwithstand- 
 ng the ridicule which he afterwards threw upon it in his 
 Dialogue entre un Conseiller et un ex-Jesnite ' The rhe- 
 torical and poetical exercises throngh which he was put bv 
 the good Pere Poree, not only in Latin, but in French also and 
 the dramatic performances, which made a conspicuous figure 
 in all the Jesuit esta.blishments, supplied the first aliment 
 to his genius for poetry and the drama to which he owed so 
 much of his contemporary celebrity throughout his career. 
 
 As Voltaire's father was a highly respectable notary, 
 entrenched in his morale bourgeoise, though of eminent and 
 extensive aristocratic business connections, it seems singular 
 that he should have selected for friend of the family, and 
 godfather of the infant Fran9ois Marie, a certain Abbe de 
 Chateaunenf , whose clerical reputation chiefly lay in the line 
 of gallantry, and whose idea of carrying out the spiritual 
 relation between himself and his godchild was first decisively 
 illustrated by introducing young Arouet to the old Aspasia 
 of French hetairism, Ninon de I'Enclos, who was then turned 
 eighty. The lively lad found favour in the eyes of the lively 
 old lady, who left him 2,000 francs in her will to buy boots 
 with. Godfather Chateaunenf introduced his youthful charge 
 into worse company than Ninon's — exceedingly good company 
 indeed in the sense of the day. While yet a pupil of the 
 Jesuit college, he was taken into the so-called Societe du 
 Temple, where, during the last dreary years of hypocritical 
 devotion of the Grand Monarque's reign, princes and dukes 
 solaced themselves with gallant and poetical abbes for their 
 compelled gravity at court by the most unrestrained derision 
 of religion and morality altogether. 
 
144 VOLTAIEE. 
 
 ' The little Society of the Temple,' says M. Desnoiresterres, 
 ' presided over by the Abbe de Chaulieu, though chiefly com- 
 posed of old men, was none the more chaste, sober, or orthodox 
 on that account.' To these voluptuaries the nearness of the 
 tom^b seemed only an additional reason for making haste to 
 enjoy their last days of grace. It was the philosophy of Tom 
 Moore's Regent in the ' Twopenny Post Bag : ' 
 
 Brisk let us revel, whUe revel we may, 
 
 For the gay bloom of fifty soon passes away ; 
 
 And then people get fat, 
 
 And infirm, and all that, 
 And a wig, I confess it, so clumsily sits, 
 That it frightens the little Loves out of their wits. 
 
 Vincennes and the Bastille had, in some flagrant instances, 
 for a while avenged the sinking monarchy of the bacchanalian 
 outrages of the princes, aged abbes, and adolescent acolytes 
 of the Temple. But the death of Louis XIV. instantly freed 
 from exile or durance vile the Chevalier (Grand Prieur) de 
 Vend6me and the Abbe Servian, the two most audacious of 
 that audacious brotherhood. Vendome was sincerely and 
 profoundly respected for his vigour in vice by the new 
 Regent. 'I have seen him,' said Saint-Simon, who knew 
 him well, ' in perpetual admiration of the Grand Prior, who 
 for forty years had every night gone to bed drunk, always 
 publicly kept mistresses, and never ran dry of sallies of im- 
 piety and irreligion.' Amongst these debauches a outrance, 
 says M. Desnoiresterres, ' of, whom Chaulieu was the patri- 
 arch, the prejudice of age no more existed than any other. 
 Greybeards retained all the gaiety and vigour of adolescence ; 
 the lapse of years was ignored altogether ; they glided by 
 like river-water, leaving no trace behind. If they developed 
 embonpoint, that only increased the resemblance to Anaereon 
 and Silenus, the saints held most in honour of the Bacchic 
 Olympus.' Their ranks indeed were ever and anon thinned 
 bv death. Godfather Chateauneuf was carried off amongst 
 others. But new guests instantly filled the place of the old ; 
 and the religion, or rather philosophy, of the place proscribed 
 superfluous mourning for the departed. 
 
VOLTAIEE. 145 
 
 Arouet the elder, says his son, gave him up for lost, 
 because he kept good company and made verses. A set of 
 men who became the rouh of the Regency would scarcely be 
 considered good company by a sober man of business, with 
 whom decorum was part of his stock in trade. Old Arouet 
 had two sons, and seems to have had little pleasure in either. 
 He was himself a Jansenist, but in moderation. His elder 
 son, Armand, became a gloomy fanatic, and participated with 
 the party in the Church to which he belonged in all the 
 enthusiastic extravagances which culminated in the miracles 
 of muscular tension exhibited at the tomb of the Abbe Paris. 
 These apparently preternatural feats, which have found 
 mesmeric parallels in our days, caused the cloisters of St. 
 Medard, the theatre of their performance, to be closed by 
 royal ordinance — a police measure which provoked the well- 
 known couplet placarded- on the walls of the cemetery : — 
 
 De par le Roi — defcTise d, Dieu 
 Defaire niirade en ce lieu. 
 
 Old Arouet used to say he had tvjo fools for sons — one in 
 prose, one in verse. But he made a mistake as to the capacity 
 of the younger for carrying on the paternal craft of money- 
 making. The time which he was compelled to spend in law 
 studies, and at the desk of a procureur, was by no means lost 
 to his future fortunes, whether in the pursuit of fame or 
 wealth. During that hated apprenticeship he doubtless 
 caught up some knowledge of law and business which 
 stood him in good stead in after years. In his autobiogra- 
 phical ' Memoires pour servir a la vie de M. de Voltaire,' he 
 expressed himself as follows, with perfect frankness, as to 
 his art of getting on in the world, for which he had been 
 shrewd enough to see from the first that literature, in that 
 age and country, offered but poor prospects. 
 
 I have been asked by the exercise of what art I have contrived to 
 amass means to live Hke a fermier-gineral. I may as well explain 
 this, that my example may serve others. 
 
 In France one must either be anvil or hammer. I was born anvil. 
 A small patrimony becomes every day smaller, since everything in 
 the long-run rises in price, and Government is ever and anon 
 
146 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 tampering with the funds and the currency. One must keep an eye 
 open to all the operations made in finance by a ministry always 
 needy and always tottering. There is always sure to be one or other 
 of these out of which an individual may make his profit without being 
 beholden for it to anyone ; and nothing is so sweet as to owe one's 
 fortune solely to oneself. The first step costs some trouble, the rest 
 is easy. One must practise economy in youth, and then one is sur- 
 prised in old age to find what an amount one has by degrees accu- 
 mulated. That is the time of life when fortune becomes most neces- 
 sary, and that is the time at which I now find myself in enjoyment 
 of it. After having lived with kings, I live chez moi like a king, 
 notwithstanding immense losses. 
 
 It is a notable instance of Voltaire's good understanding 
 (and good advice) in financial matters, that even in his ' hot 
 youth,' and with all the acquisitive ardour vrhich accom- 
 panied him from youth to age, he never was the dupe, as 
 half the nation was, of Law's paper system and of the 
 Mississippi scheme. We find him writing, in 1719, to a 
 young friend, Genonville : — 
 
 It is time, my dear friend, to take refuge in the country when 
 Plutus is turning all heads in the town. Have you really all run mad 
 in Paris? I hear no talk but of milHons. Has half the nation/ound 
 the philosopher's stone in the paper-mills ? Is Law a god, a rogue, or a 
 quack, who poisons himself with the drugs he administers to all the 
 world "i It is a chaos I cannot fathom, and about which I imagine 
 you understand no more than I do. For my part, I abandon myself 
 to no chimeras but those of poetry. 
 
 On the suppression of Law's notes, Voltaire remarked, 
 'Pamper is being reduced to its intrinsic value.' It was the 
 succinct funeral sermon of the system. 
 
 There was little in Voltaire's early coups d'essai, whether 
 in life or literature (except levity), to indicate the pre- 
 destined Prophet of the French. He did not enter in 
 earnest (as much in earnest as was in his nature) on that 
 prophetic function till after his Hegira — his three years' 
 exile from Trance and residence in England — the England 
 of Locke, Newton, and Bolingbroke, three not precisely 
 homogeneous objects of his after-adojation. Love-making 
 and verse-making, loose company and large expense, were 
 
VOLTAIRE. 147 
 
 the sources of his first scrapes in life. Tlie course of his 
 true love never did run smooth, nor could, in the channels he 
 dug for them. His watchful parent took umbrage at his 
 late hours and lavish spendings, and, to get him out of Paris, 
 made interest with the Marquis de Chateauneuf, surviving 
 brother of his godfather Abbe, to take him in his suite as 
 page to the Hague, where the marquis was French ambas- 
 sador. 
 
 From the Hague, however, young Arouet was speedily 
 sent back to Paris, on the representations made to his patron 
 ambassador by another watchful parent — a certain Madame 
 Dunoyer, a Protestant refugee, of literary and other noto- 
 riety,, whose younger daughter and Voltaire fell violently in 
 love with each other. They concocted plans between them 
 for invoking the aid of the French ecclesiastical authorities 
 to rescue the daughter from her heretical mother in Holland, 
 and restore her to her father in France, a good Catholic, if 
 otherwise rather good-for-nothing, as he seems to have been. 
 This orthodox project naturally never got any further than 
 the first conception : the lady missed the beatitudes of Vol- 
 tairian Catholicism, but retained Voltaire's friendship, which 
 he proved in later years. 
 
 In poetry as in love, Voltaire's first essays assumed a 
 colour of orthodoxy. He competed for the prize offered for 
 an ode on Louis XIV.'s restoration of the choir of Notre- 
 Dame, in fulfilment of a pious vow of his father. The 
 ode was unsuccessful, and the author was fain to confess 
 that sacred subjects were not his forte. Bn revanche, the 
 satirical pieces, rightly or wrongly imputed to him under 
 the Regency, had the success of lodging him iu the Bastille, 
 where he spent some eleven months in a detention which had 
 not much of penal in its character. Some time after his 
 liberation he happened to meet at the table of M. Le Blanc, 
 Minister of War, a certain Captain Beauregard, a Govern- 
 ment spy, to whom he imputed his late imprisonment. ' I 
 knew well,' young Arouet exclaimed with natural warmth, 
 and with the indiscretion equally natural to him, ' that spies 
 were employed, but not that they were paid by invitations 
 
 L 2 
 
148 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 to ministers' tables.' The spy revenged himself in the das- 
 tardly manner which, as we shall presently see, some of his 
 betters were not ashamed of imitating. He laid wait for 
 Voltaire by night, at the bridge of Sevres, cudgelled him 
 soundly, and even left a mark on his face. Voltaire got a 
 warrant from the Mayor of Sevres for the arrest of Beaure- 
 gard, but the latter in the meantime had joined his regiment. 
 The aggrieved party thereupon had recourse to criminal pro- 
 ceedings, with the fiery persistency with which he always 
 pursued the grievances whether of himself or others; All 
 Ihe satisfaction he got, the year after, was the placing of 
 Beauregard under arrest for a time. 
 
 A quarrel more conspicuous, m proportion to the rank of 
 the aggressor, was that which was picked, a year or two 
 later, with the young poet, who had, in the meantime, 
 assumed the name of Voltaire,' by the Chevalier de Eohan- 
 Chabot, scion of a noble stock, and field-marshal to boot, 
 albeit he never had seen a battle-field. This high-born and 
 high-ranked gentleman met Voltaire one evening at the 
 opera, and, offended apparently at something said, or not 
 said, by the latter, accosted him scornfully, 'M. de Voltaire 
 — M. Arouet — or how do you call yourself? ' Voltaire made 
 a quiet answer, and the matter passed off for the moment. 
 A night or two after they met again at the theatre, in the 
 presence of the actress Lecouvreur ; and Rohan, to show his 
 spirit perhaps before the latter, repeated his impertinent 
 question of the former evening. This time Voltaire's spirit 
 was also up, and he replied, ' It was true, indeed, he did not 
 drag after him the appendage of a great ancestral name, but 
 he knew how to do honour to the name he did bear.' The 
 
 ' The young Arouet was said to have derived his new surname from a 
 small estate he was supposed to have inherited from his mother, only no one 
 has ever been able to discover where that estate was situated. A more prob- 
 able suggestion is, that his new name may have been formed from an anagram 
 of the letters which composed his old one — Arouet I. j. (le jeune) — the v, 
 being converted into v, and the J into i. In like manner, an old college tutor 
 of his, P^re Thouli6, transformed himself, by a similar anagrammatic process 
 into the Abb^ Olivet — omitting only the unnecessary h from his original name. 
 This method of reforming a plebeian name into one more distinguished- 
 looking seems not to have been uncommon in those times. 
 
VOLTAIEE. 149 
 
 Chevalier raised his stick; Voltaire laid his hand on his 
 sword; mademoiselle fainted ; and so ended the second act of 
 this absurd drama. The third opened with what we can only 
 call a rascally ambuscade. Voltaire was dining, as he often 
 did, at the Duke de Sully's. A servant whispered him that 
 some one was waiting to speak to him at the house door. 
 He found there a hackney coach, with two men, who re- 
 quested him to get on the step, and then laid hold of his 
 clothes, and belaboured him with sticks over the shoulders 
 while the Chevalier de Eohan, from another carriage, en- 
 couraged 'his workmen ' to their work, but enjoined them 
 not to hit their victim on the head. The beaten man ran 
 back into the house, and called on the Duke de Sully to go 
 with him to a commissaire, and have a proces-verbal made of 
 the outrage. The Duke refused, and in so refusing. Dr. 
 Strauss rightly observes, showed as inadequate a sense of his 
 own honour as that of his guest, since the former was not 
 less outraged by this cowardly guet-apens than the latter. 
 But the Eohans were a noble family, of powerful and ex- 
 tended connections, and the poet was only a bourgeois by 
 birth, after all. The Prince de Conti, though he had 
 written romantic verses on Voltaire's first tragedy, lately 
 performed, remarked that the cudgelling bestowed on him 
 had been wrongly given but rightly received. The Bishop 
 of Blois said, ' It would be a bad look-out if poets had no 
 shoulders.' Condorcet, in his ' Life of Voltaire,' contents 
 himself with the dry remark, ' The Duke de Sully deigned 
 to manifest no resentment — persuaded, doubtless, that the 
 descendants of the Francs retain the right of life and death 
 over those of the Gauls.' 
 
 Voltaire set strenuously to work to take fencing lessons. 
 The Kohan family were uneasy — the police on the qui vive. 
 It was thought best that a poet who would not take a beat- 
 ing kindly should reoccupy his old apartments in the 
 Bastille. Here, as before, he was treated with all indul- 
 gence imaginable, dined at the governor's table, and received 
 visits ad libitum from the court and city. There was no 
 desire to keep him in the Bastille, nor, indeed, in the 
 
150 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 country. Voltaire offered to take a run across tlie Channel, 
 and the offer was gladly accepted. From the land of lettres 
 de cachet and arbitrary arrests he longed to fly to the land 
 of law and liberty. So the order was issued, on the 2nd of 
 May 1726, for his liberation. But the authorities, inspired 
 by the Eohans, would have the assurance that he should 
 really leave France. Accordingly, his gaoler bore him com- 
 pany to the port of embarkation, Calais. Such was Voltaire's 
 Hegira, which became the turning-point of his whole after- 
 action on his age. The princes and prelates who drove him 
 forth, or let him go, foresaw not the remoter consequences. 
 His leaving France was their work ; the mind he brought 
 back was indirectly their work also. Voltaire afterwards 
 took vengeance poetically, if not heroically, on the pride and 
 pusillanimity of his noble friend Sully, by striking the 
 character of his great ancestor out of the ' Henriade,' in the 
 first draught of which poem the austere figure of Rosny was 
 presented in contrast with the heroic type of the Bearnais. 
 In the poem as published, he substituted for Rosny (Sully) 
 the lesser personage of Duplessis-Mornai. 
 
 Dr. Strauss observes that what first made a man of Vol- 
 taire was his three years' residence in England. In the next 
 breath he adds, that all through his life he never quite 
 matured to manhood. ' Even in old age he surprises us not 
 only by outbursts of passion, but by fantastic escapades which 
 we should scarcely excuse in youth. Seriousness of mood, 
 calmness or dignity of demeanour, remained ever strange to 
 him.' Condorcet, in his 'Vie de Voltaire,' observes : — 
 
 The happy qualities of Voltaire -were often obscured and distorted 
 by a natural mobility which -was aggravated by the habit of writing 
 tragedies. He passed in a moment from anger to sympathetic emo- 
 tion, from indignation to pleasantry. His passions, naturally violent, 
 sometimes transported him too far ; and his excessive mobility de- 
 prived him of the advantages ordinarily attached to passionate 
 tempers — firmness in conduct — courage which no terrors can with- 
 hold from action, and which no dangers anticipated beforehand can 
 shake by their actual presence. Voltaire has often been seen to 
 expose himself rashly to the storm — seldom to meet it with fortitude. 
 These alternations of audacity and weakness have often afflicted his 
 friends, and prepared unworthy triumphs for his envenomed enemies. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 151 
 
 Soon after liis return to France, Voltaire prepared for 
 publication Ms ' Letters on England,' the substance of which 
 has been since reprinted in his works, principally in his 
 ' Dictionnaire Philosophique,' under other titles. His object 
 was, to make his countrymen better acquainted with the 
 philosophy, literature, sects, and politics of England. His 
 thoughts on these subjects had been partly thrown upon 
 paper during his stay in this country; and after his return 
 he had endeavoured to adapt them to the meridian of France, 
 by circumspect softenings of expression on many points on 
 which, in England, plain speaking would have been permitted. 
 He felt his way with Cardinal Fleury, who had lately become 
 Prime Minister, by reading him some carefully pruned pas- 
 sages of his Letters about the English Quakers, much, it is 
 said, to the amusement of his aged Eminence. But when 
 the book appeared in print, the authorities took up arms 
 against it, the copies were seized by the Government, and the 
 publisher thrown into the Bastille, as the author would have 
 been also, if he had not had timely warning from his friend 
 D'Argental, and taken refuge in Lorraine, and afterwards on 
 the Rhine, while his book was torn to pieces and burned in 
 Paris by the public executioner, as offensive to religion, 
 good morals, and respect for authority. 
 
 There was certainly no contesting the last count of this 
 indictment. In these Lettres anglaises not an authority in 
 France escaped some note of disrespect. 'The English 
 nation,' says Voltaire, ' is the only one who has succeeded in 
 restricting the power of kings by resisting it.' Take that, 
 royalty by right divine ! In another place he says, ' You 
 don't hear in England of haute, moyenne et basse justice, nor 
 of the right of hunting over the lands of a citizen who has not 
 the liberty of firing a gun in his own fields.' Take that, 
 privileged petite et grande noblesse! Elsewhere — 'That in- 
 definite being, who is neither ecclesiastic nor secular, in a 
 word the Abbe, is a species unknown in England. Anglican 
 ecclesiastics are all decorous, and almost all pedants. When 
 they are told that in France young men, known only by 
 their talents for debauchery, and elevated to prelatic rank by 
 
162 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 female intrigue, pursue tlieir amours publicly, give or accept 
 exquisite and late suppers nightly, and then betake them- 
 selves to imploring enlightenment from the Holy Spirit, and 
 boldly call themselves successors of the Apostles, they thank 
 God they are Protestants. But of course they are vile 
 heretics all the same — a hruler a tous les diables, as Master 
 Francis Rabelais says, and therefore I give myself no concern 
 with their affairs.' 
 
 Voltaire's scientific imports from England were scarcely less 
 obnoxious. To seek to substitute Newton's newly discovered 
 law of attraction for the Vortices of Descartes was at that 
 time an outrage for police repression, ajnd to venture to 
 recommend inoculation for the small-pox was at once to fly 
 in the face of the Faculty and the Sorbonne. In these un- 
 lucky Lettres anglaises, in short, there was something to offend 
 everyone ; and Voltaire had apparently good reason to appre- 
 hend treatment of unusual rigour if he had obeyed the 
 summons to give himself up into custody, as he took good 
 care not to do. ' I have a mortal aversion to prison,' he 
 wrote to D'Argental. " I am ill ; a confined air would have 
 killed me, and I should probably have been thrust into a 
 dungeon.' 
 
 The strange story of Voltaire's fifteen or sixteen years' 
 liaison with the Marquise Du Chatelet — ^the ' divine Emilie ' 
 — need not be told again.' It was an union of Poetry and 
 Science, however illicit, singularly constant for that age. 
 The lady's studies and talents lay in the direction of mathe- 
 matics and physics, on which she published several works. 
 She had begun a translation of Virgil in her youth, and read 
 Tasso and Milton in the originals. She had musical and 
 mimical talents to boot, but sometimes excited Voltaire's 
 impatience by showing more intei-est in a discovery of 
 Newton than in a verse of Virgil — or Voltaire. With all 
 this, she by no means played the learned lady in the great 
 world, but followed all the courtly and fashionable frivolities 
 of that day with not less ardour than her scientific studies 
 in the country. Voltaire gave her the title of Venus-Newton. 
 ■ See Quarterly Review, vol. Ixxvi. p. Ti. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 153 
 
 Voltaire had flattered himself, in prose and verse, for 
 awhile into favour with the Pompadour, though Louis XV. 
 persistently turned the cold shoulder on the courtier-philo- 
 sopher. Voltairian philosophy and ethics, however, exactly 
 suited the polite circles of the eighteenth century in Prance. 
 His writings showed a sharp and clear sense on all subjects 
 which lay not too deep for his ken or theirs, and an accom- 
 modating morality worthy of a pupil in the schools of the 
 Jesuits, summarised in the closing line of his ' Gertrude ' — 
 II n'est jamais de mal en honne com/pagnie.' The semi-perse- 
 cution he was always dodging, and seldom suffering, only 
 served to attract attention and to add piquancy to his Pro- 
 tean forms of attack on whatever was orthodox, venerable, 
 or established, and served also to absolve from serious respon- 
 sibility his bush warfare (often under false names) with ' les 
 grands anthropoJcaies,' and ' les petits anihropohaies,' who had 
 ceased to burn, and could only tease their assailants — an art in 
 which they met their match in Voltaire. At the same time he 
 was intimate with many of the higher clergy, and coaxed Pope 
 Benedict XIV. to endorse his orthodox testimonials of fitness 
 to fill a chair among the sacrosanct ' Forty ' in the Academy. 
 He represented an age in which Life had ceased to be re- 
 garded in any of its serious aspects by those classes who 
 figured in its front ranks, engrossed its privileges, and dis- 
 charged none of its duties. Voltaire's moral doctrines did 
 not fall lower than the average practice of his age : posterity's 
 quarrel with him is that they did not rise higher. 
 
 Unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! 
 
 In Voltaire's eyes man was a very poor thing, and that 
 he should seek to erect himself above himself was, 
 with him, sheer tartuffianism or charlatanism. There was 
 the vice of his system, if system he could be said to have had. 
 In his scheme of life no presentiment ever showed itself of 
 our ' pleasant vices ' making themselves ' whips to scourge 
 us.' The whimsical soliloquy, from his own pen, of a man 
 falling swiftly and softly from the top of a steeple might 
 
154 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 typify the whole period of the Voltairian ascendency in the 
 eighteenth century — ' Bon, pourvu que cela dure.' But cela 
 nepouvait durer. In the last quarter of that century came the 
 eclipse, at least partial, of Voltaire by Rousseau, of aristo- 
 cratic iconoclastic pastime by democratic iconoclastic passion. 
 After the apologist of all the levities of his age, their Avenger 
 appeared, and farce closed in tragedy. 
 
 The peculiarity of Voltaire's position towards powers and 
 dignities all through his life was that, while he was perse- 
 cuted by authority, he was petted by high society lay and 
 clerical; his genius and writings were always in fashion, 
 though always contraband. His precociously cultivated social 
 tact and talents had much to do with securing- for him this 
 privileged personal position. ' Voltaire was too vain himself,' 
 says M. Desnoiresterres, ' not to have great consideration for 
 the vanity of others, and he had too much tact not to discern 
 what might wound it, however imperceptibly.' Accordingly 
 his only personal enemies were amongst second-rate men of 
 letters, to Avhom his superiority was, of course, odious. The 
 high noblesse, many eminent persons among the dignified 
 clergy, and his leading literary and philosophic compeers 
 were his constant allies. 
 
 With one exception — Rousseau. That exception may be 
 considered as having been mainly owing to the radical oppo- 
 sition in the genius and temper of the two men. It is to be 
 noted that in all his many quarrels with authors, Voltaire 
 was rarely, if ever, the first aggressor. Once offended, his 
 wrath was unmeasured, his vengeance always unscrupulous, 
 and, too often, implacable. There was no imputation, however 
 infamous, or however monstrous, that this great exemplar of 
 the genus irritabile ever hesitated to fling at the head of any 
 critic of his whom he considered formidable, and whose 
 reputation was not altogether above aspersion. All the 
 atrocities ever put on record in the annals of crime or in the 
 tomes of casuistry printed for the practitioners of the Romish 
 confessional, were not too many to ascribe to those guilty of 
 the one unpardonable crime — that of having found fault with 
 anything whatever produced by Voltaire. Models of sarcasm, 
 
VOLTAIEE. 155 
 
 wliich he closely imitated, were furnished by our English 
 satirists, such as Pope's ' Narrative of the Frenzy of John 
 Dennis ' and Swift's ' Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge, 
 the Almanack- maker.' The Abbe Desfontaines, the Marquis 
 Lefranc de Pompignan, and "Maitre Aliboron' Freron 
 suffered, as it were, at second hand from the light artillery 
 which had first been brought against Grub Street, and the 
 sorry heroes of the ' Dunciad.' When Voltaire's vigour beyond 
 the law was challenged, in sending Freron to the galleys by 
 a stroke of the pen, he treated with all Swift's cynical in- 
 difference the question whether Freron had ever been really 
 sent, or whether he was not merely predestined to be sent 
 there some day or other. Slightly inconsistent with the 
 unbounded licence which Voltaire allowed his pen aTgainst all 
 assailants, was the habit he had of employing his influence 
 with his friends in the Government for the arrest of the 
 persons, or the suppression of the journals, of his foes in 
 the press. The first offence, however, comparatively rarely 
 came from his side. He had too much of poetical power and 
 fancy, and was besides far too much a man of the world, to 
 need, or to be in any degree disposed for, personal controversy 
 merely as a source of supply of piquant subjects for writing. 
 On the other hand, Rousseau's nature de polemiste, as M. 
 Desnoiresterres terms it, continually prompted him to find 
 or make antagonists against whom to air his paradoxes. 
 Eousseau's genius was declamatory and controversial. Vol- 
 taire never declaimed, and never answered declamation, 
 unless indirectly, in the shape of satire in prose or verse. 
 His reply to Rousseau's rebuke for his pessimist poem on 
 the earthquake of Lisbon was the publication of ' Candide, 
 ou I'Optimisme ; ' and Eousseau's revenge was to say slight- 
 ingly that he had not read it. It was a fight of hawk and 
 fish in different elements. ' Rousseau,' says M. Desnoires- 
 terres, ' was a polemist, for whose extraordinary talent of 
 impassioned rhetoric combat might almost be said to be a 
 condition of existence. Voltaire, on the other hand, could 
 not descend into the controversial arena without interrupt- 
 ing his daily habits of composition, correspondence, and 
 
166 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 country amusements.' To have a quarrel with him, Eousseau 
 was accordingly compelled to pick one. But as it was not 
 till the period of the second exile of his redoubtable rival, 
 and his choice of a residence or residences in Switzer- 
 land, or on the Swiss frontier, that Eousseau opened his war 
 of the pen with Voltaire — at first with caution and courtesy, 
 — we shall defer our notice of the first cause or pretext of 
 hostilities till we arrive at that period. 
 
 It may seem inconsistent with the exquisite social tact of 
 Voltaire, that he was always getting into scrapes which 
 seemed ascribable to sheer want of tact — of knowledge of 
 the nature of men and things ; and may be said to have lived 
 in an element of hot water of his own boiling. ' II y a des 
 gens,' wrote his friend, the President Henault, to Madame du 
 Deffand in 1742, ' que les aventures vont chercher, et qui 
 rencontreraient des hasards a la Tra^jpe.' The contradiction 
 may be solved by that insatiable and irrepressible activity 
 which was the leading trait of his character, and which the 
 vis inertiw of Louis XV. 's administrations, beginning with 
 Pleury, constantly and vexatiously impeded in every field of 
 its attempted exercise. Voltaire's impatience of these im- 
 pediments was intensified tenfold by his three years' enjoy- 
 ment of an opposite regime in England, and never did 
 absolute monarchy make a greater mistake than when it 
 sent such a spirit to such a school. Inaction was impossible 
 to him ; he must be bestirring himself in something, for or 
 against somebody, every hour of his life. Conceive such a 
 spirit struggling under such a system as was personified in 
 Fleury, whose whole wisdom might be summed up in the 
 maxim quieta non movere, and whose prime precept, like that 
 of Talleyrand to his subordinates, would be ' Surtout, point de 
 zele.' It is ' as good as a play ' to read the correspondence 
 between Voltaire and Fleury — the former pushing eagerly 
 for diplomatic employment in secret negotiation with his 
 royal friend Frederick; the latter veiling under unctuous 
 phrases of clerical-courtly evasiveness his want of initiative 
 and capacity for vigorous decision or action. Frederick, on 
 his part, in the interviews in which Voltaire endeavoured to 
 
VOLTAIRE. 157 
 
 sound his policy, knew, as well as a great Prussian minister 
 has known since, how to cloak under the frankest communi- 
 cativeness and unreserve of speech the depth of designs 
 which he would have none penetrate till in course of execu- 
 tion. While Voltaire was essaying his amateur diplomacy 
 against Frederick's kingcraft, the royal author of the ' Anti- 
 Machiavel,' on the other hand, was practising the most 
 Machiavelic artifices to make Pax-is and Versailles too hot 
 for Voltaire, and compel him to transfer the literary glory of 
 his presence to Berlin and Potsdam. ' Frederick,' says M. 
 Desnoiresterres, * was capable of proceeding to any extremity 
 to get Voltaire to Berlin ; and the surest way of doing so was 
 to render it impossible for him to stay in France. His father, 
 in time of profound peace, had been in the habit of kidnapping 
 the flower of the population of Christian states to recruit his 
 grenadiers. Frederick was a different man, no doubt, from 
 Frederick William. He was his father's own son, however, 
 on more than one point ; and in whatever he might differ, it 
 was not in failing to inherit a certain ferocity of race, which 
 he knew how to dissemble, but which betrayed on occasion 
 shrewd signs of existence.' While Voltaire was employing 
 himself for the French Government in an unavowed diplo- 
 matic mission at Berlin, Frederick was working underground 
 to cut off his retreat into France. The king wrote to his 
 ambassador-extraordinary at Paris, Count Eothenburg, ' I 
 send you an extract from a letter of Voltaire, which I beg 
 you to find some indirect channel, without committing either 
 yourself or me, to put into the hands of the Bishop of Mire- 
 poix ' (then an influential person at Court, and who was ridi- 
 culed without mercy in this letter of Voltaire to Frederick). 
 ' I want to make an irreconcilable quarrel for him in France • 
 it is the only way to make sure of having him at Berlin.' 
 
 It is amusingly illustrative of Voltaire's shrewdness, not 
 to say sharpness, in money matters, that he got himself paid 
 twice over for making his first journey to Berlin. First, by 
 Frederick, whose invitation he had accepted on condition of 
 payment of his travelling expenses, a condition which the 
 king, who looked as sharply into money matters as Voltaire 
 
158 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 himself, grumbled at extremely, writing to his confidant 
 Jordan, ' His six days ' apparition will cost me five hundred 
 and fifty crowns a day. It is paying high for a Court fool ; 
 no great lord's buffoon ever had such wages.' Secondly, 
 Voltaire got paid by his own Government for his trip to 
 Berlin, in the shape of a lucrative share in Government war- 
 contracts, which he solicited, under the name of a relative, 
 and obtained on the strength of his secret mission. 'All 
 this,' says M. Desnoiresterres, 'would not have loaded 
 Voltaire's memory very heavily (as he simply turned to the 
 best advantage the friendships he had made in high quarters, 
 and the capital he had accumulated by previous successful 
 operations), if he had not stigmatised with extraordinary 
 severity, in a letter to President De Brosses, about this time, 
 the monstrous fortunes to the building up of which all the 
 plagues which afflict nations contributed. " How long," he 
 asked, " will the people suffer themselves to be ruined to pay 
 for defeats in Germany and enrich Marquet and Company ? " 
 
 ' " Et Paris, et fratres, efc qui rapuere sub illis." ' 
 
 Considering that the brothers Paris had let in Voltaire 
 for a good thing in their contracts, there was something 
 passing strange, not to say impudent, in ' rapuere sub illis,' 
 from Ms pen. 
 
 After losing the 'divine Bmilie,' Voltaire had soon to 
 experience, in male as in female friendship, what Louis 
 XIV. in his old age gracefully expressed to one of his beaten 
 generals, ' Ah, Monsieur le Marechal, on n'est plus heureux 
 a notre age ! ' The excessive empressement and occasional 
 obtrusiveness of his courtiership had thrown him more out 
 of favour than ever with Louis XV., and the death of 
 Madame Du Chatelet having severed the closest of his 
 private ties to his country, Frederick became more pressing 
 than ever with his invitations to him to take up his perma- 
 nent residence at Berlin, "With his usual worldly shrewdness, 
 Voltaire, before he would agree to make the journey, again 
 stipulated for the advance of his travelling expenses, as he 
 said he had no cash in hand for that purpose. The king took 
 
VOLTAIEE. 159 
 
 the hint, and, as he himself expressed it in verse, poured the 
 requisite golden shower into the lap of his Danae. He sent 
 him, moreover, with a profusion of verbal blandishments, the 
 key of royal chamberlain, the cross of the Order of Merit, and 
 the grant of a yearly income of twenty thousand livres, with 
 house, table, and equipage free. The warmth of welcome 
 entirely corresponded with that of invitation. But presently 
 swrgit amari aliquid. 'What could be more natural,' 
 Frederick had written, 'than that two philosophers, indis- 
 solubly linked by likeness of tastes and sentiments— /o»-me(^ 
 to live together — should give themselves that satisfaction?' 
 In this rose-coloured programme two things were forgotten. 
 First, that one of the two philosophers, 'formed to live 
 together,' was a wit ; secondly, that the other of the two 
 was a sovereign. 
 
 The story of Voltaire's quarrel with Frederick, of which 
 the former retained the recollection all his life with his usual 
 vehemence of vindictiveness, has been told humoristically by 
 Carlyle in his ' History ' of that monarch, and with matter- 
 of-fact precision by M. Desnoiresterres, and afterwards by 
 Dr. Strauss. Frederick's favourite hobby had been to en- 
 cage round him at Berlin a French literary ' happy family,' 
 if such a family could have foregone its instincts and for- 
 gotten its teeth and claws ! No such association could hold 
 Voltaire to his good behaviour ; he was as ' impossible ' in a 
 coterie not of his own selection or his own epuration as the 
 late Lord Brougham in a Cabinet where he could not be 
 king and premier rolled into one. Submission to authority, 
 whether lay or clerical, was an impossible thing to Voltaire. 
 His wit was an indomitable and irrepressible will-of-the- 
 wisp, which would dance and flicker over whatever miasmata 
 fed its flame; and there were such to feed it under the 
 sabre sway of Potsdam as under the alternate priest and 
 petticoat sway of Versailles. On the other hand, Frederick 
 was resolved to be master in his own' house and in his own 
 Academy ; and, of the two wills, that of ' the master of thirty 
 legions' of course proved the stronger. Voltaire ofPended 
 Frederick by overwhelming with merciless ridicule the head 
 
160 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 of his Academy, Maupertuis — -formerly his (Voltaire's) friend 
 and Newtonian oracle, and that of the divine Emilie — in the 
 inimitable ' Diatribe du Docteur Ahakia,' and in supplemen- 
 tary farewell Parthian shots after leaving Berlin. He had 
 further offended the king (and, we niay add, discredited 
 himself) by one of his habitual financing operations, — this 
 time of a more than ordinarily shady complexion. We may 
 refer our English readers to Carlyle's ' History,' and readers 
 of French and German to M. Desnoiresterres' and Dr. 
 Strauss's volumes, for the details of A^'oltaire's illicit transac- 
 tions in Saxon bonds, under cover of purchases of jewellery 
 from the Berlin Jew Hirschel. Neither Israelite nor philo- 
 sopher came well out of them. It so happened that Lessing, 
 then a young man of two-and-twenty, was at Berlin, in needy 
 circumstances, glad to find penwork of any kind. He was 
 employed by Voltaire to translate into German his correspon- 
 dence in the legal proceedings against Hirschel. Lessing 
 was indiscreet enough to keep and communicate to others a 
 proof-sheet, which had fallen into his hands, of Voltaire's 
 ' Louis XIV.' then printing at Berlin, and the first sight of 
 which was, of course, reserved for royal eyes. His indiscre- 
 tion got wind, and Voltaire expressed his displeasure, well- 
 founded as it was, in terms so insulting to Lessing as made 
 that German Voltaire his lifelong enemy. The first fruit of 
 that enmity was an epigram by Lessing on Voltaire's contest 
 with Hirschel, the concluding lines of which may be freely 
 translated as follows : — ' 
 
 To cut it short, and make it clear to view 
 
 Wherefore the Jew 
 No better versus Herr Voltake succeeded — 
 
 We can but say, 
 
 'Tis plain as day, 
 Voltaire ranch better played the Jew than he did. 
 
 ' We here subjoin the original lines of Lessing : — 
 ' Und kurz und gut, den Grund zu f assen, 
 Warum die List 
 Dem Juden nicht gelungen ist, 
 So fallt die Antwort ungef iihr — 
 Herr Voltaire war ein gross'rer Schelm als er.' 
 
VOLTAIEE. 161 
 
 The indignities of Voltaire's arrest at Frankfort, on his 
 route from Berlin to Plombieres, to which place he had 
 made health his pretext for taking flight from the intolerable 
 constraint of intercourse with his royal fellow-philosopher, 
 were, for a century or so, known to the world only through 
 the narrative of Voltaire himself, and that of his confidential 
 secretary, CoUini, in which it is needless to say that Frederick 
 a,nd his stupidly blundering (as intensely servile) local satel- 
 lites, came off second-best in the eyes of the whole European 
 reading public. No contradiction to that narrative issued 
 from the Prussian Chancery ; and it was not till the late 
 Varnhagen von Ense obtained access to the royal archives, 
 in which the official documents about that affair had long 
 lain buried, that its exact circumstances were made public. 
 More than a hundred pages of Varnhagen's posthumously 
 published ' Denkwiirdigkeiten ' are devoted to a detailed 
 account of it ; and from that account it appears — as every- 
 one acquainted with Voltaire's free and easy way of dealing 
 with facts in which he was personally concerned would have 
 expected — that he had caricatured and exaggerated the lan- 
 guage and conduct of Frederick's resident at Frankfort, 
 Freytag, and his coadjutors, on every point which could 
 enhance the odium of their proceedings. But we are not 
 sure that Varnhagen's official details do not make them more 
 odious still. The less truth there was va. Voltaire's de- 
 scription of Frederick's Frankfort functionaries as mere 
 ignorant and brutal ruffians, the more deliberate and syste- 
 matic appears their non-recognition of all law, municipal or 
 international, by which their ' allerdurchlauchtigster gross- 
 machtigster Konig, allergnddigster Konig und Herr' could be 
 frustrated of his will, or baulked of his vengeance. All 
 Frederick wanted, except to show his ill-humour, was to get 
 back from Voltaire, before he left Germany, his key of 
 chamberlain, his cross and ribbon of the Order of Merit, and 
 his copy of a privately- printed volume of the royal rhymester's 
 (so-called) poetry, some of which, being of a scandalous 
 complexion towards other powers, Voltaire might make 
 mischief with. The king's orders were brief, rough, and 
 
 M 
 
162 VOLTAIEE. 
 
 peremptory, but, unluckily, vague also in the wording ; and 
 his local functionaries thought it safer to exceed than fall 
 short of the rigour with which it was apparently intended 
 they should be enforced. Accordingly, from the end of May 
 to the beginning of July, Voltaire was detained in Frank- 
 fort, even after he had surrendered without demur the key 
 and cross, and ' livre de poesMe du roi mon maitre,' as he 
 thought fit to travesty Freytag's demand for that special 
 treasure. Frederick's absence from Berlin at some of his 
 military musters created delay in getting his orders on each 
 fresh incident of this absurd transaction; and Voltaire's 
 impatience leading him to attempt to escape from Frankfort, 
 Freytag regarded as a strong presumption that he must 
 either have perpetrated, or else must meditate, the perpe- 
 tration of something altogether enorm, or he would, of 
 course, have remained quietly under royal arrest until his 
 allergnadigster K'dnig und Herr vouchsafed to send him 
 marching orders. 
 
 Frederick soon forgave Voltaire for having been ill-used 
 b}- him ; but Voltaire never forgave Frederick. His vanity, 
 indeed, found its account in renewed correspondence with 
 the once idolised monarch ; but his rancorous and vindictive 
 feeling smouldered in his breast to the day of his death. In 
 the autobiographical fragment left behind him by Voltaire, 
 his desire to blacken Frederick on the most exposed points 
 of personal character is indulged without measure or 
 modesty ; but it is impossible to suppose all false in the 
 picture of mingled philosophy and ribaldry he has left on 
 record of the royal suppers at Potsdam. Whatever Frede- 
 rick's nature may have been originally — however his heart 
 may have been ' formed for softness, warped to wrong ' — his 
 whole moral frame had received a violent wrench in youth, 
 and never recovered from its effects. Frederick, indeed, 
 gave that ' terrible man,' his father, credit for having made 
 him all he afterwards became as a king and conqueror ; but 
 his father may be said, probably with equal truth, to have 
 unmade him as a loving and loveable man. His sentiments 
 towards mankind, as a 'verdammte Race,' deserving and 
 
VOLTAIEE. 163 
 
 doomed to wretchedness — a sentence whicli, as a belligerent 
 autocrat, lie certainly did his part to execute — might well 
 have originated in his own terrorised and tyrannised boy- 
 hood. Whateyer its source, the heart's core of Frederick's 
 married-unmarried life was bitterness. Voltaire's more 
 cheerful cynicism may have given him, or rather promised 
 him, some refreshment ; but between two such spirits it was 
 not in the nature of things that there should be permanently 
 safe or satisfactory intercourse. They should have remained 
 contented with a commerce of flattery from a distance ; and 
 Voltaire could have rendered Frederick quite as well from a 
 distance the only real service he was capable of rendering 
 him^ — that of correcting his verses. 
 
 To kings most or least Christian, Voltaire owed only one 
 final obligation — that, when his skittish tricks had exhausted 
 their not too-enduring royal patience, they kept him de- 
 terminedly at a safe distance. On this one point of policy 
 at least Frederick II. and Louis XV. were fully agreed. 
 Voltaire tried to make use of his continued intimacy with 
 Frederick's beloved sister, Wilhelmine, Margravine of Bay- 
 reuth, to procure for him a renewed invitation to Berlin, 
 not probably with the intention of accepting it, but of 
 making a merit at the Court of France of declining it. To 
 Paris and Versailles, the theatres of his triumphs as a 
 dramatist, if not as a courtier, his real wishes always pointed. 
 Thither also pointed those of his widowed niece, Madame 
 Denis, who contrived, some twenty odd years afterwards, to 
 entice her aged relative to Paris to die there. At the earlier 
 epoch now before us, of his return from Germany, he re- 
 ceived intimations from his friends at Court that the great 
 objection to him in that pure moral sphere was the religious 
 one. The matter in hand, then, was to "make some con- 
 spicuous demonstration of orthodoxy ; and to Voltaire's way 
 of thinking, says Dr. Strauss, there was never any difficulty 
 about that. At Easter, 1764, he communicated in the 
 church at Colmar with all signs of devotion, which, however, 
 did him no good at Versailles or Paris. Most unluckily for 
 the convert (of Reynard the Fox's fur), copies of the ' Pucelle,' 
 
164 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 yet unpublished, had found their way to Paris, in which not 
 only saintly personages were satirised, but, what was worse, 
 unsaintly ones — the King and the Pompadour. Voltaire 
 resorted to his customary disclaimers of the authorship of 
 the obnoxious passages, and sent expurgated copies of the 
 poem to the ministers and the mistress. The device was 
 too stale. He next attempted to enlist on his side his old 
 friend the Duke de Richelieu, now governor of Languedoc ; 
 but in an interview with the Duke at Lyons got cold comfort 
 from him as to his hopes at Court. Then he paid his devoirs, 
 in grand gala-dress, to another old friend of the epoch of 
 the ' aimable BSffence,' the Cardinal Archbishop de Tencin. 
 But the cardinal bowed him out of his archiepiscopal palace 
 at Lyons in a minute or two, saying he could receive no one 
 at his table who stood so ill at Court. Voltaire hobbled 
 back to his carriage (afflicted with gout as well as with vain 
 hopes and aims), and, after some moments of moody silence, 
 said to his secretary, Collini, ' My friend, there is no footing 
 for us in. this country.' He contrived, however, to keep one 
 foot in Prance and one in Switzerland, for nearly another 
 quarter of a century, by purchases of estates on both sides 
 the frontier. ' A philosopher,' he said, ' with the hounds at 
 his heels, must have more than one hole to run to.' His 
 turn for financing had yielded to an earth-hunger for landed 
 property. Accordingly he purchased estates and houses in 
 French, Genevese, and Bernese territory, and thus had the 
 choice of three distinct governments in case of necessity to 
 seek a city of refuge. Ultimately, however, he settled down 
 on his French property, to which he made considerable 
 additions, and from which he derived the title he was latterly 
 known by — that of the Patriarch of Perney. 
 
 The quarrel of Voltaire with Rousseau, or rather of 
 Rousseau with Voltaire, began about this time, when the 
 latter first came to reside among the compatriots of the 
 ' Citizen of Geneva,' who found or took occasion for his first 
 declaration of war with the reigning Parisian philosophy 
 and its recognised chief, from the appearance of D'Alembert's 
 article Geneve, in the ' Encyclopedie.' That article had been 
 
VOLTAIRE. 165 
 
 partly written to promote the success of Voltaire's project of 
 setting np a theatre at Geneva, a project which had com- 
 bined against it the entire forces of ecclesiastical and poli- 
 tical conservatism in the city of Calvin. There was some- 
 thing rather amusing than edifying in the austere attitude 
 of Rousseau on this occasion— himself an enthusiastic 
 votary of the theatre, and a dramatic author — standing 
 forth all of a sudden to proclaim, in the pulpit style of 
 Geneva, that the drama universally, however moralised, was 
 pernicious, and that no calamity could befal his country to 
 be compared for a moment with that of imbibing a fatal 
 taste for theatricals. Voltaire, on receiving the first intelli- 
 gence of Rousseau's letter, and before he had read it, ex- 
 claimed, ' They say he has pushed sacrilege to the pitch of 
 blaspheming the drama, which is becoming the third sacra- 
 ment of Genevan Protestantism. In this country of Calvin 
 everyone is going mad for the theatre. Three new pieces 
 have been acted within three months at Geneva, and of 
 those three pieces one only is mine.' ' Eight years after- 
 wards, when Roussean thought fit to include Voltaire in the 
 imaginary machinations against his fame and peace with 
 which he charged David Hume (!), Voltaire again wrote to 
 D'Alembert, ' Imaginez-vous que Jean-Jacques m'aecuse 
 aussi d'etre de ses ennemis, moi qui n'ai d'autre reproche a 
 me faire que d'avoir trop bien parle et trop bien pense de 
 lui. Je I'ai toujours cru un peu charlatan, mais je ne le 
 croyais pas un mechant homme. Je suis bien tente de lui 
 faire un defi public d'administrer les preuves qu'il a centre 
 moi ; ce defi I'embarrasserait beaucoup, mais en vaut-il la 
 peine ? ' 
 
 The question of theatre or no theatre at Geneva was not 
 first raised by Voltaire. Wherever there were Trenchmen 
 in the last — (may we not add in the present?) — century, 
 there must needs be theatres ; and, in the France of Vol- 
 taire's day, the politics of the green-room were the only 
 politics left besides those of the boudoir. Seventeen or 
 eighteen years before Voltaire's sojourn in Switzerland, the 
 ' Lettre de Voltaire a, D'Alembert, September 2, 1758. 
 
16G VOLTAIRE. 
 
 ambassadors of France, Sardinia, and the Swiss cantons had 
 held conferences at Geneva for the purpose of restoring 
 concord in that little commonwealth much vexed with 
 factions. These assembled diplomatists, in the intervals of 
 business, missed their accustomed amusements, and besought 
 the ' Magnifiques Seigneurs ' of the governing Council to 
 provide a theatre for them at Geneva. Much against the 
 grain, the Council did permit the erection of a temporary 
 wooden edifice of that description; but the Ecclesiastical 
 Consistory only waived their opposition on condition that 
 the licence should be limited to one year. That term 
 expired, the Venerable Consistory summoned the Magnificent 
 Council to keep its promise ; and the reason they gave for 
 thinking the drama a less suitable recreation at Geneva than 
 anywhere else, was the ' prodigious taste ' for it, to which 
 they held it therefore of vital importance to administer no 
 further aliment.' Well, the theatre was closed, and theatres 
 de- famille innumerable were opened. The Magnificent 
 Council and the Venerable Consistory went on waging an 
 unequal conflict with the ' prodigious taste ' of considerable 
 numbers of their fellow-citizens, when Voltaire suddenly 
 swooped down amongst them, and the conflict from doubtful 
 seemed to have become desperate. 
 
 The civil and ecclesiastical authorities maintained, 
 indeed, their veto against the erection of a public theatre at 
 Geneva; but the Magnificent Council and Venerable Con- 
 sistory were sorely beset with remonstrances against the 
 manifest iniquity of a police which had two weights and two 
 measures for persons of quality on the one hand, and the 
 plebeian theatre- going public on the other. Wtile the 
 citizens of Geneva were rigorously refused indulgence of 
 their 'prodigious taste' for theatricals, it was alleged too 
 truly that M. de Voltaire enticed ' persons of both sexes ' to 
 his chateau, to ' commit the indecency ' of seeing and acting 
 in plays just outside the Genevan frontier. But what 
 remedy ? The creme de la creme of the society, not of the 
 cantons only, but of the adjacent French provinces, flocked 
 
 ' Mepresentation du Consistoire an Magnifiqiw Conseil du 20 et 27 Avril, 1738. 
 
VOLTAIEE. 167 
 
 to ' assist ' actively or passively in the same indecency of 
 setting at nought the united wisdom of the Magnificent 
 Council and the Venerable Consistory of Geneva. The 
 Seigneur of Terney always gave them good words in reply 
 to their pompous representations, and always good suppers 
 to those who came to see his plays. There matters rested, 
 ' to the great indignation,' says M. Desnoiresterres, ' of 
 austere people, and also of artisans and common people, who 
 denounced with justice the too evident inequality in the 
 practical application of the law to different classes.' 
 
 In Gibbon's 'Memoirs of My Life and Writings,' the 
 following description is given of the impression made on him 
 by the earlier dramatic performances started (and shared in) 
 by Voltaire before his final establishment, which, of course, 
 included a theatre en permanence, at Perney : — 
 
 The highest gratification which I derived from Voltaire's residence 
 at Lausanne was the uncon)mon circumstance of hearing a great poet 
 declaim his own productions on the stage. He had formed a company 
 of gentlemen and ladies, some of whom were not destitute of talents. 
 A decent theatre was framed at Monrepos, a coxmtry house at the end 
 of a suburb ; dresses and scenes were provided at the expense of the 
 actors ; and the author directed the rehearsal with the zeal and 
 attention of paternal love. In two successive winters his tragedies 
 of ' Zaire,' ' AJzire,' ' Zulime,' and his sentimental comedy of the 
 ' Enfant Prodigue,' were played at the theatre of Monrepos. Voltaire 
 represen ted the characters best adapted to his years — Lusignan, Al- 
 varez, Eenassar, Euphemon. His declamation was fashioned to the 
 pomp and cadence of the old stage ; and he expressed the enthusiasm 
 of poetry rather than the feelings of nature. My ardour, which soon 
 became conspicuous, seldom failed of procuring me a ticket. The 
 habits of pleasure fortified my taste for the French theatre, and that 
 taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the gigantic genius of 
 Shakspeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of 
 an Englishman. The wit and philosophy of Voltaire, his table and 
 theatre, refined in a visible degree the manners of Lausanne ; and, 
 however addicted to study, I enjoyed my share of the amusements of 
 society. After the representations at Monrepos I sometimes supped 
 with the actors.' 
 
 ' The JAfeof Edmcurd Giblon, Msq., mith Selections from his Correspondence, 
 &c., by Milman, p. 108. 
 
168 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 It is curious to contrast the moderate estimate formed 
 by Gibbon of Voltaire's makeshift theatre and amateur 
 actors with the fine frenzy of the elderly poet and performer 
 of elderly parts himself, all whose geese were swans, even 
 that fat little goose, Madame Denis, the Zaire of the troupe, 
 whom Voltaire did not hesitate to compare to Clairon, and 
 even wrote something to that effect to Clairon herself, then 
 the recognised Queen of Tragedy at Paris. The latter, who 
 (talent apart) was only five or six-and- thirty, could not feel 
 much flattered by the comparison with a jolly old soul [grosse 
 rejoide) of fifty years of age ; and Voltaire, whose dramatic 
 prestige at the capital was, in good measure, in Clairon's 
 keeping, had to disclaim the impiety of having meant to 
 compare anyone with her. Madame d'Epinay, who paid 
 Voltaire a visit about this time, has left, in a letter to 
 Grimm, a speaking portrait of Madame Denis, which we 
 cannot resist extracting : — 
 
 Voltaire's niece is enough to make one die of laughing. She is a 
 fat little woman as round as a ball, of about fifty — -fem/me comme on ne 
 Vest point — ugly, good-humoured, an enormous liar, without ill-in- 
 tention or ill-nature — without talent, while seeming talented — for ever 
 screaming at the top of her voice, laying down the law, talking poli- 
 tics, tagging verses, raisonnant, deraisonnant. All this without too 
 much pretension, and without giving any offence to anyone. Through 
 all this peeps out a little pervading tinge of partiality for the male 
 sex. She adores her uncle, en tcmt qu'oncle, et en tant qu'homme. 
 Voltaire loves her, laughs at her, and holds her in reverence. 
 
 This lively letter-writer represented all Paris in the eyes 
 of Voltaire, who paid her the most assiduous and admiring 
 attentions, and kept her amused and flattered, though she 
 pretends impatience : — 
 
 One can find no time for anything in the house with Voltaire, she 
 writes to her hon ami, Grimm. ' I have passed the day alone with 
 Mm and his niece, and he is fairly tired telling me tales. When I 
 asked permission to write four lines to you, that you might not be 
 uneasy about my health, which is excellent, he begged to stay in the 
 room to see what my black eyes were saying while I wrote. He seats 
 himself opposite me, gets up to poke the fire, laughs, and says he 
 knows I am turning him into ridicule, and that I look as if I were 
 
VOLTAIRE. 169 
 
 writing a critique of him. I reply that I am writing all he is saying, 
 as it is at least as much worth writing as anything I am thinking. 
 
 This period was beyond comparison the most productive 
 of Yoltaire's literary existence, if we consider the extended 
 scope and influence as well as the mere number of his 
 writings. Voltaire's dramatic works, which held the highest 
 estimation in his own mind and day, have long lost that pre- 
 eminence ; and his other histrionic career of courtiership, at 
 Versailles and Berlin, had, as we have seen, been anything 
 but successful. In both spheres the satirist had been too 
 much for the courtier ; but his latter rdle having finally been 
 abandoned in the period now before us, satire on State and 
 Church flowed from his pen, throughout its whole duration, 
 without impediment and without respect of persons. 'For 
 forty years,' he wrote to D'Alembert from Ferney, in 1761, 
 ' I have endured the outrages of bigots and blackguards 
 [polissons]. I have found there was nothing to gain by 
 moderation, et que c'est une duperie. I must wage war 
 openly and die nobly — 
 
 Sur un tas de bigots immol6s k mes pieds.' 
 
 Prom henceforth his writings assumed a character more 
 distinctly polemical against everything that excited his 
 displeasure in Church or State ; and as, in all his writings, 
 he aimed especially at immediate efiiect, and his natural and 
 acquired gifts were better fitted for the light cavalry move- 
 ments of wit and satire than for the heavy artillery engage- 
 ments of erudite controversy, his literary activity at this 
 period took in great part the shape of fugitive and occasional 
 pieces. ' He set flying,' says Strauss, ' from the Swiss and 
 Dutch presses a regular wasp-swarm of such writings all 
 over France and Europe.' Almost every month produced 
 some novelty of this description, and each in succession went 
 forth under the names of different authors — men who were 
 dead, or men who had never lived. His maxim was to hit 
 the mark, J)ut not show the hand of the marksman. ' I am 
 a warm friend of truth,' he wrote to D'Alembert, 'but no 
 friend at all to martyrdom.' A friend of truth, with limited 
 
170 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 liability. We believe, however, Dr. Strauss is right in 
 saying it would be misunderstanding Voltaire to ascribe his 
 disguises solely to regard for his personal safety. Quite 
 irrespectively of any danger from revealing himself, this 
 playing at hide-and-seek with the French and European 
 public was a never-failing source of amusement to one of his 
 tricksy temper. 
 
 The optimist Theodicee of Leibnitz and Pope, to which 
 he had shown some earlier leaning, became a pet subject of 
 Voltaire's satirical vein, as indulged especially in his poem 
 on the 'Earthquake of Lisbon,' and afterwards in his 
 ' Candide.' In earlier years he had shown himself quite as 
 ready to do battle against pessimist views of life and nature, 
 when these assiimed a religious shape, in Pascal's ' Pen sees,' 
 as afterwards against the systematically opposite view of 
 'the best possible world,' which he made to cut such an 
 absurd figure in the Pangloss of ' Candide.' His final 
 consolatory conclusion seems to have been that, if everything 
 is not exactly good, everything is at least passable ; and he 
 puts in the mouth of the angel Ithuriel, with obvious 
 reference to Paris, the indulgent sentence, ' H n'y a pas de 
 quoi bruler Persepolis.' Here we may remark parenthetically 
 that every successive horde of Parisian political levellers has 
 declared and demonstrated an opposite determination to 
 Voltaire's Ithuriel. Bach in succession has uniformly 
 uttered the threat that he would possess the fair Lutetia, 
 or make a holocaust of her. The last and most desperate 
 horde of anarchists in our own day went nearer carrying 
 that threat into execution than any of their precursors. 
 
 What, however, most justly rendered illustrious Voltaire's 
 so-called Patriarchate of Ferney, besides his liberal patron- 
 age and encouragement of local industries, was his persever- 
 ing and ultimately successful efforts to repair, so far as the 
 tardy intervention of public justice could repair, the atrocious 
 iniquities perpetrated by the second Parliament of the king- 
 dom, that of Toulouse, on the impulse of popular fanaticism, 
 against the innocent Calas and Sirven families. His equally 
 energetic, and still more protracted, efforts were not crowned 
 
VOLTAIRE. 171 
 
 with success, to obtain the reversal of the scarcely less out- 
 rageous sentences of thB Parhament of Abbeville against La 
 Barre and D'Etallonde, the former of which was actually 
 carried into execution. The last-named of the two youths 
 capitally sentenced for offences which, if -proved (and it does 
 not seem that they were proved), amounted to nothing more 
 heinous than some sword-cuts or cane-cuts inflicted on a 
 wooden image, the singing of some ribald rhymes of Piron, 
 and the omission of obeisance to a Capuchin procession — 
 saved himself by flight, and received, at Voltaire's request, a 
 commission in the Prussian service. 
 
 In devoting a volume to the revindication of the memorj' 
 of Jean Galas, more than a century after his memory had 
 been already vindicated by the highest judicial authorities of 
 Prance, M. Athanase Coquerel has discharged a pious office, 
 not only to the posthumous good repute of an innocent man, 
 iniquitously condemned and executed, but to the historical 
 good repute of an entire religious communion, which it is 
 shameful should have been otherwise than superfluous in 
 this latter half of the nineteenth century. He has, however, 
 discharged it thoroughly. If Count Joseph de Maistre, of 
 papacy-defending memory, were now sitting down to write 
 his ' Soirees de Saint-Petersbourg,' he would scarcely have 
 the more than Ultramontane assurance to indite the following 
 sentences of his first ' entretien ' : — 
 
 Rien de moins prowve, Messieurs, je voua Tassure, que I'innocence 
 de Calas. II y a mille raisons d'en douter, et m^me en croire le 
 contraire. 
 
 It might, indeed, have been enough to reply to the re- 
 vivers of such groundless calumnies, that a royal Commission 
 composed of the highest judicial and administrative func- 
 tionaries in Prance reversed unanimously the sentence which 
 had been pronounced and executed against Jean Calas, 
 exactly three years before, by the Parliament of Toulouse. 
 It may, nay it must, be admitted that there had been nothing 
 very exceptionally atrocious in the procedure of that body in 
 the case of Calas. Atrocity was the rule of the old judiciary 
 
172 VOLTAIEE. 
 
 administration, not the exception. On the impulse of Vol- 
 taire's disinterested and determined agitation of that case, 
 as afterwards of the not less. crying cases of Sirven, La Barre, 
 and D'Etallonde, France was awakened to the sense that, in 
 the middle of the eighteenth century, the lives and properties 
 of every subject of the realm lay at the mercy of tribunals 
 whose modes of procedure, rules of evidence, and employment 
 of torture had been formed on the model of the Holy In- 
 quisition of the fourteenth century. The procedure of the 
 Parliament of Toulouse in the case of Sirven, shortly subse- 
 quent to that of Calas, showed that it was sensible of no 
 deviation from precedent in the first of these cases ; and that 
 of the Parliament of Abbeville, in those of La Barre and 
 D'Etallonde, furnished Voltaire new subjects of impassioned 
 and just invective, and of active intervention through every 
 channel open to his personal influence. 
 
 The case of Jean Calas has been so often set before general 
 readers, especially readers of Voltaire, that a brief notice may 
 suffice in this place of the most salient and shocking points 
 of it as brought out in bold relief by M. Coquerel. 
 
 Jean Calas was a Protestant tradesman in Toulouse, that 
 most Catholic city. He had been established in trade forty 
 years there, and had won the respect and confidence not of 
 his fellow-Protestants only, but also of his respectable Roman 
 Catholic fellow-citizens, with whom he had always lived in 
 perfectly amicable relations of business and intercourse. One 
 of his younger sons had gone over to the dominant Church, 
 having been aided and abetted in that transition by a Roman 
 Catholic female servant in his father's house. It is charac- 
 teristic of the tolerant religious temper of the family that, 
 notwithstanding the injury, as they must have considered it, 
 thus done them, this woman, Jeanne Viguier, continued un- 
 disturbed in their service, and steadfastly attached to the 
 unfortunate family all the rest of her life. The eldest son, 
 Marc-Antoine, was ambitious to enter the profession of the 
 law ; but, having passed the examinations requisite for ad- 
 mission to the title of advocate, had been refused the certifi- 
 cate of Catholicity further requisite for that admission, which 
 
WLTAIKE. 173 
 
 was commonly granted without inquiry, as a matter of form. 
 The same obstacle stopped him at the threshold of other pro- 
 fessions, and, greatly to his disgust, he found himself thrust 
 back behind his father's counter. The young man became 
 idle and irregular in his habits ; at home, sombre and taci- 
 turn. According to his mother's evidence, he was fond of 
 repeating whatever he could find in Plutarch, Montaigne, or 
 Gresset (Werther and Rene had not yet loomed lurid on those 
 days) in the nature of apology for, or glorification of, suicide. 
 The day of his death he had almost wholly spent in the 
 billiard-room and tennis-court, and had given no account of 
 a sum of money entrusted to him to exchange silver for gold. 
 That evening Marc-Antoine supped as usual, about seven 
 o'clock, with the family, and, as usual, sat moody and silent, 
 and he quitted the table early. The rest of the party, in- 
 cluding a young man of the name of Lavaysse, who was in 
 Toulouse for a day or two, and casually invited to supper, 
 stayed together in the upper room, where they had supped, 
 till about a quarter to ten, when Lavaysse took leave ; and 
 a younger son, Pierre, went down to show him out. When 
 these two got downstairs with a light, they instantly gave 
 the alarm to those above of a catastrophe that had happened. 
 A surgeon was called in, and the younger son, Pierre, ran 
 wildly about the neighbourhood, as he said, 'demander con- 
 seil partout.' 
 
 'Novr what had happened on Jean Calas' ground -floor? 
 By the subsequent testimony of Pierre Calas and Lavaysse, 
 they had found Marc Antoine hanging to a log of wood (such 
 as was used to wind bales of calico round) placed on the top 
 of the two leaves of an open door which divided the front and 
 back shops. The first thing done was, of course, to take him 
 down and attempt resuscitation. The next thing that 
 suggested itself unfortunately to Calas, the father, was to beg 
 the rest to say nothing of the situation in which the body 
 had been found, in order to spare it the public ignominies 
 inflicted on suicides. In the meantime, the alarm given by 
 Pierre Calas had brought a mob round the house. The dis- 
 simulation attempted by the father as to the cause of death 
 
174 VOLTAIEE. 
 
 created a mystery which the mob instantly solved after mob- 
 fashion by improvising a Catholic legend of a Protestant 
 religious murder. This monstrous supposition, echoed by 
 every tongue, was at once, with blind precipitation, assumed 
 as fact by the magistrate, David de Beaudrigue, who first 
 showed himself on the spot. That over-zealous functionary, 
 without the slightest pains to take an exact survey of the 
 place and circumstances — especially two most significant 
 circumstances — that the upper garments of the unfortunate 
 youth were found set aside, neatly folded, and that the body 
 and the rest of the apparel bore no marks of a struggle — 
 hurried off to prison the whole family party found in the 
 house, including the Catholic servant-maid and the chance 
 guest, who had come back there voluntarily after having left 
 it, and had found some difficulty in readmittance. Truly two 
 most likely accomplices, by their conduct and antecedents, 
 in the presumed Protestant crime ! 
 
 The legend started at once in full panoply from the 
 popular brain. Marc-Antoine, it was fabled, had shown 
 signs of approaching conversion to the Catholic faith. The 
 Protestant body, it was further fabled, ma.de it a point of 
 principle to assassinate all seceders from their Huguenot 
 heresy. That body had held a sort of VehmgericM, no one 
 could say where, to pass the sentence of death, de rigueur in 
 all such cases, on Marc-Antoine. The young Lavaysse had 
 acted as a delegate from that body to help the parents of 
 Calas to carry the sentence of their coreligionists into effect. 
 But the Catholic servant-maid, who had promoted one con- 
 version in the family already, with perfect impunity as well 
 to herself as to the convert — was she, too, a party to this 
 Protestant capital punishment of the eldest son of the family 
 for the (invented) intention of following the example of his 
 younger brother ? She must ! But how could she ? A 
 mystery of iniquity, none the less easily credited because 
 passing comprehension. 
 
 The moment the family party found themselves charged 
 Avith a crime, the imputation of which, with their well-known 
 antecedents, they could scarcely have conceived as possible 
 
VOLTAIEE, 175 
 
 they abandoned all attempt to save the memory of the 
 suicide, and each separately stated the facts of the case as 
 above narrated. 
 
 But M. David de Beaudrigue, a titular Capitoul of Tou- 
 louse {i.e. one who, as Voltaire expressed it, had bought for 
 money the right, as a Councillor of Parliament, to administer 
 injustice), was resolved that about this Protestant murder 
 of an intending Catholic convert there was, and could, and 
 should be no mistake. The crime was self-evident from the 
 moment it suggested itself to an orthodox mob. But some- 
 thing that should look like corroborative evidence still 
 appeared wanting, or something that could be extorted 
 as direct evidence from the prime culprit by torture. Ac- 
 cordingly, on the one hand, a fulminating monitoire was 
 issued, by the Archbishop of Toulouse, quite in the style of 
 the fourteenth century, to be read from all pulpits for a series 
 of weeks, enjoining, on pain of excommunication, on all 
 persons who should have learned, hy hearsay or otherwise, 
 anything whatever on the several heads of accusation 
 enumerated in that precious document (in which were 
 assumed, not only the guilt of the Galas family and their 
 alleged accomplices, but the maxims of murder calumniously 
 ascribed to the whole Protestant body) — to make their de- 
 positions before the proper authority. 'Evidence in favour of 
 the accused was neither invited nor accepted when tendered. 
 Thus were collected, to do duty for evidence, all the idle 
 hearsays afloat in Toulouse, utterly unsupported, utterly un- 
 sifted, though the facts lay open to any impartial scrutiny. 
 But, as all did not sufiSce to bring home guilt to parties 
 perfectly innocent, the unexceptionable method, sanctioned 
 by many a time-honoured precedent, remained, to extract the 
 truth by torture, ordinary and extraordinary, from Jean Calas 
 himself. Accordingly, this man, Avho, for more than sixty 
 years, had led a life on which no reproach ever rested, this 
 father of a family, whose family rule had been one of tolerance 
 and indulgence, was put to tortures the blood runs cold to 
 read, for the sole purpose (his own doom had been already 
 pronounced) of involving in that doom his equally innocent 
 
176 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 wife, son, servant, and guest. If Galas had flinched from the 
 extremest torments flesh could endure, and retain life and 
 speech ; if his undaunted soul had for one moment been be- 
 trayed by his aged and enfeebled frame, his torture and death 
 would have been shared by all the survivors of that fatal 
 supper party. But the fortitude of innocence sustained Jean 
 Galas to the bitter end ; and the honest priest, who stood at 
 his side during his last two hours of agony on the wheel, 
 thought it his duty to go round to the members of the me- 
 diaeval judiciary, who had condemned him, to attest that the 
 innocent man had, to the last, asseverated his innocence, and 
 that of all involved along with him in the same monstrous 
 accusation. This saved the family : even the Gapitouls of 
 Toulouse durst not repeat the procedure which had failed of 
 the effect mainly intended in the case of Jean Galas. The 
 popular sympathies were by this time changing sides. Mr. 
 Morley is in error in stating that ' the widow and the children 
 of Galas were put to the torture,' and also in stating that 
 they eventually fled to G-eneva to take refuge with Voltaire. 
 One of them alone did so. 
 
 That such a sentence as that of Galas should have been 
 passed and executed in the kingdom of France at the date 
 of the opening of the reign of our George III. — a prodigy 
 of bigotry, any Protestant parallel to which, in England, 
 must be sought as far back as the reigns of our 
 Gharles and James II. — was disgrace enough to the inquisi- 
 torial judicial procedure under the old regime — a procedure, 
 by the way, which has left its mauvaise queue behind it in 
 Prance to our own times. But some worthy descendants ol 
 the Toulouse Gouncillors of Parliament in 1762, and some 
 worthy representatives of that inveterate intolerance of reli- 
 gious dissidence which, in the South of France, has smoul- 
 dered on from generation to generation, under cineri doloso 
 from that day to this — have, in quite late years, thought fit to 
 take on their own shoulders even a worse disgrace than that 
 of their great-great-grandfathers, as regards the case of 
 Galas. After all, their ancestors acted on popular impulse, 
 as ours did in the Popish Plot trials. But to seek to reassert 
 
VOLTAIRE. 1 7 7 
 
 in these days the justice of the preposterous procedure which 
 convicted Galas, in the teeth of the solemn and deliherate 
 reversal of the results of that procedure, is much as if the 
 ultra-Protestant champions of our own day should set about 
 rehabilitating the judges and juries who did legal murders 
 on the evidence of Gates and Bedloe. The only explanation 
 of the obstinate tenacity of life of such strong delusions in 
 the minds of men who, by courtesy, may be termed educated, 
 is, that the cause of innocence, in the persons of the Galas 
 family, owed its triumph to Voltaire, and tliere are minds so 
 constituted that they will not serve God if the devil bids 
 them. The Abbe Salvan, one of the recent apologists of the 
 judicial murderers of Jean Galas, expresses himself as fol- 
 lows in reply to the first edition of M. Coquerel's work : 
 ' That philosopher [Yoltaire] has done a great deal of harm 
 to Galas. Many people have believed the guilt of the Tou- 
 louse Protestant solely because Voltaire took up the defence 
 of his memory, and went so far as to pay the costs of 
 the final proceedings.' Truly that was going further than 
 ecclesiastical charity would have gone in Voltaire's day. 
 But ' that philosopher ' would as willingly have advanced the 
 cost of Galas' defence before he had been racked and broken 
 on the wheel as after. Had Voltaire been in time to arrest 
 the execution of an iniquitous judgment, instead of merely 
 obtaining a tardy reparation for those who survived it, would 
 the reverend Abbe have ventured to affirm that ' that philo- 
 sopher ' had ' done a great deal of harm * to Jean Galas, by 
 preserving his home from being broken up, his property con- 
 fiscated, his body racked in the gaol, and his limbs fractured 
 on the scaffold ? That was what Voltaire would have done 
 doubtless, or endeavoured to do, had he had earlier notice of 
 the proceedings against Galas, while they were yet pending. 
 What the Abbe Salvan's ecclesiastical predecessors at Tou- 
 louse did was to foment to their utmost the popular zealotry 
 which, from the first moment, prejudged the case. Even after 
 the reversal of the judgment of the Parliament by royal 
 authority, the Archbishop of Toulouse, to requite the religi- 
 ous zeal of Messieurs du Parlement, and to administer spiritual 
 
 N 
 
178 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 consolation for their secular snubbing, granted each and all 
 of them the singular privilege of having mass celebrated 
 in their houses on Sundays.' 
 
 It was, as we have said, during the twenty years of Vol- 
 taire's Ferney patriarchate that his pen took the widest 
 range over the whole field of philosophy and theology, after 
 his own discursive fashion. In his writings and correspond- 
 ence of those years the Abbe Barruel and Professor Eobison 
 found their strongest ' Proofs of a Conspiracy ' against all 
 Thrones and Altars. Voltaire and his encyclopedic Paris corre- 
 spondents at any rate conspired aloud. There never was much 
 mystery about the mark aimed at, though, as we have said, 
 there might be some effort to conceal -the marksman's hand. 
 What, then, was the mark aimed at ? What was the occult 
 sense of that mystic formula, ' Ecrasez Vinfdme,' which custo- 
 marily closed Voltaire's letters of that period to D'Alembert, 
 and his former patron, and still philosophic brother, Frede- 
 rick of Prussia ? Dr. Strauss has the following observations 
 on this much-vexed question : — 
 
 No lesser name than that of Jesus Christ has been said to be 
 intended by the ' infdme ' ; no lesser offence than blasphemy has 
 therefore been charged on its use. But what sufficiently shows that 
 such cannot have been the intention of the Voltairian use of that 
 name is, that the word ' infame,' in most instances in which it is 
 used, is not masculine but feminine. This appears from those 
 passages in which the phrase is carried out into length, and in which 
 this strange personified attribute is represented by a feminine pro- 
 noun. Thus Voltaire writes to D'Alembert : ' Adieu, man d,ur philo- 
 sophe, si vous pouvez ecraser I'infdme, &crasez-la, et aimez-moi.' Frederick 
 
 ' It would seem, however, that not even the privilege of Sunday masses 
 a domicile could ' minister to the mind diseased ' of David de Beaudrigue. 
 That busy municipal, who must be hold the prime mover of the murder of 
 Jean Calas, had thought fit, without any official obligation, to be present at 
 his execution — not, says M. Coquerel candidly, to feast his eyes with the 
 torture and death of his victim, but from the ardent desire to convince him- 
 self that he had not made a cruel mistake, and to catch at a last dying con- 
 fession from that victim, were it but by a word or look. ' David n'6tait pas 
 un monstre ; c'etait un fanatique plein de precipitation et d'emportement, 
 II avait besoin de croire que les Calas etaient coupables, et h mesure que le 
 dernier moment approchait, il renfermait avec effort au-dedans de lui les 
 premieres angoisses du doute fipouvantable qui finit par le rendre fou.' 
 
VOLTAIRE. 179 
 
 writes to Yoltaire : ' J'approuvefort la methode de donner des nasardes 
 d I'infdme en la cornblant de politesses.' "Well, but who then is this 
 feminine ' Infdme,' to whom Voltaire and his friends have vowed 
 destruction 1 Upon this point, also, his correspondence leaves us in 
 no doubt. ' I would wish,' writes Voltaire to D'Alembert, ' that 
 you crushed the Infdme — that is the essential point. Vous pensez 
 Men que je ne park que de la superstition ; car, pour la religion, je 
 I'aime et la respecte comme vous.' Again, D'Alembert to Voltaire : ' Get 
 infdme fanatisme, que vous voudriez voir ecrase, et qui fait le refrain de 
 toutes vos lettres,' &,c. The ' Infame,' then, is Superstition — fana- 
 ticism. These, however, are abstract notions. What is their intended 
 application to actual facts "i When Voltaire writes to D'Alembert 
 that he wishes to see the ' Infame ' reduced in France to the same 
 condition in which she finds herself in England, and when Frederick 
 writes to Voltaire that philosophers flourished amongst the Greeks 
 and Romans, because their religion had no dogmas — ' mais les dogmes 
 de notre infdme gdtent tout ' — ^it is clear we must understand by the 
 ' Infame,' whose destruction was the watchword of the Voltairian 
 circle, the Christian Church, without distinction of communions. 
 Catholic or Protestant. 
 
 In otlier passages of Voltaire's correspondence with 
 D'Alembert lie distinctly declares his conviction that the 
 philosophers ' wiU certainly not destroy the Christian reli- 
 gion ; but Christianity, on the other hand, will not suppress 
 the philosophers. Their numbers will continually go on in- 
 creasing, from them will young men, destined to important 
 public stations, seek enlightenment. Their increasing in- 
 fluence will render religion less savage, society more soft. 
 They will prevent priesthoods from sapping religion and 
 morality. They will render fanatics hateful, superstitionists 
 ridiculous.' 
 
 No regimen could have been conceived more certain to 
 convert expansive into explosive forces than that which was 
 maintained throughout the eighteenth century in France, 
 down to the actual outbreak of the great Eevolution of 1789. 
 There was just enough of authoritative restraint to give zest 
 to resistance, just enough of feeble attempt at persecution 
 to excite public curiosity and interest about the obnoxious 
 opinions. There was just enough of vexatious censorship of 
 
 N 2 
 
180 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 literary productions, and occasional confiscation of literary- 
 property, to exasperate witiout effectually disabling the class 
 which had most influence over the public mind. But what 
 we are chiefly led to take notice of by our present subject is 
 the effect produced by this regimen on the mode of discussing 
 the most serious questions. All that authority really suc- 
 ceeded in doing was in forming the controversial style of 
 Voltaire. Such a style of controversy could admit of no 
 apology in a free country. In proportion as discussion on 
 the highest subjects is free, flippancy is indefensible. But, 
 as Shaftesbury has observed : — 
 
 If men are forbid to speak their minds seriously upon certain 
 subjects, they will do so ironically. And thus raillery is brought more 
 in fashion, and runs into an extreme. 'Tis the persecuting spirit has 
 raised the bantering one ; and want of liberty may account for want 
 of true politeness, and for the corruption or wrong use of pleasantry 
 and humour.' 
 
 Voltaire's sharpest stabs at the creed of his Church are 
 usually followed by the most edifying exhortations to sacrifice 
 reason on the altar of faith, and the most vehement dis- 
 claimers of all concurrence in the audacious heresies which 
 he repudiates, while promulgating them. The disguise is 
 transparent ; but even a pretext for assuming it would have 
 been wanting, if authority had not ever and anon had recourse 
 to the secular arm, to seizures and burnings of books and 
 imprisonment of authors. 
 
 ' In our own times,' says Mr. Morley, ' the profession of letters is 
 placed with other polite avocations, and those who follow it for the 
 most part accept the traditional social ideas of the time, just as clergy- 
 men, lawyers, and physicians accept them. The modern man of 
 letters corresponds to the ancient sophist, whose office it was to confirm, 
 adorn, and propagate the current prejudice. To be a man of letters 
 in France in the middle of the eighteenth century was to be the 
 official enemy of the current prejudices and their sophistical defenders 
 in the Church and the parliaments. Parents heard of a son's design 
 to go to Paris to write books, or to mix with those who wrote books, 
 with the same dismay with which a respectable Athenian heard of a 
 son following Socrates, or a respectable modern hears of one declaring 
 
 himself a Positivist. 
 
 ' Cliaracteristics, 1. 71. 
 
VOLTAIRE. 181 
 
 Wkere Mr. Morley got kis notion that the literary men 
 or the professional men of our times are remarkably prone 
 implicitly to accept traditional doctrines, we cannot pretend 
 to conjecture. It is indeed true that neither men of letters 
 nor men of science, for the most part, show themselves pre- 
 pared to exchange old dogmatisms for new. A ' respectable 
 modern ' would probably hear of his son ' declaring himself 
 a Positivist ' with the sort of amusement with which older 
 men are in the habit of hearing other ' positive ' declarations, 
 made by younger ones, who have not yet sown their philo- 
 sophical wild oats. There is an old story of Robert Owen's 
 father-in-law. Dale the Quaker, saying to him, after hearing 
 his confident programme of a complete new social system : 
 ' Thee should be very right, Eobert, for thee's very positive.' 
 Minds which have not yet reached (and minds that never 
 reach) maturity readily grasp at whatever offers itself in the 
 shape of plausible projects of entire intellectual and social revo- 
 lution. So much study is saved by them ! ' Positivism ' shelves 
 so summarily all theology, and all metaphysics, as lumber of 
 bygone ages — and even in physical science narrows so autho- 
 ritatively the field of requisite study ! Indolence and conceit 
 (the besetting failings of youth, and which stick for life to 
 those who have not stamina to reach mental manhood) find 
 their account in welcoming a world-philosophy which, while 
 it tabooes, ex cathedra, from, all future ' scientific ' inquiry the 
 highest subjects of study which have hitherto exercised the 
 highest minds amongst men, cuts down those subjects which 
 it dogmatically admits within the domain of ' positivism ' to 
 just so much of misunderstood science as came within the 
 imperfect vision of the most purblind of pseudo-philosophic 
 mystagogues. 
 
 But enough of Comte and Positivism — topics which indeed 
 have as little to do with Voltaire as muddled brains can have 
 to do with clear ones. In turning over the ' dreary and ver- 
 bose pages,' as Professor Huxley truly terms them, of the 
 ' Philosophic Positive,' pages at every second or third of which 
 the word spontane or spontanement recurs regularly with no 
 
182 VOLTAIEE. 
 
 precise meaning, one is sorely tempted to exclaim — for 
 one hour of Voltaire ! for a stroke or two from the satiric 
 pen of Doctor Akakia ! 
 
 To a lady who once complimented Voltaire on his exquisite 
 phrases, he replied, ' Madam, I never made a phrase in my 
 life.' Neither did he. He talked with the pen to all readers 
 on all subjects, and his winged words flew over all Europe as 
 light as thistledown, depositing, like thistledown, abundant 
 seeds for prickly growth. Sixty odd years and seventy 
 volumes were filled with his conversations with all Europe — 
 with all in Europe capable of the charm of literary conversa- 
 tion. That conversation was, indeed, conducted under diffi- 
 culties ; but these gave zest to the appetite with whicb the 
 forbidden fruit of his writings was produced and plucked, 
 despite the official frown and impotent interdict of authority. 
 ' Je tiens infiniment a ce qu'on me Use ' was his own frank 
 avowal, and the difficulties often thrown in the way of bring- 
 ing himself before the public doubtless kept him the more 
 alive to the requisites for catching and fixing public interest. 
 If his sense and taste made Voltaire averse to phrase-making, 
 he was not less averse to punning — a sort of wit, he said, cul- 
 tivated by those who have no other. His own wit, however, 
 was sometimes exercised in plays upon words, as when an 
 English visitor, Sherlock, dined with him once at Femey, 
 and asked him ' comment il avait trouve la ch^re Anglaise ? ' 
 * Tres'fraiche et tres-hlanche,' replied the Patriarch. 
 
 The twenty odd years of Voltaire's life spent on the 
 borders of Switzerland were, as we have said, the most pro- 
 ductive, and certainly the least perturbed, part of it. But 
 his own impatience (still more that of his housekeeping niece, 
 widow Denis) of lifelong exile from Paris lured him back 
 at last to be whirled to death in the metropolitan Maelstrom. 
 Louis XV. had for once shown enough of the royal virtue of 
 decision to keep Voltaire at a distance from his court and 
 capital. Louis XVI. seldom had will enough of his own to 
 be capable of frustrating the will of others. Widow Denis 
 (who, as she proved within a year after the death of her 
 uncle, had no wish so strong as to find opportunity for 
 
VOLTAII^H. 183 
 
 indulgence of the long-cherished impulse convolare in seeun- 
 das nwptias) had able and not over-scrupulous accomplices 
 at Ferney in her feminine plot to coax the old patriarch back 
 to Paris. A protegee of hers was married to a fashionable 
 and philosophic Marquis de Yillette, and the pair were domi- 
 ciled at that time with Voltaire at Ferney. They contrived 
 amongst them to get epistolary reports from Paris that Court 
 and city were alike prepared to do homage to the old poet- 
 philosopher. He had just completed a new tragedy, ' Irene,' 
 the last child of his dramaturgic old age; and his familiar 
 fiends tempted him with suggestions that it could not be put 
 well on the stage without his personal presence in Paris to 
 school the actors. The ruling passion, strong on the verge 
 of death, prevailed. His judicious physician, Tronchin, pre- 
 dicted — a prediction too soon verified — that so old a tree 
 conld be transplanted so late only to perish. 
 
 Voltaire, when asked at the barriers of Paris if there was 
 anything contraband in his carriage, replied, ' Only myself ! ' 
 Poems, addresses, and deputations came thick upon him, 
 and he had something lively and pleasant to say to all who 
 came. The Hotel de Villette, where he had taken up his 
 temporary abode, was crowded all day with visitors. Other 
 crowds followed him whenever he showed himself in the 
 streets. The popular voice hailed the old patriarch especially 
 as the defender of Galas ; and his old coach, as well as his 
 old-world costume, everywhere drew the public gaze. He 
 went about in a red coat lined with ermine, a black wig 
 unpowdered, a red cap also trimmed with fur, not the last 
 cap of that colour destined, at no long interval of time, to 
 be seen in Paris. He had come from Perney in his old coach, 
 which was painted sky-blue studded with gold stars, and was 
 dubbed by the wits of Paris 'the chariot of the empyrean.' 
 Another car of Voltairian triumph, under another regime, 
 was destined to be dragged through Paris some few years 
 later. It was said of him epigrammatically, in the days 
 when Eevolution was sanguine, and before it had yet become 
 sanguinary on a grand scale, ' 11 n'a pas vu tout ce qu'il a fait, 
 mais il a fait tout ce que nous voyons.' 
 
184 VqLTAIKE. 
 
 Not foreseeing- Ee volution, Voltaire soon saw lie had no 
 friends at Court — none, at least,- who could help him to 
 regain his footing there of some thirty years before. The 
 Count d'Artois, indeed, afterwards the Most Christian King 
 Charles X., but who was then as liberal as youth and vice 
 could make him, would have been well disposed to give 
 courtly and cordial welcome to all that was worst in Voltaire. 
 Queen Marie Antoinette would have liked, it was said, to 
 have gone to his play, with the longing, says Strauss, of a 
 crowned daughter of Eve after forbidden fruit, or with a not 
 less natural curiosity to set eyes on the old Tree of Know- 
 ledge himself. But here for once Louis XVI. interposed his 
 royal and marital veto, and Versailles left Paris to apotheo- 
 sise unassisted the old Proteus of literature on the old- 
 accustomed scene of the successes most prized by him — the 
 stage. Voltaire was present in his box, the observed of all 
 observers, while his bust was being worshipped in rhyme and 
 crowned with laurels, and the house rang with the reiterated 
 plaudits of the Parisian public. ' You are stifling me with 
 roses,' he exclaimed. All that glorious noise was indeed his 
 death-knell. Not only were his nerves strained beyond his 
 strength with excitement, he had filled his hands with work. 
 He had undertaken to aid the Academy in their Dictionary 
 of the French language: he took the letter A on his hands, 
 and wound himself up to his task with strong coffee. This 
 produced a return of inflammation of the bladder from which 
 he had formerly suffered, and then he gave himself overdoses 
 of opium to still the pain. The beginning of the end was 
 evident. Tronchin was called in too late. Too late also for 
 the purpose were called in the offices of the clergy, whom the 
 dying man could not satisfy that he died believing enough to 
 entitle his corpse to Catholic burial. 
 
 Voltaire had always expressed great horror at the idea of 
 such indignities befalling his own remains as he had seen 
 inflicted on those of his actress-friend Adrienne Lecouvreur, 
 and which he had branded soon afterwards in indignant verse. 
 An actor or actress dying in harness (like Moliere or Le- 
 couvreur) was refused burial in consecrated ground as a 
 
VOLTAIRE. 185 
 
 matter of course. A fortiori, a writer such as Voltaire, 
 dying unreconciled to the Church, would assuredly not be 
 suffered to repose in consecrated ground. Accordingly, 
 Voltaire, on his death-bed, invited the offices of the clergy, 
 and signed voluntarily a declaration that he died in the 
 Catholic religion in which he was born, and, if he had ever 
 given cause of scandal to the Church, asked pardon of God and 
 of her. The clergy demanded a more explicit and more ample 
 retractation, and the aged patient expired without having 
 put his signature to the prescribed document. His Genevan 
 physician Troncliin, who had made way in Paris, like many 
 less skilful innovators, on the strength mainly of his innova- 
 tions on the old medical practice, must be accepted as a not 
 unfriendly though unsympathetic witness of Voltaire's last 
 moments. The moral temperament of the two men was 
 antipathic. Tronchin might have, stood for the crMcppcuv, 
 Voltaire for the aKoXacrros of Plato. But the whole incom- 
 patibility between them must not be set down to the charge 
 of Voltaire. It was calm prosaic science contrasted with 
 poetic fire, fancy, and impulse. Tronchin imposed respect 
 on Voltaire — Voltaire by no means equally so on Tronchin. 
 ' He is six feet high,' wrote the former, ' has the skill of 
 ^sculapius, and the form of Apollo.' Tronchin, on the other 
 hand, scanned Voltaire with the keen eye of the physician 
 and physiologist, and condensed the expression of his physical, 
 and indeed moral, state in the few following words : ' Bile 
 always irritating, nerves always irritated, have been, are, and 
 will be the perennial sources of all the ills of which he com- 
 plains.' Tronchin, in a letter to Bonnet, compares to a 
 hurricane the terrible excitement of Voltaire's dying moments, 
 and declares that it reminds him of the Furies of Orestes, 
 and that, if anything had been wanting to confirm him in his 
 principles, Voltaire's end would have done it. Tronchin was 
 doubtless right ; but his acquaintance, professional and per- 
 sonal, with Voltaire having dated from the first arrival of the 
 latter in Switzerland, he could scarcely have expected com- 
 posure, resignation, and dignity on his death-bed from one 
 who had displayed those qualities at no crisis of his life pre- 
 
186 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 viously. That unlucky letter A of the French Academy's 
 Dictionary seems to have worked his over-excited brain to the 
 last. 
 
 Voltaire's executors had to run a race against the eccle- 
 siastical authorities to obtain for his body the decencies of 
 interment at a distance from Paris. His nephew, Counsellor 
 Mignot, happened to be titular abbot of Scellieres, near 
 Troyes, and made pious haste to put Uncle underground, 
 ' ere the bishop could bar.' Episcopal inhibition followed — 
 the day after the funeral. Thus the old persifleur's last trick 
 on the clergy was as complete a success as had been all his 
 other tricks on that order during his long life; 
 
 Our readers, who have thus far borne us company in once 
 more reviewing the most prominent passages of Voltaire's 
 strangely chequered career, may perhaps expect that we 
 should not conclude without laying before them some general 
 estimate of his moral and intellectual influence on his age, 
 for good or evil. 
 
 There has been no distinguished man, says Dr. Strauss, on whose 
 whole personality it has been more customary to pass judgment in 
 decisive and trenchant terms than Voltaire, and none to whom that 
 treatment has been more inappropriately, we might say senselessly, 
 applied. The same thing, indeed, might be said of such treatment, 
 as applied to any really distinguished person. But amongst such 
 there are, so to speak, monarchical souls, whose rich and manifold en- 
 dowments, whose impulses and inclinations, all converge towards some 
 one gi'and all-overruling object of effort. It might be a bald and 
 shallow, but not absolutely absurd, way of writing of such men, to 
 deal in general epithets- — as noble or ignoble, selfish or self-sacrificing, 
 earnest or frivolous. But Voltaire, in that sense, was no monarchical 
 sovil. If, indeed, the efiects produced by him were pretty much in 
 one direction, they were, however, the results of the complex play 
 of powers very various, of impulses pure and impure, crossing and 
 jarring with each other, as motive forces in his mind. My name is 
 legion, Voltaire's Demon might have said, lite that of the Gadarene. 
 In that legion, however, there were good spirits as well as evil. Even 
 of the latter few were exactly fitted to pass into swine, if many into 
 cats or apes. 
 
 What more, after all, can be said on a final review of 
 Voltaire's life and writings than was said long ago in his 
 
VOLTAIEE. 187 
 
 epigrammatic epitaph— ' Ci-gfii Venfant gate du monde qu'il 
 gdta ? ' It may, however, be worth while to examine a little 
 more closely in what respects his age spoiled him, and he 
 spoiled his age. A writer whom we have before had occasion 
 to quote, on the revolutions of his country,' has observed 
 justly :— 
 
 When you see these great flaws — which it were puerile to deny — 
 in the French national character, don't forget that France (at the 
 epochs of the Saint Bartholomew and of the revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantes) had torn out her own heart and entrails by exterminating 
 the persons or stifling the convictions of nearly two milUons of her 
 best citizens. These are wounds which do not heal for centuries. 
 The infliction of such wounds becomes a habit in our history. The 
 amputation first of one member of the body politic, then of another, 
 is the rule amongst us at every difficult epoch. Beware lest, after 
 every noble part has been successively severed, nothing remain at 
 last to France but an enslaved ti-unk. She had severe virtues ; the 
 old regime constrained her to become frivolous — to scatter abroad 
 amongst foreigners her best gifts, her most soUd faculties. She has 
 retained only half her genius — eclat, brilliancy, mobihty. But it is 
 not with this mobile temper any nation can found its hberty. 
 
 With this mobile temper, however, Voltaire was infected 
 by the age in which his impressible youth was passed. The 
 rouh of the Regency had in that age succeeded the real or 
 pretended bigots of the last years of the Grand Monarque. 
 The dominant Church had silenced or exterminated the 
 religious dissidents who had invaded (very wholesomely to 
 herself) her monopoly of Christian teaching. The angel that 
 troubled the waters was put to flight, and the Bethesda of 
 orthodoxy stagnated. But out of the stagnation sprang new 
 and venomous swarms of irreligious dissidents, whom the 
 Church had left quite out of her reckoning. All that can 
 be said of Voltaire is, that he condensed and concentrated 
 the irreligious ideas which were bubbling up on all sides at the 
 opening of the eighteenth century into succinct and sparkling 
 forms of expression, which had never before been equalled, 
 and have never since been surpassed. As for his moral 
 character, that also, it must be confessed, partook of the 
 ' Quinet, La Revolution, vol. i. p. 212. 
 
188 VOLTAIEB. 
 
 general laxity which dates more especially from the Orleans 
 Eegency. Then was the grand debacle of all that had pre- 
 served public respect for the titularly and ostensibly leading 
 classes in France — of all that had preserved respect in those 
 classes for the moral bonds which hold society together. The 
 world of rank and fashion framed for its own nse a practical 
 philosophy, which Voltaire rationalised and idealised for it 
 in prose and verse. He became, as it were, the spiritual 
 director-general of fashionable Irreligion, as his youthful 
 teachers, the Jesuits, had been of fashionable Eeligion in 
 the preceding century. 
 
 But the irreligion of the age got beyond Voltaire. 
 Horace Walpole wrote from Paris to Mr. Brand in 1765 : — 
 
 I assure you, you may come hither very safely, and be in no danger 
 from mirth. Laughing is as much out of fashion as pantins and 
 bilboquets. Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God 
 and the king to be pulled down first : and men and women, one and 
 all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite 
 profane for having any belief left. 
 
 The same lively writer mentions an atheistic philosopher 
 in petticoats, who exclaimed of Voltaire — ' Ne me parlez-pas 
 de ce biffot-la ; il est Deiste ! ' 
 
 The conceit of philosophical honnetes gens in Prance 
 during the eighteenth century — till the crash came — was 
 that they could have their irreligion all to themselves, leav- 
 ing a safe residue of superstition to the canaille. Thus 
 Voltaire writes to D'Alembert : — 
 
 La raison triomphera, au moins chez les honnStes gens ; la canaille 
 n'est pas faite pour elle. 
 
 Again — 
 
 II ne s'agit pas d'empScher nos laquais d'aller a la messe ou au 
 prSche. 
 
 In another place, — 
 
 Je pardonne tout, pourvu que I'infdme superstition soit d^cri^e 
 comme il faut chez les honnetes gens, et qu'elle soit abandonne aux 
 laquais et aux servantes, comme de raison. 
 
 Even after the first growls of revolutionary thunder were 
 
VOLTAIEE. 189 
 
 audible, in June, 1789, we find the following entry of the 
 Diary kept during his first visit to France by that shrewd 
 American observer, Gouverneur Morris : — 
 
 June 11, 1789. 
 This morning I go to Reinsi. Arrive at eleven. Nobody yet 
 visible. After some time the Duchess (of Orleans) appears, and teUs 
 me that she has given Madame de Ohastellux notice of my arrival. 
 Near twelve before the breakfast is paraded, but as I had eaten mine 
 before my departure this has no present inconvenience. After break- 
 fast we go to mass in the chapel. In the tribune above we have a 
 bishop, an abbe, the duchess, her maids, and some of her friends. 
 Madame de Ohastellux is below on her knees. We are amused above 
 by a number of little tricks played off by M. de 86gur and M. de 
 Oorbiferes with a candle, which is put into the pockets of different 
 gentlemen, the bishop's among the rest, and lighted while they are other- 
 wise engaged (for there is a fire in the tribune), to the great merri- 
 ment of the spectators. Immodei-ate laughter is the consequence. 
 The Duchess preserves as much gravity as she can. This scene must 
 be very edifying to the domestics who are 02}2}osite to us, and the villagers 
 who worship below} 
 
 ' Ah, Monsieur ! ' said a Parisian hairdresser, about the 
 same epoch — (resolved not to lag behind the honnetes gens 
 whom he curled and powdered, at least in the article of 
 atheistic enlightenment) — 'ah, Monsieur, je ne suis qu'un 
 pauvre miserable perruquier, mais (proudly) je ne crois pas en 
 Dieu plus qu'un autre ! ' 
 
 Twice in the eighteenth century Prance imported— first 
 from England, afterwards from a new England — systems 
 of philosophy and politics which, borrowed as they both 
 were, inspired her with the conceit that it was hers alone 
 to regenerate the whole world of thought and action in all 
 countries, and for all ages. England and America, first 
 through the medium of Voltaire, next of Lafayette and his 
 fellow-comrades of Washington, set Prance on fire with 
 doctrines which had left comparatively cool the lands where 
 they were first conceived and promulgated. Locke and 
 Newton never made the figure at home of incendiary in- 
 novators ; Bolingbroke, admired as a speaker, never set the 
 Thames on fire as a philosopher. Washington and Pranklin 
 I Life of Gouvernenr Morris, by Jared Sparks, vol. i. p. 312. 
 
190 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 were the most sober-minded of men whom events ever roused 
 into revolutionists. France showed no originality but that of 
 extravagance in her mode of appropriating theories of Mind, 
 and Eights of Man, which, in the lands of their origin, turned 
 no one's brains, whether of their teachers or learners. Now 
 how came this ? May we not be warranted in saying that 
 the main cause of the difference was that England old and 
 new possessed, and France had lost, an nnmutilated and 
 independent middle class ? 
 
 Where such a class has made its opinion respected in 
 society, and its power felt in politics, it is impossible that 
 the grave realities of life, with which it is constantly in 
 contact, should come to be treated with that reckless levity 
 and frivolity which marked the age of Voltaire. And it is 
 not too much to say that in a moral and social atmosphere 
 more bracing, Voltaire himself would have been quite a dif- 
 ferent man. That we do not speak without book is suffi- 
 ciently proved by the zeal, energy, and ability with which 
 he threw himself into any the smallest opening which pre- 
 sented itself for action, whether in benevolent interest for 
 oppressed individuals, or in public affairs. We have cited 
 the cases of the Calas, Sirvens, La Barre, and D'Btallonde. 
 And if it be said that Voltaire's anti-Christian zealotry 
 alloyed the merit of his Christian charity in those cases, this 
 cannot be said of his earnest and disinterested efforts to 
 save Admiral Byng. That unfortunate commander, we 
 scarcely need remind our readers, was judicially sacrificed to 
 political faction and national pride, which could not brook a 
 single instance of French naval triumph over England, and 
 would have imposed on Byng the Spartan alternative of 
 destruction or victory. He had shrunk from that alternative, 
 not, it may fairly be supposed, from want of courage ; and 
 Voltaire obtained and transmitted to Byng, in aid of his 
 defence, the most distinct testimony from Marshal Richelieu, 
 'the hero of Port-Mahon,' that by acting otherwise his 
 antagonist would have uselessly sacrificed his ships and 
 crews. All was in vain : a court-martial capitally convicted 
 Byng of not having done all he might have done to achieve 
 
VOLTAIRE. 191 
 
 victory. And on such a sentence, passed on such grounds, 
 he was condemned to be shot, as Voltaire bitterly expressed 
 it in ' Candide,' ' pour encourager les autres.' 
 
 Voltaire gave proof of political sagacity and patriotic 
 feeling, which might have made him an important public 
 man in a free country, by his persistent efforts to move that 
 equally sagacious old profligate Cardinal Tencin (with whom 
 he had become reconciled by that strongest of earthly 
 motives, idem sentire de republicd) to induce the government 
 of Louis XV., or rather of Madame de Pompadour, to enter- 
 tain the overtures of peace made by Frederick II., at the 
 lowest ebb of his fortunes, when his destruction by the com- 
 bined arms of Austria, Trance, and Russia appeared all 
 but inevitable. The question arose for Prance, as Voltaire 
 pointedly put it (certainly without any personal tenderness 
 for his old patron-persecutor), why she should aid Austria 
 to destroy an enemy whose destruction must draw after it 
 that of the whole pre-existing balance of power in Central 
 Europe. Frederick, it was said, had his capsule of corrosive 
 sublimate ready in the last resort. Voltaire seriously and 
 strenuously dissuaded him from the suicide he was avowedly 
 meditating; but the imbecility of Soubise and the victory 
 of Eosbach proved more effectual antidotes against despair. 
 Voltaire and Tencin, in their well-meant and well-motived 
 pleadings for peace on the eve of defeat and the brink of 
 bankruptcy, were contending fruitlessly with Petticoat the 
 Second, who then ruled supreme in Prance. Frederick had 
 repulsed the advances and ignored the sovereignty of the 
 Pompadour : Maria Theresa, with more policy, if at some 
 sacrifice of imperial-queenly dignity, condescended to mes- 
 sages of friendship and esteem for that royal mistress. All 
 the foresight of Voltaire, and all the experienced tact of 
 Tencin, found themselves unequally matched against the 
 petty spites of the seraglio. Frederick was unlucky with 
 women — always excepting his devoted sister, and natural 
 and constant ally, Voltaire's not less constant friend, Wil- 
 helmine — or rather his wayward misogynic temper never 
 would allow him to learn how to deal with them. He was 
 
192 VOLTAIRE. 
 
 as nearly as possible precipitated from his throne and driven 
 to his dose of corrosive sublimate by the conspiring exaspe- 
 ration of Maria Theresa and the Marquise de Pompadour. 
 The imbecile arms of France were the saving of Prussia at 
 Eosbach and Crefeld. But Austria and France might have 
 been saved their hour of humiliation by the wit of Voltaire. 
 Voltaire reigned paramount in French literature and 
 philosophy for nearly half a century ; his reign opening, it 
 may be said, at his return in 1729 from his three years' 
 exUe in England, and closing with his life, ' stifled with 
 roses ' by the Parisian public, in 1778. 
 
193 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE OLD RiiaiME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 1. Origiries de la France Contemporawie. Par H. Taine. Tome I. L'Ancien 
 
 Regime. Deuxi&me edition. Paris, 1876. 
 
 2. On the State of Society in France l)efore the Revohition of 1789, and on the 
 
 Causes which led to that Event. By Alexis de Tocqueville, Member of the 
 French Academy. Translated by Henry Keeve, D.C.L. Second edition, 
 with seven additional Chapters. London, 1873. 
 
 3. Jean-Jacques Bousseau, sa Vie et ses Owvrages. Par Saiut-Marc-Girardin. 
 
 Avec une Introduction par M. Ernest Bersot, Membre de I'Institut. 
 2 Vols. Paris, 1875." 
 
 It required an intellectual intrepidity, in which M. Taine is 
 not deficient (witness his Gallic invasion of the whole domain 
 of English literature), to project the completion of a work 
 which Tocqueville had left unfinished — the work of tracing 
 the formation and development of contemporary France 
 through the ' Ancien Regime,' the Revolution, and the 
 successive ephemeral Governments which followed. In his 
 present volume he carries that enterprise no farther than 
 Tocqueville had already proceeded with it, and he works, as 
 he could not otherwise than work, on the lines laid down by 
 his precursor. 
 
 The French Revolution, as it is truly observed by 
 Tocqueville, will remain inscrutably dark to those who fix 
 their eyes upon itself exclusively. ' The only light which 
 can clear up that darkness must be sought in the times pre- 
 ceding it.' Not less truly it might be said that France, as 
 she now is, can only be understood by tracing the distinctive 
 characters of that revolution to their original sources in the 
 previous state of France under the old regime. 
 
 We suppose there is no instance of an order of things, in 
 ' From the Qtuirterly Review, April 1876. 
 
 
194 THE OLD RfelME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 the midst of an active-minded and progressive people, sur- 
 viving for centuries its original raison d'etre — its social and 
 national utility — so extraordinary as tliat whicli was afforded, 
 down to August 4, 1789, by the old feudalism of France, 
 with all its oppressive incidents. If we were asked. What 
 made the French Revolution the terrible thing it was ? we 
 should answer in three words — The French Monarchy. The 
 persistent policy of the French monarchy for centuries had 
 been to paralyse and annul in action every independent 
 organisation in France but its own ; and when it was itself 
 struck at last with a like paralysis, no resisting power was 
 left against the popular masses. Had not Louis XIV. been 
 able to say, with truth, ' L'Etat, c'est moi ! ' the populace of 
 Paris might never have been able to boast, ' La Nation, c'est 
 nous !' 
 
 M. Taine divides into five sections his study of the old 
 regime in his present volume, entitled respectively — 1. 'The 
 Structure of Society;' 2. 'Manners and Characters;' 
 3. ' The [revolutionary] Spirit and Doctrine ;' 4. ' The 
 Propagation of the Doctrine ;' 5. ' The People.' 
 
 It m^ay be laid down as a general rule, admitting but few 
 exceptions, that most arrangements and most disarrange- 
 ments between class and class — between man and man — are 
 concerned, directly or indirectly, with money, or money's 
 worth. Without disputing Mr. Carlyle's dictum that cash 
 payment never can be the sole nexns between man and man, 
 we find, nevertheless, cash payment, or some ruder equiva- 
 lent in simpler times, the most universally current mode of 
 recognition of service given and received. So long as the 
 service is in some shape rendered, men do not grudge the 
 payment ; or, at any rate, whether or not grudgingly, they 
 feel they must make it. The clergy and feudal nobility of 
 France had performed for the people, during the darkest 
 ages of European history, the services most indispensable to 
 soul and body — to spiritual and secular protection from utter 
 disorganisation and despair. The clergy alone opened and 
 multiplied asylums for the conquered and oppressed over the 
 whole territory. The clergy alone preserved in its churches 
 
THE OLD EfelME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 195 
 
 and convents all that remained of the arts and acquirements 
 of antiquity ; alone held the pen in the councils of long- 
 haired and hard-headed men of war ; alone vindicated the 
 reign of law, the sanctities of religion, property, and 
 marriage. The nobles alone (valour then constituted 
 nobility) rallied round them all who could bear arms 
 and who would submit to vassalage as the price of 
 protection : — 
 
 ' In a time of permanent war,' says M. Taine, ' one regime only is 
 good— that of armed force posted in the presence of the enemy. Such 
 is the regime of feudalism. One could live at least, or begin again 
 to live, under its steel-gloved hand. Under the double title of 
 sovereign and proprietor, the seigneur reserved for himself the waste 
 lands, rivers, forests, rights of chase. These rights did not much 
 wrong to anyone, as the country was half desert, and the lord em- 
 ployed all his leisure in hunting wild beasts. He alone having any- 
 thing that could be called capital, he alone could build mills, baking- 
 ovens, wine-presses, bridges; could establish ferries, make roads, 
 embank ponds, rear or purchase bulls. Accordingly he levied dues 
 for all these services, and monopolised their performance. By degrees 
 the fetters of feudal obligation became relaxed, and the sentiment of 
 feudal loyalty became rooted. The lordship, the county, the duchy 
 became objects of local patriotism. Thus revived, after a thousand 
 years of suspended animation, the most powerful, energetic, and 
 vivacious of the sentiments that maintain society amongst men — a 
 sentiment the more potent in its influence the wider its range. In 
 order that the little feudal country may merge in the nation, it 
 suffices that the seigneuries recognise a central power Ln the sove- 
 reign, and that the king stand forth as head and chief of the nobles.' 
 
 If the French nobility could have transformed themselves 
 in modern times from a military into a political aristocracy 
 largely dashed with democracy, as in England, the evolution 
 from feudalism into modern life and laws might have been 
 gradual, as in England, and the evils and excesses of the 
 French Revolution obviated. Or if it had been recast on the 
 Prussian model into a phalanx of instructed and serviceable 
 military and civil functionaries, the monarch might have 
 made use of them in peace or war, as in Prussia, and the 
 monarchy might have been saved. 
 
 It is not necessary, however, to look to England, and 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE OLD EEGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 still less to Germany, for examples of tlie manner in whicli 
 a fendal migM tave been transformed into a political 
 aristocracy in Prance, and combined with other classes in all 
 the practical functions of local administration. The instru- 
 ments for effecting that transformation lay ready at band in 
 France herself ; in the old institutions of the provinces called 
 pays d'Etat, in each of which the local a.dministration had 
 formerly been carried on under the King's Government by 
 the gens des trots etats, as they were then called, i.e., the 
 representatives of the clergy, the nobility, and the commons. 
 But the King's Government chose to break those instru- 
 ments instead of using them. 'A small portion,' says 
 Tocqueville, ' of the perseverance and the exertions which 
 the sovereigns of France employed for the abolition or the 
 dislocation of the provincial estates, would have sufficed to 
 adapt them to all the wants of modern civilisation, if those 
 sovereigns had ever had any other aim than to become and 
 remain the masters of France.' 
 
 The old provincial libei-ties had substantially survived, 
 down to the Revolution,' in two important provinces only — 
 Brittany in the west, Languedoc in the south of France. In 
 Brittany the nobles had the right individually of attending 
 the States in person, which made their meetings, according 
 to Tocqueville, a sort of Polish diets. But in Languedoc the 
 better system prevailed of representation of the three orders. 
 The nobles were represented by twenty-three of their order, 
 the clergy by the twenty-three bishops of the province, and 
 the towns had as many representatives as the two first orders 
 taken together. The peasantry do not appear to have been 
 directly represented, unless so far as the resident nobles 
 and clergy really represented their interests — and so far it 
 certainly seems they did, that the States of Languedoc 
 imposed no corv'ees on the peasantry, but executed public 
 works, which no other province dreamed of undertakings 
 without either robbing private proprietors of their lands or 
 wretched peasants of their labour. The States of Languedoc 
 presented for centuries a model of vigorous and successful 
 local administration, which the central government, under 
 
THE OLD ElfiGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 197 
 
 Richelieu, crushed for a moment, but which was happily 
 restored in the minority of Louis XIV., and flourished till 
 the Revolution. Two or three years before that event the 
 Government of Louis XVI., so many of whose good intentions 
 went to pave a bad place, instituted throughout France pro- 
 vincial assemblies of a very different type from the States of 
 Languedoc, and which served no purpose but substituting 
 popular anarchy for royal despotism. All local affairs were 
 devolved on local assemblies elected by ignorant con- 
 stituencies, and no provision made for any executive agency 
 or any central control. The States of Languedoc had 
 presented an unique spectacle of three orders, which else- 
 where fell into fatal discord, working together in perfect 
 harmony in a single assembly. As the tiers-Stat had an 
 equal voting power to that of the two other orders, its spirit 
 became diffused through the whole body. The three magis- 
 trates, who, under the name of syndics generaux, were 
 entrusted with the general conduct of business, were always 
 lawyers, that is to say, roturiers. Ecclesiastics were almost 
 always delegated to discuss with the ministry at Versailles 
 whatever points of dispute might arise between the States 
 and the royal authority. 'It may be said,' concludes 
 Tocqueville, 'that, during the whole of the last century, 
 Languedoc was administered by bourgeois, controlled [or 
 rather influenced] by nobles, and assisted by bishops. And 
 thus the spirit of modern times came to penetrate peacefully 
 this old institution, and modify everything while destroying 
 nothing. It might have been so everywhere else throughout 
 
 France.' 
 
 But the King's Government in France had aimed for 
 centuries to convert the nobles into courtiers, thus drawing 
 them away from the natural sphere of their influence, where 
 they might have been useful (and formidable), to make them 
 mere ornamental appendages of royal state ; mere servile 
 accomplices in crushing the peasantry, whom it was their 
 special duty to protect, under an overwhelming load of 
 feudal and fiscal dues and imposts from which they had 
 bargained for their own exemption. This system of self- 
 
198 THE OLD EjgGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 exemption from their share of public charges, as ultimately 
 from public duties of all descriptions, save military and Court 
 service, began as far back as Charles VII. and the wars of 
 the Plantagenets. ' It was at that era,' says Tocqueville, 
 ' that the nation, fatigued with the long disorders which had 
 followed upon the captivity of King John and the insanity of 
 Charles VI., suffered the kings to impose general taxes 
 without consulting it, and that the nobles had the baseness 
 to let the tiers-Mat be taxed at discretion, on the condition 
 only that they themselves should be left untaxed. I cannot 
 but admire the singular sagacity of Philip de Commines in 
 saying that " Charles VII., who carried this point of impos- 
 ing the taille without the consent of the States, laid a heavy 
 burthen on his own soul and the soul of his successors, and 
 inflicted on the kingdom a deep wound, which will long 
 bleed." ' 
 
 It was impossible for M. Taine to take any other view 
 than Tocqueville had taken of the ultimate consequences of 
 throwing on the peasantry the main weight of taxation, and 
 leaving the amount of that taxation discretionary to the 
 King's Government from year to year. But even that 
 unlimited concession to royalty with regard to the taille 
 did not place it in funds to defray the extravagant expendi- 
 ture of the Court in the last ages of tbe monarchy, when, 
 having converted its nobles into courtiers, it had to attach 
 its courtiers by dividing among them the spoils of the people. 
 Another source of supply was hit upon in France, un- 
 paralleled elsewhere in modem European history, the regular 
 sale of judicial and municipal appointments. It is remarked 
 by Tocqueville that these practices were resorted to by the 
 best, as well as the worst, French monarchs. ' It was Louis 
 XII. who completed the system of the sale of offices. It was 
 Henri IV. who first put up to sale the hereditary succession 
 to them. So much stronger are the vices of a system than 
 the virtues of those who conduct it.' 
 
 The sale of judicial offices, of municipal functions and 
 privileges to the towns, and of titles of nobility to all 
 who had money to purchase them, became the regular and 
 
THE OLD El^GIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 199 
 
 habitual financial resource of a Government which had, 
 once for all, resolved not to go for supplies to the representa- 
 tives of the people. To the people it was at last compelled 
 to go by convoking the States-General of 1789, but not till 
 the people had become thoroughly exasperated by the 
 rapacious and spendthrift system of centuries. For centuries 
 two most oppressive aristocracies, or rather three, had been 
 favoured at their expense : first, that of the old nobles, who, 
 as we have seen, had surrendered the vassals they should 
 have protected to taille a merci et a misericorde, to save them- 
 selves from their fair share of the public taxation. Secondly, 
 the bastard aristocracy of the long robe, and the nouveaux 
 anohlis, who, or whose forefathers, had bought with hard 
 money their bran-new titles or hereditary judicial oflBces, 
 and had therewith purchased the supercilious scorn of the 
 old nobility, and the envy and hatred of all who had not 
 money wherewith to purchase privilege. Lastly, a sort of 
 third bourgeois aristocracy, so far as regarded exemption 
 from taille, consisting of the holders of petty municipal 
 offices in the towns, which were constantly being multiplied 
 by the Government for no purpose but to sell them — the 
 charters of the towns, at recurring short periods, being 
 revoked and renewed, solely for the purpose of selling those 
 offices over again ! That such a system should have gone 
 on with continual aggravations in a country calling itself 
 civilised — the most civilised in Europe — till nearly the close 
 of the last century — left little to wonder at in revolution, 
 except that it came no sooner. 
 
 The main weight of all these accumulated abuses in the 
 matter of taxation — the most vital point where political 
 abuses make themselves felt — fell on the broad but bent 
 shoulders of Jacqiies Bonhomme — the peasant of the old 
 regime. And that weight was increased infinitely in oppres- 
 sive effect by its incalculableness from one year to another. 
 It lay in the breast of the conseil du roi and the contrSlewr- 
 gen&ral what addition should be made year by year to the 
 amount of the taille ; what public works should be under- 
 taken, in what province, and what corvees (forced labours), 
 
200 THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 at arbitrary and inadequate wages, imposed on the peasantry 
 for their execution. It lay in the breast of the military ad- 
 ministration what troops should be marched, in what direc- 
 tions — corvees, again, on the wretched peasantry to provide 
 means of transport, and probably get their horses lamed 
 without compensation. But, besides all these burdens, laid 
 mainly on Jacques Bonhomme's shoulders by the King's 
 Government, were those laid exclusively on his shoulders 
 not by the King's Government, but by the hereditary holders 
 of feudal rights and dues — -themselves, in large proportion, a 
 most impoverished class, whose presence in the country was 
 felt by the peasant only through their incessant exactions — 
 felt the more gallingly as relics of a system of feudal depen- 
 dence whose raison d'etre (the payment of services for protec- 
 tion) had long ceased. The great nobles in the last ages of 
 the monarchy were, for the most part, adorning Versailles 
 and Paris with their (often unpaid for) fripperies ; the poor 
 provincial nobles — hohereaux, as Jacques Bonhomme nick- 
 named them — were snatching the last fowl from the peasant's 
 pot in payment of their feudal dues — if, indeed, the poule au 
 pot, which Henri Quatre wished for the peasant's pot, ever 
 found its way there. 
 
 ' Picture to yourself,' says Tocqueville,' ' a French peasant of the 
 eighteenth century, or, I might rather say, the peasant now before 
 your eyes, for the man is the same ; his condition is altered, but not 
 his character. Take him as he is described in the documents I have 
 quoted — so passionately enamoured of the soil, that he will spend all 
 his savings to purchase it, and to purchase it at any price. To 
 complete this purchase he must first pay a tax, not to the Government, 
 but to other landowners of the neighbourhood, as unconnected as 
 himself with the administration of public affairs, and hardly more 
 influential than he is. He possesses it at last ; his heart is buried in 
 it with the seed he sows. This little nook of ground, which is his 
 own in this vast universe, fills him with pride and independence. But 
 again these neighbours call him from his furrow, and compel him to 
 come to work for them without wages. He tries to defend his young 
 crops from their game ; again they prevent him. As he crosses the 
 river they wait for his passage to levy a toll. He finds them at the 
 market, where they sell him the right of selling his own produce ; 
 ' Mr. Beeve's Translation, p. 37. 
 
THE OLD EEGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 201 
 
 and when, on his retarn home, he wants to use the remainder of his 
 wheat for his own sustenance — of that wheat which was planted by 
 his hands, and has grown under his eyes— he cannot touch it till he 
 has ground it at the mill and baked it at the bakehouse of these same 
 men. A. portion of the income of his httle property is paid away in 
 quit-rents to them also, and these dues can neither be extinguished 
 nor redeemed. 
 
 ' Whatever he does, those troublesome neighbours are everywhere 
 in his path, to disturb his happiness, to interfere with his labour, to 
 consume his profits; and when these are dismissed, others in the 
 black garb of the Church present themselves to carry off the clearest 
 profit of his harvest. Picture to yourself the condition, the wants, 
 the character, the passions of this man, and compute, if you are able, 
 the stores of hatred and of envy which are accumulated in his heart.' 
 
 An incident related in Eousseau's ' Confessions,' whicli M. 
 Taine does not cite, probably because he supposes it already 
 familiar to Frencli readers, is strikingly illustrative of the 
 sort of vexatious espionage practised on the French peasan- 
 try for the purpose of discovering fresh matter for fiscal 
 extortion, and which was naturally encountered by every art 
 of concealment of whatever means they possessed. The in- 
 cident occurred in a youthful journey on foot between Paris 
 and Lyons. 
 
 One day in particular, having wandered out of my road to look at 
 a landscape which attracted me, I fairly lost my way altogether, and, 
 after hours of unavailing effort to retrace it, weary and half-dead 
 with thirst and hunger, I entered a peasant's house of no very pro- 
 mising aspect, but which was the only house I saw within reach. I 
 expected to be made welcome, as in Geneva or Switzerland, where all 
 the inhabitants in any tolerable circumstances are ready to exercise 
 hospitality. I begged the peasant to give me dinner, which I said I 
 would pay for. He set before me skimmed-milk and coarse barley- 
 bread, telling me it was all he had. I drank the milk with eagerness, 
 and ate the bread, straw and all, with good appetite ; such fare, how- 
 ever, was not very restorative for a man exhausted with fatigue. My 
 host, who was watching me, inferred the truth of my tale from the 
 evidence of my appetite. All at once, exclaiming that he saw I was 
 an honest young man, who did not come there to inform on him, he 
 opened a little trap-door beside his kitchen, descended, and returned 
 a moment after with a loaf of brown wheaten bread, a ham very appe- 
 tising though well cut into, and a bottle of wine, the sight of which 
 
202 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 rejoiced my eyes more than all the rest. To these good things he 
 added a tolerably substantial omelet, and I made such a meal as no 
 one ever did but a foot wayfarer. When it came to paying, his 
 uneasy apprehensions again laid hold on him ; he would have none 
 of my money, and refused it with renewed symptoms of alarm. I 
 could not conceive what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with 
 trembling the terrible words of ' commis ' and ' rats-de-cave.' He 
 gave me to understand that he concealed his wine because of the aides, 
 that he concealed his bread because of the taille, and that he should 
 be a ruined man if it came to be suspected that he was not dying of 
 hunger. All that he said to me, and of all of which I had no previous 
 idea, made an impression on me which will never be effaced, and was 
 the germ of that inextinguishable hatred which has since developed 
 itself in my heart against the oppressions endured by the poor 
 miserable people and against their oppressors. This man, though in 
 easy circumstances, dared not openly eat the bread he had earned by 
 the sweat of his brow, and could escape ruin only by making show 
 outwardly of the same indigence as reigned all round him. I left the 
 house full of indignation as of compassion, and deploring the lot of a 
 country on which the bounties of nature have been lavished only to 
 leave her the prey of barbarous publicans [revenue farmers]. 
 
 Contrast the condition thus imposed, under the old 
 regime, on the great majority of Frenchmen, the actual cul- 
 tivators of the soil, with that of the classes partially, when 
 not wholly, exempt from fiscal imposts. 
 
 ' In the bishop, the abbot, or the count,' says M. Taine, ' the king 
 respected the possessor of feudal rights while reducing to subjection 
 the former rival in sovereign power. The king felt that he himself 
 was only the most privileged of the privileged. Treaties, precedents, 
 immemorial usage, founded on former independent positions, forbade 
 fiscal exactions from nobles who were once sovereigns. In Alsace, 
 the foreign princes, lords of the soil, the Teutonic order, and that of 
 the knights of Malta, enjoyed entire exemption from all contributions, 
 real or personal. In Lorraine, the Chapter of Eemiremont had the 
 privilege of taxing itself Throughovit the provinces, whether pays 
 d'lEtat or pays d'ilection, the taille only reached the property of 
 nobles through their roturier tenants. Accordingly, in the Limousin, 
 and other districts, where the main part of the products of the soil 
 were from pasture and vineyards, the noble owner took care to keep 
 his property in his own hands, or those of his agents, thus exempting 
 himself and them from the unwelcome visits of the collector. Further, 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 203 
 
 the exemption of the privileged orders extended to their servants and 
 servants' servants, from being drawn for the milice, from having 
 troops quartered on them, and from subjection to forced labour on 
 public -works, roads, &c. Besides the poll-tax {capitation), intended 
 equally to reach all, being assessed according to the taille, the nobles 
 paid little, having little taille to pay. " In the provinces,'' wrote 
 Tiu:-got, " the capitation of the privileged orders has undergone suc- 
 cessive reductions to a very low figure, while that of the taillables 
 almost equals the amount of their taille." Towards the privileged 
 orders, besides, the collectors thought themselves obliged to observe 
 menagements. The Duke of Orleans [afterwards Philippe Egalit^] 
 avowed, " Je m' arrange with the intendants. I pay pretty much what I 
 choose." And then complained that the new provincial assemblies 
 instituted two or three years before the Revolution, by assessing him 
 strictly, were going to make him lose 300,000 livres de rente.' 
 
 Under the old regime, adds M. Taine, exemption from 
 imposts was a last rag of sovereignty, or at least of royal or 
 noble independence. The prince or noble evaded or resisted 
 taxation not only as detriment, but disbonour. It was the 
 sufferance badge of roture, that is to say, of servitude, and he 
 repulsed the tax-gatherer quite as much from pride as in- 
 terest. 
 
 The princes of the blood, in fact, retained many rights of 
 sovereignty. Throughout the domains forming their appanages, and 
 extending over more than twelve of the present departments, the 
 appointments to ecclesiastical benefices and judicial offices were in 
 their hands. They were a sort of lesser kings, and received not only 
 the dues which the king would have received as seigneur, but a 
 portion of those he elsewhere received as sovereign. The House of 
 Orleans, for instance, received the aides, that is to say, the duties on 
 wine and spirits, on manufactures of gold, silver, iron, steel, cards, 
 and starch — the whole amount, in short, of one of the largest branches 
 of indirect taxation. It was not surprising if princes so nearly placed 
 in the position of sovereigns had, like sovereigns, a council, a 
 chancellor, a debt, a court, and whole code of domestic ceremonial. 
 
 It was not perhaps surprising, but it was surely scan- 
 dalous, that the Duke of Orleans, like other princes du sang, 
 with all their appanages, was an importunate and successful 
 applicant to royalty for out-door relief. During the life of 
 
204 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL 
 
 his father he had received a pension from the Crown of 
 150,000 livres (francs) on the plea of poverty. The succes- 
 sion to his father having enriched him above 3,000,000 per 
 annum, he resigned his pension, but presently again applied 
 for it, representing to the king that he found his expenditure 
 exceed his income. The Prince de Conti had 1,150,000 francs 
 from Louis XVI. to pay his debts. Any noble gentleman, or 
 noble lady, who had debts to pay (especially under the Calonne 
 and Brienne ministries, which just preceded the Revolution) 
 had only to ask the good easy monarch for money to pay them 
 with — and get it. ' Quandj'ai vu,' said a courtier of that epoch, 
 ' que tout le monde tendait la main, j'ai tendu moil chapeau.' 
 
 The Court, said D'Argenson (and the courtiers called him 
 la iete, for speaking the truth about them), became in effect 
 ' the only senate in the nation ;' and such a senate was of 
 course often swayed by its most worthless members, or para- 
 sites, male or female. The Court was the only institution of 
 the country left standing towards which all eyes were turned; 
 and the pomp of Versailles, costly and cumbrous as it was, 
 was not more than proportioned to the use made of it — an 
 use, however, which ended by rendering nobles and king 
 alike useless, That use was to keep a whole nobility occupied 
 dally in doinff nothing — or, in official language, in discharging 
 their duties about the king's person. It was, as M. Taine 
 observes, a courtly continuation of the old feudal homage. 
 The staff of nobles was bound to appear daily en grande tenue 
 around their born general. Absence from Court, or slack 
 attendance there, was regarded as a mark of independence 
 or indifference, and never escaped the vigilant eye of Louis 
 XIV. glancing round his circle. The Duke de Larochefou- 
 cauld, grand veneur under that monarch, was a model of the 
 courtly virtues. Por ten years together he would miss no 
 day's attendance at the royal lever, coucher, chasse, or pro- 
 menade, with the appropriate and prescribed change of dress 
 for each. And in more than forty years he had not slept 
 twenty times out of Paris, or asked leave for any more 
 latitude of movement than occasionally to dine out en ville, 
 thus missing his usual attendance on the royal promenade. 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 205 
 
 To reduce a noblesse to mere idle ornaments of a Court 
 was for the monarch to subject himself to the like servitude 
 as he imposed. The king, says M. Taine, had undertaken 
 to find occupation for a whole aristocracy, and by consequence 
 to show himself, and payer de sa personne at all hours, even 
 the most private, even when getting out of bed, or when 
 getting in.^ M. Taine describes the royal lever as a piece in 
 five acts. ' Nothing certainly could be more skilfully devised 
 for occupying a whole nobility about nothing.' But, on the 
 other hand, the king had himself to undergo the idle con- 
 straint he imposed on his nobles. ' He, too, had his part to 
 play. Every one of his movements and gestures had been 
 arranged beforehand. He had to regulate his countenance ; 
 to modulate his voice ; to do the dignified and affable ; to 
 distribute his glances and inclinations of the head with due 
 reserve and distinction ; to say nothing at all, or only speak 
 about hunting ; and put a prudent extinguisher on his own 
 thoughts, if he happened to have any. For a descendant of 
 Louis XIV. to eat, drink, get up, or go to bed, was to officiate.' 
 Frederick II. of Prussia, after all these etiquettes were ex- 
 plained to him, said that, if he were king of France, he would 
 appoint another king to hold Court in his place. 
 
 During the magnificent and ruinous reign of the Grand 
 Monarque the French Court had become, as M. Taine de- 
 scribes it, a salon en permanence, or, as he varies the description 
 in another passage, French Court life had become an opera. 
 Of the cost of that opera to the people, who had no seats 
 there, we have already said something, and shall have some- 
 
 • Poor Marie Antoinette, unaccustomed to etiquettes so preposterous, could 
 not endure them at all. M. Taine quotes as follows from Madame Campan : 
 ' La reine dSjeune dans son lit, et " il y a dix ou douze personnes k cette pre- 
 miere entree" .... Les grandes entries faisaient leur cour 4 rheiire de la 
 toilette. " Cette entree comprenait les princes du sang, les capitaines des 
 gardes, et )a plupart des grandes charges." En tout trois entries le matin 
 chez la reine. MSme ceremonial que pour le roi au sujet de la chemise. Un 
 jour d'hiver Mme. Campan prfisentait la chemise lb la reine ; la dame d'hon- 
 neur entre, 6te ses gants, prend la chemise. On gratte -X la porte, c'est la 
 duchesse d'OrMans, elle ote ses gants, re5oit la chemise. On gratte encore, 
 c'est la comtesse d'Artois qui par privilege prend la chemise. Cependant la 
 reine grelottait, les bras croises sur sa poitrine, et murmurait : " C'est odieux 
 quelle importunity ! " ' 
 
206 THE OLD KEGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 thing further to say. Its ultimate cost to France, in the 
 character of her Revolution, is not paid yet in full. It has 
 cost her the whole structure of her national institutions, the 
 whole continuity of her national life. 
 
 There is, we suppose, no parallel in history to the century 
 of Court life in France, intervening between its first complete 
 organisation under Louis XIV. and the common catastrophe 
 of Court and monarchy under his unfortunate successor, Louis 
 XVI. The successive phases of that life are brought before 
 us in characteristic detail in M. Taine's volume. A stately 
 decorum and grand style of decoration and diversion could 
 alone, of course, flourish in the dignified and imposing pre- 
 sence of the great founder of Court life in France, whose 
 really eminent personal qualities might, it would seem, have 
 made him the founder of something better than a system 
 which sunk her nobility to a valetaille, and reduced the art 
 of government of a great country to the art of playing the 
 part of a courteous host to all-approving guests. When the 
 Grand Monarque's career of conquest was followed by the 
 crushing reverses of the war of the Spanish succession, the 
 military glory of France sufiered a long eclipse ; and the 
 French noblesse, during the eighteenth century, with rare ex- 
 ceptions, ceased to render the sole serious service by which a 
 courtier-military caste could distinguish itself. . Instead of 
 celebrating victories, the courtiers were reduced to chansonner 
 defeats, and to solace themselves for the disasters of cam- 
 paigns with the success of epigrams. The song indited on 
 the battle of Hochstaedt (which we English call Blenheim) 
 was voted good-for-nothing ; and some one said thereupon, 
 ' I am sorry for the loss of that battle — la chanson ne vaut 
 rien.' Defeats and chansons, however, improved in quality 
 in the last half of the century ; and it was decided in Court 
 circles that the song on the shamefully-lost battle of Eosbach 
 was charming. The 'stern realities of active life had lost 
 their import for a class which had ceased collectively to take 
 any active part in them ; and life by daylight, indeed, had 
 in a manner been all but superseded by life illuminated by 
 crystal chandeliers and reflected in gUt mirrors. The tone 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 207 
 
 of society, alike in the salon and on the stage, had become 
 
 thoroughly histrionic. 
 
 The limits of the sphere of dream, 
 The bounds of true and false were past. 
 
 The universal passion for amateur dramatic performances of 
 itself characterises the century. 
 
 ' Towards the end of the century,' says M, Taine, ' all the world 
 became actors. All the world, indeed, were actors already. Nothing 
 was talked of but the little theatres of the great in the environs of 
 Paris. For a long time back, the example had been set by the 
 highest personages. Under Louis XV., the Dukes of Orleans, 
 de Nivernais, d'Ayen, de Ooigny, the Marquesses of Courtenvaux 
 and d'Entraigues, the Count de MaiUebois, the Duchess de Brancas, 
 the Countess d'Estrades, formed, with Madame de Pompadour, the 
 theatrical company of the Petits Cabinets — manager, the Duke de la 
 Vallifere. When a ballet was introduced in the piece, the domseurs 
 en titre were the Marquis de Courtenvaux, the Duke de Beuvi'on, 
 the Counts de Melfort and de Langeron. " All those," writes the sage 
 and pious Duke de Luynes, " who are skilled in these matters agree 
 that professional actors could hardly play better, or with more in- 
 telligence of their parts. At last the dramatic contagion reaches 
 even the royal family. At Trianon, first before an audience of forty 
 persons, and afterwards before audiences much less select, the queen 
 [Marie Antoinette] plays Colette, in the Devin du Village ; Gotte, in 
 the Gageure Imprevue ; Kosine, in the Barhier de Seville ; Pierrette 
 in the Chasseur et la Laitiere. The other performers are the leading 
 personages of the Court, the Count dArtois, the Counts d'Adh^mar 
 and de Vaudreuil, the Countess de Guiche, the Canoness de PoUgnac. 
 Monsieur [afterwards Louis XVIII. ] had his theatre ; the Count 
 d'Artois his two theatres ; the Duke of Orleans two ; the Count de 
 Clermont two ; the Prince de Cond6 one. The Count de Clermont 
 took serious parts; the Duke of Orleans played to the life (avee 
 rondeur et naturel) the rdles of peasants and financiers. M. de Miro- 
 mesnil, ga/rde des sceaux, was the slyest and supplest of Scapins ; 
 M. de Vaudreuil was regarded almost as a rival of Mol4 ; the Count 
 de Pons played the MisaMhrope with rare perfection." " There are 
 ten or more of our women of the grand monde," wrote the Prince de 
 Ligne, " act and sing better than the best I have seen or heard at 
 any theatre." By the talent acquired, we may judge of the study 
 devoted to acquire it. Evidently, for many of these personages, this 
 must have been the main occupation of life. 
 
 ' The last trait of the time, and the most significant, was ^e petite 
 
208 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FAXL. 
 
 piece. For the beau monde, indeed, life itself was a carnival, scarce 
 less rakish than that of Venice. The slight (and loose) material of 
 these petites pieces was commonly taken from the farces of the Italian 
 buffos, or the " Oontes " of La Fontaine, and they were sometimes so 
 far the reverse of decent as to be only fit to be performed before great 
 princes, or gay ladies of a certain description. The Duke of Orleans 
 sang songs the most highly spiced on the stage ; and the performances 
 at Brunoy [Monsieur's] waxed so licentious that the king expressed 
 his regret to have come there. Two ladies of the audience fairly took 
 flight ; but the worst enormity of all was that the queen had been 
 invited to witness the performance. Gaiety,' says M. Taine, ' is a 
 sort of intoxication which drains the cask to the last drop, and when 
 the wine is drunk out, drinks the dregs. Not only in their pedis 
 soupers with girls, but in the grand monde with ladies, these great 
 persons give themselves freedoms only fit for taverns. Tranchons le 
 mo<— they behave like blackguards \_polissons'\. " During the last six 
 or seven months," writes a lady in 1783, "suppers are followed by a 
 game of blind man's buff, or a tratne-haUet, and finish off with a polis- 
 sonnerie ginerale. People are invited a fortnight beforehand. On 
 this occasion the tables and furniture were upset, twenty water- 
 decanters and their contents scattered about the room. I did not get 
 away till half-past one, half-dead with fatigue, half demolished with 
 coups de mouchoir, leaving Mme. de Clarence with her voice gone, 
 with her dress torn into a thousand pieces, with an arm grazed, a 
 contusion in the head, but delighted to have given so gay a supper, 
 and flattering herself that it would be the prime topic of the next 
 day." Such,' says M. Taine, ' are the last excesses of the unbridled 
 rage for amusement. Under its sway, as under the sculptor's hand, 
 the physiognomy of the age transforms itself gradually till it loses 
 all stamp of seriousness. The formal countenance of the courtier 
 first relaxes into the jovial air of the mondain. And at last, from 
 the altered and distorted lines of that smiling mouth, breaks forth the 
 i;ude and reckless laugh of the gamin.' 
 
 In the meantime, with all this 'pride of life' ofVersailles 
 and Paris (not unattended by its known scriptural concomi- 
 tants), where was the life of Fraflce ? In Paris and Versailles 
 — nowhere else, so to speak. ' Sad is the aspect,' says M. 
 Taine, ' of a country where the heart has ceased to impel the 
 blood through the veins.' The testimony of our countryman, 
 Arthur Young, as to the internal state of France — which he 
 surveyed with the eyes of a farmer and a freeman in three 
 
-THE OLD KEGIME IN FKANCE AND ITS FALL. 209 
 
 tours through that country between the years 1787 and 
 1792 — is the testimony (and the fact is gratifying to English- 
 men) most universally and most reliantly cited by all the 
 best French writers from Tocqueville and Leonce de Lavergne 
 to M. Taine. While a double file of carriages, going and 
 returning, stretched from morning to night without inter- 
 ruption over five leagues of road between Versailles and 
 Paris (such, says M. Taine, is the description given him by 
 old people who witnessed the courtly spectacle before 1789), 
 great was the contrast, and almost complete the solitude, on 
 the other royal roads which pierced France in straight lines 
 in all directions, designed and constructed with right royal 
 disregard of the ' holy bounds of property,' and the yet holier 
 liberties of labour. 
 
 ' The road to Orleans,' says Arthur Young, ' is one of the greatest 
 that leads from Paris. I expected, therefore, to have my former im- 
 pression of the Uttle traffic near that city removed, but, on the 
 contrary, it was confirmed ; it is a desert compared with those round 
 London. Knowing how great, rich, and important a city Paris is, 
 this circumstance perplexes me much. Should it afterwards be con- 
 firmed, conclusions in abundance are to be drawn.' 
 
 At Nantes, whose flourishing colonial trade the Revolution 
 was soon to ruin, Arthur Toung notes the like contrast of 
 town and country. 
 
 Arrive ; go to the theatre, new built of fine white stone, and has 
 a magnificent portico front of eight elegant Corinthian pillars, and 
 four others within, to part the portico from a grand vestibule. 
 Within, all is gold and painting, and a coup d'ceil at entering that 
 struck me forcibly. It is, I believe, twice as large as Drury Lane, 
 and five times as magnificent. It was Sunday, and therefore full. 
 Hon Bieu ! cried I to myself, do all the wastes, the deserts, the 
 heath, hng, furze, broom, and bog, that I have passed for 300 miles 
 lead to this spectacle ? What a miracle, that all the splendour and 
 wealth of the cities in France should be so unconnected with the 
 country ! There are no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from 
 comfort to wealth : you pass at once froni beggary to profusion j 
 from misery in mud cabins to Mademoiselle St. Huberti, in splendid 
 spectacles, at 500 livres a night (21Z. 17s. M.). The country deserted, 
 or if a gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole, to save 
 
 P 
 
210 THE OLD REGIME IN PRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 that money which is lavished in profusion in the luxuries of a 
 capital. 
 
 We may here remark, in passing, that ruined chateaux, 
 like peasant properties in France, are no exclusively post- 
 revolutionary phenomena. Arthur Young says of Verteul, a 
 chateau near Angouleme of the Duchess d'Anville, where he 
 was most hospitably received — 
 
 It is excellently kept ; in thorough repair, fully furnished, and 
 all in order, which merits praise, considering that the family rarely 
 are here for more than a few days in a year, having many other and 
 more considerable seats in different parts of the kingdom. If this 
 just attention to the interests of posterity was more general, we should 
 not see the melancholy spectacle of ruined chateaux in so many parts 
 of France. 
 
 The truth really was that, even if a violent revolution 
 had not supervened, the old noblesse of France was going 
 rapidly to ruin in its condition of powerless privilege. 
 Twenty country gentlemen could not meet to discuss their 
 own business without express royal permission. And, indeed, 
 all business, except in the pays d'Etat, had in a manner been 
 taken out of their hands. Nothing was left them but naked 
 titles and obnoxious privileges. Excluded by the royal bu- 
 reaucracy of the intendants and their sub-delegates from all 
 public functions, and by their pride of birth from all lucrative 
 occupations, there was nothing left them but to vegetate in 
 the country or ruin themselves in town. M. Taine cites 
 Bouille's ' Memoirs ' for the statement that ' all the old 
 families but two or three hundred are ruined.' ' Everything,' 
 M. Taine adds, ' contributed to that decadence — laws, man- 
 ners, and, first of all, the droit d'ainesse.' 
 
 ' In Brittany,' says Chateaubriand, ' the elder sons of the nobility 
 carried off two-thirds, and the younger divided among them one-third 
 of the paternal heritage. Consequently, the younger sons of younger 
 sons soon descended to the division of a pigeon, a rabbit, a duck- 
 pond, and a sporting dog. My grandfather's whole fortune did not 
 exceed 5,000 livres de rente, to two-thirds of which (3,300 livres) his 
 eldest son succeeded, leaving 1,666 for the younger members of the 
 family, and even on that residue the eldest levied a pr&aiput (pre- 
 ference share).' 
 
THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS PALL. 211 
 
 It is curious to observe how some of the same effects, which 
 are now, we think justly, charged on the rigid enforcement of 
 equal division of peasant properties among children, resulted 
 in old France from the rigid enforcement of unequal division 
 of noble estates. But the droit d'ainesse was intended at 
 least to keep one member of the family rich — the eldest son. 
 Generally speaking, it did not even effect that. A class con- 
 demned to inactivity in all local and all national affairs had 
 only the choice of living in mortal ennui in the country, or 
 ambitiosa paupertate in town. None but the wealthiest 
 could bask in Court sunshine without paying for it at a 
 rate altogether ruinous. None but those in credit at Court 
 could benefit by those auriferous streams — that royal Pac- 
 tolus — which flowed for courtiers only. The tone of the 
 Court nobles was that of supreme contempt for all attention 
 to money matters. ' My Lord Archbishop,' said Louis XVI. 
 to M. Dillon, ' it is reported that you have debts, and heavy 
 debts.' ' Sire,' said the aristocratic prelate, ' I will ask my 
 steward, and shall then have the honour to inform your 
 Majesty.' This superb contempt for taking any account of 
 money led to the dire necessity for making money by all 
 possible means, except only the honourable means of earning 
 it. When the auriferous streams of royal bounty failed to 
 flow freely enough, the noble squanderers were fain to make 
 money ad exemplar regis, by selling judicial offices — the 
 justices seigneuriales being the last fragment of feudal sove- 
 reignty that remained to them. 
 
 ' The sable swarm of judicial leeches,' says M. Taine, ' sucked blood 
 all the more eagerly because they had bought the right to suck it. 
 The arbitrariness, caprice, and corruption of such a system may be 
 better conceived than described. " Impunity," says Renauldon, -" is 
 nowhere more complete than in the justices seigneuriales. No attempt 
 is made to bring the most atrocious crimes to justice, for the seigneur 
 is afraid of having to defray the expense of a criminal trial, and his 
 judges and attorneys of not being paid their fees and costs. Accord- 
 ingly his estates become the asylum of all the ruffianry of the 
 canton." Terrible consequence of his sordid indifference — soon to 
 recoil on himself. To-morrow at the club the pettifogging practi- 
 
 p 2 
 
212 THE OLD EEGIME IN PRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 tioners he has multiplied will demand his head — the lawless handitti 
 he has tolerated wiU stick his head on a pike.' 
 
 ' There is notliing harder to bear in poverty,' writes the 
 great Roman satirist, ' than that it makes the men who have 
 to bear it ridiculous.' The pretentious poverty of most of 
 the provincial nobles of France in the last century, amidst 
 the growing wealth of the active classes, did, it must be 
 confessed, make them more or less ridiculous to all above, as 
 their pride and rapacity made them odious to all below, 
 them. 
 
 'Many of them,' says M. Taine, 'had sold everything that be- 
 longed to them, except their little manor-houses and seignorial rights, 
 including the rights of maladministration of justice over the domains 
 of which they were once the proprietors. As the feudal dues payable 
 to them formed their whole means of living, they were compelled to 
 exact those dues, even when the exaction was oppressive — even when 
 the debtor was indigent. How could they let him off his payments 
 in kind in corn and wine, when these were their whole supply of 
 bread and wine through the year ? How could they let him off his 
 payments in money, when it was the sole money they received 1 Them- 
 selves necessitous, how could they be otherwise than rapacious? 
 Behold them, then, face to face with the peasant, simply in the posi- 
 tion of creditors ! That is the finale of the feudal regime of protec- 
 tion, as metamorphosed by monarchy. Behold round the chateau 
 peasant sympathies expiring, envy awakening, hatred growing. Ex- 
 cluded from affairs, exempted from taxes, the seigneur stands isolated 
 amongst his former vassals. His authority annihilated, and his 
 privileges preserved, make for him a life apart. He never takes a 
 step out of his soHtude but to add involuntarily to the public misery. 
 From the products of a soil already shorn by fiscal imposts, he comes 
 in to claim so many ears of corn, so many vats of wine. The crops 
 of the peasant are half devoured by his game or pigeons. What can 
 be saved from these the peasant must take to be ground at his mill, 
 and a sixteenth part of the meal stays there. If the peasant again 
 sells for 600 livres a field he has bought of the noble (and paid for), 
 100 livres of the proceeds of the sale go into the noble's pocket. A 
 year's income of the heritage of a peasant's brother likewise goes to 
 the noble before any benefit of that heritage reaches the peasant. 
 The latter, such as we see him at this day, eagerly intent on gain, 
 determined and habituated to do and endure anything, with the 
 prospect in view of saving or gaining a crown of three francs, ends 
 
THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 213 
 
 by casting side-looks of rage at tlie Turret whicli contains the feudal 
 archives, the detested parchments, on the strength of which a man of 
 another species — benefited to the detriment of all, and receiving 
 tribute from all for doing nothing — extorts his privileged portion from 
 all soils and from all products. Let but opportunity offer — the 
 archives will burn — ^with them the turret — with that the chateau.' 
 
 With reference to the generally accredited myth of bands 
 of 'brigands having sprung out of the earth suddenly, no one 
 knew whence or how, to plunder and burn chateaux, all that 
 can be said is that it is true enough there were brigands, but 
 amateur brigands — peasants brutalised by ignorance and 
 oppression. Arthur Young, in his ' Second Travels,' says on 
 this point — 
 
 I asked M. de Morveaux [the celebrated chemist, then resident at 
 Dijon] how far it was true that chateaux had been plundered and 
 burnt by the peasants alone; or whether by those troops of brigands 
 reported to be formidable ? He assured me that he has made strict 
 inquiries to ascertain this matter, and is of opinion that all the 
 violences in this province, which have come to his knowledge, have 
 been committed by the peasants only ; much has been reported of 
 brigands, but nothing proved. At Besancon I heard of 800 ; but 
 how could a troop of 800 banditti march through a country, and 
 leave their existence the least questionable? — as ridiculous as 
 M. Bayes's army incog. 
 
 The general state of the peasantry, in the revolutionaiy 
 year 1789, is painfully illustrated by an incident mentioned 
 in the same. Travels. 
 
 Walkiag up a long hill, to ease my mare, I was joined by a poor 
 woman, who complained of the times, and that it was a sad country. 
 Demanding her reasons, she said her husband had but a morsel of 
 land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet they had a.francha/r (forty- 
 two pounds) of wheat and three chickens to pay as a quit rent to one 
 seigneur ; and four frcmcha/rs of oats, one chicken, and Is. to pay 
 to another, besides very heavy failles and other taxes. She had seven 
 children, and the cow's milk helped to make the soup. ' But why, 
 instead of a horse, do you not keep another cow ? ' ' Oh, her husband 
 could not carry his produce so well without a horse, and asses are 
 little used in the country. It was said, at present, that something was 
 to be done hysome great folks for such poor ones, hut she did not know 
 
214 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 who nor how, but God send us better, car les failles et les droits nous 
 ecrasent.' This woman, at no great distance, might have been taken 
 for sixty or seventy, her iigure was so bent and her face so furrowed 
 and hardened by labour; but she said she was only twenty-eight. 
 An Englishman who has not travelled cannot imagine the figure 
 made by infinitely the greater part of the countrywomen in France. 
 It speaks, at the first sight, hard and severe labour. I am inclined to 
 think that they work harder than the men, and this, united with the 
 more miserable labour of bringing a new race of slaves into the 
 world, destroys absolutely all symmetry of person and any feminine 
 appearance. To what are we to attribute this difierence in the manner 
 of the lower people in the two kingdoms ? To Government. 
 
 The government of France tlirougliOTifc its thirty provinces 
 (except the pays d'Mat) had been carried on till the estab- 
 lishment of provincial assemblies, just before the Revolution, 
 by the king's intendants and their sub-delegates, respon- 
 sible only to their royal employers.' The opinion of Trance 
 — which was chiefly concentrated in Paris — was formed by 
 the salons. The privileged classes, practically excluded 
 from all public influences and all public duties, except those 
 precious ones of which we have spoken, about the king's 
 person, were restricted to the sole function of receiving 
 company, the sole occupation of amusing themselves and 
 others. 
 
 ' If a man of high birth,' says M. Taiue, ' was sent into a province 
 with the title of governor, it was for show only. While the inten- 
 dant administered, he received company and gave dinners. These 
 were the sole functions of a grand seigneur, and, by consequence, 
 religious and political questions were, for him and his circle, subjects 
 of conversation, and nothing more. In good company, it was held, 
 anyone had the right to say anything. The social machine, besides, 
 had gone on working of itself, so to speak, from time immemorial. 
 Was it likely to be deranged by the careless chat of a salon t In any 
 case, it was not he that conducted it, or could be responsible for its 
 going right or going wrong. Accordingly, all uneasy reflections, all 
 
 ' The clever Scotch financier Law, no prophet in his own country, who was 
 unfortunately entrusted by the Regent Orleans wirh the pilotage of French 
 finance, said to D'Argenson, ' Know that you have neither Parliaments nor 
 ;6tats, nor Governors. The happiness or misery, the plenty or scarcity of the 
 provinces, wholly depend on thirty masters of requests, to whom their absolute 
 administration is committed.' 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 215 
 
 morose preoccupations, were thrown aside. Lightly, boldly, the great 
 lord followed wherever his pet philosopher led the way. Unconcerned 
 in affairs, he could give himself the free range of ideas ; like a young 
 man of family fresh from college, who, having got hold of a principle, 
 draws all possible deductions from it, and so constructs himself a 
 system without the least in the world troubling his head about 
 practical applications.' 
 
 To reduce an aristocracy to inaction, says our author, is 
 to create a Fronde. The ridiculous heroes (and heroines) of 
 the Fronde of the seventeenth century had their parallels, 
 male and feinB,le, in the eighteenth. The salons furnished 
 the field of battle, the Court — its partial favours and failings 
 ^the causes of war. His Majesty's Opposition met nightly 
 under gilt mouldings and multitudinous wax-lights. His 
 Majesty's Government had in hostile array against it all 
 those courtiers who felt themselves slighted in the distribu- 
 tion of Conrt favours ; all those provincial nobles who found 
 themselves outside the door while the Court nobles partook 
 of the royal banquet within ; all those of the king's subjects, 
 finally, who, seeing his Government assume the role of 
 Providence upon earth, and take everything on itself, were 
 disposed to cast on it the entire responsibility for everything — 
 from the price of bread to the bad state of a road. Lastly, 
 the old Government had in hostile array against it the 
 New Humanity, which accused it of upholding unchanged 
 the superannuated remains of a barbarous system — taxes 
 unequally imposed, unduly apportioned, and oppressively 
 levied; antiquated procedures, atrocious punishments, reli- 
 gious persecutions, lettres de cachet, and State prisons. 
 
 Two remarkable incidents of the old regime are given in 
 the Memoirs of Malouet; and we are rather surprised M. 
 Taine has not thought them worth citing. One is a robbery 
 which was committed on Malouet by a servant, who broke 
 open his writing-desk, and took out of it sixty louis and two 
 pairs of lace wristbands. The Lieutenant of Police at that 
 time (in the last years of Louis XV.'s reign) was M. de Sartine, 
 of whom the well-known story is told, ti^at a thief having 
 excused his delinquency by pleading, ' Monseigneur, I must 
 
216 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 live ! ' Sartine replied, ' I don't see the necessity,' and had him 
 hanged accordingly, notwithstanding his plea of ' extenua- 
 ting circumstances,' which probably would not have failed of 
 better success with a French jury at the present day. The 
 robber of Malouet's writing-desk having been caught, and 
 having confessed the robbery, Malouet was informed that in 
 such cases, of what was legally described as vol avec effrac- 
 tion, the practice was to hang the malefactor before the door 
 of the house he had robbed. This in Paris, in the ieaw 
 milieu of the eighteenth century ! It remin«ls us of the 
 mode of executing Highland justice, proposed about the same 
 period by the gracious Captain Duncan of Knockdunder. 
 ' He would hang the men up all three in one row before coot 
 Leddy Staunton's windows, which would be a creat comfort 
 to her in the morning to see that the coot shentleman, her 
 husband, had been suitably afenged.' 
 
 Malouet addressed himself in vain to M. de Sartine to 
 deviate from the usual mode of proceeding in this instance. 
 He next had recourse to the intercession of Madame Adelaide, 
 daughter of Louis XV. ; and the thief, instead of being 
 hanged, was imprisoned in the Bic^tre. On the death of 
 Louis XV., the benevolent Malesherbes, who had come into 
 the ministry, made a philanthropic tour of the prisons, 
 under the impression that he should find cases of abuse of 
 power. Malouet's thief contrived to persuade him that he 
 was unjustly imprisoned on mere suspicion, and Malesherbes 
 set him at liberty, his first use of which was to threaten 
 proceedings against his former master for false imprisonment, 
 and claim back his money. Sartine laughed heartily at the 
 merciful man's recompense ; and the thief's previous written 
 confession having been looked up, the police were again set 
 on his traces, for he had disappeared after his strange 
 bravado, and some six months after he was recaptured and 
 replaced in the BicStre. Malouet relates another incident 
 which is truly shocking, and which occurred a good many 
 years after, in 1 785, while he was Intendant of the Civil 
 Department of Naval Administration at Toulon. 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 217 
 
 ' On the arrival of D'Estaign's squadron [from the West Indies] 
 I had no money to pay off the crew, to whom an enormous amount of 
 pay was owing. Marshal de Castries, the minister, was as much 
 at a loss as myself, and sent me a small sum on account, the first 
 claimants on which were the ship-captaina. I could not bring 
 myself to discharge the sailors without paying them ; but many of 
 these unfortunate men, dreading the contagious fever their ships had 
 brought back with them from the West Indies, and impatient to 
 return to their homes, went off without leave and without money. 
 Want compelled them to stop passengers on the high roads, and six 
 of them having been taken, and tried at Aix, were sentenced to 
 breaking on the wheel, when their last words on the scaffold were — 
 " If we had been paid what was owed us, we should not be here now." 
 The deplorable fate and last words of these men,' says Malouet, ' drove 
 me to despair. I went to Marseilles, borrowed 100,000 crowns, and 
 paid off the crews. M. de Castries, who was not less afflicted than 
 myself at what had happened, approved my conduct, and enabled me 
 to repay the loan I had raised.' 
 
 The feeling was excellent ; but what is to be said of a 
 Government which had money for every extravagance of the 
 Court and none for the public service ? 
 
 The good company of the salons ha.d objections of other 
 kinds to everything established. The aimahles oisifs — ' the 
 hundred thousand people who had nothing to do but di- 
 vert themselves ' — regarded the established religion as a 
 most irksome pedagogue — always scolding, always hostile to 
 the pleasures of the senses and the use of the reason. The 
 established principles of sexual morality, sneered at as la 
 morale hourgeoise, were another stumbling-block and rock of 
 offence to the Eichelieus, Lauzuns, Tillys — in short, to all 
 that world of libertine gallantry for whom irregularity was 
 the sole rule of life — who were well pleased to learn from the 
 lips of their pet philosophers that marriage was a conven- 
 tional prejudice, and well prepared to applaud Saint-Lambert 
 when, raising a glass of champagne to his lips, at a supper 
 at Mademoiselle Quinault's, the actress (where Madame 
 d'Epinay was one of the guests, and reports the trait), he 
 gave as a toast, ' The return to Nature, and the manners of 
 Otaheite ! ' 
 
 The long robe and even the cassock in the high places of 
 
218 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 the hierarchy were in those days under no more restraint 
 than the laced coat. M. Taine quotes the following passage 
 from the unpublished reminiscences of an ex-Parlementaire, 
 whom, he says, he is not at liberty to name : — ' When I 
 entered the world, in 1785, 1 was introduced at once to the 
 wives and mistresses of the friends of my family, and passed 
 my evenings alternately in the soirees of the former and those 
 of the latter. And I was not eighteen ! And I belonged to 
 a family of hereditary rank and standing in the magistracy ! ' 
 From the lives of Church dignitaries in old France it would 
 not be diificult to infer their principles. But in most cases, 
 says M. Taine, we are spared the trouble of inference. M. 
 de Brienne, Archbishop of Sens, and afterwards of Toulouse 
 — last minister but one, and the most feeble and fatal minis- 
 ter of Louis XVI. before the meeting of the States-General ; 
 M. de Talleyrand, Bishop of Autun ; the Abbe Maury, who 
 became the most eminent champion of the Church in the 
 Constituent Assembly, were notorious sceptics. Another 
 (lay) sceptic, Eivarol, affirms that, on the eve of the Eevo- 
 lution, the clergy (the dignified clergy) equalled in enlighten- 
 ment the philosophers. And the Archbishop of Narbonne, 
 in describing the resistance of the higher clergy in 1 791 to 
 the political attacks on the Church, describes that resistance 
 not to steadfastness in the faith, but sense of professional 
 honour. ' We behaved at that epoch,' he says, ' like true 
 gentlemen, for most of us could not be said to be actuated 
 by principles of religion.' The chief ministers of religion hav- 
 ing thus, as it were, tacitly acknowledged her throne vacant, 
 we come to inquire what new spiritual powers had supplanted 
 those still ostensibly, and still legally, dominant. In other 
 words, what was the ruling French philosophy of the eigh- 
 teenth century? 
 
 There were two philosophies which successively swayed 
 opinion in the course of that century — the laughing, satiris- 
 ing, and scoffing philosophy of Voltaire, and the larmoyante, 
 sentimental, and rhetorical philosophy of Eousseau. The 
 former held undisputed ascendency in the first half, the 
 latter contested it in the second half of the century. Vol- 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 219 
 
 taire's light artillery of satire and criticism was long ascen- 
 dant above all rivalry in the salons. Rousseau's strange 
 combination of philanthropy and misanthropy first made a 
 new sensation in the salons, and — what was more momentous 
 — first stirred the passions of the people. It is scarcely an 
 exaggeration to say that the character and writings of 
 Eousseau were the most important and influential moral 
 phenomena of the eighteenth century. They struck the key- 
 note of Revolution ; they woke the responsive vibrations of 
 every aspiring and every revolting heart in France. Every- 
 thing that was uttered, in speech or writing, on the popular 
 side, during the brief but passionate period of revolutionary 
 ascendency, consisted of mere variations on the original theme 
 of Eousseau. 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ou la mort,' 
 had summarised the whole democratic doctrine of the 
 ' Contrat Social ' before coming to form the watchword of 
 Robespierre's Reign of Virtue and Terror. 
 
 The curious thing is that Rousseau, in enunciating that 
 astounding dogma, distinctly guarded it, like his other moral 
 and social paradoxes, from all supposition of applicability 
 anywhere but in small and simple communities. The Jacobins 
 seized on the dogma, and ignored the reservations : — 
 
 ' I find two men,' says M. Saint-Marc Girardin, ' in the " Contrat 
 Social," tlie one prudent and moderate, the other daring and despotic. 
 Which of the two has most excited attention — which of the two has 
 chiefly furnished contemporaries and posterity with political watch- 
 words ? One must know mankind very little to suppose that the 
 good sense was what it listened to — that the paradox was what it cast 
 aside and rejected. Men are caught by audacity, and only return to 
 good sense when they are at last fatigued and disgusted with paradox.' 
 
 In all Rousseau's writings, as the same intelligent and 
 impartial critic, the late Saint-Marc Girardin, truly says, his 
 tactic was to begin with some startling singularity, in order 
 to arrive in the end at some sensible and sober common- 
 place. In his lucid intervals he had much less of the inno- 
 vator than of the reactionist against speculative innovation. 
 Every one found this out who wrote or talked to him as if 
 
220 THE OtD REGIME IN FEANCE jiND ITS FALL. 
 
 he held in earnest those of his published opinions which first 
 attracted public attention and admiration. When George 
 III. rallied Wilkes on his demagogue antecedents, on some 
 occasion of his attendance at Court as City Chamberlain, his 
 reply was — ' Tour Majesty, I never was a Wilkite.' Eous- 
 seau was, in effect, continually answering all who came or 
 wrote to consult him about education, suicide, or State in- 
 stitutions, that he never was a Eousseauite. 
 
 The epoch at which Rousseau awoke one morning and 
 found himself famous was that of the publication of his first 
 paradoxical ' Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts.' Rousseau 
 himself says that his idea of declaring war against all art and 
 all science first flashed on him while walking to Vincennes 
 to visit Diderot, who was imprisoned there. Instantaneously 
 on the thought striking him, he says he threw himself on 
 the grass in the avenue of that fortress, and lay there half- 
 an-hour in a state of such agitation that, when he got up 
 again, he found the front of his waistcoat all wetted with 
 his tears, without the least consciousness of having shed 
 them. A preternatural inundation ! Laharpe tells a different 
 story, and the truth was perhaps somewhere between the 
 two. When Rousseau, he says, told Diderot of the question 
 proposed for a prize by the Academy of Dijon — 'Whether 
 the progress of the arts and sciences has contributed to 
 corrupt or purify manners ? ' — Diderot asked him, ' Which 
 side are you going to take?' 'I am going,' said Rousseau, 
 ' to demonstrate that the progress of art and science purifies 
 manners.' ' Eh ! that is the pons asinorum,' rejoined Diderot. 
 ' Tahe the other side — you will make a noise du diahle ! ' 
 Rousseau took the other side, and the prophecy of his friend 
 was more than fulfilled. His ' Discours,' besides being 
 ' couronne,' made a noise de tons les diahles. 
 
 We should be unjust to Rousseau, as well as to the mul- 
 titude of his sectaries, male and female, including such a 
 respected name as Malesherbes — succeeded as they are, in 
 these times, by admirers of his genius and writings more 
 limited in numbers, more limited still in devotion — if we 
 ascribed to the mere sensation excited by systematic paradox 
 
THE OLD EEGIME IN FEANCE AND ITS FALL. 221 
 
 the influence of the ideas he was the first to promulgate in 
 direct opposition to the fashionable philosophy of his time. 
 The deeper source of Rousseau's immense influence over the 
 mind and heart of his age was his impassioned appeal to 
 Nature, and the Eeligion of Nature, against modes of 
 thought, and still more modes of life which had become 
 estranged from both. 
 
 Chamfort, the most petted author, and the most en- 
 venomed enemy, of the Court of Louis XVI. in its last years, 
 describes a courtier, M. de V., as saying, ' So rare is any real 
 sensation or sentiment, that, returning from Versailles, I stop 
 sometimes in the streets to look at a dog gnawing a bone.' 
 Not only the outside but the inside of every life, says M. 
 Taine, was factitious. There was what Kant might have 
 called a ' categorical imperative ' — imposed by the fashion of 
 an age which, in society at least, had reversed the Salic law 
 and made Woman queen — not only on the precise correct 
 manner of walking, sitting, saluting, picking up a glove, or 
 presenting an object — but equally on the manner of thinking, 
 feeling, living, and dying. This reminds us of the judgment 
 passed on the death-bed of Talleyrand in those Parisian circles 
 which preserved the traditions of the last century in the 
 present : ' II est mort en homme qui savait vivre.' 
 
 What could bring a little natural heat into French life 
 in the last century ? Voltaire did not feel the want of it ; 
 Diderot and Rousseau did, and each in his way, the latter 
 with marked success, addressed themselves to supply it. But 
 Diderot, as the Patriarch of Perney truly said, was an over- 
 heated oven, which burned whatever it baked. Rousseau, 
 too, brought strange fire upon French hearths and altars. 
 Still it was an immense merit in his own day and generation 
 to remind Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of such things as 
 hearths and altars. Rousseau brought God and the Child 
 into fashion — after a fashion of his own. His new accents 
 of passion and sentiment, in an age of mere gallantry, took 
 women by storm; nay, he even made it the fashion for 
 women to nurse and caress their children. In a less vicious 
 age, his Heloise would scarcely have passed for a paragon of 
 
222 THE OLD EEGIME IN EEANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 feminine excellence, nor his Savoyard vicar for a perfect 
 pattern of life and doctrine. But Eonsseau's female models, 
 whom no idealism could invest with refinement, had been 
 Madame de Warens, and his servant-maid mistress, Therese. 
 And Rousseau's Savoyard vicar was himself, with his most 
 besetting frailties. However, all things are relative, and 
 there was an upward look towards good morals in life- 
 pictures which portrayed, at least, better morals than those 
 of Crebillon fils in fiction, or of Richelieu or Lauzun in 
 fact : — 
 
 ' What to us seems gross,' says M. Saint-Mavc Girardin,' 'in the 
 " Nouvelle Heloise," may be regarded as a commencement of com- 
 parative purity at the time it came out ; and the loves of Julie and 
 Saint-Preux, which we should have liked more delicate, seemed 
 almost too delicate as compared with those depicted by Crebillon 
 fiZs. All depends on what point one starts from. To anyone who 
 starts from the petites maisons of the Regency, the Charmettes might 
 seem a Reformatory, and the groves of Clarens a sanctuary. The 
 eighteenth century, tired of the monotony of its libertine novels, felt 
 obliged to Rousseau for setting pictures before it on which the eye 
 might rest without the cheek blushing. As Rousseau painted love 
 in another manner than his precursors, he received credit for painting 
 a higher and purer love. The amorous hero and heroine of the 
 Heloise passed almost for Platonic, because they were not libertine.' 
 
 The publication of ' Heloise ' at once established sensi- 
 bility as the universal passion — or fashion : — 
 
 ' Into every detail of life,' says M. Taine, ' sensibility drags its 
 emphasis. One builds in his park a little temple to Friendship; 
 another sets up in her boudoir a little altar to Beneficence ; a third 
 adopts a costume d, la Jean-Jacques Rousseau, analogous to the prin- 
 ciples of that author ; others select for head-dress poufs au sentiment, 
 where may be placed portraits of one's daughter, of one's mother, of 
 one's canary, of one's pet dog, with hair of one's father, or one's ami 
 de coeur for garnish. The ladies have their female friends de cmur 
 too, for whom they feel " something so deep and so tender, as to 
 amount really to passion," and whom they cannot live without meet- 
 ing at least thrice in the day. It is the fashion especially for every 
 woman, at the sight of M. de Voltaire, to be suddenly afiected with an 
 
 ' Saint-Maro Girardin, Moiisseau, vol i. p. 198. 
 
THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 223 
 
 all-over-ishness — to throw themselves into his arms, stammer, weep, 
 and fall into a state of emotion, exhibiting all the symptoms of the 
 most passionate love. When an author of fashion reads a piece in a 
 salon, it is the correct thing for ladies to explode in cries and sobs, 
 and for at least one fainting fair to need unlacing. Madame de 
 Genlis, who laughs at all these affectations, adds a few of her own. 
 She would suddenly call out in the middle of a large party to the 
 young orphan she matronised and exhibited — " Pamela, do H^loise !" 
 And thereupon Pamela, to the applause of the whole assembly, would 
 let down her hair, kneel, and lift up her eyes to heaven with a look of 
 inspiration. Sensibility, in fact, had become an institution.' 
 
 It might be added that Revolution was soon to make it 
 acquainted with strange bedfellows. M. Taine tells us that 
 the first number of the ' Mercure ' that appeared after the 
 massacres of September 1792 contained in its first column 
 an elegy — 
 
 ' AUX MANES DE MON SEEIN ! ' 
 
 It is truly remarked by M. Saint-Marc Girardin, that the 
 writings of Rousseau teem with the strangest contradictions 
 a human soul could exhibit. His ' Emile,' like his previous 
 paradoxical discourses against the arts and sciences, breathed 
 a spirit of independent, almost savage, individualism; 
 whereas in his ' Contrat Social,' which the passions of the 
 coming time converted into a grim gospel of Jacobinism, 
 Rousseau denudes the individual man of all independence 
 whatever— strips him successively, in the assumed interest of 
 the State, of every individual right. He takes away from 
 him that of family, that of property, and, to complete his 
 subjection to the State, he takes away from him even the 
 right of cultivating any personal relation with his Grod. 
 Rousseau's Citizen (he was the first to import that title into 
 Prance from Geneva) receives from the State a God and a 
 religion of State fabric, as he receives from the State all his 
 other rights and all his other sentiments. 
 
 The political writings of Rousseau, more than any other 
 single influence, determined the peculiar political character 
 of the French Revolution. And the political system of 
 Rousseau may be shortly stated as the system of Hobbes 
 
224 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS PALL. 
 
 democratised — an eighteentli-ceiitury edition of the Levia- 
 than ad usum plehis. Never was there a more complete code 
 of despotism than that which was laid down with the method 
 of madness in the ' Contrat Social ; ' and that code was not 
 less Draconic in its sanctions than despotic in its character.' 
 Louis XIV. had pronounced L'Etat, c'est moi ! and the Paris 
 populace, when it had learned the politics of Rousseau from 
 Robespierre, alike assumed to itself the whole power of the 
 State in the abused name of the nation. Rousseau had 
 expressly declared the will of the nation at all moments 
 sovereign. He had declared that, in the exercise of that 
 sovereignty, no rule could be prescribed to it, whether it 
 should adhere to-day to its will of yesterday, or change it. 
 But in a great country, to ascertain or collect the will of the 
 whole people at any moment being impossible, it followed 
 by revolutionary logic that the nearest populace on every 
 emergent occasion assumed itself, as a matter of course, to 
 be the people, and imposed its will on the central or local 
 powers for law. Rousseau had long been a wilful and sys- 
 tematic paradox-monger before he became a maniac; but 
 never, in his wildest or wilfuUest illusions, could he have 
 dreamed that the Civil Religion, set forth in his new version 
 of democratic Hobbism, would so soon, with the pikes of the 
 populace for its secular arm, have its Reign of Terror in 
 France. 
 
 Could tlie spirit of Burke revisit the sphere of earthly 
 politics, it would be to find reproduced by the ablest pens of 
 France all those darkest lineaments of the French Revolu- 
 tion which drew down on him, when first prophetically traced 
 in his immortal ' Reflections,' the loud and angry protests of 
 those who claimed in his day to stand forth as the special 
 
 ' The ' Contrat Social ' provided for the establishment of a civil religio?i 
 (destined to be idly parodied in Robespierre's ' F^te de I'Etre Supreme ') one 
 article of which was the sacredness of the ' Contrat Social ' and its derivative 
 laws. This new religion was to be maintained in observance by a new Inqui- 
 sition. ' If anyone,' it was laid down, ' after having publicly subscribed to 
 these doctrinesj conducts himself as if he did not believe them, let him be 
 pujiislied with death ; he has committed the greatest of crimes : "il a menti 
 d<ivant les lois." ' 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN EEANCE AND ITS FALL. 225 
 
 and exclusive representatives of Liberal principles. From 
 France itself come the most emphatic testimonies to the 
 truth of every vFord Burke uttered on the nature and por- 
 tents of her vast volcanic upheaval. Whether we turn to 
 the calm philosophic pages of Tocqueville — to those of the 
 late Prevost-Paradol, Edgar Quinet, Eenan, Le Play, Janet, 
 or last, not least, M. Taine — all alike abjure the politics of 
 popular despotism, which the great Apostle of Vanity, as 
 Burke designated Rousseau, worked so powerfully to render 
 supreme in France. All alike trace mainly to the political 
 religion of the ' Contrat Social ' the specific shape assumed 
 there by democratic anarchy and democratic dictatorship 
 and terrorism. And the concurrent tribute to the insight 
 and foresight of our illustrious countryman is the more 
 remarkable as the less conscious and intentional. There 
 has been on the part of recent French writers on their 
 great Revolution no conscious concurrence in raising a 
 monument to Burke. Not the less effectively have they 
 assisted in raising it — not the, less will it stand perennial 
 and colossal. 
 
 Where Burke's view of the French Revolution was in- 
 complete, was in his perception, not of its nature, but of 
 its sources. These we have endeavoured to illustrate from 
 the abundant materials before us. The eminent critical 
 faculty which M. Taine had amply proved in his former 
 works, comes out conspicuously in the lucid view pre- 
 sented in his present volume of the special adaptation of 
 the French philosophy of the last century to satisfy the 
 fastidious conversational tastes of a very intelligent, but very 
 superficial, upper-public, and the utter incompetence of the 
 raison raisonnante alone cultivated by that public to explore 
 the historical antecedents and actual conditions of the life of 
 a nation, and therefore to form any sound or trustworthy 
 judgment what changes its political and social constitution 
 might need or could bear. The world of that day, says 
 M. Taine, for want of comprehending the past did not com- 
 prehend the present ; had no accurate idea of the peasant, 
 the working man, the provincial bourgeois, or even of the 
 
226 THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 provincial noble. All these figures they saw half-eflfaced 
 bj distance, transformed and embellished by philosophical 
 theories and the haze of sentiment. Jacques Bonhomme let 
 them know who he was presently, and he is letting every 
 one again know who he is now. He is the overwhelmingly 
 preponderant Constituent Power of France, by grace of 
 Universal Suffrage. 
 
 The following observation of Dumont, in his ' Souvenirs 
 sur Mirabeau,' on the causes of the French Revolution (he 
 would have expressed himself more correctly by saying on 
 the causes which siamped on the French Revolution its 
 special and distinctive characters of sophistry and atrocity) 
 is pregnant with much matter for reflection : — 
 
 People argue without end about the causes of the Revolution. In 
 my opinion, it had only one determining and efficient cause — the 
 character of the king. Substitute for Louis XVI. a monarch of firm 
 and decided character, and the Revolution would not have taken 
 place. 
 
 Dumont should have said — such a revolution would not 
 have taken place as that which fatally developed itself. 
 
 ' His whole reign,' proceeds Dumont, ' had no other effect than that 
 of bringing it on. There was no time during the first [Constituent] 
 Assembly at which the king, could he but have changed his cha- 
 racter, might not have recovered his authority, and established a mixed 
 constitution, firmer and mare solid than ever had been the parlia- 
 mentary and nobiliary monarchy of France. His indecision, his weak- 
 ness, his half-councils, his half-measures, ruined everything. Secondary 
 causes did but develop that first cause. When the prince is weak, 
 courtiers become intriguing, demagogues insolent, the people auda- 
 cious. Honest men are intimidated, able men discouraged, the best 
 advice followed to no fruitful issue. A king who should have shown 
 dignity and energy of character would have drawn towards himseK 
 all who, as matters went, took part against him. The Lafayettes, 
 the Lameths, the Mirabeaus, the Si^yfes, would not even have con- 
 ceived the idea of playing the part which they actually did play; and, 
 having been set to work on quite another plan, would have seemed 
 quite other men.' 
 
 In all revolutions there are two principal factors. First, 
 a general change which has taken place in men's minds, 
 
THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 227 
 
 necessarily drawing after it some corresponding change in 
 their social relations. Such a general revolution of mind 
 was already accomplished in France, even before the ac- 
 cession of Louis XVI. to the throne. Secondly, the charac- 
 ters and passions of men, and the posture of affairs at the 
 final epoch when organic reforms in the State force them- 
 selves on for discussion and adoption'. It is perfectly true 
 that Louis XVI. 's whole reign tended to bring on revolution ; 
 but it is equally true that this tendency was in men's minds 
 before it was in public measures. The whole question was 
 whether the King's Government should show itself able to 
 take a decided initiative in those measures which the temper 
 of the times required ; and in old France those measures 
 must in substance have been revolutionary, however appear- 
 ances might and ought to have been saved in form ; or 
 whether it should wait till the initiative was taken out of 
 its hands by the people — or rather by the agitators who had 
 . the ear of the people — whether reforms should be planned 
 by statesmen or dictated by demagogues. It is quite true, 
 as Dumont says, that the one thing needful in 1789 was a 
 king of firm and decided character. The king's name was 
 the sole tower of strength left in France ; and a king who 
 should have felt that strength, a,nd discerned its use, might 
 have saved France from the sinister turn of events that 
 followed. Even Louis XV., in his last enfeebled years, had 
 struck a successful coup d'etat by abolishing the parlements 
 and setting up a new judicatux-e in their stead — a good rid- 
 dance of the arrogant pretensions to political power in those 
 bodies, and a good clearance of the ground for a genuine 
 constitutional system. True, Louis XV. and his chancellor 
 Maupeou had struck down the parlements in the sole interest 
 of despotism. But not less true that Louis XVI., with a 
 Ma(7hault or Turgot beside him, might have raised some 
 more substantial structure of political liberties on the site 
 whence these turbulent and antiquated assemblies had been 
 thus summarily swept away. One of the first steps, how- 
 ever, of the young monarch on his accession, under the 
 plausible and popularity-seeking misguidance of Maurepas, 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 THE OLD EEGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 was to restore the parlements, and again gratuitously expose 
 the measures of the King's G-overnment to the fitful and 
 capricious opposition of those inept and irresponsible bodies. 
 When the Chancellor Maupeou's dismissal from the ministry- 
 was announced to him by the Duke de la Vrilliere, he con- 
 tented himself with saying, - J'avais fait gainer un grand 
 f races au roi, il veut remettre en question ce qui etait decide ; 
 il en est le maitre.' 
 
 We have ourselves little doubt that if instead of Louis 
 XVI. there had mounted the throne of France, in 1774, a 
 king possessed of the political genius of Mirabeau, the pure 
 public spirit of Turgot, with the sword of Frederick II. of 
 Prussia in his hand, and with. Frederick's army at his back, 
 such a king might have impressed on the French Revolution 
 what direction be pleased — except a retrograde one into the 
 old orniere of aristocratic privilege and plebeian oppression. 
 But was it to be expected that a prince born in the purple, 
 brought up amidst those empty forms of Court ceremonial 
 which Louis XIV. had taught the nobility of France to 
 regard as the main duties they had to discharge to their 
 king and country — was it to be expected that one who did 
 not wield the sword of Frederick, nor was backed by such 
 an army so officered and so disciplined as that which 
 Frederick's father had placed at his absolute disposal, should, 
 at the crisis of the fate of France and of Europe, have had 
 energy to impose, or power to enforce, submission alike on 
 aristocratic arrogance and democratic impatience ? Louis 
 XVI. would have needed both a firm will and a reliable 
 force — neither of which he possessed--to have taken suc- 
 cessfully the initiative in carrying out that royal revolution 
 which he had in effect commenced when he called together 
 the StatesTGeneral. 
 
 At that momentous epoch France displayed the double 
 phenomenon, elsewhere unparalleled, of a moneyed class 
 malcontent in proportion to their investments in public 
 securities, and a landed class revolutionary in proportion to 
 their purchases of landed property. Paris furnished three 
 distinct contingents to the grand army of national discontent, 
 
THE OLD RjfiaiME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 229 
 
 ■which had been everywhere recruiting' from about the middle 
 of the eighteenth century. First, the frondeuse philosophy 
 of the Liberal-aristocratic salons. Secondly, the increasing 
 ill-temper of a moneyed bourgeoisie, galled in its roturier 
 self-respect by the irrepressible insolence of the Court nobles, 
 and alarmed for its investments, which had become con-: 
 siderable, in Government securities by the perpetual pros- 
 pect of recurrence to the old royal resource of bankruptcy. 
 Thirdly, the turbulent element, comparatively of recent 
 growth, of a large proUtaire population, whose numbers in 
 the metropolis are calculated to have been doubled during 
 the reign of Louis XVI. by the exceptional franchises ac- 
 corded in that reign to the manufacturing faubourgs. And 
 beneath and behind these metropolitan hotbeds of revolution 
 lay that vast subject stratum of twenty millions of Trench 
 peasants, the last to receive, but, when once fairly aroused, 
 the most formidable recipients of that impulse to change 
 which, for a whole generation at least, all classes above them 
 seemed emulously eager to give. Peasant penuriousness 
 had, in many instances, scraped together the means to pur- 
 chase the lands which noble prodigality found itself forced 
 to. sell. But, as the bourgeois fundholder felt no conser- 
 vative sense of safety in his public securities, so the peasant 
 landowner had no unvexed enjoyment of his newly acquired 
 property. He might be said to have acquired little else 
 than extended liability to the double and overwhelming 
 pressure of seigneurial dues and government taxes. 
 
 In this state of things the tranquil insouciance of the 
 privileged orders seemed proof to all portents. 
 
 ' Ifever,' says M. Taine, ' was blindness move wilful and more 
 total. The Duke of Orleans offered to bet a hundred louis that 
 the States- General would separate without doing anything — without 
 even abolishing lettres de cachet. After the work of demolition was 
 actually commenced — nay, after it was consummated — the privileged 
 orders arrived at no more correct judgments. They had no idea of 
 what the social edifice was ; they had never put a hand to it. They 
 ended by thinking that it would be best to let it fall completely, 
 without an effort to save it. It would not fail to rebuild itself of its 
 own accord — they should not fail to re-enter their salons restored and 
 
230 THE OLD REGIME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 
 
 regilt, and recommence the agreeable conversation interrupted for the 
 moment by an accident — a street-tumult. Clear-sighted in society, 
 . their eyes were dim in politics. They saw everything admirably by 
 the artificial light of wax-candles, but natural daylight confused and 
 dazzled them. Their visual organs, applied so long to the delicate 
 details of polished life, had no clear apprehension of popular life — the 
 life of the masses ; and in the new element in which they found 
 themselves suddenly plunged, the very fineness of microscopic percep- 
 tion they possessed destroyed their insight. 
 
 ' It was necessary however to act, for danger was at their door, at 
 their throats. But the danger was a danger of an ignoble description, 
 and their education afforded them no appropriate arms against it. 
 They had learned fencing, but not boxing. To engage in conflicts 
 with porters and poissardes, to take their antagonist at the club by 
 the collar, to harangue at street corners, to bring fists and cudgels 
 to bear on the brutes and madmen who employed no other argument 
 than that of physical force (as the jeunesse doree did with good effect 
 at a later epoch), to take up the truncheon of special constable, to 
 spare neither their own skin nor the skins of others, to confront the 
 common people in the guise of common people — these were simple 
 and effective modes of proceeding. But to have recourse to them did 
 not even enter into the heads of well-bred persons ; they neither knew 
 how nor chose to make use of their hands for such work. Such a 
 thing was never seen as for a gentleman arrested in his own house to 
 break the head of the Jacobin clubbistwho arrested him. To make a 
 disturbance or scene of any kind would have been bad taste. For 
 them the first consideration was to remain what they were, gens de 
 bonne compagnie. In prison, men and women dressed with care, paid 
 and received visits, held salons at the end of the corridor by the light 
 of four candles. No matter ; they could exchange pleasantries, de- 
 vise madrigals, sing songs, pique themselves on being as gay and 
 gallant as ever. Must one become morose and ill-bred merely because 
 one finds oneself accidentally lodged in a bad inn ? Before their revo- 
 lutionary judges — on the cart to the guillotine — they retained their 
 smile and dignity. Women in particular went to the scaffold with as 
 much ease and serenity as though they were going to a soirfe. 
 
 Wlien the sword of Prance fell from the feeble hand of 
 Louis XVI. the question for the future was, What firmer 
 hand should finally grasp it ? When Authority ceases to 
 command traditional respect, Force alone can compel obe- 
 dience. Force, indeed, is the ultima ratio of all authority ; 
 but where the legitimacy of the established powers of the 
 
THE OLD REG-IME IN FRANCE AND ITS FALL. 231 
 
 State has not been called in question — where the continuity 
 of the national existence has not been broken — force never 
 nakedly occupies the foreground of the political scene. The 
 Yalne of the sanction of time and usage to authority is not 
 felt till it is lost. It was lost to the old monarchy of Prance 
 in July 1789, and its armed substitute was not effectively 
 established till November 1799 — the epoch of the 18th 
 Brumaire. Within those ten years the wheel of Revolution 
 had run full circle — the advocate's tongue and the popular 
 jonrnalist's pen had finally given place to the Soldier of 
 Fortune's sword. 
 
232 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 1. Sistowe de la Terrew, 1792-1794, d'apres des Documents Authentiques et 
 
 Inedits. Par Mortimer-Ternaux, Membre de I'lnstitut. Vols. I.-VII. 
 Paris, 1869. 
 
 2. Tableaux de la Revolution JPranqaise : publies sur les Papiers Inedits du 
 
 Bepartement et de la Police Secrete de Paris. Par Adolphe Schmidt, Pro- 
 fesseur d'Histoire &, rUniversit^ de J6na. 3 vols. Leipzic, 1867-1870. 
 
 3. La Demagogic en 1793 a Paris ; ou JSistoire, jov/r par jour, de V Annie 1793, 
 
 accompagnee de Documents contemporains rares ou inedits, recueiUis, mis 
 en ordre, et commentes. Par C. A. Dauban. Ouvrage enrichi de seize 
 gravures, &c. Paris, 1868. 
 i. Pa/ris en 1794 et en 1795; Histoire de la Rue, du Chib, de la Famine; 
 composee d^apres des Documents inedits, partioulierement les Rapports de 
 Police et les Registres du Comite de Salut Public. Avec une Introduction 
 par C. A. Dauban. Ouvrage enriobi de gravures du temps et d'un fac- 
 simile. Paris, 1869.' 
 
 Febnoh Revolution history (it was liigli time !) is being re- 
 written. Professor Von Sybel, in Germany, is bringing to 
 completion his comprehensive survey of the history of the 
 Revolution Era in France, and the contre-coup of that tre- 
 mendous explosion in Europe. , The valuable work of M. 
 Mortimer-Ternaux has been interrupted by his untimely 
 death; but where it breaks off — at the fall of the Gironde — 
 the publications of Professor A. Schmidt, of Jena, and of M. 
 Dauban take up the thread of the history of the Terror, and 
 effectively contribute, each in his way, to the picture of a 
 great capital and a civilised country subjected to what M. 
 Thiers has called the sombre and ragged rule of the multi- 
 tude. 
 
 Professor Schmidt and M. Dauban are both literary in- 
 vestigators of that useful class who make it their business to 
 
 ' From the Qua/rterly Review, July 1872. 
 
THB EEIGN OF TEEROE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 233 
 
 ' attend to tlie neglected and remember the forgotten.' The 
 former takes precedence (at least in date and singleness of 
 scope) in a field of research in which both have been employ- 
 ing their time and pains very serviceably to future historians 
 of the French Revolution, viz., in bringing under the light of 
 publicity, for the first time, the reports of the police ' obser- 
 vateurs ' (Anglice, spies) kept in pay by the ephemeral holders 
 of power, or at least of office, during its successive phases. 
 Professor Schmidt's protracted labours in the reproduction of 
 the police records of that period — which had lain undisturbed 
 ever since the epoch at which they were penned, in their 
 dusty official cartons in the central Archives of France, 
 formerly entitled 'Archives of the Kingdom,' afterwards 
 ' Archives of the Republic,' to-day (1867) ' Archives of the 
 Empire,' and on the morrow, we may add, of that day (1871) 
 again ' Archives of the Republic ' (who knows what new name 
 to bear on the morrow of that morrow?) — will furnish 
 materials of very substantial value to the future historian of 
 the Revolution, and have already, we are told by Professor 
 Schmidt, in the preface to his third volume, been charac- 
 terised, to his lively gratification, as ' precious ' by M. 
 Mortimer- Ternaux, ' the truly critical author of the " Histoire 
 de la Terreur." ' 
 
 The two very curious and interesting volumes published 
 by M. Dauban, entitled respectively 'La Demagogie en 1793 
 a Paris,' and ' Paris en 1794 et en 1795,' &c., are drawn, in 
 like manner, from documents of the time, but of more mis- 
 cellaneous character, and owe much of their entertaining 
 quality to the somewhat indiscriminate variety of their 
 sources. For our present purpose we shall chiefly concern 
 ourselves with those portions of them which, like the bulk of 
 the contents of Professor Schmidt's volumes, consist of the 
 secret communications which paid ' observateurs ' then, as at 
 more remote and more recent periods, were in the habit of 
 making to their patrons and employers in office of all they 
 could collect, by poking about in all quarters of Paris, of 
 the state of popular opinion and feeling on men and things 
 generally, and with special reference to the question which 
 
234 THE EEIGN OF TEEROE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 ReTolution placed most in jeopardy — tlie daily question of 
 daily bread. 
 
 The twofold character of French Eevolutionism, from its 
 birth-hour to the present day — that which renders its move- 
 ments apparently endless in their recurrence as fruitless in 
 their results — is one which seems, at first sight, self -con- 
 tradictory — combining the most outrageous contempt for law 
 with the most implicit submission to any and every ephemeral 
 usurping public power that does but assume the insignia, no 
 matter how conferred, of legal authority. But the contradic- 
 tion vanishes when it is remembered that contempt for law 
 was for ages a royal prerogative, and submission to the 
 delegates of the lawless power of the Crown the habit of the 
 people. Law, for ages in France, had neither supplied the 
 sanction nor prescribed the limits of obedience ; royal func- 
 tionaries had acted as the delegated depositaries of absolute 
 power ; and when these became revolutionary, they did not 
 lose their habit of lawless absolutism, nor did the subject 
 masses shake off theirs of servile and implicit obedience. 
 The well-meant effort of the Constituent Assembly to de- 
 centralise and distribute public powers through every grade 
 of official hierarchy, and every field of local action, only pro- 
 duced a multiplication of petty potentates, each doing what 
 seemed good in his own eyes, and exerting himself, to the 
 extent of his influence or impudence, to make all around him 
 do what seemed good in his eyes likewise. Every petty 
 municipal, newly entitled to tie a scarf on his shoulder, held 
 himself therewith entitled to wield unlimited and irresponsible 
 powers, so far as he could get unscarved citizens to obey 
 them. And this habit of French functionarism of exerting a 
 vigour beyond the law survives down to our day. 
 
 The two years' terror of 1792-4, like the two months' 
 terror of 1871, was the work of a set of men who themselves 
 acknowledged that they did not represent France, and of 
 whom it may be affirmed, with equal certainty, that they did 
 not represent Paris.' Having seized power by surprise, they 
 
 ' ' The Jacobins,' says Yon Sybel, in his History of the Revolution Time, 
 vol. Iv. 0. 5, ' could not conceal this fact from themselves. "All France is 
 
THE REIGN OF TEREOE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 235 
 
 could only hope to keep it by terrorism. They had against 
 them large — we can scarcely say decided — majorities in two 
 successive Assemblies — first in the Legislative Assembly, 
 afterwards in the National Convention — though the latter 
 body was elected under the terrifying impression of the Sep- 
 tember massacres, planned and executed by the usurping 
 insurrectionary Commune of Paris, its parliamentary or ex- 
 parliamentary leaders in the background, and its subsidised 
 satellites in the lowest dregs of the Paris populace. 
 
 The sovereignty of Paris, involving that of France, was 
 usurped in a single night — that of the 9th-10th of August, 
 1792 — by a knot of conspirators calling themselves the com- 
 missaries of the forty-eight sections, which a recent decree 
 of the Legislative Assembly had most suicidally constituted 
 en permanence, and thus rendered just so many available 
 rallying points for perpetual commotion. The majority of 
 the sections on that night, as M. Mortimer- Ternaux has 
 shown by documentary evidence, elected no commissaries 
 at all, and the remainder, with a few ardent revolutionary 
 exceptions, were represented by a mere fraction of their 
 members — knots of conspirators assembling in the dead hours 
 of the night — a real electoral coup d'Stat against the consti- 
 tuent majority of the metropolis. The whole subsequent 
 history of what has been called by popular French historians 
 the ascendant period of the French Revolution is, in truth, 
 the history of the rapid and lawless development of the law- 
 lessly usurped power of these eighty-two commissaries of the 
 sections,' who installed themselves, in the night of the 9th 
 and morning of the 10th of August, 1792, in a room of the 
 Hotel de Ville beside that of the real Council of the Com- 
 mune. In the morning of the fatal 10th of August the legal 
 Council of the Commune submitted to the usurped sway of 
 
 against us," said the younger Robespierre in the Jacobin Club, on the 29th 
 September, 1792 ; "our sole hope lies in the citizens of Paris." " Don't trust 
 too much to that ground of hope," Desfleux warned the same audience. 
 " Even here in Paris it is only too certain that we should be beaten at every 
 election made by secret voting." ' [The Jacobins, indeed, were themselves so 
 sure of this, that they violently set aside the legal mode of taking the votes 
 whenever they could bring their mob force to bear on the elections.] 
 
236 THE EEIGN OF TEEROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. ■ 
 
 these intrusive niglit-birds who had nestled so near them — 
 so far as to send a message at their dictation to the Com- 
 mandant of the National Guard, Mandat, who had taken the 
 military measures his duty demanded for defence of the 
 avenues to the Tuileries. He received orders to withdraw 
 the cannon he had posted on the Pont IsTeuf and the quays, 
 and to present himself in person before the Council of the 
 Commune. When he came, on reiterated summons from 
 the legal authority which he supposed still existing, he found 
 himself placed in the sinister presence of the intrusive com- 
 missaries, and by them was speedily thrust out to be massa- 
 cred by their mob outside. As soon as these night-birds 
 (some amongst them jail-birds) had put out of hand this 
 preliminary piece of morning work, and got all they wanted 
 of ostensible legal authority for crippling the legal force from 
 the complaisant municipal council in the next room, they 
 simply walked in and took their places — which, indeed, the 
 latter (the legal Municipals) were already vacating. The 
 usurping Commune of Paris, thus constituted, in contempt 
 of law — law fresh from the mint of Revolution — are ' damned 
 to everlasting fame ' as the founders and inaugurators of the 
 unparalleled regime branded by history as the Terror. 
 
 What manner of men were they who thus seized into their 
 own hands the sovereign power of a great city and a great 
 country ? ' When one runs through the list of these pre- 
 tended Commissaries,' says M. Mortimer-Ternaux, ' what are 
 the sort of names (such of them as were known at all) which 
 meet our eyes ? We find men of the worst and lowest de- 
 scription — "scribes of the kennel" as M. Michelet terms them, 
 like L'huillier and Truchon, " hommes de sac et de corde," such 
 as Huguenin, the ex-clerk at the barriers, and Hubert, the 
 ex- vendor of checks at the theatre doors — lazy and good-for- 
 nothing workmen, like Eossignol, who became a not less 
 Idche and good-for-nothing general — apostate priests, like 
 Bernard and Xavier Audoin — Simon, the shoemaker, the 
 future torturer and murderer of the royal orphan — Cailly, 
 Lenfant, and Duffort, the future colleagues of Marat, Panis, 
 and Sergent in the September comiti de surveillance ; the rest 
 
THE REIGN OE TEEROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 237 
 
 totally unknown either to fame or infamy.' And these were 
 the men who, in a night of fatal memory, held the destinies 
 of France at their uncontrolled disposal ! — who, and whose 
 successors, held those destinies at their disposal for nearly 
 two years, through their political chiefs in the National Con- 
 vention and- its committees. 
 
 Such having been the Elect of the night of the 9th of 
 August, 1792, and such their titles to seize the whole powers 
 of governpaent in a great city and a great country, the 
 question suggests itself in reviewing so strange an epi- 
 sode in civilised history : What sort of anarchy must have 
 first crept over a nation's mind, before such an anarchy 
 could, for a time, overspread a nation's life, and stiffen, by 
 cement of daily bloodshed, into a terrific tyranny ? 
 
 It is an eternal truth, and a truth eternally lost sight of, 
 that connivance with evil draws subjection to evil after it. 
 The Girondists had*called the Anarchists in aid of their own 
 ambition ; and their too protracted connivance with excesses, 
 consummated at last by regicide, struck them with moral 
 impotence to stem the rising tide of Anarchy against them- 
 selves. Of the rank and file of the party which finally 
 triumphed it is said, we think truly, by M. Dauban,' 'Jaco- 
 binism is not, in its original essence, a homicidal frenzy, an 
 insatiable thirst for blood ; it is not in its nature precisely 
 malignant [mechant) ; it is much worse — it is bete. The most 
 stupid of men are precisely of all men the most dangerous, 
 because, independently of the evil they may intend to do, 
 they do, without intending it, the evil others in the back- 
 ground have an interest of their own to set them doing.' 
 And thus, between the Mtise of the popular masses and the 
 unbridled passions and unscrupulous aims of their leaders, 
 Mirabeau's prophetic words were verified, which must have 
 seemed extravagant when they were uttered : — ' Vous aurez 
 des massacres — vous aurez des boucheries — vous n'aurez pas 
 meme I'execrable honneur d'une guerre civile.' 
 
 There is not in the history of mankind a more instruc- 
 tive example than that which is afforded by the internecine 
 ' Paris en 1794 et en 1795, &o. Introducticm, p. xviii. 
 
238 THE EEiaN OF TEREOE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 struggle betweeen the Gironde and the Mountain during the 
 first nine months of the National Convention, of the unequal 
 chances and predestined issues of a conflict in which, while 
 on the one hand there is a clear superiority of mental and 
 even of physical power, there is on the other a not less clear 
 superiority of concert and organisation, albeit concert in 
 crime and organisation of anarchy. In the three successive 
 national Legislatures of the French Revolution — the Consti- 
 tuent and Legislative Assemblies, and the National Conven- 
 tion — the majorities might be said to be conservative — so far, 
 at least, as sentiment and intention went — of the essential 
 principles on which civilised society is founded. There was, 
 indeed, a sad amount of presumptuous ignorance of the con- 
 ditions of stability in a political system, foremost amongst 
 which is that it shall not be attempted, in a country of old 
 habits and traditions, to erect an entire polity de novo. There 
 was an utter want of acquaintance with the art of conducting 
 public business through parliamentary channels, an utter 
 ignorance of parliamentary tactics or party discipline, a 
 fatal want of consistent and effective leadership on the pai't 
 of the men who made themselves the organs and mouth- 
 pieces of the majority, rather than of willingness to be led 
 in the rank and file. But here was the worst consequence of 
 the self-denying ordinance of the Constituent Assembly, re- 
 adopted by the succeeding Legislatures, which disabled the 
 leading members of the national representative body from 
 becoming ministers, and therefore deprived that body of all 
 responsible and steadying guidance. In the first months of 
 the National Convention, and under the recent impression of 
 the anarchical outrages, of which the leading functionaries 
 of the Commune were the agents, and the leaders of the 
 Mountain in their own body the abettors, an energetic 
 minister could have carried any measures conservative of 
 social order which he should but have put in substantive 
 shape and pressed as Cabinet questions. This was proved 
 by the fact that the Conservative motions of individual 
 members were invariably carried, but carried in no shape 
 capable of practical execution. The Party of Order had as 
 
THE EEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 239 
 
 many heads as Hydra, but no directing head. The conse- 
 quence was, that the Party of Order made ' most admired 
 disorder,' and the Party of Disorder kept perfect working 
 order in its own ranks. Their bond of union was the con- 
 scious solidarity of crime, the sense of implication in guilt 
 and danger of punishment, the instinctive feeling that no- 
 thing could ensure impunity for the past but perpetual 
 recurrence to fresh outrages and fresh terrorism. They had 
 on their side the insurgent Commune of Paris confronting 
 the legal Executive ; the Jacobin club confronting the 
 National Convention; and the lowest Parisian populace, 
 armed and finally subsidised at forty sous a day, to overawe 
 the real public, whose sentiments from time to time found 
 utterance, but failed to find means and instruments of effec- 
 tive action. 
 
 In the Girondin ministry, nominally reinstated in power 
 after the 10th of August — 
 
 ' the attribute of weahneas,' says M. Mortimer-Ternaux, ' was repre- 
 sented by Garat, one of those men of letters, without moral stamina 
 or consistency, who, thanks to a certain facility of pen or fluency of 
 speech, sometimes play for a moment, at epochs of revolution, a part 
 out of all proportion to their real importance. Whether they are 
 poets, publicists, or orators, matters not much. In verse or prose 
 they adore the divinity of the day, and prostrate themselves before 
 the rising sun. They are never at a loss to find materials in their 
 common-place book for dithyrambs or harangues to celebrate the 
 triumph of the stronger party, and the proscription of their former 
 friends and colleagues. The incense they can no longer ofier to the 
 minions of absolute monarchy they burn at the feet of the new idol, 
 the People-King, and tune their lyres to celebrate the charms of the 
 guillotine, just as they previously tuned them to celebrate the charms 
 of Phillis and Chloris. Devoid of strong convictions, pliant to " pres- 
 sure from without,'' submissive to all powers that be, which they 
 eulogise by turns with the like naive shamelessness, they are ready to 
 embellish with all the tinsel of their eloquence the most execrable 
 outrages, the most monstrous crimes. Such, in many respects, was 
 the new Minister of Justice, Garat.' ' 
 
 ' Garat afterwards became a count and senator under the First Empire, 
 having been successively Minister of Justice and Minister of the Interior 
 under the Convention'. He became also, in his character of iel esprit, a 
 
240 THE EEIGN OF TERROE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 When Eoland at length retreated before the rising storm 
 from the Ministry of the Interior, Garat was made use of as 
 an unobnoxious stop-gap to fill his place. Most fatally he 
 filled it for his friends of the Girondin party, who put him 
 there. After their fall, under the Jacobin insurrection of 
 the 31st of May and 2nd of June, 1793 (just as the Throne 
 had fallen under the insurrection connived at by the Gironde 
 on the 10th of August, 1792), Garat was still complaisant 
 enough to remain in ofBee as the Jacobin stop-gap, as he 
 had previously been put in of&ee as that of the Girondins. 
 
 The system of secret police — of ' observation ' — or, in 
 plain terms, espionage of all that was said, done, or written 
 in the French metropolis — we scarcely need remind our 
 readers, was no invention of the revolutionary era of 1789-92. 
 So long back as the date of the royal ordonnanee of 1667, by 
 which the police of the city and vicinity of Paris was placed 
 in charge of the lieutenant-general of that city, there was 
 established under his authority not only a public but a secret 
 police, represented by a larger or smaller number of agents, 
 euphemistically entitled ' observateurs.' The functions of 
 these ' observers ' have varied under various regimes from 
 that day to this, but have never gone out of use, least of all 
 under the Second Empire. Under the old regime a host of 
 spies was employed of all ranks ; and the whole life and con- 
 versation of individuals were often subjected for years to the 
 
 member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiqiies. It has been sur- 
 mised that the moral and political science he had chiefly studied must have 
 been that which had taught him to cultivate covfardice as prudence, baseness 
 as moderation, and dissimulation as reserve. The daughter of the well-known 
 barrister and political historian, John Adolphus, in her lively and entertaining 
 MecoUeetions of her father, makes the following mention of Garat in his later 
 days (about 1820) :— 
 
 ' A remarkable French acquaintance made by my father was Garat, who, 
 as Minister of Justice in 1793, delivered the sentence of death to Louis XVI. 
 He was a quiet, gentle-mannered old man. He and his daughter joined a 
 dinner-party at our house, and were much pleased with the English, and 
 greatly enjoyed London. It seemed like a dream to see a man who had been 
 so prominent in the tragedy of that dreadful Revolution sitting at the table 
 of so pure a Royalist as the author of the Biographical Memoirs, cheerful, 
 simple, and agreeable in his manners and conversation, and recalling to the 
 mind no trace of former days and dreadful deeds.' 
 
THE KEiaN OF TEREOR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 241 
 
 secret inquisition of cue or more of these ' observateurs,' of 
 whom many were domestic servants. These observers were 
 specially set to observe men of letters, priests, ' dames 
 galantes,' ' filles publiques,' and French refugees in foreign 
 countries. Under their supervision also were placed the 
 ' Nouvelles a la main,' or manuscript scandalous chronicles, 
 which were circulated in the capital, and throughout the pro- 
 vinces, at rates of subscription from six to nine and twelve 
 francs monthly. Under Louis XV. the police busied itself 
 in penetrating all the scandalous secrets of Paris life for the 
 amusement of the jaded voluptuary on the throne. The sys- 
 tematic violation of the secrecy of letters was regarded as a 
 natural right of the Government, and the discoveries made 
 by these disgraceful methods were doubtless often turned to 
 the purposes of private vengeance, ambitious intrigue, and 
 arbitrary power, with its ever ready instrument of ' lettres 
 de cachet.' These portentous warrants — sometimes of im- 
 prisonment which might be perpetual — were signed in blank, 
 as a matter of course, by the monarch, and left to be filled 
 up at discretion by his ministers, or his ministers' lackeys, or 
 those to whom his ministers, or his ministers' lackeys, might 
 give or sell them. More than 150,000 of these documents 
 are said to have been issued under the sign manual of Louis 
 XV., 14,000 even under that of the mild Louis XVI.' It 
 need scarcely be asked in what school the Revolutionists 
 learned their processes of arbitrary arrest and unlimited in- 
 carceration. They bettered the instruction indeed by mas- 
 sacre ; but that was the only addition, unless in extended 
 scale of operation, they could well make to the processes of 
 lawless power. 
 
 The utter destruction of all that remained of the prestige 
 of royalty — of ' that divinity which doth hedge a king ' — by 
 the otherwise contemptible (but unchecked) rabble-march on 
 the Tuileries of the 20th of June, and the not less con- 
 temptible (but unresisted) rabble-siege of the Tuileries of 
 
 ' It must be observed, in order to render the above figures credible, first, 
 that a second ' lettre de cachet ' had to be issued to liberate prisoners enibas- 
 tilUs by a first ; secondly, that the larger proportion of these royal mandates 
 were not issued for imprisonqient in the Bastille, but for exile from Paris. 
 
 S 
 
242 THE REIGN OF TEEROK AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 the 10th of August — was accompanied by an entire revolu- 
 tion in the police of Paris, as in the administration oi 
 Prance : — 
 
 ' The legal municipality,' says Professor Schmidt, ' was superseded 
 by an insurgent Commune, which arrogated to itself all power, ac- 
 knowledged no authority, and assumed into its hands the government 
 of the whole of France. The police, the proper function of which 
 was the maintenance of public order, the prevention or repression of 
 crime, on a sudden itself became disorderly and criminal — ^ passed in 
 great part from the hands of the municipality into those of the 
 sections, and from those of the sections into those of the clubs which 
 domineered over them. During this monstrous metamoi'phosis it 
 declared the city of Paris en masse in a state of suspicion, performed 
 domiciliary visits in all directions, crammed the prisons with innocent 
 victims, suborned and perpetrated the massacres of September, openly 
 set at defiance the Legislative Assembly as afterwards the Convention, 
 annulled the authority, co-ordinate with its own, of the Department, 
 and paralysed the action of the ministerial government — ^the power of 
 the executive Council of the State.' 
 
 Under such circumstances, secret police communications 
 to the nominal Executive Power could have no more efficacy 
 for the prevention of crime, or the preservation of order, 
 than the impotent moralisings of a Greek tragic chorus. 
 Accordingly, Roland, as Minister of the Interior and mem- 
 ber of the Executive Council, gave up all hopes of doing 
 anything with the police — which had, indeed, been wrenched 
 from his hands — and set up as a counterpoise to the 
 anarchical omnipotence of the Commune, clubs, and sections 
 what he called a ' Bureau d'esprit public,' for the Diffusion 
 of Useful Knowledge throughout Prance on political subjects. 
 Such an idea was amiably characteristic of the Gironde, who 
 never lost the illusion that murder and rapine, freed from 
 the fear of law, could be restrained by words spoken or 
 written. ' Madame Eoland,' says Dumont, in his ' Sou- 
 venirs sur Mirabeau,' ' was too fond of writing, and incited 
 her husband also to scribbling without end. It was the 
 ministry of political penmen. A single good journal would 
 have served the Girondins better than did all the swarms of 
 scribblers subsidised by the Minister of the Interior, under 
 
THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 243 
 
 the notion of enliglitenrng tlie nation and forming public 
 opinion.' 
 
 Public opinion, indeed, in Paris, as in tbe provinces — 
 (all that deserved the name) — was already pre-enlisted on 
 the side of Public Order. The problem was, to give legal 
 organs and legal force to it ; and that problem the Girondins 
 never fairly grappled with or worked out. 
 
 When Garat, on the fall of Eoland, sufifered himself to 
 be pitchforked into the Ministry of the Interior, he often, 
 and with great justice, complained that the National Con- 
 vention neither bestowed power, nor confidence, nor agents 
 on that ministry ; that it left, in fact, all practical power in 
 the hands of the Commune, which had the usurped attribute 
 of arbitrary arrests, and the armed force of the sections, at 
 its disposal. 'All these exorbitant powers,' said Garat, in 
 his conversations with the Girondins, ' were granted against 
 kings ; and why are they left in the hands of the Commune 
 now that there are no kings? Tou leave the Executive 
 Council, composed of your friends, powerless ; and you leave 
 the Commune, composed of your enemies, all-powerful. 
 Make haste to organise a Government such as shall possess 
 force and merit confidence.' 
 
 'But why,' Professor Schmidt asks, with not less jus- 
 tice, 'why did Garat, on this subject, confine himself to 
 private conversations with one or other member of the Con- 
 vention of his acquaintance ? Why did he not make his 
 well-founded complaints heard in the Convention itself? 
 Why, we would add, had not the ministry the power of 
 making itself heard there regularly ? That arena was, most 
 mischievously, left to ' independent members,' who have been 
 described by a British minister as ' members there is no 
 depending on.' Had even a minister with so little pluck 
 and bottom as Garat possessed seat and voice as a minis- 
 terial leader in the Convention, instead of appearing before 
 it only when he was summoned, or only on some special and 
 instantly alarming emergency, is it possible he should have 
 left to an independent member (Gensonn^) to bring forward, 
 unsupported, a motion for placing in the hands of the Exe- 
 
 B 2 
 
244 THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 cutive Council the power of calling out the armed force, 
 which it did not possess, which the Commune did possess, 
 and used — we all know how ? Is it possible that even a 
 minister like Garat should not have made a Cabinet 
 question of such a motion ? — a course in which he would 
 have, most unquestionably, been backed by a majority in 
 the Convention. As a substitute for the only effective 
 constitutional remedy for the situation which would have 
 been supplied by the presence of ministers in the House, 
 Garat declared his opinion (as usual, without attempting to 
 get it acted on) that the Executive Council had better be 
 suppressed altogether, and the Convention take into its own 
 hands, through its Committees, the execution of the laws 
 and the disposal of the armed forces of the metropolis. The 
 Girondins having then the majority in the Convention, and 
 its Committees, might have got the start of Robespierre, 
 who established his tyranny on precisely the same basis. 
 The Gironde left to the Mountain, as represented by Robes- 
 pierre, to propose later the transfer of the whole powers of 
 administration to the afterwards too-famous Committees, on 
 the very substantial ground that ' a Government was needed 
 of which all the parts should be in contact ; and that there 
 had hitherto existed between the Executive power and the 
 Convention a barrier which prevented that unity of action 
 which formed the essential force of a Government.' From 
 the date of that transfer, the seat of political initiative and 
 executive action may be said to have been transferred from 
 the anarchical absolutism of the Commune to the Terrorist 
 absolutism of the Committee of Public Safety, wielded in 
 effect by Robespierre. 
 
 We have seen that Revolutionary legislation had com- 
 pletely disabled the nominal holders of executive power in 
 France, either for taking charge of public measures in 
 Parliament, or for calling public force in aid of effective 
 administrative action. They were neither in a position 
 personally to press the passing of measures of public 
 urgency, nor to secure the execution of such measures, even 
 had they been passed. What was left them ? A role un- 
 
THE EEIGN OF TEEEOR AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 245 
 
 fortunately congenial to Garat's natural disposition — that 
 of passire observation of the unchecked progress of anarchy 
 towards tyranny. Garat organised what he called ' a system 
 of observation for the departments and for Paris ' — a pale 
 reproduction of the system of secret police of Louis XV. — 
 with the important exception of the Cabinet Noir at the 
 Post-ofl&ce. That department of espionage, with all its 
 persecuting and plundering opportunities, the Commune had 
 taken good care to keep in its own hands. 
 
 Under these circnmstances, Garat gave himself the ste- 
 rile satisfaction of secretly organising a corp of ' Commis- 
 saires observateurs locanx du departement de Paris.' The 
 object was to keep the Home Minister, by daily reports, au 
 courant of all that was said and done in Paris. Garat's 
 corps of ' Commissaires observateurs ' consisted of at least 
 seven. Amongst the reports of these observers, published 
 by Professor Schmidt, the most original in character, and in 
 all respects the most deserving of notice, are those of Citizen 
 Dutard, extending only over the short period from April 30 
 to June 25, 1793, a period including the last unequal 
 struggles and final fall of the Gironde. Dutard had exer- 
 cised the profession of an advocate at Bordeaux and Paris, 
 and, it seems, had owed obligations to Garat's family. 
 There is much good sense and evident good faith in Dutard's 
 reports, and he seems to have done all that a humble friend 
 could do to stir his patron to action. His reports afford 
 ample confirmation to every other trustworthy contempo- 
 rary authority that there was in Paris, as well as in the 
 departments, an enormous preponderance of force, as well as 
 of opinion, ready to array itself against the Jacobin populace- 
 tyranny. But that force was without organisation and 
 without leaders. Revolutionary legislation, which had let 
 all the administrative powers of the State drop into the 
 hands of the populace, had helped the Jacobins to both. 
 The Jacobins, therefore, triumphed. 
 
 The worst firebrand of civil discord — the only one, indeed, 
 which could have kindled anything like intestine war in Prance 
 in the first years of a revolution which had thrown to the 
 
24-G THE EEIGN OF TEEEOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 popular masses the bait of material benefits partly real, partly 
 illusory, from the overthrow of the old order of things — was 
 the religious firebrand lighted by the Constituent Assembly in 
 its civil constitution of the clergy, and hurled far and wide 
 among the millions of adherents pure and simple to the 
 Church (who had also, including the great body of the curSs, 
 been adherents of the Revolution), by the savage spirit of 
 persecution with which the first mistaken measures of the 
 first Assembly were followed up by the second, by the revo- 
 lutionised Commune of Paris, and by the National Conven- 
 tion. Very vivid are the impressions communicated by 
 Dutard's reports of the oppressive effects of the interdict 
 attempted to be enforced by the Commune and the revolu- 
 tionary committees of the sections on the popular religious 
 fetes and processions which had been customary in Paris 
 from time immemorial. The Kings of France had always 
 figured in the procession of the Pete-Dieu (Corpus Christi 
 day), the greatest and most popularly-honoured annual 
 solemnity of the Catholic Church in Paris. In 1791 this 
 religious anniversary happened to fall on the days of Loais 
 XVI. 's ill-starred flight to Varennes. The king's place in 
 the procession was taken by the President of the National 
 Assembly — at that time, by a curious freak of destiny, the 
 Marquis Alexandre de Beauharnais. 
 
 ' "Who could have predicted at that time,' says M. Mortimer-Ter- 
 naux, ' to that simple member of the Assembly, separated from his 
 colleagues in the procession only by an interval of a few paces (but 
 whom that interval designated for the day as the representative of 
 French royalty), that, sixty years later, his grandson should be in- 
 vested with the imperial purple, and with sovereign power in France 
 for himself and his heirs [?], by virtue of a constitution, the ninth in 
 succession to that which the Constituent Assembly was then engaged 
 in completing 1 ' 
 
 ' The P6te-Dieu is at hand,' Dutard writes to Garat on 
 May 26, 1793— 
 
 Remember, that it was at this time last year Petion, the popular 
 idol, was pelted by the sans-culottes of Arcis for having put forth an 
 ordonnance that people on that day should be free to work, or not to 
 
THE EEIGN OF TEEROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 247 
 
 work, as they pleased. Rememter that, at the same anniversary, the 
 sans-culottes of Paris debated for some days whether they should not 
 stone Manuel for having dared to print that they should be free to 
 hang out tapestry from their windows or not. 
 
 It was on that occasion Camille Desmoulins addressed to 
 his friend tlie Procureur of tlie Commune the ironical caution — 
 ' Mind what you are about, friend Manuel ! les rois sont murs 
 — le Ion Dieu ne Vest pas encore ! ' 
 
 The fete-day recurred, in 1793, just on the eve of the final 
 Jacobin movement against the Gironde, begun on the 31st 
 May and consummated on the 2nd June. The revolutionary 
 municipals did their worst to prevent the usual processions 
 and decorations. The Paris population generally, however, 
 persevered, under difficulties, in honouring the day as here- 
 tofore. The processions, indeed, were shorn of all their 
 official pride, pomp, and circumstance. The line of march 
 was headed by no representative of the democratic supre- 
 macy of the moment. Only the priests led, and the people 
 followed : 
 
 The countenances of the assistants plainly spoke their feelings. 
 There was an involuntary contrast of things as they were with things 
 as they had been — a sense of privation by the arbitrary abolition of 
 the most splendid ceremony of the Church. ' I observed also,' adds 
 Dutard, ' regret at the loss of the accustomed profits which this and 
 other ffetes produced to thousands of workpeople. The people of all 
 grades and all ages were silent, shamed, depressed. Some had tears 
 in their eyes. The priests and cortege seemed well pleased with the 
 reception given them.' 
 
 What results most clearly from the personal observations 
 of the most intelligent of Garat's secret police, is the warning 
 example against pushing political animosities and resentments 
 to such a pitch as to preclude united action against worse 
 enemies in a common cause. A trivial enough instance of 
 this ever-recurring French foible is affisrded in the following 
 report of Dutard to Garat, 30th April, 1793 : — 
 
 Yesterday, in the Palais Egalit^, a young man who, by his bear- 
 ing \par son moral], seemed to me to be a Brissotin or an aristocrat, 
 got into a quarrel with a Jacobin. The former had trod on the tail 
 of the latter's dog ; and for this cavise a serious aifair was on the point 
 
248 THE REIGN OF TEEROE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 of arising between them. The Jacobin had a long sword, the aristo- 
 crat none. The latter at first put a good face on the matter, but at 
 last turned pale and apologised. 
 
 You will ask me ho"w it could happen that a dozen Jacobins 
 should have intimidated two or three hundred aristocrats. [It may 
 be observed that Dutard's ' aristocrats,' at this epoch, like Pr^ron's 
 ' jeunesse doree ' at a later epoch, seem to include everybody with a 
 hat and coat.J It is because the former have a rallying -point, and 
 the latter have none. It is because the aristocrats are still divided 
 amongst themselves. All alike are open-mouthed against the massa- 
 crers [' les tueurs '] — some of the more reasonable wish to unite with 
 the sound part of the Convention — but the majority resists. Their 
 heads are still full of all the old quarrels — their tongues are still wag- 
 ging against the Guadets, the Yergniauds, and so on. 
 
 Dutard's reports supply some curious and amusing details 
 of the sort of pressure from without which carried the too 
 famous law of the maximum — a law which pretended to fix 
 maximum prices for the first necessaries of life. Ducos had 
 argued in the Convention with convincing force (to instructed 
 minds) that if you insist on fixing a maximum price for 
 grain, you must fix it for everything else. He showed that 
 the cause of the high prices of necessaries was the excessive 
 issue of assignats — which, being inconvertible into specie, 
 necessarily became depreciated.' To attempt to remedy this 
 by fixin g the price of corn and provisions was illusory ; the 
 only real remedy was reduction of the issues of paper. But 
 the populace of Paris, and the patriotic women and girls of 
 Versailles, thought otherwise ; they invaded the Convention 
 
 ' Another cause of high prices of agricultural produce, since the outbrealc- 
 ing of the Revolution, was the considerable decrease of agricultural produc- 
 tion, owing to the successive sweeping measures of confiscation. The state 
 and communal management of the confiscated landed property of the Church 
 and the emigrants was so wretched, and their cultivation so crippled, that 
 before the end of 1792 it was estimated that a twentieth part of the land 
 previously under cultivation lay as good as waste. Those lands which came 
 into the possession of petty holders without skill or capital throve accordingly. 
 The general derangement of the whole rural economy rendered it more and 
 more difficult to supply from home sources the wants of Paris and the other 
 great towns of France ; and in 1793 and 1794 the frantic administration of 
 the Terrorists {teste Gouverneur Morris) laid embargoes also on the American 
 and other foreign commerce in French ports, which might to some extent 
 have supplied the revolutionary deficiency of home production. 
 
THE EEIGN OF TEEEOE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 249 
 
 ■witli all tlieir cliarms on the 2nd May, 1793, and seemed to 
 have formed the main body of the force which carried the 
 maximum. ' The people,' says Dutard, ' has witnessed with 
 satisfaction the sort of victory gained by the women of Ver- 
 sailles yesterday ; but the Jacobins, for their part, do not 
 mean to remain content with that victory.' 
 
 The Yersaillaises evacuated the hall of the Convention about six 
 o'clock, and traversed the length of the Chateau [of the Tuileries] as 
 far as the Grande Allee. All the gi'oups in the gardens dissolved in 
 an instant — men, women, old, young, aristocrats, and Jacobins — it 
 "was who should run the fastest to see the Yersaillaises pass. I was 
 really quite ashamed to see people comme il faut, of all ages, of all 
 ranks, scampering through the mud, and jumping over the puddles 
 which had been formed by the rain that had fallen. And all to see a 
 hundred or so of women walk in procession with a battered drum at 
 their head. 
 
 On reflection I felt ashamed to let myself be left behind, and ran 
 like the rest. A pretty Tersaillaise, who had observed that I had 
 something about me that looked like gaiety, seized hold of my arm, 
 saying — ' If you are not an aristocrat, you will come aloug with us.' 
 The challenge was tempting ; so I fell into the line of march, and 
 accompanied them as far as the barrier. At the Pont Tournant [which 
 formerly connected the Tuileries gardens with what is now the Place 
 de la Concorde] we found the sides of the road crowded with men 
 and women. I started the cry of Vive la Rejiublique near a hundi-ed 
 times over (I play the fool pretty well when I set about it). But 
 what was my surprise to find that the word struck a chill into all 
 round me, and that none of these people — not even the blackguards 
 of the street — echoed it ! 
 
 Ari'iving at the Champs Elys^as, we passed a public-house with 
 an awning outside it. Under this awning about sixty persons had 
 assembled for shelter from the rain. Of the sixty, forty at least had 
 the air of aristocrats. At this point I amused myself by setting my 
 sans-culottes by the ears with the gens culottes. These good people 
 looked rather like dogs when, to provoke them, you crook your fingers 
 in guise of claws. They half grinned, but never could be got to cry 
 ' Vive la Ripuhlique ! ' — ' Vivent les sans-culottes 1 ' — ' Vivent les gens 
 de Versailles I ' 
 
 We halted at the barrier, all carrying branches of trees. I for- 
 got to mention that a flag preceded us, bearing in large and legible 
 characters the inscription — ' We bring you a decree fixing the price 
 of corn.' Here then we halted, and fell into each other's arms pro- 
 
260 THE EEIGN OF TEEEOR AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 miscuously. I received a hundred compliments and invitations to 
 come to Versailles, and for my own share kissed at least sixty 
 citizenesses. 
 
 I returned in company with, a baker's daughter, about sixteen 
 years of age. She talked to me all the way of nothing but the sit- 
 tings of the Jacobins. ' My papa goes to every sitting of the club 
 almost, and mamma is much pleased when papa has other business, 
 for then she goes instead. I think it very hard (_/e suis tres-privee) 
 that I mayn't too. Things can't go on this way very long— we 
 will wait just a little longer — but if the cdte droit [at that epoch 
 Girondin] don't convert itself, it may get the worst ' (fa pourra hien 
 aller mal pour lui) . 
 
 Sternly menaced for sweet sixteen ! And tlie menace was 
 too soon verified ; and thus did Versailles send its States'- 
 girls to bully the squeezable Convention — to press on them 
 the reluctant passing of the Law of the Maximum — tbe Law 
 of Famine, which, if it fed nothing else, daily fed the guil- 
 lotine. 
 
 Let it be ovraed, that the direful depreciation of the as- 
 signats furnished too fair an excuse of the popular pressure 
 for the maximum. But the effect of decreeing maximum 
 paper prices for the first necessaries of life was simply that 
 those selfish accajpareurs, the farmers and graziers, withheld 
 their supplies of corn, cattle, and forage from Paris. They 
 Tincivically declined to supply money's worth for fixed prices 
 in worthless paper. Thence the protracted scarcity, not- 
 withstanding the most lavish municipal and State subsidies 
 to provision Paris. It was a state of siege, self-infiicted, 
 without besiegers. Thence the spectacle of those long-suf- 
 fering queues at the bakers' and butchers' shops, which Paris 
 has seen renewed so recently under German pressure from 
 without. Thence the hungry readiness to follow the mono- 
 maniac Marat's murdering and plundering counsels; thence, 
 from the unsatisfied rage of hunger, the thirst for blood. The 
 successful demagogues of the day always made it an article 
 of charge against their last precursors that they had con- 
 spired to starve Paris. And at every fresh foumee of victims, 
 whether aristocrat or Jacobin, the Political Women always 
 promised themselves that they should have cheap bread. 
 
THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 251 
 
 The precious regimen of assignats, tempered hy a maximum, 
 produced a state of things which drove the working class to 
 desperation. The flight from Paris of a large proportion of 
 the wealthier classes, who had been the most considerable 
 employers of labour and purchasers of its products, com- 
 pleted their misery. Evidence on these points abounds in 
 the secret police reports before us. A report of Dutard, 2nd 
 May, 1793, gives the following instance: — 
 
 A sturdy locksmith, one of those blunt discoursers who have a 
 good deal of dry humour, said : — ' I work in iron ; if anyone will 
 prove to me that I can hve on iron, I shall be satisfied ; but as it is, 
 if the gros bourgeois, if the rich proprietor, refuses me bread, I shall 
 
 say to him, " B , I don't care a fig for your assignats — what I 
 
 want is bread ; I give you iron, I give you my labour, on condition 
 you give me, not assignats, but bread." ' 
 
 Some nine months later — that is to say, in the thick of 
 the Terror (February 1794) — we find the following passage 
 in a report of another police ' observer.' It must be ad- 
 mitted that these reports, in the strict sense of the word, 
 may be termed ' trivial ' — the materials for them are picked 
 up for tbe most part in the public thoroughfares — but they 
 are not the less illustrative of the sort of life-in-death of 
 the dismal epoch before us : — 
 
 A group of workpeople, amongst whom were carvers and gilders, 
 were complaining that they had been a long time out of work. ' How 
 should we have work,' said they, ' when all the rich, whether patriots 
 or no, are clapped in prison, and the only workpeople now who can 
 get a living are those employed by the army contractors ? ' ' That 
 won't last long,' repUed another ; ' there is a commission to inspect 
 the cases of those who have been unjustly imprisoned ; and as soon 
 as they are released you will see they will find employment for the 
 hands of the poor.' 
 
 The Paris workpeople had some five months to wait — 
 till the fall of Eobespierre — for the first partial realisation 
 of their modest hopes for the good of trade by the liberation 
 of rich customers from wholesale incarceration. Poor 
 people ! they lived and died before the enlightened days of 
 that new economic science which has demonstrated, with 
 
252 THE EEIGN OF TEREOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 such cogent logic, that rich customers are no good to trade 
 — that ' demand for comm,odities is no demand for labour.' 
 
 Nothing more true, throughout the long dismal monotony 
 of the Two Years' Terror, than M. Dauban's remark that 
 the one word ' Hunger ' explains horrors inexplicable with- 
 out it. We would only add one epithet to that sad sub- 
 stantive — Ignorant Hunger. It is remarked in the post- 
 humously-published Continental journals of the late Mr. 
 Nassau Senior, that England is the only country in Europe in 
 which the visitations of cholera were not ascribed by the 
 people to poison scattered about broadcast by some or other 
 of their betters. The distinction is a happy one — confuting 
 of itself many assertions one often hears of the deeper 
 popular ignorance, and wider chasm between classes, in 
 England than elsewhere. In Paris, during the dismal 
 years of the Terror, ' a people mad with mistrust and misery ' 
 — we again cite M. Dauban — ' credits all capital charges, 
 applauds all capital executions. It asks for bread — they 
 throw it carcasses. Its wrath is wild as its sufferings are 
 sharp — and when did ever famine listen to reason ? If the 
 j)eople is being famished, it is being famished purposely — it 
 is being betrayed. Death to the monopolists ! death to the 
 traitors ! The monopolists are the rich — the bourgeois — the 
 peasants : the traitors are their own chiefs, civil and mili- 
 tary. The history of reiterated political ingratitude and 
 political iniquity — the history of wholesale slaughter, sacri- 
 ficing alike innocent and guilty, old and young, friend and 
 enemy — and, lastly, tliose who drew the proscription-lists 
 themselves — has never hitherto had its true name given it — 
 the History of Famine.' 
 
 It so happened that the policy which in a manner forced 
 itself on the men who wielded the Terror, was a policy pre- 
 cisely congenial to the nature of its pre-eminently Repre- 
 sentative Man. That man may be regarded as the very 
 incarnation of revolutionary ' Preternatural Suspicion ' ' — of 
 seemingly sincere disbelief of any possible Public Virtue but 
 his own, or that of his most obsequious and unwavering 
 
 ' Carlylc. 
 
THE ElilGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 253 
 
 sHdes. It was early predicted of him, on Ms first undis- 
 tinguished appearances in the Constituent Assemblj'- — ' Get 
 homme ira loin, car il croit tout ce qu'il dit.' Eobespierre 
 profoundly believed in Eousseau's apocryphal political gospel 
 of the ' Contrat social.' But, above all things and all men, 
 he profoundly believed in Maximilian Eobespierre. As 
 that latter belief of his was never partaken by men of more 
 liberal culture or more genial temperament, Eobespierre had 
 the stimulus of irritated self-love, as well as ' Preternatural 
 Suspicion,' to make him feel quite in his element as de- 
 nouncer-in-chief of victims to the political justice of the 
 Paris populace. There was no moral reason, either in his 
 temper or theirs, why the process of ' epuration/ whose 
 crucible was the guillotine, should not have gone on, so 
 long as that populace and its chosen chief believed in its 
 efficacy. The physical obstacle to the indefinite duration of 
 the Terror was that the number of heads available for its 
 daily consumption was, after all, limited, and that every 
 member, even of the passive ' Plain,' in the National Con- 
 vention was beginning to ask himself how long his own 
 head was safe on his shoulders. 
 
 There is nothing more clearly demonstrated, as we have 
 already remarked, in the intelligently written portions of 
 the police reports before us than that there existed, at any 
 moment previous to the complete establishment of the reign 
 of Terror, available forces amply sufficient, had they been 
 brought into action, to have driven the Terrorists back in 
 discomfiture into the obscure haunts from whence they 
 issued. Months after the 10th of August, months even after 
 the 21st of January, the available effective force was never 
 wanting — had there existed anywhere authority and energy 
 to muster and lead it — to have formed an Army of Order 
 fully able to put down Mob Eule.' The tourhe rSvolutionnaire 
 
 ' The Pwpiers potthumes of the unfortunate Rossel — martyr to the Com- 
 munal cause, of which he frankly acknowledged himself to have been the dupe 
 — contain the following striking and unsuspicious testimony to the same pre- 
 posterous stale of things in the Paris of 1871. as in the Paris of 1792-3, viz., 
 the shameful subjugation of preponderant moral and physical forces under 
 rabble rule, through mere lack of leaders, union, and organisation : — 
 
 ' II y avait dans Paris, an 18 mars (c'est un compte dont je sais I'exaoti- 
 
254 THE EEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 by whicli Paris, in 1792-3, passively suffered itself to be 
 disarmed, man by man, and house by house, was certainly 
 and consciously inferior — not only in intellectual but in 
 physical force — to the great body of the comparatively in- 
 structed and possessioned classes, whom Danton, Robes- 
 pierre, and the rest, set themselves systematically to lay 
 prostrate under the heel of a Jacobinised proletariat. 
 
 The character of Danton he that runs may read, if he 
 will read it in the original and authentic records of the 
 man Danton's own words and deeds. Human nature has 
 been said to have much of the beast in it, and some of the 
 devil. It may be said of Danton's nature that it had more 
 of the animal and less of the diabolical, while Robespierre's, 
 if less of the former, had more of the latter. Danton had 
 nothing of the atrabilious temperament or political fanaticism 
 requisite to have made him a sincere zealot of proscription 
 and massacre. He let loose both indeed deliberately over 
 the length and breadth of France. But it was simply to 
 preserve his populace-leadership in Paris. Populace-leader- 
 ship in Paris meant prolonged enjoyment for Danton — first, 
 of bribes from the Court to avert risings of the populace ; 
 secondly, of the lion's share of public plunder after their 
 triumph. 
 
 The first appearances of Danton in Paris politics stamped 
 the reckless and truthless demagogue. He was elected a 
 member of the Council-General of the Commune in Sep- 
 tember 1790 by the section of the Theatre Pran^ais. Five 
 months later, in February 1791, he contrived to get himself 
 elected into the Council-General of the Department — a 
 
 tude), soixante. bataillons revolutionnaires ; il y avait quatre-vingt-dix batail- 
 lons entiferement conservateurs. Le reste gtait partag^, et incapable d'avoir 
 une action decisive. Les quatre-vingt-dix bataillons conservateurs ^taient 
 plus anciennement formes, mieux fiquipfe, mieux armfe que les revolution- 
 naires ; ils fitaient Sgalement nombreux, ils ^talent mieux commandos et plus 
 disciplines. Seulement ces indignes oitoyens ont I'liabitude de s'en remettre 
 4 rarmSe et fi, la police, qui sent chargees de se faire tuer pour I'ordre. Mais 
 il y a des moments oil la police est sur les dents, oA rarmSe ne comprend pas 
 bien de quel c6te est son devoir, ou si son devoir n'est pas de rester tranquille, 
 A ces moments-ljl, le pavS de Paris est au premier occupant.' (Rossel — Papiers 
 postliumes reoueillis et annates, par Jules Amigues, Paris, 1871.) 
 
THE REIGN OF TEEBOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 255 
 
 body instituted as a sort of Conservative Senate, to keep the 
 democratic Commune in check. Here Danton found himself 
 in a minority of one for the most part. On the 18th April 
 of that year, Louis XVI., wishing apparently to ascertain 
 by experiment whether he was, or was not, a prisoner in his 
 own palace, set out ew carrosse to pass a few days at St. Cloud, 
 whereupon arose a furious emeute, and the royal party were 
 forced back to the Tuileries, notwithstanding all the efforts 
 of Bailly and Lafayette to coax the mob and clear the way. 
 
 On the 28th April, Danton denounced to his Section 
 (that of the Theitre Fran9ais) the conduct held by Lafayette 
 and Bailly on the 18th. This denunciation was placarded 
 by the Section all over Paris, and Danton's part in the 
 matter was brought formally before the Department. The 
 report (published for the first time by Professor Schmidt) 
 of the sitting of the Council-General of that body on the 
 subject demolishes the falsities and fanfaronnades which 
 had found their way into history from the Paris journals of 
 that day, prompted and inspired by Danton. Those journals ' 
 had asserted that 
 
 Lafayette and Bailly solicited tlie Department to proclaim martial 
 law, and authorise firing on the people. But Danton was there. 
 He prostrated them at once [il les a terrasses\; he pulverised the 
 demand with the thunders of his popular eloquence. He carried the 
 rejection of the resolution for martial law. Lafayette left the room 
 full of rage. 
 
 At the above-mentioned meeting of the Council-General 
 
 of the Department a formal declaration was drawn up — 
 
 first, that, on the 18th April, two sittings had been held of 
 
 that body. At the first of those sittings, which was being 
 
 held at the moment when the mob round the palace were 
 
 putting their veto on the excursion of the king to St. Cloud, 
 
 M. Danton was not present. [For the very sufiScient reason 
 
 that he was present at the Tuileries, and taking part with the 
 
 mob, at the head of his battalion of the National Guard.] 
 
 Secondly, that it was false that, at that sitting, any demand 
 
 ' Camille DesmoTilina, Mevolntioiis de France et de Brabant; Fr&on's 
 Orateur du Pcvjile, &c. 
 
256 THE KEIGN OF TEEROE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 had been made on tlie part of tlie Mayor of Paris (Bailly) or 
 the Commandant-G-eneral of the National Guard (Lafayette) 
 to be authorised by proclamation of martial law to fire on 
 the people. Thirdly, that the second sitting had taken 
 place after the king had given up his intended excursion. 
 At that sitting, at which M. Danton was present with other 
 members, nobody had asked for any order or authority to 
 fire on the people ; and as the assemblage had by that time 
 dispersed, there remained no motive for any such appli- 
 cation. Danton made a lame explanation, and the matter 
 dropped. 
 
 Danton has been described as a Mirabeau en mains grand 
 et en plus laid. But Mirabeau had the genuine aristocratic 
 virtue of abhorring, in his heart, revolutionary disorder and 
 violence, though he lent his tongue, at some critical moments, 
 to promote or palliate them. Mirabeau's main efforts went 
 to bridle Revolution before it should irrecoverably convulse 
 France — Danton's to unbridle Revolution till it should 
 elevate and enrich Danton. That effected, he was the sort 
 of revolutionary lion that would willingly have lain down 
 with the lamb. Land and beeves — domus et placens uxor 
 (the second) — as well as a certain self-indulgent good-nature 
 in the man himself, and a clear and acute perception of the 
 hoUowness of the ochlocratic bubble he had been blowing 
 — were rapidly converting Danton, in his last days, into 
 something as like an easy-going Conservative country gentle- 
 man as anyone in France could well be in An II. of the 
 Republic one and indivisible. But he reckoned without his 
 host. The wakeful and vindictive malice of Robespierre had 
 been roused by the lenient velleities and the ill- concealed 
 contempt of Danton for the dneries of the great Jacobin 
 Incorruptible. And whom Robespierre spited he never 
 failed to strike down — till his last fatal failure.' 
 
 ' A shrewd observer, Gouverneur Morris, has left the following observations 
 on the fall of Dauton, which occurred during his stay in France. They read 
 curiously at the present day from their at least partial variance with the revolu- 
 tionary mythology of which eminent pens have made Danton the hero. But they 
 transmit impressions which must be supposed to have been current in France 
 
THE EEIGN OF TEEEOE AKD ITS SECEET POLICE. 257 
 
 Tliat a worthless, possessionless, brainless minority — Mr. 
 Briglit's true ' residuum ' — could ride roughshod oyer all 
 that had sense or substance in Paris and throughout France, 
 during the eighteen months or two years of the Terror, was 
 owing, as we have already indicated, simply and solely to 
 organisation on one side, want of organisation and isolation 
 on the other. The scoundrels who had scent of blood and 
 plunder were banded, and, fatally for France, badged with 
 the insignia of municipal office; the honest working men 
 and substantial citizens were scattered unofficial units. 
 They had lost the protection of the old royal government, 
 and did not know (till they came to feel) all that was in- 
 volved in the experiment of critting an old kingdom to 
 pieces in order to stew it into a new Eepublic. 
 
 'There is not the slightest doubt,' says M. Dauban, 'that 
 if the citizens of Paris who were then under arms [on June 
 2, 1793, which completed the fall of the Gironde] had been 
 informed of the courageous stand which was being made for 
 hours in the Convention by Lanjuinais, Isnard, and others 
 against the conspiracy, the day of the 2nd June would have had 
 a very different termination. Blood would have flowed, doubt- 
 less — but how much blood would have been spared!- — how 
 much shame would have been spared to the French name — 
 nay, to human nature itself ! ' 
 
 The superior order of the Paris workpeople, as well as 
 the bourgeoisie, belonged, and felt they belonged, to the 
 
 at the time Morris wrote them down for the information of his official chief, 
 Edmund Randolph : — 
 
 ' Danton always believed, and what is worse as to himself at least, always 
 maintained, that a popular system of government for this country [France] 
 was absurd ; that the people were too ignorant, too inconstant, and too cor- 
 rupt to support a legal administration ; that, habituated to obey, they required 
 a master ; and that, even had they been educated in the principles of freedom 
 and joined to the energy of sentiment the force of habit, yet, like ancient 
 Rome, they had reached the period in which Cato was a madman and Gassar 
 a necessary evil. His conduct was in perfect unison with those principles 
 when he acted ; but he was too voluptuous for his ambition, too indolent to 
 acquire supreme power. Moreover, his object seems rather to have been great 
 wealth than great fame. He has fallen at the feet of Robespierre.' — Zi/e 
 and Writings of Goweerneur .Morris, by Jared Sparks, vol. i. p. 42. 
 
 S 
 
258 THE EEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 classes interested in preventing public confusion. The 
 reports, already cited, of the police ' observer ' Dutard give 
 some cui'ious instances of the feelings prevailing amongst 
 those classes just on the eve of the decisive Jacobin triumph 
 over the Gironde — a triumph which nothing prevented from 
 being decided the other way, but the sad fact that the friends 
 of Order were isolated, and its foes combined ; that the party 
 still in nominal possession of power — the Gironde — bad no 
 conception of a practical line of action, or no nerve to strike 
 into it ; while the party in pursuit of power, per fas aut 
 nefas, had at least those faculties for its attainment and 
 remorseless exercise. 
 
 'Yesterday,' writes Dutard [May 28, 1793], 'I wasattheMontagne 
 Ste. Genevieve, at a bookbinder's — a very honest and very industrious 
 man. He had formerly been of the Jacobin party himself — that is to 
 say, he loved above all things liberty and the Revolution. I have 
 often had conversations with him before, but I never found him so 
 reasonable as I did yesterday. / ought to observe that work is beginning 
 to fail him — he has been struck by the current rumours and newspaper 
 announcements that the faction would level all conditions. This honest 
 man is not rich, but he has a modest apartment of his own, com- 
 fprtably furnished — his workshop and an avant-boutique which contains 
 his merchandise. He has two little children, and to save the expense 
 of servants, he does his cooking himself since his wife is dead. He 
 possesses ybrce assignats, and perhaps some louis. He spoke to me 
 yesterday pretty mvioh in the following terms — " M. Didot is richer 
 than I, but if they wpuld give me hig fortune to-morrow I would not 
 take it ; and if, on the other hand, they proposed to take it away from 
 him to give it to some one else who had nothing, I should oppose that 
 too, because I feel that M. Didot owes his fortune to his labour, 
 to his industry, economy, &c. Let those who have nothing do as 
 M. Didot has done — as I have done, though I have little-^let him 
 work to get soniething. Is it not scandalous that they want to sub- 
 stitute for the bourgeois, avocats, &c., all the common workpeople 
 employed on the church of Ste. Genevieve ? Is it by people of that 
 sort they mean us to be governed in future 1 " 
 
 ' Another true sans-culotte with whom I supped yesterday, near the 
 Cour St. Martin, who had nothing but his daily labour to live upon, 
 held pretty much the same style of reasoning. His wife, whose 
 ruling passion is to lie soft, and put as many as four mattresses on her 
 bed, said to me.—"Mafoi! they say that, to be a true saus-culotte one 
 
THE EEIGN OF TERBOE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 259 
 
 should lie upon straw. At that rate I never shall be a true sans- 
 culotte, for I love my bed hugely. Let others keep what they have — 
 I mean, for one, to keep the little I have. I should like to see a 
 stinkard \un puant] come and ask me to part with it ! Tiens, they 
 have combed off our small lice, and clapped big ones on instead, which 
 bite much harder. The former were plump, comfortable, and kept 
 quiet ; these they now give us are meagre, eager, and would gnaw the 
 devil to the bone. Par exemple, everything is grown too dear ; it is no 
 longer possible for the poor to live." I wish you could have heard 
 how this good lady tackled a sans-culotte commissary, who came to 
 demand an extraordinary contribution " Veux-iu me. . . . . le camp ? — 
 if I take the broomstick to you I'll show you the difference. You're 
 a good one to come here asking monej^ ! Where did you study law — 
 under a cabbage-leaf eaten bare by the caterpillars 1 " " Ah, ah ! " 
 cried the husband, laughing fit to split himself, " SQ the P,6re Duchesne 
 is learning to whistle in prison ! " ' 
 
 Unluckily, the Girondin Committee of Twelve, -who had 
 plucked up spirit enougli to put Hebert and Dobsent in 
 prison, could not contrive to keep them there, under the 
 timorous and time-serving ministry of Garat. It njay be 
 sadly feared that 6ur friend the sans-culotte ^nd his wife 
 who liked so much to lie soft, found their next lodging at the 
 Conciergerie for lese-Jacohinisme, after the 2nd June had finally 
 decided that the puants were uppermost, and should thencer 
 forth lay all well-doing and well-to-do citizens under con- 
 tribution to pay them forty sous a day for keeping them in 
 daily terror. 
 
 The following passage affords additional illustration of 
 the description of persons from amongst whom the tourhe 
 revolutionnaire were chiefly recruited : — • 
 
 Among the classe enrag&e there exists a sort of men who have no 
 kind of prudence in the conduct of their own affairs. When they 
 have 50 livres, they spend 50 livres ; when they have only 5, they 
 spend only 5. So that, spending habitjially pretty much all they have, 
 they save nothing — they accumulate nothing. Since the Revolutiofli 
 this class has suffered greatly, and it is this class wl^ich fills the 
 galleries of the popular societies, makes motions, collects groups, &c. 
 At this day, what is the situation of these people? They have 
 nothing — they have divested themselves by degrees of every article 
 of furniture which flattered them with the notion of some fortune, of 
 
 s 2 
 
260 THE EEIGN OF TEEROE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 some possession. With what chance of a favourable or patient audience 
 can you now propose to give these people laws ? The staid and 
 orderly man — the modere, in a word — seems to them an oppressor. 
 For they know well that, in any settled state of things, the man in 
 decent circumstances, decently dressed, whose wife has gold earrings, 
 a watch, a silver key-ring, a showy necklace — that all these individuals 
 will enjoy a position of social superiority over those who are reduced 
 to a state of destitution. Many of these people are in debt to their 
 baker, their butcher, their wine-dealer — nobody any longer will give 
 them credit. They have wives they are tired of; children who are 
 crying for bread while their father is at the Jacobin club or the 
 Tuileries. 
 
 There is the true morbid anatomy of Revolution. The 
 Desperate, at such epochs, soon shove aside, soon polish off 
 (if the phrase be permitted), the earlier easy-going Eevolu- 
 tionists who have aught to lose : — 
 
 ' These political raisopneurs,' writes Dutard, ' these habitual 
 haranguers at the Caf6 Cayeau, whenever they come my way,- 1 pull 
 them down from their high horse, by saying, " Where's your sabre ? 
 You have not got one ? Well, then, hold your tongue / " Yesterday 
 a petit-maitre was saying, " They won't take away my arms, for I 
 never had any." " Don't boast of that," said I ; " there are forty 
 thousand folks like you in Paris might say the same thing, and it 
 does the good town of Paris little honour." ' 
 
 The suburban auxiliaries of the tourbe revoluUonnaire 
 about that epoch are ominously described by the same 
 observer as follows : — 
 
 All the rabble in the environs run up to Paris at the first beat of 
 the drum, in hopes of doing a lucrative stroke of business in one way 
 or other. I have seen, within these few days, swarms of people 
 attracted by the scent of game to Paris from Versailles, Neuilly, St. 
 Germain-en-Laye, &c. 
 
 Soon after the decisive 2nd June, Dutard writes : ■ 
 
 I called at the shop of a marchaiid de vin, where I stayed half an 
 hour. His wife, whom I have always known as a patriote enragee, 
 was declaiming against the Revolutionary Committee. The arbitrary 
 disarmings, arrests, &c., have considerably disgusted her. Her 
 husband besides finds himself taken fqr an aristocrat. ' C'est une 
 infamie ! ' 
 
THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 261 
 
 On the 8tli June Dutard writes as follows : — 
 
 In one of the groups of the Palais-Egalit^ a fellow in the uniform 
 of the National Guard, but with his hair cut short round his head 
 (which led to a surmise of other recent discipline), audacious in bear- 
 ing, of visage pale and haggard, eyes sparkling with the fires of 
 discord, sabre at side, and pair of pistols in belt, was declaiming 
 vehemently on the anticipated arrival of ten thousand Bordelais, said 
 to be on their march to Paris to claim their arrested deputies [the 
 Girondins], ' lis n'en sauteront pas mains le pas,' exclaimed this 
 spadassin. ' I, too, am a Bordelais, and it is by these Bordelais them- 
 selves they will be escorted to the scaffold.' [The sinister prediction 
 proved only too true : the provincial federes invited to Paris to pro- 
 tect the Legislature were speedily Jacobinised by the clubs and com- 
 mittees organised to oppress it.] 'Yes,' proceeded this worthy, 
 recurring to the September massacres, ' all my concern is that they 
 did not last longer. But ga reoommenoera — only wait some fifteen 
 days or so.' The monster's language was visibly repudiated by those 
 who heard it. But their tongues remained mute. After that, don't 
 tell me year is not the ready accomplice of every ruffian who would 
 deprive his country of its liberty. Don't tell me that a people thus 
 sheepish is not ever on the verge of losing that liberty, 
 
 June 13 :— 
 
 The wife of a perruquier of my acquaintance, a woinan of some 
 wit and amiability, said to me — ' Servants are vile creatures ! I 
 never hated them so as since this revolution. They come here daily 
 tattling, and telling all sorts of tales of their masters. I have known 
 some of them who had received benefits from those very masters, some 
 who were receiving them still. It is all one — nothing stops their 
 tongues . . . .' 
 
 Two or three priests were returning froln a sad office. The first 
 of them happened to knock with his silver cross against a porter 
 carrying a load, — ' Eh Men, toi ? — where art thou cotning to with thy 
 cross 1 ' ' Chut ! ' said his comrade, ' c'est le hon Dieu I ' ' Bah ! ' 
 was the rejoinder, ' le bon Dieu ! II n'y a plus de bon Dieu / ' 'On 
 parle de Dieu,' said a woman, ' mais Dieu est de I'aristocratie ! ' 
 
 In the sitting of the Convention of August 26, 1793, a 
 deputation of teachers and school-children was admitted to 
 the bar. One of the latter acted as spokeshoy. This pre- 
 cocious protapostle of secular education demanded for him- 
 self and his fellows that they should be preached to no longer 
 
262 THE KEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 in the name of a soi-disant Dieu, but should receive instruc- 
 tion in the principles of equality, the constitution of 1793, 
 and the Eights of Man. The demand was graciously received, 
 and promptly acted on. It was not only decreed that the 
 Constitution should be taught in the schools (a Constitution, 
 by the way, the coming. of which into actual operation had 
 been adjourned by the same authority sine die, or so long as 
 ' revolutionary government ' should continue to be deemed 
 necessary), but the memory of school-children was loaded with 
 the principal productions of the patriotic eloquence of the 
 time.' 
 
 ' C'est le peuple bete qu'on remarque partout,' says the same 
 police observer. 
 
 Now that they see things are not going as they had imagined, 
 their self-love is strangely wounded, their ambition desperate. Por it 
 is to be remarked that every single individual amongst the people, 
 since the Revolution, has, according to his condition, constructed for 
 himself his own little chdteau en Espagne. What a contrast to what 
 they looked for before, when they now look behind them ! They 
 seem to say to you — ' We had been promised such great things, we 
 were all to be happy — And we should haVb been, were it not fok, 
 THE TRAITORS. I should havG aCquired independence. I should have 
 acquired perhaps fortune : and instead of that, I have run through 
 the little I had, What shall I do to get it back ? ' &c. 
 
 Take the following darker development of what we may 
 term Disappointed EevolUtionism :— - 
 
 ' These executions,* says Dutard, with frightful coolness, 'serve to 
 CALM the resentment of the people for the ills they experience. It 
 is there they wreak their vengeance for all they have themselves 
 suffered. The wife who has lost her husband, the father who has lost 
 his son, the tradesman who has lost his trade, the workman who pays 
 so dear for everything that his wages are reduced almost to nothing 
 — can only be brought to bear patiently the ills they experience by 
 the sight of human beings more unhappy even than themselves, and 
 in whom they have been taught to believe they see their enemies.' 
 
 The Political Women, d,bove all — -the terror of the weaker 
 sex in the galleries of the Convention and the Jacobin Club — 
 
 ' Dauban, vol. i. p. 350. 
 
THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 263 
 
 made their shrill voices heard (many of them, doubtless, had 
 children a"^fc home crying in vain for bread) in demand for 
 more and more convictions and executions, in delight at 
 every new founfi&e of their former favourites sent to the 
 guillotine. 
 
 ' The great art of demagogues in all ages,' observes M. Dauban, ' is 
 to divert the multitude from the sense of its own privations by exciting 
 its jealousies and resentments. Thus it won't do to say to it that the 
 scarcity it suffers proceeds from the insufficiency of the harvest — from 
 the excessive drought, or excessive humidity — from some natural 
 cause, in short. The suffering people would not rest content with any 
 such simple explanations. It suffers ; therefore it is strongly disposed 
 to distrust or detest all whom it supposes more at ease, or less badly 
 off than itself. It is exasperated ; therefore, like the angry child, it 
 must needs find something to break in pieces. The demagogues 
 eagerly compete to furnish it some object on which its fury may wreak 
 itself, and even, in their precipitation to court its favour, are ready to 
 offer up one another to its vengeance.' 
 
 ' Near the Champs Elys^es,' says one of the Police Reports before 
 us [March 25, 1794], ' a journal was being read in which mention was 
 made of Chaumette [then under arrest, who had been one of the most 
 prominent ringleaders of the Commune]. Almost all the women who 
 stopped to listen said — " Oh, as for him, I shall go to see him guillo- 
 tined ; he is a rascal, who, with all his fine speeches, wanted to starve 
 Paris." ' 
 
 ' Hebert,' says M. Daubanj ' had urged the execution of 
 the Girondins, the execution of the queen, by publishing in 
 his Fere Duchesne, " Bread has been found in the sewers ; meat 
 has been thrown in the river ; the conspirators and their 
 abettors seek to starve the people. Their death will be 
 followed by the return of plenty and prosperity." ' The very 
 same language was held in turn against Hebert himself — it 
 is the only language that can be held with any effect to a 
 famished and ignorant democracy. 
 
 ' The report has been current,' says another of the police ' ob- 
 servers ' before us, ' that a commissary of police had found id. 
 Hebert's house nearly a hundred pounds of salt pork, which, in spite 
 of the remonstrances of the Pere Duchesne, he had caused to be sold 
 to the people, at the rate of 15 sous the pound, at the house door. . . . 
 
 ' The hawkera were crying in one of. the suburbs the arrest of the 
 
264 THE BEIGN OF TEREOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 
 
 P^re Duchesne. " He, too, is a traitor, then," said some sans-culottes, 
 male and female ; " allons liite ! — let him be led to the guillotine. 
 Ah, les coquitis I ah, les scelerats ! " they exclaimed, " let them be 
 brought out — let them perish. It has been rightly said," they added, 
 " that it is only Saint Guillotine can save us." 
 
 ' In the March^ du Faubourg Antoine a fruit-woman distributed 
 6 ,200 eggs. There was a legion of women marketing, each of whom 
 got some. No untoward incident happened, though there was no 
 guard on duty, and the citoyennes made the remark that " since the 
 P^re Duchesne smokes his pipe no longer, market-women fall out less 
 among themselves — they don't . . . fisticuffs at each other, as they 
 did a week or so back. 
 
 'It was reported to-day [March 19, 1794] that more than 50 
 cartloads of butter and eggs had come in to provision Paris. " See," 
 said a good woman, " since these rogues have been taken up, provisions 
 abound. Oh ! pour le ooup, nous pouvons dire que cela va. Would 
 it not be as well," added this Pohtical Woman, " to make a clean 
 sweep of the members of the Commune altogether; since there is 
 reason to believe that they are all implicated more or leSs 1 " " Oh, 
 certainly," said a citizen, " it would be well to put them all under 
 arrest provisionally. . . ." 
 
 ' In all the groups in the National Gardens, nothing was talked of 
 but provisions, and the scarcity of provisions was exclusively ascribed 
 to Hebert and his clique.' 
 
 The ' observer ' Pourvoyeur writes as follows on February 
 19, 1794:— 
 
 A citizen in a gi'oup, this evening, said, ' It was not just that the 
 restaurateurs should be suffered, notwithstanding the dearth of meat, 
 to have half an ox, a calf, or a sheep in their larders, while fathers of 
 families could get nothing to put in the pot for their sick wives at 
 home.' This citizen demanded that no restaurateur should be suffered 
 to have more meat by him than any other man. 'If he wants to give 
 his customers something to eat, let him give them beans or potatoes. 
 Plenty of honest citizens at this time are obliged to put up with such 
 Lenten entertainment.' 
 
 Bacon writes on February 22 : — 
 
 A fruit-woman at the Porte St. Denis, who was detected in the 
 possession of some eggs and some pounds of butter, occasioned a con- 
 course of women, who were on the point of strangling her as an 
 acca2}areuse. 
 
THE EEIGN OF' TEEEOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 265 
 
 The section of the ' Indivisibility ' sent deputations this evening 
 to the popular societies to announce to them that there were subter- 
 ranean passages at the H6tel de la Force, through which were driven 
 live oxen, calves, sheep, &c., for the supply of the prisoners. Similar 
 statements were made at the section of the ' Droits de I'Homme ' 
 respecting the prison of the Carmes. ' That's the way we are made 
 game of,' said some women near me ; ' they give meat to the rich 
 prisoners, and to us pauvres diahlesses they give nothing at all. What 
 do we want with all these aristocrats in the prisons ? These wretches, 
 who starve Paris, ought they not to have been brought to the guillo- 
 tine by this time \ ' ' 
 
 No one could possibly grudge the guillotine to the Chabots, 
 Chaumettes, and Heberfcs. But tlie honest artisans and 
 workpeople of Paris, as we have already partly seen, did 
 grudge to the guillotine the throats of their innocent and 
 opulent eiaployers and customers. Berard, one of the police 
 ' observers,' at present under our review, honestly reports as 
 follows to his ofiScial employers (February 22, 1794) : — 
 
 ' History, it is said, never repeats itself. Does it not 1 Compare the 
 passages above cited with the following, which we translate from the useful 
 little reprint entitled Zes Clubs Rtmges, of the Jowrnal des Debats' reports of 
 the sittings of the popular societies in Paris, during the German siege of 
 1870-71 :— 
 
 ' Dbmoceatio Club of the Rub Cadet, 25th Nov. 1870. — The citizen 
 Wallach denounced the luxury of certain members of the clergy, while the 
 people of the poorer quarters are dying of hunger. There are individuals 
 who gorge themselves, while others want bare necessaries. " Some of these, 
 
 1 know," said the speaker, " have four dishes of meat at their dinner." [J/arfo 
 of astonishment and unbelief. '\ "Yes, I have seen, this very day, one of those 
 guttlers singly swallow three dishes." \_Kame tlis guttler /] The orator next 
 denounced the acoajiareurs, who have walled up their cellars, after having filled 
 them with hams by the million, and comestibles of all sorts. [Cries of indig- 
 nation — II faut faire des perquisitions .'] ' 
 
 ' Club op the Marseillaise, La Villette, 11th Jan. 1871. — A citizen, 
 name imknown, claiming to be a member of the National Guard, spoke as 
 follows : — " They have closed the Jardin des Plantes j and do you know why ? 
 Because they have been selling the elephants, bears, and other rare animals, 
 for their weight in gold to the restaurateurs of the Palais-Royal, to feed the 
 stock-jobbers and food-monopolists who speculate on the misery of the people. 
 We — the necessitous, as they insultingly call us — what can we do with our 
 30 sous a day, when a bushel of potatoes costs 30 francs, and a stalk of celery 
 
 2 francs ? " Another citizen said he knows a restaurant frequented by the 
 employes of the Bank, where, only last week, they consumed two cows and 
 a calf, while the ambulance opposite was in want of fresh meat. [ Violent 
 murmws.'] ' 
 
"266 THE EEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECKEP POLICE. 
 
 It is the observer's duty to state the feelings and opinions of the 
 people about the arrests. The people applauded so long as the arrests 
 were confined to suspected persons and rich ' egoists ; ' but now that 
 merchants who provided the means of subsistence for numbers of 
 workpeople — now that fathers of families become the victims of ill- 
 humour, personal animosity, and pretended patriotism — the people 
 which feels that it is systematically sought to deprive it of those who 
 enabled it to subsist, murmurs loudly against the violation of all re- 
 publican laws and principles. ' What has become,' asks one, ' of that 
 Commission which was to liberate from imprisonment those who are 
 detained unjustly 1 ' ' Don't you see,' replied another, ' that it was 
 only to pacify and delude us that it was made believe that some such 
 commission was about to be named ? If it existed, we should see 
 who are those it releases from prison ; but, on the contrary, ever since 
 the day it was announced, we see a hundred and fifty or two hundred 
 individuals arrested daily.' ' Poor people,' exclaimed a third, ' it is 
 only to trick and tease you that they are always making believe they 
 are about to resort to milder measures. It is only to tear you more 
 completely to pieces. What they want is civil war ; and we shall 
 have it. No meat, no vegetables, no tradespeople, no rich, to feed or 
 employ the poor ! ' 
 
 Latour-Lamontagne reports (February 23, ]794)i — 
 
 From all points of the Eepublic nothing is heard but complaints 
 of the arrest of the most sincere patriots. No citLzen who employed 
 his fortune in the relief of the people, or his talents in their instruc- 
 tion, ever long escapes the inquisitorial researches of these new 
 despots, who do not choose to permit the people to be relieved or 
 instructed. If the Convention [poor Convention ! in the fell grip of 
 Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety] does not make haste 
 to detect and frustrate their criminal manoeuvres, one Sole resource — 
 one sole consolation — is left to the man of good will, the man who is 
 really penetrated with the love of his country. That resource is to 
 seek a glorious death from the Austrian sword on the frontier, rather 
 than endure the chains forging for us at home. 
 
 Moncey reports (February 24, 1794) : — 
 
 In the Caf6 Hottau, on the Terrasse des Feuillants, many citizens 
 were talking of the Revolutionary Committees of Paris — 'saying that 
 the intrigants, who have been named members of those Committees, 
 do incredible mischief by molesting and arresting better patriots than 
 themselves. ' The Revolutionary Committee of the section of the 
 
THE EEIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 267 
 
 Montague,' observed a citizen, ' is one of those which ought to be 
 purged ; for I know three individuals in that Committee who are at 
 the bottom of all the vexations practised by it, and who have con- 
 tinually caused good citizens to be imprisoned from private spite 
 rather than to serve the public cause.' 'What are the names of those 
 three members of the Committee of whom you speak ? ' asked a citizen. 
 ' Their names,' he said, ' are Degoust, coiffeur, Fort6, and Joubert ; 
 and I expect, if their conduct were closely examined, plenty of things 
 would come out against them. As these three persons have plenty of 
 words at command, and the other members of the Committee are good 
 easy folks, they are always sure of carrying a majority with them.' 
 ' These are the sort of people,' said my indignant citizen, ' who should 
 be denounced at the bar of the Convention, for the liberty and honour 
 of good citizens are too precious to leave at the mercy of men of that 
 description.' 
 
 Le Breton reports (Marcli 1, 1794) : — 
 
 Yesterday, on the Place de la Il^volution, I came upon a pretty 
 considerable group of men and women, compassionating the fate of 
 two individuals about to be guillotined, and I heard them say, ' Oh, 
 my God ! when shall we be tired of all this bloodshed ? ' Another 
 answered, ' When we shall have no more criminals.' A third struck 
 in, ' The death of a man is no great matter.' Another rejoined, ' If 
 people are to be guillotined for their thoughts, what multitudes must 
 be caused to perish ! ' Lastly, so^me one said, ' Don't let us talk so 
 loud. We may be overheard and nabbed ' (pincSs). 
 
 Pourvoyeur reports (Marcli 2, 1 794) : — 
 
 This afternoon, on the Place de la Revolution, while a numbei' of 
 persons were being guillotined, a citoyenne exclaimed ' Quelle hor- 
 reur ! ' Several citizens who heard her, took the citoyenne to task 
 for her exclamation. ' What do you mean by such words ? Are you 
 sorry conspirators should be punished V 'No,' she replied, ' but I 
 meant to say how surprising it is that, so long as all this guillotining 
 has been going on, cela ne corrigedt pas les autres.' 
 
 The people observed, on seeing some peasants mount the scaffold, 
 ' How is it these scel&rats have let themselves be corrupted ? If they 
 were rich or noble, one would not be surprised they should be coun- 
 ter-revolutionists, but in this class one expects to find good patriots. 
 The law is just,' they said, ' it strikes the rich and poor without dis- 
 tinction.' ' 
 
 ' 'Two-thirds of the victims,' says Von Sybel, in his History of tlie Rero- 
 lution-Time, ' sent by the Paris Revolutionary Tribunal to the scaffold, between 
 the 22nd Prairial and the 9th Thermidor, mere jieasants! 
 
268 THE EEION OF TEEEOR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 This Pourvoyeur, observes M. Dauban, might well be 
 called Purveyor to the guillotine. ' The rich require a 
 scarecrow,' he says — the guillotine. Elsewhere, ' People are 
 asking each other, How many have been guillotined to-day?' 
 The work, they say, must go on quicker. ' Paudrait que cela 
 aille plus vite que cela.' In another place, ' The people say 
 one guillotine is not enough for Paris ; there ought to be at 
 least four.' 
 
 Por the credit of humanity — even in the grade of paid 
 police spies — most of these ' observateurs,' beginning with 
 our friend Dutard, are of a less sanguine complexion. ' One 
 or two of these observers,' says M. Dauban, ' are Jacobins, 
 almost all are moderes.' Berard describes courageously the 
 prevailing public distress, which he does not hesitate to 
 ascribe to a bad public policy. Latour-Lamontagne (a man 
 of letters this one, and favourite of the Muses, author of a 
 piece entitled ' Le Montagnard a Bordeaux, scenes patrio- 
 tiques en vers libres ') declares himself against the Hebertists 
 and TerroristSj against the multiplied executions inflicted 
 on persons of all ages and both sexes. His tone contrasts 
 strongly with that of Pourvoyeur. Berard is, in like manner, 
 a rnodere, who blames the increasing frequency of executions. 
 Perriere much affects the moralising style, lays himself out 
 
 ' It happened sometimes that in villages composed, say, of a dozen house- 
 holds, all the heads of those households belonged to the Comite Rcvolutionnaire 
 of the place, and set themselves to exercise a jealous surveillance over each 
 other. The greater number of them valued their new position, first for the 
 pay attached to it, but secondly and specially for the opportunities it afforded 
 of crushing every one against whom they happened to have a grudge — the 
 hated relation, the troublesome neighbour, the importunate creditor or trade 
 rival. In this way the Terror, which at first directed its blows only against 
 nobles, clergy, and rich bourgeois, now made them felt far and wide amongst 
 the lower classes. A good third of French territory had changed hands in the 
 great confiscations, and the overthrow of all old hereditary rights and customs 
 had extensively excited the passions of envy and covetousness in the hearts of 
 the peasantry. The new possessors of the soil, who had first been greeted by 
 the ruling party with acclamations, very soon found themselves looked at 
 askance from all sides. The Government viewed them as having become land- 
 owners on too large a scale, the poorer peasantry drew unfavourable compari- 
 sons between them and the old proprietors. None" of them could well fail to 
 have private enviers or political enemies. Hence it happened that, during the 
 last months of the Terror, the glaive de la loi chiefly descended upon the 
 necks of the new class of peasant proprietors.' 
 
THE REIGN OF TERROR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 269 
 
 for piquant anecdotage and vivacity. We may add, after 
 reading more of his Reports than deserved reading, that 
 he is a thoroughly mean creature, who, with all his moral 
 essaying, takes kindly to the task of delator of the vague 
 crimes that sent myriads to the scafPold at the dismal epoch 
 before us. 
 
 Let us now place on the scene, for a single instant, a 
 model juror of the Revolutionary tribunal and his 'chaire 
 Sponge' — such was this worthy's epistolary orthography in 
 addressing his probably not worser half. Trinchard, a joiner, 
 who sat as juror for eighteen francs a day in that court of 
 infamy, ' seems,' says M. Dauban, ' to have regarded all the 
 accused with that sort of curiosity, pure and simple, which 
 attracted the proletaires of Imperial Rome to the Coliseum 
 on the days when the Christians were to be thrown to the 
 wild beasts.' It never seems to have entered into Juror 
 Trinchard's head that persons accused could be acquitted; 
 and he invited his friends, before the trial, to come and see 
 them condemned. Citizen Trinchard was desirous to treat 
 his ' chaire Spouge' to the spectacle of a ntimber of persons 
 of distinction to be sentenced on a particular day. Twenty- 
 one of the ex-members of the Parliaments of Toulouse and 
 Paris — Thouret, Depremenil, Lechapelier, Lamoignon de 
 Malesherbes and his whole family, were to be brought in 
 one day before this illiterate and insensible brute and his 
 colleagues. Trinchard writes as follows, proposing the party 
 of pleasure to his ' chaire epouge : ' ' — 
 
 Si tu nest pas toute seulle, et que le compagnion soit a travalier 
 tn peus ma chaire amie venir voir juger 24 mesieurs tous si deven 
 president ou conselies au parlement de Paris et de Toulouse. Je 
 t'ainvite a prendre quelque choge aven de venir parcheque nous 
 naurons pas fini de 3 hurres. 
 
 Je tembrasse ma chaire amie et Sponge. 
 
 Ton mari, 
 
 Trinch4ED. 
 
 Never, surely, were Tragedy and Farce brought into such 
 shocking contact — flebile ludibriuml On the one hand, all 
 
 ' Archives 4e VEmvire. carton W. 500. 
 
270 THE EEIGN OF TEREOR AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 that was venerable and illiastrious in the old age of Males- 
 herbes, all that was interesting in youth, sex, and innocence 
 in two generations of his descendants : on the other, this 
 civic brute Trinchard and his ' chaire ipouge,' whom he 
 invites, 'if so dispoged' (to borrow Mrs. Gamp's phrase), 
 to see ' ces mesieurs,' and he might have added ' ces dames,' 
 tried for a crime sufficient to secure condemnation — their 
 moral and social superiority to their accusers and judges ; 
 and whom he counsels to tahe lunch before she comes to 
 witness her spouse's more than ordinarily distinguished 
 day's tale of murders. 
 
 How the decemvirs of devastation and massacre, judicial 
 and extra-judicial, were lodged, our readers may be amused 
 to learn from the following description given by M. Dauban, 
 from a writing of the period, of the salons in the Tuileries 
 appropriated to the sittings of the Gomite de Salut Public : — 
 
 All the corridors which led to the place of sitting of the Com- 
 mittee were sombre, tristes, and strongly contrasted with their saloons 
 themselves. Those who could penetrate so far were astonished, and 
 dazzled by the change of scene. The floors were decked with the 
 most splendid carpets from the looms of the Gobelins, marbles and 
 gilt bronzes were reflected from every side in magnificent mirrors, 
 sumptuous clocks and glittering girandoles adorned the mantelpieces. 
 It was here that delegates from, revolutionary committees came to 
 communicate information and receive orders — it was here that mem- 
 bers of the Convention came humbly to solicit missions in the depart- 
 ments. The national representation was entirely absorbed in the 
 Committee. The Convention had become a place merely for the 
 formal proclamation of public measures. The twin Committee, ' de 
 SHrete Genercde,' however, attracted the greatest crowd of suppliants. 
 It was contimtally besieged by families in tears, and repulsed them 
 with brutal ferocity. Nothing was done there without having first 
 taken the orders of the Comiti de Salut Public. 
 
 That the strength of Jacobinism mainly resided in the 
 disunion, and thence weakness, of its opponents — in the 
 freemasonry of crime, which combined its ringleaders in a 
 mutual assurance of impunity — was finally made evident by 
 the marvellous ease with which the populaces-power was put 
 down in Paris, and throughout Prance, the moment the split 
 
THE REIGN OF TEEEOE AND ITS SECEET POLICE. 27] 
 
 amongst its leaders, whicli produced the 9tli Thermidor, 
 left Jacobinism acephalous, as previous distrusts and divisions 
 had left Girondism and Eoyalism. ' From the date of the 
 11th Thermidor' (Julj' 29, 1794), writes Prud'homme, 'the 
 word "Terror" is proscribed; the revolutionary tribunals 
 employ the last days which remain to them in violent and 
 vain efforts at resistance. Numbers of Montagnards are 
 arrested. Freron musters against them the young men of 
 Paris, who received the nickname otjeunesse doree, and wore, 
 by way of uniform, the distinctive badge of black collars.' 
 
 The account which reads most like truth of this jeunesse 
 doree is the following, given long back by Lacretelle, the 
 historian,' who took up arms {i.e., a walking-stick) in its 
 ranks : — 
 
 At that epoch, it was necessary to combine another sort of com- 
 bats, not indeed military, but at least athletic, with those of the press 
 and tribune. The . Thermidorian party — finding themselves hard 
 pressed by Billaud-Varennes and his Jacobin cohorts, who talked 
 big about the re-awakening of the lion, and took possession of the 
 Tuileries gardens and the Palaig-Royal, the old head-quarters of revolt 
 during the last years — conceived the idea of appealing to the youth 
 of those classes most interested in resisting them. The deputy Freron, 
 who had only just before been an out-and-out Jacobin, first put him- 
 self forward in this appeal, the echoes of which soon thundered only 
 too loud through France. I shall not take up the epic trumpet to 
 recount the exploits of this youth, dubbed doree, because it donned 
 the coat instead of the carmagnole, the black hat instead of the red 
 cap. The arms it carried had nothing noble — but nothing homicidal 
 about them — they were walking-sticks. We marched, however, to a 
 tune well fitted to excite alarm in our enemies — the Reveil du Peuple. 
 The multitude no longer swelled the ranks we denounced as Terrorist; 
 but we did not want to give it time to rejoin them with its array of 
 pikes. No sooner did a group form itself of an evening, than we 
 were down upon it with our Reveil du Peuple, charging it with coups 
 de hdton, which almost always effected its prompt dispersion. During 
 a campaign of two or three months, the Convention had no occasion 
 for any guard bijt ours, "We in turn formed the audience in the gal- 
 leries, the sovereign people, the public at all the theatres, the oracles 
 at all the caf^s, the orators at all the sections — ^in a word, the new and 
 
 ' Dix Aiiiiees d^Epreuves pendant la Sevoliition, p. 199, 
 
272 THE REIGN OE TEEEOE AND ITS SECRET POLICE. 
 
 not less absolute dictators of Public Opinion. Lastly, we expelled, 
 with, ignominious cudgelling, from their club — the very name of which 
 had so lately thrown Royalty throughout all Europe into ague-fits — 
 Jacobins and Jacohines — not without something like violence and 
 something like outrage — and we pulled down the Deity Marat from 
 the Pantheon, to throw him into the sewer. 
 
 'What a contrast,' says Von Sybel, 'between July 1789 
 and 1794 ! ' At tlie former epoch, the democratic party had 
 stood at the head of all France, and had at its back the 
 boundless hopes and resolute will of the vast majority of the 
 nation. JVow, that party was divided and demoralised by 
 its internal discords, while it had made itself, by the fear- 
 ful abuse of its power, an object of universal abhorrence. 
 Through all Paris, and soon through all France, the cry 
 went forth with daily swelling strength and vehemence, that 
 now was the reign of Force, and Robbery, and Murder come 
 to an end. A multitude of newspapers, tbe interdict on 
 whose appearance was taken for granted to have been 
 annulled by the 9th Thermidor, hastened to anticipate by 
 energetic manifestoes the views of the people. The suspects 
 were already being daily released by hundreds, the Maximum 
 was everywhere set at nought, the exemplary punishment 
 of the great criminals, the tyrants of France during the last 
 two years, was loudly called for. Meanwhile, the Govern- 
 ment, still Jacobin in its personnel and proclivities, after as 
 before the 9th Thermidbr, durst take no pronounced part, 
 whether in repression or furtherance of the national re- 
 action. 
 
 In the Convention, Freron, with the newborn zeal of a 
 renegade, moved that the Hotel de Yille, that Louvre of the 
 tyrant Robespierre, should be razed to the ground. He was 
 more wisely answered, 'Punish crime, hut do not demolish 
 monuments.' M. Dauban hereupon remarks, ' C'etait un pro- 
 grh.' 
 
273 
 
 VIII. 
 
 THROUGH ANARCHY TO GJESARISM— NAPOLEON 
 THE UNGLE> 
 
 1. Dr. Bigiy's Letters from France, Jj'c, in 1789. Edited by his Daughter, 
 
 Lady Bastlake. London, 1880. 
 
 2. Tlrsprvng und Beginn der Mevolvtionskriege 1791 und 1792. Vou Leopold 
 
 von Eanke. Leipzig, 1875. 
 
 3. Geschichte der Revolutionweit von 1789-1800. Von Heinrioh von Sybel. 
 
 5 Bande. Stuttgart, 1859-79. 
 i. La Revolution de Tliermidor. Rdbeipierre et le Cotnite de Salut Public en, 
 VAn II. P'apres leg Sources Originales et les Docu/ments Secrets. Par 
 Ch. d'Herioault. Paris, 1876. 
 
 5. VEtat de la France au 18 Brwmavre, d'apres les Rapports des Conseillers 
 
 d'iitat cUa/rges d'utie Enquete swr la Situation de la Republique, S;c, Par 
 F61ix Eooqnain. Paris, 1874. 
 
 6. Directovre — Origine des Bonapa/rte. Par J. Michelet. Paris, 1872. 
 
 7. Mimoires de Madame de Rimusat — 1802-1808 — Publics pa/r son Petit-Fils 
 
 Paul de Remusat, Senatewr de la Haute- Garonne. 3 vols. Paris, 1880. 
 
 The veteran historian, Leopold Von Eanke, lias established 
 one more claim, in addition to all his other claims, to the 
 grateful acknowledgments of inquirers after historical truth 
 by his recent publication on the ' Origin and Beginning of 
 the French Revolutionary Wars.' We may say that while 
 Professor Von Sybel, in his great work, the ' History of the 
 Eevolution-Time,' has given the world the most complete, 
 and on the whole satisfactory narrative of all the vicissitudes 
 of that troubled epoch Professor Von Eanke now supplies 
 the most judicially impartial summing-up of the cause 
 celebre so long contested between Prance and Europe — the 
 never-ending controversy on the still-vexed question, who 
 began the last great European war of principle ? 
 
 The spring of 1792 witnessed the declaration of war 
 
 between Prance and Austria by Louis XVI., or rather by his 
 
 Girondin ministry in his name. The autumn of 1802 wit- 
 
 ' Nov? first published. 
 
 T 
 
274 THROUGH ANAECHY TO C^SAEISM— 
 
 nessed the signature between France and England of the 
 peace, or rather truce, of Amiens, under the first consulate of 
 the first Napoleon. What were the causes which had ren- 
 dered the decade of years between those two epochs a 
 decade, not of French revolutionary convulsions only, but 
 of European conflict j* The answer to that question must 
 depend on the answer to another question. What were the 
 causes of national and international anarchy in France and 
 Europe ? 
 
 ' How such a convulsion as the Revolution,' says Lady 
 Eastlake, in her thoughtful introduction tr» her father's 
 artlessly interesting ' Letters from France,' addressed to his 
 daughters in the storm-pregna.nt summer of 1789, ' should 
 have occurred exactly when the causes that led to it were in 
 the act of subsiding ... is a question on which inquiry is 
 insatiable and materials interminable — it may be added — and 
 solution impossible.' 
 
 How the Revolution should have so soon passed into a 
 ' convulsion ' was, indeed, a strange surprise to its devout 
 adherents. The Revolution was already accomplished in 
 men's minds before ever the States- Greneral met. The only 
 question was, who should seize its guidance ? And on the 
 question whether the old royal executive could, or could not, 
 hold its own in France, depended the question whether or 
 not the Revolution should break wholly with the historical 
 past of France and Europe. 
 
 Amongst the merits which distinguish Professor Von 
 Sybel's great historical work is that he holds the balance 
 very fairly even between the crimes of despots and of dema- 
 gogues. He is far from charging exclusively on the French 
 Revolution and its leaders all the calamities which came 
 over Europe like a flood during the last eventful decade of 
 the eighteenth and throughout the first fifteen years of the 
 nineteenth century, In the sense of setting all laws of 
 nations at defiance, and spurning all barriers, save those 
 opposed by superior force, to their lust of aggrandisement, 
 Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia were amongst 
 the most revolutionary potentates that ever existed. It was 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 275 
 
 primarily due to their joint policy of perfidy and yiolence in 
 Eastern Europe tliat Germany opposed no effective com- 
 bined force to tlie revolutionary torrent which so soon bnrst 
 on her from the West. To the distrusts and discords engen- 
 dered between the natural conservators of the established 
 European balance of power by their mutual guilt and con- 
 flicting cupidity in two successive partitions of Poland — to 
 the division of councils at the crisis of their common fate 
 caused by their common crime — cannot but be mainly 
 ascribed the failure of the German Powers to confront 
 anarchy in France, or even to resist the subjugation and 
 spoliation of Germany, begun by the armies of the first French 
 Republic, and consummated by those of the first French 
 Empire. Never did national punishments follow more 
 closely upon national sins. If Central Europe was, from 
 first to last, crippled in the life-and-death struggle with 
 revolutionised France, this was due less to the force of 
 French attack than to the feebleness of German defence. 
 The curse of Poland, the scramble of Prussia and Austria 
 for the lion's share of her spoil, rendered impossible all 
 effective continental combination against the common 
 enemy. Before the close of the last century, the Republic 
 one and indivisible had triumphed over all the divided 
 (which should have been united) Powers of Europe, that is 
 to say, over every Power but England, for England was not 
 drawn off from the duty of encountering hostile force by the 
 appetite for despoiling prostrate weakness. She had Engr 
 land to defend and no Poland to phmder. 
 
 Anarchy in Europe then— international anarchy pro- 
 duced by the lawless will of her rulers — preceded anarchy 
 in France, and rendered Europe defenceless against French 
 invasion. But what were the direct and immediate sources 
 of anarchy in France, the sole possible diversion from the 
 destructive intestine action of which was to be sought and 
 found in carrying war over Eurppe ? We should regard it 
 as little less than blasphemy against God, and a gospel of 
 despair to man, to subscribe to that fatalistic philosophy of 
 circumstance so long accredited amongst French popular 
 
 t2 
 
276 THROUGH ANAECHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 historians, according to whicli, the revolutionary impulse 
 once given, everything else followed. Yes, if man abdicated 
 his vyhole function as a moral being, and left the entire 
 a.rbitrament of human events to the blind force of things. 
 But that noble sentence of Madame de Stael should be held 
 in immortal remembrance, ' C'est aussi une circonstance que le 
 courage d'un honnete homme.' 
 
 The two great needs of France in 1789 were a hing and a 
 minister. A minister who could read aright the signs of the 
 time, a king who would stand by his minister. Even a 
 Louis XIII., with a Richelieu beside him, exerted a pre- 
 dominant influence over the whole policy of Europe. A 
 William I. of Prussia, with a Bismarck beside him, van- 
 quished France and annexed Germany. It was the initiative 
 of the royal government itself in France that brought 
 revolution to the birth, and then shrank from the obstetrical 
 office that belonged to it. It was the royal government that 
 deliberately swamped, at the outset, the two privileged 
 orders in the States- General (by giving the Tiers a double 
 vote), and then failed to seize the dictatorship of the demo- 
 cracy it had called into existence. There was a moment, a 
 fleeting moment, in the fateful year 1789 when the king's 
 name was still a tower of strength, and when a king and a 
 minister, who should have known and used that strength, 
 might have remained masters of the situation. Poor Louis 
 XVI., the Hamlet of monarchs, was a man certainly of the 
 best intentions that ever went to the paving of a pande- 
 monium. Truly might he have said, like his Shakspearian 
 prototype^ — 
 
 The time is out of joint — cursed spite 
 That ever / was born to set it right. 
 
 The wealthy and circumspect Count de Chambord may 
 be deemed wise in his generation, who declares publicly that 
 he never will be King of a Eevolution. To be King of a 
 Revolution, however, or no king at all, were the sole pos- 
 sible alternatives placed before Louis XVI. in 1789. In 
 default of the hardly to be hoped-for double phenomenon 
 of a king and minister standing firm by each other at such 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 277 
 
 an epocli as tlie opening of tlie States-General, what was 
 there left between France and anarchy? JSTothing. What 
 between anarchy and war? Again nothing. Anarchy in 
 Prance was, from the first, portentous of war in Europe. 
 War, indeed, and the government of men by martial in de- 
 fault of all other law, offered the sole ultimate rescue from 
 the most destructive consequences of intestine discords. 
 
 Tor what, after all, did the French so-called Constituent 
 Assembly constitute? It constituted forty odd thousand 
 little independent Eepublics. The uncontrolled autonomy 
 which the insurgent Commune of 1871 claimed to set up in 
 Paris, the Constituent Assembly of 1789 set up in every 
 commune of France. All the legal means of action, which 
 should have been specially and carefully reserved to the 
 central executive power and its local agents, were by the 
 Constituent Assembly dropped into, or devolved upon, 
 hands utterly unaccustomed to wield them. It was decen- 
 tralisation run mad, and that at a moment when the action 
 of the central executive was more indispensable than at any 
 previous epoch of French history. 'No gift more fatal could 
 have been made to a people like the French at such an epoch 
 as that before us than that of local autonomy, practically 
 unchecked by any central power representing the nation. 
 
 So early as January 1790, Grouverneur Morris, after- 
 wards American Minister at Paris, relates as follows a con- 
 versation he had held with M. de Montmorin, at that time 
 Foreign Minister of Louis XVI. : — ' In talking over the 
 deplorable situation to which the kingdom was reduced, I 
 told him that I saw no means of establishing peace at home 
 but by making war abroad.' Writing from London in the 
 spring of the same year to a French friend in Paris, we find 
 Gouverneur Morris again harping on the same string : — ' I 
 see no means of extricating you from your troubles, but 
 that which most men would consider as the means of 
 plunging you into greater — I mean a war. And you should 
 make it to yourselves a war of men, to your neighbours a 
 war of money. I do not explain, because a word to the wise 
 is siafBcient.' 
 
278 THROUGH ANARCHY TO CiESARISM — 
 
 Who shall say that Machiavellic counsels are only ad- 
 dressed to princes ? Here is the whole theory which was 
 afterwards carried into practical effect in the French revolu- 
 tionary conflict with Europe, and which was finally summa- 
 rised in the notorious Napoleonic formula of making war 
 support itself, propounded beforehand in cold blood by an 
 unconcerned American bystander, as the sole issue that 
 could be opened from the desperate internal situation of 
 Prance ! 
 
 It has long been the theory of ultra-popular politicians 
 amongst ourselves, that the excesses of the French Revolu- 
 tion were solely owing to the unprovoked attempts of the 
 Powers of Europe to suppress it. The wolves fell foul of the 
 lamb for alleged troubling of the political waters ^ and the 
 lamb waxed wolf-like in successfully repelling their unjust 
 aggression. This is a very pretty theory ; it has but one 
 fault — that of contradiction with facts. The great Powers 
 of Europe were at first, notwithstanding the embarrassing 
 importunities of the French emigrant nobles, incontestably 
 reluctant to engage in war with France — always with the 
 exception of Russia, which was very willing that other 
 Powers should commit themselves in active hostilities with 
 their revolutionised neighbours, to disable them from any 
 effective combination against Russian aggrandisement. At 
 the epoeli when France declared war with Austria (April 20, 
 1792) she had distinctly the choice of peace or war in her 
 own hands. 
 
 If it is not true that France, in April 1792, was first 
 attacked by Austria, still less is it true that, in February 
 1793, she was first attacked by England. In the preceding 
 year England had held herself aloof from the Austrian and 
 Prussian belligerents, and had proclaimed, and observed as 
 long as France would let her, a policy of strict neutrality. 
 It is almost enough to say that, at the epoch when war broke 
 out between France and England, our Prime Minister was Pitt, 
 and our Foreign Minister Grenville. The hopes and wishes 
 of the former statesman were fixed on peace with a view to 
 financiai reform ; and the principles of the latter were not 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 279 
 
 less fixedly opposed to all military intervention in continental 
 politics. So late as Pitt's Budget speech of 1792, in moving 
 a reduction of the military and naval estimates, he hazarded 
 the anticipation (rashly, as the event proved), that ' there 
 never was a time in the history of this country when, from 
 the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect 
 fifteen years of peace ! ' The judgment stands on record of 
 so competent and impartial an authority as the late Sir 
 George Lewis, that the, grounds upon which the Convention 
 declared war with England (on February 1, 1793), 'were 
 frivolous almost beyond example.' ' 
 
 Of all foreign historians (always excepting the redoubt- 
 able Anglophobe Professor Von Treitschke), the most uni- 
 formly aspersive on England (and on most people besides) is 
 P. C. Schlosser, author of the well-known ' Gesehichte des 
 XVIIIn Jahrhunderts.' Schlosser may be described as 
 the German Cobbett amongst historians. As he has no 
 reticences, and no respects humains, he is, like Cobbett, 
 capital reading, and from amongst his outspoken animosities 
 and antipathies one can generally extract the truth on most 
 matters. With reference to the resolutions adopted at the 
 much magnified Conference held at Pillnitz, between the 
 Emperor Leopold of Austria and King Frederick William 
 II. of Prussia, on August 27, 1791, Schlosser says that 
 England declared to those Powers that she would have no- 
 thing to do with a war of principles against France. [Von 
 Sybel and Eanke have added ample proofs of her neutral 
 policy.] ' If,' continues Schlosser, ' nothing came in ques- 
 tion that regarded meum and tuum, she would, like all those 
 practical spirits whom Dante excludes alike ftom heaven 
 and hell, remain neutral.' In the position of England 
 towards France and Europe a wiser resolution could not 
 have been taken. Towards the close of the next year 
 France, by setting at nought the treaty engagements of 
 England, compelled her to prepare for war, and soon after 
 herself declared war on England. 
 
 ' JSssays on the Administration of Great Britain from 1783 to 1830. 
 London, 1864. 
 
280 THROUGH ANAEGHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 It must be frankly admitted, as Professor Von Eanke 
 Bets forth with, characteristic impartiality, that Austria 
 showed at that epoch the unfortunate talent which she has 
 shown on other occasions for precipitating war in her awk- 
 ward efforts to preserve peace. Old Prince Kaunitz, the 
 octogenarian Chancellor of that old shadow of empire — the 
 Holy Roman — who had been minister of Austria in three 
 eventful reigns, and remained so at the opening of a fourth 
 reign, destined to be more eventful than any preceding it — 
 was perhaps the best representative of the deliberata dis- 
 position of conservative monarchical Europe towards revolu- 
 tionised Prance. No man in Europe less accessible to Prench 
 emigrant illusions about any possible restoration of antiquated 
 feudal abuses — no man less bigoted to right divine whether 
 in priests or princes. But, while it may safely be affirmed 
 that the intention of his diplomacy at this epoch was pacific, 
 it must, on the other hand, be admitted that nothing could 
 have played more unluckily than the tone of that diplomacy 
 into the hands of the war party in Prance. Kaunitz knew 
 only one way of dealing with spiritual powers obnoxious to 
 him — viz., by snubbing them. He had tried that method 
 with Pope Pius VI., when he came to Vienna some ten years 
 before, to endeavour to induce Joseph II. to desist from the 
 process of which he had set the first example to subsequent 
 crowned or uncrowned revolutionists — the process, namely, 
 of wholesale confiscation of ecclesiastical and conventual 
 property. Snubbing the Pope, however, had not rendered 
 Belgium less disaffected to Austria. Kaunitz now again 
 foimd himself confronted by a new and still more formidable 
 spiritual power in Prance — that of the revolutionary apostles 
 of the Gospel of the Contrat Social in the Paris Jacobin Club. 
 Upon these, too, he tried his old method of verbal snubbing. 
 All he said in his despatches of their dangerous and destruc- 
 tive ascendancy was undoubtedly true, and was in fact in- 
 spired by the confidential communications of some of the 
 leading ex-champions of constitutional principles in the 
 Prench Constituent Assembly. Kaunitz, however, was 
 apparently not aware of a great truth in politics, taught 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 281 
 
 since to the world to some purpose by a Napoleon and after- 
 wards by a Bismarck — that hard words, to produce the effect 
 intended, must be backed by hard blows, or at least by plain 
 demonstration of readiness to strike hard blows. 
 
 It would be difficult to imagine two men more different in 
 character, and more diverse in faculty for acting on other 
 men, than Maximilian Eobespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 Nothing could be more marked than the moral antipathy of 
 the two characters ; yet nothing could follow more naturally 
 than the sway o£ the soldier after that of the demagogue. 
 It may be added that Eobespierre foresaw, as clearly as his 
 range of mental vision rendered him capable of foreseeing 
 anything, the period which would be put to his popular 
 ascendency by the rise of a military dictator. 
 
 The power of Eobespierre was that of popular revolu- 
 tion pushed to its extreme consequences; the power of 
 Napoleon that of military dictatorship thereon ensuing — 
 Punishment after Sin. Eobespierre seemed to have taken 
 in hand to ' shorten by the head ' all of the human race 
 who gave umbrage in any way to his engrossing ambition 
 of solitary and unpartaken ascendancy, or alarm in any 
 way to his jealousy of whatever outgrew the stature of 
 his own moral and intellectual mediocrity. Madame de 
 Stael said of the first Napoleon, that he seemed to have 
 taken in hand to checkmate the human race collectively. 
 Ultra-popular politicians show some dim sense of the 
 discipline good for them when they exalt the achievements 
 of Oliver Cromwell and Napoleon Bonaparte. 
 
 The inevitable end of such a power as that of the 
 Terror-triumvirate in France resulted from the national 
 feeling, which could not but at length assert itself, of the 
 utter incompatibility of its prolonged duration with civilised 
 existence. Bat the champion of civilisation in the last 
 resort must be some one with a sword in his hand. The 
 armies of France alone had preserved the traditions of 
 command and obedience. The Terror-triumvirate, resting 
 for support solely on an armed populace, and holding 
 power by the sole tenure of subserviency to its passions. 
 
282 THROUGH ANAKCHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 was of necessity followed by the less intolerable terrorism 
 of a trained and disciplined armed force under the leader 
 who was unanimously acclaimed ablest to wield it. 
 
 In the spring of 1793, that is to say, in the dreary dawn 
 of the Eeign of Terror, Dutard, one of the police ' observers ' 
 under Garat's Ministry of the Interior, reports as follows to 
 his employer : — 
 
 I fell in yesterday with officers of the line, all quiet-looking men, 
 but all of them with a very good aix and long swords. It is curious 
 to see what respect that military air impresses on the people — how a 
 man is looked at who wears moustaches, and lets his sabre trail on 
 the ground — how people of all sorts run after him to learn who he is, 
 what corps he belongs to, and what serious reflections the sight of arms 
 and uniforms seems to inspire in the people. 
 
 The five years from the fall of the Bastille to the Trium- 
 virate of the ' Terror ' witnessed the flood-tide of the first 
 great French Eevolution — the five following years its ebb. 
 No section of French revolutionary history has been less 
 studied than these five transition years from the word-power 
 of Robespierre to the sword-power of Napoleon. And in 
 truth no subject of historical study could be more dispiriting 
 — no drearier ebb of a more tumultuous tide. Those five 
 years have been glided and glossed over accordingly by 
 French popular historians as regarded internal politics, and 
 their main efforts directed to faire mousser les victoires of 
 French armies on the frontiers. The late M. Thiers accom- 
 plished the double feat of glorifying in succession the short- 
 lived triumph of democracy and the Napoleonic Csesarism 
 which crushed it. But he made no attempt at bridging over 
 the tremendous chasm between, or bringing out how it 
 happened that the military overthrow of a rabble-regime, 
 which might be termed anarchy on system, was hailed by 
 the French people generally with no less unequivocal 
 plaudits than its popular inauguration had been ten years 
 before. 
 
 Civilisation affords no precedent or parallel throughout 
 its annals for the state of things immediately succeeding the 
 fiall of Eobespierre. So completely had the whole Terrorist 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 283 
 
 system been identified in the public mind with his name," 
 that his death was hailed with universal joy as the death of 
 the Terror. Hope — the hope of a life other than life in 
 death — resurged from under the heaped homicides which, 
 during the Terror-triumvirate, had been decimating, not the 
 aristocracy only, but the democracy of Trance, and trans- 
 forming her bright capital into a human abattoir. As a 
 population flying from the eruption of a volcano, when it has 
 burnt itself out, return rejoicing to their homes, though only 
 to find those homes in ashes,^ so the people of Paris, sur- 
 rounded as they still were by danger and misery-^the blood 
 fresh shed still smoking — the edicts of a tyranny unex- 
 ampled in history still unrepealed^-were elevated by the 
 sudden intoxication of joy above all their necessities, and 
 filled the streets the whole of the 10th Thermidor, and the 
 night following, with their jubilant groups. ' I have often 
 asked,' says the late historian, Michelet, 'the survivors of 
 that epoch, what were the people's thoughts, what their 
 wishes, after that immense convulsion. " To live," they 
 answered. And what else ? " To Live !" ' 
 
 M. Michelet has somewhat sacrificed, sicut suus est mos, 
 accuracy to efi'ect in describing the Parisians, after the 9th 
 Thermidor, as having seen with astonishment and admiration 
 the cessation of executions on the Place de la Revolution, 
 now the Place de la Concorde. It is true that the latest 
 executions just witnessed (those of the Terror-triumvirate 
 themselves, and their satellites in the Commune, whom the 
 Convention had voted hors-la-loi along with them) were per- 
 formed on that noted or notorious theatre of revolutionary 
 justice. But for nearly two months before the fall of Ro- 
 bespierre, the disgust and horror unmistakably, though 
 passively, testified by the Parisians generally at the multi- 
 plied massacres on that spot had compelled the governing 
 committees to shift the scene, first to the Place Saint 
 
 ' 'It was not,' justly observes M. d'Hfirioault, 'after the fall of Hebert, it 
 was not after the fall of Damon, it mas on the fall of Rohesjiierre, that the 
 Terror came to an end. Down to the day of his death the Terror had redoubled 
 in violence. When lie disappeared, the Terror disappeared too.' 
 
 2 Von Sybel. 
 
•284 THEOUGH ANARCHY TO CjESARISM — 
 
 Antoine, and afterwards to the Barriere du Trone. On that 
 spot, says Barante,' twelve hundred and fifty-one persons 
 were executed within six weeks. 
 
 After the first moment of impulsive unreflective joy on 
 the sudden collapse of terrorism, there arose a cry of myriads 
 of surviving sufferers for justice — for vengeance. When the 
 prisons were opened, and the hundreds of thousands released 
 who had been immured there without crime — without even 
 specific charge of crime — many returned to their homes only 
 to find those homes stripped and desolated. The revolutionary 
 committees, in every town and village, had laid under seques- 
 tration the houses and goods of persons arbitrarily arrested, 
 and had then, in innumerable instances, themselves broken the 
 seals. Strong-boxes had been ransacked, furniture carried off, 
 innocent and respectable persons without number robbed, out- 
 raged, orphaned. Few families but had to lament the judicial 
 murder of one or more of their members. Exasperation was 
 unbounded and universal — exasperation among the surviving 
 victims of the Terror, provoked by its crimes — amongst its 
 agents and satellites, provoked by the cessation of those crimes. 
 
 The net result of that unparalleled regime has been placed 
 on record as follows, by a politician of orthodox Montagnard 
 antecedents, Eobert Lindet, in a speech delivered in the 
 National Convention, September 1794, that is to say, about 
 two months after the fall of Eobespierre. 
 
 We had reason, to fear that the rural districts would no longer 
 have hands for their culture, since landholders were either languish- 
 ing in prison or withdrawn from labour to attend clubs and revolu- 
 tionary committees. Commercial activity has dwindled down to 
 nothing ; the necessities of the people are aggravated, while \mpro- 
 ductive consumption goes on at an extravagant rate. Trade is dis- 
 organised, the materials of manufacturers are under seal of sequestra- 
 tion, all branches but those for the supply of the armies have ceased 
 working, all classes, all divisions of the people are estranged from each 
 other; seeds of discord are sown broadcast, and rapidly germinate 
 between towns and villages, peasants and artisans, neighbouring 
 communes and family connections. The genius of discord traverses 
 the country with destructive strides from one end to the other. 
 ' Ilistoire de la Convention Nationiile, tome iv. p. ,S71. 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 285 
 
 The condition of France in the years succeeding the 
 collapse of the Terror resembled that of the man in Scripture 
 from whom the unclean spirit had gone out — walking through 
 dry places, seeking rest and finding none. ' Then he saith, 
 I will return unto my house from whence I came out ; and 
 when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept and garnished. 
 Then goeth he, and taketh unto himself seven other spirits, 
 more wicked than himself; and they enter in arid dwell 
 there. And the last state of that man is worse than the 
 first.' One is involuntarily reminded of the text of St. 
 Matthew above cited by the doings, or rather the intended 
 doings, of the desperate seven who took principal part in the 
 conspiracy which goes by the name of Babeuf. Babeuf's 
 conspiracy fills a pretty long chapter in the fourth volume of 
 Professor Von Sybel's ' History of the Eevolution-Time ; ' 
 and the late M. Michelet, in the last volume he published 
 before his death, did his best to rehabilitate with posterity 
 the obscure ill-fame of the Babouvists — not, indeed, in their 
 public acts, or abortive attempts at action, but in their 
 poetically imagined public motives. 
 
 The social-democratic doctrine of the confiscation of all 
 wealth, public and private, for the assumed benefit of an 
 omnipotent and all-levelling proletariat was not left to the 
 mauvaises tetes of the present century for the first time to 
 propound and seek to apply in practice. ' Vixere fortes ante 
 Agamemnona.' That doctrine had been formulated by 
 Babeuf and his fellow-conspirators with as much precision 
 and (to say the least) as much vigour of expression, and pre- 
 pared to be carried into practical effect with as much violence, 
 as its later votaries have ever exhibited, whether in language 
 or action. The intended insurrection of the Babouvists in 
 Paris — discovered and stifled on the eve of explosion — might 
 by possibility have been momentarily successful in May 1 796, 
 as was that of the Communists in March 1871. Its avowed 
 aim was to take up anew, in a social sense, the work which 
 the Terror had left unfinished. Jacobinism had brought 
 Communism to the birth, but had not strength to bring forth. 
 The desperate discontents, which finally exploded in 
 
286 THROUGH ANAECHT TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 Babouvism, were the natural ojBfspring of tlie state of things 
 produced in France by the regime of the Terror. The ex- 
 chisive appropriation of the wealth of the country to its 
 proletariat had not, indeed, been regularly formulated in 
 theory under that regime, but the effort to put it in effect in 
 practice had been extended over the whole length and breadth 
 of France. Landed and monied wealth had not been in terms 
 denounced as a crime, but the possession of landed or monied 
 wealth had been tacitly taken as a vehement presumption of 
 the vague crime of incivism, almost in itself sufBcient to 
 sweep its possessors within the category of ' suspects.' 
 
 To have been driven by dread of murder or outrage to 
 leave one's land, was to incur the doom of death denounced 
 by the ' Law of Emigrants ' on return. To be found in pos- 
 session of specie was to incur the same doom, unless sur- 
 rendered to the authorities of the day for worthless paper. 
 When the ex-butcher Legendre vociferated to Lanjuinais in 
 the Convention ' Je t'assommerai ! ' the latter replied quietly, 
 ' Fais decreter que je suisun hoeuf, Legendre- — tu m'assommeras 
 apres ! ' In like manner large, and presently also small, 
 landowners were assumed under the Terror to be aristocrats ; 
 capitalists and merchants were branded en masse with the 
 vague imputation, invented by Robespierre and St. Just, of 
 negotiantisme. From thence it was but a step, in the pet 
 phrase of the epoch, to ' coin money on the Place de la Ee- 
 volution ' by decapitation of both. Practice in all branches 
 precedes theory. The Jacobin Terror-triumvirate had 
 attempted to put in practice that exclusive proletarian pos- 
 session of all wealth which we find again extensively pro- 
 claimed in theory at the present day. The progress of that 
 experiment in national economy having been cut short in 
 Thermidor (but not till it had universalised poverty instead 
 of wealth), Babeuf and his fellow-conspirators arose to re- 
 vindicate the Eobespierrian practice, as having failed only 
 because it did not go far enough, and explicitly to enunciate 
 the doctrine of universal confiscation and equalisation which 
 had been implicitly involved in the practical policy of the 
 Terror. 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 287 
 
 The Communism of Babeuf was the last and logically con- 
 sistent development of Jacobinism, and contained the germs 
 of all that has frighted Europe from her propriety within 
 these late years. But on its first barefaced apparition its 
 doom was sealed in a country which meant to continue 
 civilised, however severe a shock its civilisation had siiffered. 
 The mere possibility that a set of men, banded to accomplish 
 such ends by such means as those proposed and adopted by 
 Babeuf and his fellow-conspirators, should make themselves 
 masters by surprise of Paris (as their worthy emulators of 
 the Commune actually did seventy-five years afterwards), 
 immensely increased the force of the reaction which had 
 already set in throughout France, and was already beginning 
 to invoke, and prepared to welcome, a military dictatorship, 
 as holding out the sole remaining hope of tranquillity and 
 security. 
 
 At the epoch when Terrorism committed suicide after all 
 its murders, France had become, throughout her whole 
 length and breadth, passionately anti-Jacobin. 'No man 
 could have been better fitted to assist a nation in putting an 
 end for the time to its own revolutionary political life than 
 one who, like the first Napoleon, had no sympathy with that 
 life in any shape. 
 
 Whatever there was of generous feeling in his generous 
 years — and the res angusta, domi, as well as the intensely per- 
 sonal character of his ambition, cut those years very short — 
 was expressed in his early adhesion to Paoli, the unsuccess- 
 ful champion of independence of his island country, Corsica. 
 Whatever there was of patriotism in his heart was Corsican, 
 and therefore anti-Gallic. But it is curious to mark how 
 his only sincere political allegiance (that which he professed 
 to Paoli) gave way at once to the first early promptings of 
 his personal ambition, which also was Corsican, not French. 
 The first rehearsal of the coup d'etat at Saint Cloud, which 
 made him master of France, was struck by the young Bona- 
 parte at his native town of Ajaccio, to carry his own ap- 
 pointment as chef de hataillon in the national guard of his 
 pi'ovince. The French Constituent Assembly had sent a 
 
288 THEOUGH ANARCHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 commissioner to Corsica to control the native factions in the 
 elections ; and the rival candidate having contrived to get 
 the commissioner to his house, and thus to secure that the 
 official weight should be thrown in his own scale, young 
 Bonaparte, at the head of his probably also young partisans, 
 made an armed attack on the house, carried off the commis- 
 sioner, and by mingled intimidation and cajolery, made 
 conquest of that presiding influence in favour of his own 
 election. He was at this time a subaltern officer in the 
 French army, which still called itself royal, and his absence 
 without leave in Corsica was a breach of discipline, in those 
 days an unconsidered trifle. Amongst the papers found at 
 the Tuileries in the sack of the 10th of August was a cap- 
 tain's commission, signed by Louis XVI., for the young artil- 
 lery officer, for whom an ex-governor of Corsica, a friend of 
 the Bonaparte family, had obtained the previous favour of 
 professional education in the military school of Brienne. 
 
 Captain Bonaparte witnessed with the disgust and dis- 
 pleasure with which a military eye could not but witness the 
 mob triumph of the 10th August (preluded by the 20th 
 June) 1792 over the last remaining regular force of the 
 French monarchy. It cannot be doubted that, had he been 
 in a position to command the combined action of the sound 
 portion of the National Guard and the Swiss troops in the 
 Tuileries, the result of that fatal day would have been dif- 
 ferent. It further appears, from the St. Helena memorials, 
 that if his Girondin friends could have, at a later period, 
 enabled him to use his sword in their defence, the young 
 soldier of fortune would have very willingly done so. But 
 he soon made up his mind to take part with the stronger 
 side, and since the mob-force under Jacobin leadership de- 
 monstrated itself for the time the stronger against the 
 Gironde, Captain Bonaparte threw first his pen and then 
 his sword into the Jacobin scale. He had no belief in the 
 Jacobin programme of pure ochlocracy, but he had good 
 hope that a resolute and accomplished military adventurer 
 like himself could cut his fortune with his sword out of the 
 political chaos. Such is the sole inspiration of the curious 
 
NAPOLEON -THE UNCLE. 289 
 
 little tract, in form of dialogue, entitled Le Souper de Beau- 
 catre, wliicli he thought it expedient to publish soon after the 
 decisive overthrow of his Girondin friends. ISTapoleon ac- 
 knowledged afterwards that all his political sympathies had 
 been on the side of the Gironde, but after the event of the 
 2nd June 1793, he set himself to show, in the pamphlet 
 above referred to, that it was decidedly q,n act of ' civism ' to 
 adhere to the Mountain, the Mountain having for the time 
 proved itself the stronger party. An adhesion advocated 
 on such grounds of course depended for its duration on the 
 Mountain continuing to show itself the stronger party, and 
 after the 9th Thermidor, Bonaparte lost no time in hauling 
 down the Eobespierrian coloiir3 he had hpisted for the 
 nonce in the Bowper de Beaucaire, 
 
 The first distinguished service of the young artillery 
 of&cer to the Republic was performed at the siege of Toulon 
 in 1793, his Corsican countryman Salicetti, then a commis- 
 sary of the Irrational Convention attached to the army, 
 having introduced him to the ignorant Jacobin general, 
 Carteaux, to teach him where to place and how to point his 
 guns. His good service at Toulon raised young Bonaparte 
 to the rank of general of artillery, and procured him fresh 
 opportunities of distinction in the army of Italy, of which 
 Eobespierre junior was then the political dictator, f^s 
 Robespierre senior was of France. After the fall of the 
 Robespierres, the army of Italy was regarded by the mode- 
 rate Thermidorians (for the moment ascendant) as the mili- 
 tary headquarters of the deposed terrorism, and amongst 
 those most obnoxious by their terrorist a-ntecedents or asso- 
 ciations, the young military protege of the Robespierres 
 could not well escape removal. Bonaparte, to his intense 
 disgust, was transferred to the command of a brigade of iur 
 fantry in the west, that is to say, on the inglorious theatre 
 of civil warfare in La Vendee. This appointment he made 
 no haste to take up on the plea of ill-health, and accordingly 
 remained in a manner professionally shelved at Paris. B^it 
 a man who had proved his power to make himself useful 
 could not long remain unused. The army of Italy having 
 
 u 
 
290 THEOUGH ANAKCHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 suffered serious reverses, the war administration bethought 
 themselves of the young general of artillery who had taken 
 Toulon, and attached him to their topographical committee 
 to draw up plans of campaign to be addressed to the generals 
 of that army. 
 
 In this capacity Bonaparte drew up for Generals Keller- 
 man and Scherer successively a series of instructions, which 
 he was enabled the year after to carry out in his campaign 
 of Italy on his own account. Kellerman replied that the 
 author of such instructions should be sent to a madhouse ; 
 Scherer, that the man who had drawn them up was the only 
 man who could be expected to execute them. In the mean- 
 while occurred the momentous day of the 13th Vendemiaire 
 (5th October 1795), a day which decided that the old man of 
 the Mountain was not quite out of the saddle yet, and gave 
 Bonaparte opportunity to take as usual the stronger side, 
 and bring in play his artillery against the anti-Jacobin sec- 
 tions of Paris, as he had done two years before against the 
 anti-Jacobin citizens of Toulon. 'The 13th Vendemiaire,' 
 justly observes M. Lanfrey, ' showed all the woi'ld how de- 
 cisive a weight the sword of a soldier could throw into the 
 balance. That fatal day first accustomed the sovereign 
 power to count on the army. It first prepared the way for 
 military government.' ' 
 
 The anti-Jacobin electors, ascendant in the sections of 
 Paris, had shown reckless imprudence in setting the first 
 example of that war of the streets of which Paris has since 
 seen so many repetitions. A ' whiff of grapeshot,' ^ under the 
 skilful direction of Bonaparte, sufficed to put down their 
 movement. But, far from putting down, it exasperated the 
 general discontent of the nation ; and as the partial elections, 
 which the Convention could not prevent nor influence, in- 
 variably returned opponents of the ex-Jacobin rump, it scon 
 became a matter of certainty that the new Legislature (con- 
 sisting, by the Constitution of An III, of two Councils, a 
 third of whose members was to be subject to annual re-elec- 
 
 ' Histaire de NaxwUon, vol. i. p. 75, 
 ? Carlyle's French Revolution. 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 291 
 
 tion) would speedily find itself in hostile confrontation with 
 the executive power, consisting of five Directors, one of 
 whom only was to be re-elected annually — all five of whom 
 had been nominated by the unreformed Convention — all five 
 being regicides. This foreseen event was obviated in right 
 Jacobin fashion by the Directorial coup d'etat of the 18th 
 Fructidor, followed up by the sweeping proscription, and in- 
 tentionally murderous deportation to Cayenne, of the anti- 
 Jacobin and moderate members of both Councils. This was 
 the second (and this time openly illegal) intervention of the 
 army in Paris instigated (as the first had been executed) by 
 Bonaparte, who had been exasperated by the attacks in the 
 Councils on his high-handed military diplomacy in Italy. 
 The Constitution of An III. had given the legislative and 
 executive powers no legal means of exercising any reciprocal 
 control of each other's action. Precisely the same blunder 
 was repeated, fifty-three years afterwards, in the Constitution 
 of 1848, with precisely the same result ; viz. that the execu- 
 tive power, which had the military force at its backj re- 
 mained master of the field against a clear majority of the 
 Legislature. 
 
 The advancement of Bonaparte to so eminent a post as 
 the chief command in Italy had been owing, in part at 
 least, to his marriage with Josephine Beauharnais, who eur 
 joyed the influential friendship and protection of the Director 
 Barras. Thus it was under the ex-Jacobin auspices, asceur 
 dant at that time in the Directory, that the bright field of 
 Italy was thrown open to the military ambition of Bona- 
 parte, and to the fiscal rapacity of the ephemeral rulers he 
 despised and served. 
 
 The late M. Lanfrey has earned the acknowledgments of 
 all solicitous for the truth of history by his penetrating and 
 thoroughly informed exposure of the lying J^apoleonic 
 legend of St. Helena. But we cannot admit the fidelity to 
 fact of the contrast he draws between the ambition and 
 rapacity of Napoleon, first developed in the campaign of 
 Italy, and the pure philanthropy of Republican propagandism 
 which he thinks fit to ascribe to the elder champions of 
 
 V 2 
 
292 THROUGH ANAECHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 Revolution. He contrasts the avowed predatory incentives 
 addressed by the first Napoleon to the army of Italy in 1796, 
 with the alleged exalted generosity of the motives of the 
 first revolutionary campaigns of 1792. Now it may be 
 admitted that the new-ffedged Republicans of France, in the 
 first year of their war with Europe, did not at once confess 
 to themselves the mere unprincipled greed of territory and 
 money, which the profligate pentarchy of the Luxembourg, 
 some four years afterwards, had arrived at the impudence of 
 ceasing to disguise from themselves or others. But it is no 
 less certain that the National Convention and its commis- 
 saries, in 1792-4, could not easily be surpassed by the Direc- 
 tory or its young general of 1796, in their avowed purpose 
 of plundering, in every possible shape, the countries they 
 invaded, to make them pay the price for emancipation by 
 the armed apostles of sansculottism from the tyranny of 
 priests, kings, and kaisers. The early Revolutionary gene- 
 rosity lauded by M. Lanfrey took the same practical shape 
 towards Belgium, Holland, and Germany, as the later rapa- 
 city of the Directory towards Italy and Switzerland. The 
 proclamation addressed by Bonaparte to his army, at the 
 opening of his Italian campaign, is censured by M. Lanfrey 
 as breathing an utterly opposite spirit to that which had 
 hitherto animated the armies of the Republic, and as 
 announcing, not a war of liberty, but a war of conquest. 
 Why, what had the war hitherto been but a war of conquest? 
 Why was the war protracted but because neither in Belgium, 
 on the Rhine, or in Holland, would revolutionary France 
 surrender one of her conquests to purchase peace ? Where 
 had she founded liberty? — whither had she not carried 
 annexation, rapine, and robbery, in its abused name ? 
 
 A few pages farther on M. Lanfrey finds himself con- 
 strained by the force of facts to set the saddle on the right 
 horse, and charge on the Directory (all Revolutionists pur 
 sangi— that is to say, all regicides) — the predatory character 
 stamped on the campaigns of Italy. 'The further instruc-. 
 tions,' he says, ' addressed by the Directors to Bonaparte, 
 exercised a dominant and deplorable influence on the con- 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 293 
 
 duct of the war. For there is something more deplorable 
 still than the policy of conquest, and that is the policy of 
 depredation.' 
 
 It is idle to seek to make Bonaparte the sole scapegoat 
 for the sordid" sins of his right revolutionary employers. 
 While he was plundering Italy to prop the sinking credit of 
 the Directorial firm at Paris, none of the plunder stuck to 
 his own fingers. He flew at higher game. His ambition 
 for power and pre-eminence had none of the miserable 
 mammon stains of the Sieyes and Rewbells. In a com- 
 munication addressed by the Directors to the General on the 
 16th of May 1796, they explained their predatory inten- 
 tions at least with sufBcient clearness. ' The resources you 
 may procure,' they wrote to Bonaparte^ ' are to be remitted 
 to France. Leave nothing in Italy which our political situa- 
 tion {i.e. having the point of our sword at Italy's throat) 
 enables you to carry off, and which can be useful to us.' 
 Bonaparte admirably well knew how to serve such masters so 
 as to secure a firm footing in their service. He poured into 
 the laps of these battered Danaes of decrepit Jacobinism 
 all he could extort of money and art-treasures from the princes 
 and people of Italy. But he diverted no portion of those 
 treasures to his own use. He winked hard at the scandalous 
 fortunes made by the other generals and agents, while he let 
 them see that he was not their dupe, and so prepared them to 
 feel him their future master. ' As for himself,' acknowledges 
 M. Lanfrey, ' amongst so many venal souls, he chose to re- 
 main incorruptilsle ; but he so remained by superiority of 
 pride and ambition, rather than virtue.' ' 
 
 Bonaparte having climbed to its topmost round the 
 
 ' The Memorial de Sainte- Helens relates that, when Bonaparte was treating 
 with the Duke of Modena, Salicetti (his Corsican compatriot, who had first 
 introduced him to employment as an artillery officer at Toulon) came to speak 
 to him privately in his cabinet as follows : — ' The Commander D'Este, brother 
 of the Duke, is here with four millions of gold in four chests. He comes to 
 beg you, in his brother's name, to accept them, and I advise you to do so. The 
 Directory and the Corps LSgislatif will never remunerate you for your services. 
 This is fairly yours— accept it without scruple and without publicity.' Bona- 
 parte replied coldly, ' Thank you ; I am not going, for that sum of money, to 
 put myself at the disposal of the Duke of Modena.' 
 
294 THROUGH ANAECHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 Jacobin ladder towards autocracy, nothing remained, wlien 
 it could help him no higher up, but to kick it contemp- 
 tuously down, and throw himself openly on the army and on 
 the country, which were equally sick of Jacobinism and all 
 its works ; and neither of which he had any difficulty in 
 inspiring with the same contempt for the corrupt pentarchy 
 at the Luxembourg, which he himself had impatiently dissem^- 
 bled for years till the pear was ripe, as he saw it to be after 
 his return from Egypt, for transferring into his own hands 
 their unpopular sovereignty — a transfer made by perhaps 
 the most bungled of coups d'etat that ever was struck — but 
 which could not be so bungled as to be unsuccessful. 
 
 It would be impossible to imagine a more extraordinary 
 spectacle of an old civilised country fallen, as it were, to 
 pieces — into a state of utter social and administrative dis- 
 organisation—of utter disruption of all the ties which hold 
 society together — all security for order, all guarantees of 
 right or protection from wrong — than that which was exhi- 
 bited throughout the length and breadth of France under the 
 Convention and Directory, down to the decisive epoch of the 
 18th Brumaire. So far as national opinion could still be 
 said to exist in France, or could make itself audible, that 
 opinion was for the restoration of the gendarme in some shape 
 or other, as the sole champion of civilisation in the last 
 resort, as the sole agency which could save the body politic 
 from dissolution and decomposition. Military dictatorship 
 was alone possible after Jacobin demagogism, and all its 
 destructive consequences. 
 
 A political pamphleteer of long-lived notoriety, M. Fievee, 
 has left on record in his ' Memoirs * that, vphile living retired 
 in the country in the heart of the Bourbonnais, towards the 
 close of the year 1799, there was one observation which he 
 had daily occasion to make, and which alone recalled him to 
 politics. ' Every peasant I met,' he says, ' in the fields, in 
 the woods, or vineyards, accosted me to ask if I had any 
 news of General Bonaparte, and why he did not return to 
 France ? No one ever made any inquiry about the Direc- 
 tory ! ' France already recognised her master, untowardly 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 295 
 
 detained, as lie was just then, by stress of Nelson and Sidney 
 Smith, from returning to rule her. 
 
 When General Bonaparte at length effected his return 
 from Egypt, he found ' the pear ripe ' for finally seizing 
 supreme power into his own hands. M. Michelet, in his 
 random way of hitting, hits the right nail on the head in the 
 reasons he assigns why, not the army only, but also the 
 people, gave in its adhesion to the young military Dictator 
 when he decisively threw his sword into the scale on the 18th 
 Brum aire. 
 
 ' It was thought best,' he says, in a tone of irony which does not 
 affect the substantial truth of the statement, ' to trust that Italian 
 who gave hopes to all the world. This is what had been seen so 
 often in Italy, when a city-commonwealth, despairing of native paci- 
 fication of its internal discords, confided the task to some stranger 
 brought from a distance — an armed judge, a podestat. Society itself 
 appeared in peril, and to save it recourse was had to the great Italian 
 promiser, who gained to his side the two classes of proprietors, the 
 old and the new, by guaranteeing to the latter their newly-acquired 
 possessions,- gratifying the former with places, and giving them back 
 so much of their property as had not actually fallen by public sale 
 into other hands.' 
 
 All things, to a Frenchman, so soon become antiquated, 
 that it is nothing surprising M. Michelet should lump 
 together as old proprietors the multitude of all classes — land- 
 owners, farmers, manufacturers, simple peasants, and work- 
 people — who had been driven out of -France but a few years 
 before by the Terror. Those multitudes who had nothing 
 whatever in common with the first Royalist emigration, 
 formed a large proportion of the emigrants seeking re-ad- 
 mission after Thermidor. M. Michelet says their re-admis- 
 sion was ' a magnanimous imprudence.' It was a political 
 necessity, which the moribund Convention and Directory 
 had as little power as they had right to resist. But there 
 can be no doubt that the re-admission into France of multi- 
 tudes of all classes expelled and plundered by the Terror, 
 and the relief of multitudes more of relatives of emigrants 
 from the infamous laws of proscription and confiscation. 
 
296 THEOIIGH ANABCHY TO C^SARISM — 
 
 whicli had been extended to them, opposed new difficulties 
 to the retention or resumption of power by the proscribers 
 and confiseators. There was equal difficulty in substituting 
 the sway of any other party sufficiently strong and cool to 
 hold the requisite balance between conflicting interests. 
 The exiled Royalists, with their unsubdued pride and unsur- 
 rendered pretensions, had played their part so badly that 
 they had lost all chance of serving or saving their country 
 at the crisis now under our review. Remained the army, 
 and its universally recognised Representative Man. 
 
 In the minds of the soldiery ' the Revolution ' no longer 
 meant anything else than the decisive preponderance of a 
 democratically organised army.' In the nation at large, all 
 that was left of love for the Revolution might more fitly 
 have been termed hatred of the old regime. The mass of 
 cultivators of the soil in France — who were neither military 
 nor political, but who hated Jacobinism because it hindered 
 the return of internal tranquillity and prosperity, and dreaded 
 Eoyalism because it portended the return of the old lords of 
 the soil to their confiscated estates and abolished privileges — 
 came by some curious instinct to regard the first Napoleon, 
 who has sometimes been styled 'the child and champion of 
 Jacobinism,' as the man whose military decision of character 
 rendered him the most likely to be able and disposed to pro- 
 tect them from a revived ' Terror ' or a restored Feudalism. 
 
 Professor von Sybel draws the following striking and 
 lifelike portrait of the young Dictator in prospect, as he 
 appeared in Paris in the spring of 1 798, the year before his 
 assumption of an authority in effect absolute — an assumption 
 which can scarcely be called an usurpation, so readily was it 
 met half-way by the tacit or expressed assent of almost all 
 classes and parties : — 
 
 ' In a volume entitled Voyage d'un Allemand a Paris, et Metour pa/)- la 
 Suisse, the writer, a, warm friend of the Eevolution, travelling in France in 
 1798, remarks with sorrow that any one who witnessed the ostentatious parade 
 of military force at public fgtes, the domineering attitude assumed by the 
 soldiers towards the citizens, and the rudeness with which they thrust them 
 aside on all occasions, would be constrained to acknowledge that never had 
 less consideration been shown the people in royal fStes under the old regime 
 than was shown them now. It was the eve of a new regime of Cjesarism. 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 2.97 
 
 He was of slender make, with thin face, thin lips, sunken cheeks, 
 large eyes, long and lank hair. Quick and abrupt in all his move- 
 ments, in conversation his questions pressed uninterruptedly one 
 upon another. Without much of regularly acquired knowledge on 
 general subjects, he showed an intelligent interest in everything, and 
 his own manner of speech, if never much affecting beauty of form,- 
 was always marked by aptness and originality of expression. In 
 every interview he manifested that half-negligent half-confident 
 security which sprang from conscious superiority to his interlocutors 
 in strength of character or position, in possession or prospect. That 
 he should one day grasp the sovereign power in France was a point so 
 settled in his mind, that he had leisure to consider the question when 
 and how with perfectly cool composure. 
 
 The observation here offers itself, that not a single important 
 enterprise of the Consulate or Empire but may be traced back to the 
 early youthful projects of the born world-conqueror. It is striking 
 to remark how little is evinced of progressive development in the 
 mighty career which bears the name of Napoleon Bonaparte. It 
 was not two years, at the epoch before us, siuce he had first come out 
 from comparative obscurity on the great theatre of the world's affairs, 
 and already everything which he afterwards carried into effect at the 
 meridian of his power had shaped itself out completely in his mind — 
 the internal constitution of the French Empire in embryo — the im- 
 perial dominion over Italy, the subjection of the Pope, the subjuga- 
 tion of the Spanish peninsula — the vassalage of Germany to France, 
 with the means applicable to achieve it — the excommunication of 
 England from Europe — afterwards attempted by the continental 
 system. He did not strike out a single new idea in subsequent 
 years ; his whole course of government was nothing but the realising 
 in action of the ideas he had first formed in his youth. And in Uke 
 manner as the political views and projects, had the individual spirit 
 and character of the man himself already come to complete maturity 
 in his twenty-eighth year. From his first day of command, his 
 matchless military talent displayed itself in its full and complete 
 development, and not less the consummate statecraft — the remorse- 
 less perfidy — the insatiable egoism — the demonic charm of personal 
 intercourse and influence. In no one point was there any sign of 
 growth in subsequent years. 
 
 He grew indeed more corpulent and more communicative, but the 
 sole internal change traceable in him was a change for the worse. 
 The formerly marvellous equilibrium between imagination and in- 
 tellect, between caution and hardihood, between passion and calcula- 
 tion, became more and more dangerously disturbed and shaken by 
 
298 THEOUGH ANAECHY TO CJESAEISM — 
 
 every new success. It would seem as though he had risen from his 
 cradle a world-conqueror, as Pallas sprang forth in complete panoply 
 from the head of Zeus.' 
 
 The question has been sometimes — in our humble judg- 
 ment, somewhat idly — raised : Might not the first Napoleon 
 have played the patriotic part of a Washington, and set con- 
 stitutional liberty again on its legs, instead of trampling it in 
 the dust ? This seems a question which may best be answered 
 by another: What was there in the qualities which enabled 
 the first Napoleon to seize absolute power in France that 
 conld dispose him to surrender it, and restore political liber- 
 ties into hands which had already proved themselves unable 
 to preserve or use them ? And had he even been so disposed, 
 what was there in the character of his chief constituents — 
 the military — that could dispose them to render their services 
 for any such disinterested purpose ? In the political chaos 
 of Revolution the armies alone had developed a povv^er of 
 permanent practical organisation and action. They alone 
 had saved France from the worst consequences of anarchy — 
 national dissolution and dismemberment. But they had 
 saved France as armies are apt to save nations, that is to 
 say, by bringing her under the undisguised yoke of military 
 despotism. 'Napoleon,' says the late M. Lanfrey, 'was 
 assured beforehand of the support of the military, because 
 his elevation was the stire pledge of tbeir own influence in 
 the State.* The soldiery had twice already been used, not 
 without Napoleon's aid and incitement, to crush popular or 
 parliamentary resistance to an ex-Jacobin Directory. When 
 Napoleon, in Brumaire, proceeded to use them a third time 
 on his own account, he implicitly bound himself to redeem 
 the pledge his elevation gave them. How should he have 
 redeemed that pledge by taking as his motto Cedant arma 
 togas ? Or where should he have found a determining motive 
 for any such cession in his own military ideas of the essential 
 bases of governing power? ' E% derniere analyse,' he himself 
 said at St. Helena, ' on ne gouverne qu'avec des eperons et des 
 hottes.' And this was undoubtedly true at the epoch at which 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 299 
 
 he undertook to govern — to govern on the sole title of mili- 
 tary ability to command military obedience. 
 
 That, when the first Napoleon seized the sceptre of 
 France, she had fallen into a condition in which despotism 
 itself seemed a blessed rescue from social and political dis- 
 organisation, admitted at the time no question, unless from 
 the surviving sectaries of that anarchy on system which Trance 
 in reality had to thank for her Csesar. Injustice and violence, 
 on whatever pretexts perpetrated, can but inaugurate, not 
 an age of gold, but an age of iron. After the ravages made 
 by Jacobinism in her whole social and political condition, no 
 regime but sword-rule could impose restraint on the conflict- 
 ing passions still animating the late holders and the late 
 victims of lawless power. 
 
 To form a perfectly just estimate of the character and 
 policy of the first Napoleon, it never should be forgotten 
 that he had climbed to power over the heads of able and 
 ambitious rivals by the result of a sort of competitive exa- 
 mination of personal capabilities for empire, informally 
 instituted by military and popular opinion. He must not 
 be judged by the same standard as a ruler whose title is 
 undisputed, whose tenure of power traditional. He was a 
 political Blondin, whose nerves and brain were at all times 
 tasked to their uttermost to preserve a ' tremulous and danc- 
 ing balance ' on his narrow though lofty foothold.' 
 
 ' George Jackson, younger brother of onr resident Minister at Paris at the 
 epoch of the Peace of Amiens — in the first flush of the military and political 
 autocracy of the first Napoleon — writing home, retails as follows what his 
 brother told him of the position and supposed policy of the First Consul : — 
 
 ' He (the elder oflficial brother) said the First Consul had made the 
 replacing of the country in a state of peace, after a successful war, an object 
 of the first importance to him. He believed he would persevere in it. Still, 
 allowing him all possible credit for sincerity, bis views, he considers, are sub- 
 ject to contingencies which do not depend altogether either upon him or the 
 Powers vrith whom he is treating. His generals are dissatisfied with what is 
 going on at Amiens, and desire war that they may enrich themselves by 
 plunder. General Massena has openly boasted of the ease with which he 
 could have effected the invasion of England, and considers his career of victory 
 and glory cut short by the negotiations for peace. If Bonaparte does not find 
 himself strong enough to overcome these plotters and intriguers, it is my 
 brother's opinion that he will, to preserve his own position, gratify his 
 generals, and once more plunge the country in war.' — Diaries and Letters of 
 Sir Oeorge Jaelison, vol. i, p. 33. 
 
300 THROUGH ANARCHY TO C^SARISM — 
 
 Madame de Eemusat is not the first distinguished French- 
 woman who has bequeathed to posterity a woman's estimate 
 of Napoleon. The first impulse, in fact, to the composition 
 of her Memoirs was given by the unlooked-for appearance of 
 Madame de Stael's posthumously published work entitled 
 ' Considerations sur la Eevolntion Fran9aise.' ' What espe- 
 cially struck my grandmother in that work,' says M. Paul de 
 Eemusat, ' was the vehement pages in which tlie author 
 gave vent to her somewhat declamatory animosity against 
 Napoleon.' Writing to her son, the late eminent French 
 academician and father of the present editor of her Memoirs, 
 ' I was bitten,' Madame de Eemnsat said, ' by the desire to 
 speak again about Bonaparte. Behold me therefore sitting 
 down at six o'clock in the morning to relate the death of 
 the Duke d'Bnghien— that terrible week I passed at the 
 Malmaison. After a few lines, as I am an emotional person, 
 I feel transported back again to those times ; the words and 
 deeds I have witnessed seem to recur to my mind as though 
 of themselves.' 
 
 ' An observation v,rhich I had occasion to make about this 
 time,' says Madame de Eemusat, speaking of her first years 
 of court service as dame du palais under the Empress Jose- 
 phine, ' and which a good deal amused me, was that the 
 ci-devant great lords, whatever difference there might be in 
 their characters, all alike experienced, on coming to this 
 court, a sort of disappointment which was curious enough to 
 notice. 
 
 On their first appearance, finding themselves again breathing 
 palace air, again moving in the sphnre of court etiquette, and re- 
 suming the old modes of speech current in royal residences, they 
 gave way rather precipitately to the illusion, and fancied they could 
 bring back into vogue the same ways of speaking and acting to which 
 they had accustomed themselves in the same palaces, where nothing 
 appeared changed but the master. Very soon, however, a severe 
 word, an abrupt expression of absolute will, suddenly and harshly 
 warned them that everything in the new court was placed on a new 
 footing. It was then a sight worth seeing, how, put out as they 
 found themselves in all their wonted frivolous modes of being, find- 
 ing, as it were, the ground give way under their feet, they lost all 
 
KAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 301 
 
 aplomb, despite their efforts. Too vain or too weak to assume a 
 gravity foreign to all their antecedents, they no longer knew what 
 air to take or what language to hold . 
 
 If it was a part of Napoleon's policy to restore the 
 etiquettes, it was not in his nature or culture to restore the 
 manners of the old regime. This defect was conspicuous in 
 his habitually rough way of addressing women. 'Almost 
 always,' says Madame de Remusat, 'his first question, 
 whether to men or women, was " What is your name ? " and 
 every woman he spoke to rejoiced when he moved away from 
 her neighbourhood.' 
 
 The first Napoleon's general demeanour towards women 
 was habitually cynical, and sometimes capable of becoming 
 exceptionally rude. Not to mention his little war of police 
 proscription against Madame de Stael, or his unchivalrous 
 insults to the interesting and unfortunate Queen Louisa of 
 Prussia, he was habitually uncivil without intention — or in- 
 tentionally so without motive — even to ladies whose orna- 
 mental presence he wished to attract to his court. It was 
 as ornaments indeed he wanted them, and as nothing else. 
 Even high-born dames, whose titles of old nobility were 
 Napoleon's sole motive for cajoling them into his court 
 service — such, for instance, as Madame de Chevreuse — had to 
 endure his ' short and shocking ' apostrophes ; or if, like her, 
 they had spirit, were now and again provoked to reprisals. 
 Madame de Chevreuse, it seems, though pretty, had red hair, 
 and Napoleon twitted her with it. ' Cest possible,' she re- 
 plied, ' mais aucun homme ne me I'avait encore dit.' 
 
 ' Bonaparte,' says Madame de Remusat (he is always 
 Bonaparte with her from first to last), ' often repeated " II 
 faut que les femmes ne soient rien a ma cour ; elles ne 
 m'aimeront point, mais j'y gagnerai du repos." ' And she 
 added, ' II tint parole.' 
 
 Whether indeed with men or women at his court. Na- 
 poleon's was an attitude of 'no confidence.' He was ever on 
 the watch to repel encroachment or detect treachery, Like 
 the once noted tamer of wild beasts, Van Amburg, as depicted 
 
302 THEOUGH ANAHCHY TO C^SAEISM — 
 
 by Landseer, he was always on Ms guard against tlie moment 
 when — if they would not turn and rend him — they would at 
 any rate, in vulgar parlance, get on his back. ' I had risen 
 from the crowd,' he said to Las Cases at St, Helena ; ' it was 
 a matter of necessity for me to establish an etiquette ; other- 
 wise I should have been slapped every day on the shoulder.' 
 
 Amongst the most curious and amusing passages in 
 Madame de Remusat's Memoirs is the description of 
 Napoleon's court at Fontainebleau in the early autumn of 
 1 807. At that epoch his ascendancy in Europe had i-eached its 
 zenith. His short but murderous first struggle with Eussia 
 in the snows and swamps of Poland had terminated in the 
 triumphant treaty of Tilsit, and the sudden embrace and 
 reconcilement of the Imperial Peachum and Lockit. Every 
 subjugated nation had been tased in its best blood to furnish 
 recruits for the grand army of universal conquest. Spaniards 
 had been marched through France to fight Russians on the 
 Vistula. ISTow came a parade of peace, a courtly assemblage 
 of conquered princes to swell their conqueror's triumph, and 
 obey his sovereign command to amuse themselves. 
 
 ' All those foreign grandees,' says Madame de Eemusat, ' drawn 
 together at Fontainbleau — all more or less humiliated and despoiled 
 — came to seek favour or justice. All knew that their destiny was 
 being decided in silence in some cabinet of the chateau where they 
 were then met ; all had to assume the like countenance and affect the 
 like unconcern ; to hunt, dance, or do anything else they were asked. 
 Nothing else was asked of them but to do anything whatever that 
 should save the master the necessity of giving them a formal audience 
 or answer. There were fixed days for hunting, and it came into the 
 Emperor's head to invent a costume de chasse for the ladies. Each of 
 the princesses had her own distinguishing colours for herself and lier 
 household. The Empress's colours were amaranth with gold embroi- 
 dery, with a cap embroidered in like manner, and white plumes. The 
 Queen of Holland chose blue and silver, Madame Murat rose colour 
 and silver also. Princess Borghese lilac embroidered with silver. The 
 Emperor and the men of his court were in green uniform with gold 
 and silver lace. These brilliant costumes had a charming effect, 
 glancing in all directions through the fine forest of Fontainebleau. 
 
 The Emperor liked hunting rather for the sake of exercise than 
 the sport in itself. He did not always trouble himself much about 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 303 
 
 following the stag, but often forgot the motive which had led him to 
 ride through the forest, and let his horse carry him which way it 
 would, while he gave himself up to rather protracted reveries. He 
 had falls now and then, of which nothing was ever said in his pre- 
 sence, as that would have displeased him. He sometimes took a fancy 
 for driving, but it was not very safe to ride with him when he drove, 
 as he took no precautions for turning corners or avoiding obstacles. 
 Once at Saint-Cloud he took it in his head to drive four-in-hand, when 
 his horses ran away with him almost at first starting, and in passing 
 through a gate he upset the carriage with the Empress in it, and 
 other persons — himself coming off with no worse consequence than a 
 sprained wrist. From that time forward he gave up the freak of 
 charioteerJJig, saying, everyone, in small or great things, should stick 
 to his own trade.' 
 
 It is curious that a very similar freak of Cromwell is 
 recorded as follows, from contemporary sources, in Lingard's 
 ' History of England ' : — 
 
 ' About this time an extraordinary accident occurred. 
 Among the presents which Cromwell had received from 
 foreign princes were six Friesland coach-horses from the 
 Duke of Oldenburg. One day, after he had dined with 
 Thurloe under the shade of the park, the fancy took him to 
 try the mettle of the horses. The secretary was compelled to 
 enter the carriage : the Protector, forgetful of his station, 
 mounted the box. The horses at first appeared obedient to 
 the hand of the new coachman ; but the too frequent appli- 
 cation of the lash drove them into a gallop, and the Pro- 
 tector was suddenly precipitated from his seat. At first, he 
 lay suspended by the pole with his leg entangled in the har- 
 ness ; and the explosion of a loaded pistol in one of his 
 pockets added to the fright and the rapidity of the horses ; 
 but a fortunate jerk extricated his foot from the shoe, and 
 he fell under the body of the carriage without meeting with 
 injury from the wheels. He was immediately taken up by 
 his guards, who followed at full speed, and conveyed to 
 Whitehall. Thurloe leaped from the door of the carriage, 
 and escaped with a sprained ankle and some severe bruises. 
 Both were confined to their chambers for a long time. The 
 cavaliers diverted themselves by prophesying that, as his 
 
304 THEOUGH ANARCHY TO C^SARISM — 
 
 first fall had been from a coach, the next would be from a 
 cart.' 
 
 Not perhaps the least characteristic chapter of Napo- 
 leon's personal history is that which may be called the 
 scandalous chronicle of his amours. Madame de Eemusat 
 says that were she not well assured that, during her lifetime 
 at least, certain details would meet no eye but her son's, she 
 would not trust them to paper. Certainly they illustrate 
 what she calls the sauvage galanterie of Napoleon's ways 
 with women. We shall not seek (after the lapse of two- 
 thirds of a century, it would be very little worth while to do 
 so) to lift the discreet veil of initials from the names of the 
 ladies whom Napoleon honoured with his attentions. One 
 incident, however, may be singled out from his other tran- 
 sient liaisons, because it commenced a more permanent con- 
 nection and touched more important interests. 
 
 ' During his first campaign in Poland,' says our memoir 
 writer, ' Murat, who had preceded him to Warsaw, received 
 orders to "look out for him a young and pretty woman 
 against his arrival there, by preference from amongst the 
 nobles." Murat adroitly executed his commission, and found 
 the requisite qualities and the requisite complaisance in the 
 person of a young and noble Polish lady married to an old 
 husband. The fair dame's arrival, rather late at night, was 
 duly announced to the Emperor at a chateau near Warsaw 
 where he had taken up his quarters. He contented himself 
 with giving orders for her accommodation, and went on 
 working with his papers. When he had quite finished he 
 presented himself en maitre in the apartment where he had 
 been long waited for, and without wasting a moment on use- 
 less courtesies opened a long conversation with the young 
 lady on the political situation of Poland, putting just such 
 questions as he might have put to a sharp police agent, and 
 expecting in reply the most circumstantial details about all 
 the great Polish nobles then at Warsaw, their opinions, 
 interests, and so forth, and carrying on these curious inter- 
 rogatories a.t great length. The astonishmeni; of a young 
 woman of twenty, not in the least prepared for such a debut, 
 
NAPOLEON THE UNCLE. 305 
 
 may be imagined. She replied on all points to the best of 
 her ability, and not till she had got to the end of her 
 answers Wapoleon seemed to remember that Marat had 
 engaged for him that he should say a few words of softer 
 import. 
 
 Napoleon's singular style of gallantry did not prevent the 
 young lady from attaching herself to him. 
 
 ' She afterwards,' says Madame de Remusat, ' came to Paris, and 
 had a son on whom many of the Poles fixed their hopes as the future 
 founder in Poland of one more Napoleonic dynasty.' ' I have seen,' 
 says Madame de Remusat, ' the mother pi'esented at the Imperial 
 court, at first exciting the jealousy of Josephine, with whom, after 
 her divorce, she became rather intimate, and often brought her son to 
 visit her at the Malmaison. It is said that she remained faithful to 
 the Emperor on the fall of his fortunes, and visited him more than 
 once in his first exile.' 
 
 The anonymous author of a pleasant little volume en- 
 titled The Island Empire, published in 1855, relates some 
 circumstances of the visit (presumably) of this lady to Elba, 
 and mentions the odd qui-pro-quo to which it gave occasion 
 among some of Napoleon's followers in that island. 
 
 ' In all the memoirs of the Emperor,' says the above-cited author, 
 ' it has been stated that, during his sojourn at Elba, a lady with a 
 child came to the island for a short time, who was supposed by the 
 islanders to be the Empress [Marie Louise], but by persons better in- 
 formed to have been another lady, whose personal attractions and 
 accomplishments had some time before fascinated him. In the begin- 
 ning of August 1814, a Genoese felucca, the interior of which was 
 fitted up in a luxurious manner, arrived at Porto Ferrajo, bringing a 
 lady, a little boy, and a Polish or German colonel, whose name does 
 not transpire. In the course of the day of their arrival, the Emperor, 
 accompanied by General Bertrand, Captain BaiUon, and my informant, 
 started on horseback, as though for San Martino. Arrived at the 
 cross-road where the two roads to San Martino and Marciana branch 
 ofi", the Emperor, continuing his route to the former place with General 
 Bertrand, ordered his other two followers to wait at this spot for a 
 carriage that would soon pass, and to desire the coachman not to 
 proceed further till his Majesty's return. On his leaving, Captain 
 Baillon said to his companion, ' Yoilk, nous avons I'lmp^ratrice k 
 File d'Elbe.' 
 
 X 
 
306 THROUGH ANARCHY TO C^SARISM. 
 
 The occupants of the carriage had not to wait long for the 
 Emperor to join them, who, on riding up, entered the carriage, while 
 General Bertrand was observed to speak to the lady with marks of 
 extraordinary respect. On arriving at Procchio the party took boat, 
 and proceeded to Marciana Marina, whence they proceeded to the 
 Madonna, where tents were provided for their accommodation. The 
 following day, as the child was playing about under the chestnut- 
 trees, the Emperor came up to Doctor Fourreau, who was in conver- 
 sation with the Captain, and asked him what he thought of the 
 child. The Doctor answered, ' He appears to he much grown since I 
 had the honour of seeing him at Fontaineileau.' His answer was 
 evidently displeasing to the Emperor, who answered abruptly, 
 " Qu'est ce que vous chantez done 1 ' and turned away, leaving the poor 
 Doctor almost in tears, and in a state only to be understood by those 
 attendants who unfortunately fell under their master's displeasure. 
 The Emperor, seeing that the Captain had observed that the child 
 called him 'Papa,' asked him what the Elbans thought of his 
 visitors. The Captain answered, ' They think that Elba is honoured 
 with the presence of the Empress and of your Majesty's son.' On 
 which the Emperor rejoined, ' He may well be my son, and yet not 
 the King of Rome.' 
 
 This Polish mystery may be said to have since come 
 ■under the category of ' secrets known to all the world.' 
 
307 
 
 IX, 
 
 MONSIEUR GUIZOTS ' OWN TIMEP 
 
 3Iimoires jiowr servir a VSistoire de Mon Temps. Par M, Guizot. Tomes I.-VIIL 
 Paris, 1858-18«7. 
 
 Monsieur Guizot's memory of things and persons goes back 
 to times whither few surviving contemporaries are left to 
 follow it — ^from his first introduction to society and to 
 bureaucracy in the latter days of the Empire — through all 
 the earlier vicissitudes and later fatalities of the elder Bour- 
 bon restoration and the perturbed polities, quorum, purs magna 
 fuit, of the younger dynasty dethroned in turn. He notes a 
 trait of constant recurrence in French life and character, 
 and which yet, at every epoch of its recurrence, is always a 
 sort of surprise. The lull of politics, and the social fusion 
 for the time being of all the elite of all parties, which had 
 taken place under the strong compression of the government 
 of the first Napoleon, had encouraged hopes which, when 
 that compression was removed by his fall, soon proved falla- 
 cious, that the truce which had been enforced on party pas- 
 sions by an absolute government would be observed longer 
 than the time when the liberty to give them again their 
 swing was restored. M. Guizot describes as follows the sort 
 of ' trnce of God ' that had suspended party conflicts in 
 France during the years which intervened between the revo- 
 lutionary troubles in which the last century had closed, and 
 the reopening of the political arena by the restoration of 
 chartered royalty : — 
 
 I was living in the midst of a thoroughly French society — more 
 strongly impregnated perhaps than any other with the national taste 
 and spirit. I witnessed there precisely that sort of rapprochement, 
 
 ' From the Fortnightly Remem, May 1866, September 1867. 
 X '1 
 
308 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 harmony, and fusion of different classes, and even of different parties, 
 ■whicli appeared to me to siipply an essential condition of the stability 
 of the new and free regime which was to succeed. Men of all ranks, 
 all professions, nay, all opinions — men of the old noUesse, magis- 
 trates, lawyers, ecclesiastics, men of letters, and men of business — ■ 
 men of the ancien regime, of the Constituent Assembly, of the Con- 
 vention, and of the Empire, were living at that time in easy and 
 amicable relations, miitually recognising, without constraint or effort, 
 their differences of position or views, and apparently disposed to a 
 good understanding with each other on the affairs of their common 
 country. Strange contradiction in French manners ! So long as no 
 other relations are in question than those formed for the pleasures of 
 literary and social intercourse, all class distinctions, all party struggles, 
 are suspended ; we all thint only of throwing our merits and accom- 
 plishments into the common stock of enjoyment. But only let political 
 questions come up again, and the positive interests of life connected 
 with them — only let the question come to be, not of joining in social 
 meetings devoted to mere pleasure and amusement, but of claiming 
 each his part in the rights, affairs, honours, advantages, and burthens 
 of the body politic, on the instant all the suppressed differences re- 
 appear — all the pretensions, all the stubborn prepossessions, all the 
 susceptibilities, all the struggles, recommence ; and the same society 
 which had seemed so harmonious and so united, shows itself at once 
 not less diverse and not less divided than it had ever been. 
 
 This unfortunate incoherence between the apparent and real state 
 of French society suddenly revealed itself in 1815. The reaction 
 provoked by the Hundred Days [Napoleon's return from Elba] 
 destroyed in a moment the whole work of social pacification which 
 had been going on in France for sixteen years, and produced a 
 sudden explosion of all the passions, good or bad, of the ancien 
 regime, against all results, good or bad, of the Revolution. (Vol. i. 
 p. 111.) 
 
 If the Consulate and Empire of the first Napoleon liad 
 effected a sixteen years' suspension of the political passions 
 and conflicts of the ten revolutionary years preceding, on the 
 other hand, his prolonged military dictatorship had equally 
 arrested all acquirement of political experience during the 
 same period. It has often heen thrown in the teeth of the 
 men of the old regime who took subsequent part in politics, 
 that, since its downfall, they had forgotten nothing and 
 learned nothing. But the same thing exactly might have 
 
MONSIEUE GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 309 
 
 been said, with equal truth, of the men of the Revolution, 
 and of the new generation who sat at their feet and handed 
 down their traditions. There had been no school of public 
 life open in France for sixteen years where either Eoyalists 
 or Revolutionists could have learned, or could have learned 
 to forget, anything. Accordingly the first use the former 
 made of their temporarily restored ascendancy was to domi- 
 neer ; the first use the latter made of their newly-restored 
 liberties was to conspire. Neither had an idea of anything 
 like a spirit of concession, self-moderation, or self-restraint 
 in politics. While the Eoyalists remained uppermost, their 
 language and attitude, rather than any overt acts, provoked 
 revolt; whenever the Liberals got a chance they revolted. 
 Neither knew how to use parliamentary government for its 
 proper purpose ; both justified, in turn. Mallet Du Pan's 
 sentence in a letter addressed to Count Saint-Aldegonde in 
 1797: — 'Une grande assemblee deliberative en Trance ne 
 sera jamais qu'une petaudiere ou un brulot.' 
 
 The worst enemies of the permanent power of the 
 Royalist party in France were in its own ranks ; and the 
 most fatal blows which were struck at that power, when it 
 seemed consolidated, were struck by its own malcontent 
 members. Of these, the most conspicuous and the most 
 formidable was Chateaubriand, whose writings attracted M. 
 Guizot's early admiration, as that of young France generally 
 under the First Empire, and whose eccentric character and 
 career he has traced with justice, and not without sympathy: — 
 
 The situation of M. de Chateaubriand at Ghent [during the 
 refuge taken by Louis XYIII.'s little court there in 1815] was 
 singular. He was a member of the Royal Council ; he put forth 
 brilliant expositions of its policy in official documents, and defended it 
 with not less eclat in the " Moniteur de Gand." He was, nevertheless, 
 in a very bad humour with everybody, and nobody paid much personal 
 attention to him. In my opinion, neither the King nor his successive 
 governments at that time, nor afterwards, rightly understood M. de 
 Chateaubriand's character, nor estimated at a high enough rate the 
 importance of his concurrence or hostility. I am ready to admit he 
 was a most inconvenient ally, for he had pretensions to everything, 
 and took offence at everything. With just claims to stand on an equal 
 
310 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 footing with men of the rarest talent and highest genius, his delusion 
 was to imagine himself also the equal of the greatest masters in the 
 art of government ; his heart was full of bitterness when he was not 
 recognised as the rival of Napoleon as well as of Milton. Practical 
 politicians would not humour this self-idolatry, but they did not take 
 sufficient account of the qualities of the man, whether as friend or as 
 enemy. It might have been possible to satisfy him by tributes to his 
 genius and sops to his vanity; or if it was not possible to satisfy 
 him, it should, at all events, have been felt necessary, from motives of 
 prudence as well as of gratitude, not merely to soothe his jealous 
 susceptibilities, but to load him with favours. He was one of those 
 towards whom ingratitude is not less dangerous than unjust, since 
 they resent it passionately, and know how to revenge their felt or 
 fancied wrongs, without incurring the imputation of betrayal of their 
 party or desertion of their professed principles. (Vol. i, p. 88.) 
 
 Chateaubriand's ea,rlj youtli, passed between a dilapidated 
 feudal chateau and a remote Breton college, the vagabondage 
 of his early manhood in both hemispheres, in forest and 
 camp, under the storm and stress of those years of revolution 
 in its first period, vyhich drove all aristocratic and almost all 
 French life from its moorings — brought to maturity whatever 
 was original, peculiar, and Quixotic — -sometimes pseudo- 
 Quixotic — in his genius and character, and rendered him, like 
 Rousseau, eminently self-concentrated, self-conceited, and 
 unsociable. Like Eousseau, Chateaubriand early conceived 
 the idea of ' Confessions,' but, unlike Eousseau, he declared 
 he should not take the world into the confidence of the weak 
 or sore places of his soul and life. He has, however, done 
 so, whether in writing of himself or others. There is a 
 curious contrast — to the advantage indeed of Chateaubriand's 
 originality of thought and play of fancy, but to the advantage 
 also of M. Guizot's better regulated mind, self-judgment, 
 and judgment of others — between the ' Memoires d'Outre- 
 Tombe,' and M. Guizot's ' Memoires de Mon Temps.' It is 
 impossible to deny that, with all Chateaubriand's conceits 
 and affectations, with all the distortions, more or less 
 conscious as it may be, of action and character, caused by 
 the disturbing force of his own ever-present personality, its 
 pretensions and resentments, his autobiography has a power 
 
MONSIEUE GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 311 
 
 of description and vividness of colouring of the chequered 
 life of his times, which it would be vain to seek in Mi 
 Guizot's. On the other hand, no one would take on trust 
 Chateaubriand's estimates of the acts or characters of any of 
 his contemporaries, without first examining at what points, 
 real or fantastic, they had come in contact with himself. He 
 could not see the Fete-Dieu celebrated at Lyons in 1803, 
 without referring the re-establishment of Christianity in 
 France to his ' Genie du Christianisme.' ' Je croyais avoir 
 quelque part a ces bouquets de fleurs, a cette joie du ciel que 
 j'avais rappelee sur la terre.' It is, however, quite true that 
 Chateaubriand possessed a peculiar faculty — partly due to 
 his vivid imagination, partly, it must in justice be owned, to 
 the element of fearless independence in his character, and 
 his habitual disregard of interested considerations of the 
 lower sort — for doing, at critical epochs, what Madame de 
 Stael termed, ' un devoir qui nous distingue,' and striking 
 what might sometimes almost be termed literary and rhetori- 
 cal coups d'etat. His public life was a series of conspicuous, 
 not to say ostentatious, sacrifices to a cause and principle 
 which he takes care to tell us were not those of his rational 
 and interior conviction. He did life-long battle, as he afiirms, 
 for Church and Crown, from a point of honour not very ia- 
 telligible in its origin or obligation ; but his real and intimate 
 faith was in his own divine right to unceasing incense. This 
 the human race will not pay long to anyone ; and Chateau- 
 briand sought refuge for his unsatisfied vanity in the profes- 
 sion of ennui of everything — as Rousseau had in suicide. In 
 politics, with which our concern is at present, his insociability 
 made opposition his natural element. By his own ac- 
 knowledgment, he would act alone, or would not act at all. 
 When Napoleon, always in quest of talent that might be 
 made serviceable, first appointed him Secretary of Legation 
 at Rome on the strength of his ' Genie du Christianisme,' he 
 says naively, ' I was by no means convinced that I could be 
 useful in the place I was called to fill — I a,m good for nothing 
 at all in the second rank.' Presently, Napoleon, then First 
 Consul, made him Minister in the Valais — no verj- important 
 
312 MONSIEUE GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 mission. 'He had come to perceive,' says Chateaubriand, 
 ' that I was of that race which is only good for anything 
 when placed in the first line — that I must not be joined or 
 mixed with anyone, or no good would ever be got out of 
 me.' 
 
 Chateaubriand had, or rather took, an opportunity, under 
 the Bourbon Restoration, for that isolated action for which 
 his genius, he conceived, was fitted. As envoy from the 
 Villele Cabinet to the Congress of Holy Allies at Verona, in 
 1823, he contrived to force the hand of a reluctant minister 
 and a no less reluctant monarch (Louis XVIII.) into the 
 impolitic, though successful, Spanish war of that year, in 
 which France really made herself the cat's-paw of the Holy 
 Alliance to extract the chestnuts of Spanish absolutism from 
 the fire of revolution. Chateaubriand always claimed the 
 war of 1823 as his Spanish war, and certainly, whether as 
 ambassador at Verona, or afterwards as Foreign Minister, he 
 was the one Trenchman who had the best right to claim a 
 voluntary initiative in putting through that monarchical 
 European work. But as he found no special laurel- wreath 
 placed on his brow for it by king, minister, or public — as he 
 found, or fancied, himself slighted at court on his first ap- 
 pearance there, when his war policy had triumphed — he was 
 thrown back on his old natural proclivity to secession and 
 opposition, and took the first opportunity, not a very decent 
 opportunity, of indulging it. 
 
 Nothing is of more common observation in politics 
 than to find the first fatal shock often given to the power of 
 parties, nay, even to dynasties, by some apparently petty 
 cause. It may seem absurd when stated, but it is true, that 
 the government, first of the elder, and afterwards of the 
 younger Bourbon dynasty, got the first serious shake by a 
 sudden split in the ranks of their natural supporters on a 
 question which would have seemed so inadequate to such 
 issues as the reduction of the French Five per Cents. ! That 
 question caused the abrupt expulsion of Chateaubriand from 
 the Villele Cabinet in 1824 ; the wayward Foreign Minister, 
 disgusted that no Te Deums were sung to him as the author 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 813 
 
 and finislier ofjiis Spanisli war, taving wrapt himself up in 
 sullen silence in the Chamber of Peers on that ministerial 
 measure, and having spread, as it was suspected, or detected, 
 amhiguas voces about it among the many malcontents — ^prin- 
 cipally Parisian fundholders — against it out of doors. Re- 
 tired to his natural role of opposition, Chateaubriand became 
 the most formidable member of that opposition, in the 
 Royalist ranks themselveSj which succeeded in overthrowing 
 a moderate Royalist government (that of M. de Villele), and 
 creating such difficulties for ' the king's government ' in any 
 hands, that a monarch of weak mind and strong prejudice 
 cut them short at last by the Polignac Ministry and the 
 ordonnances, which sent the elder Bourbons a third time into 
 exile. 
 
 Twelve years later, in 1836, the same Five per Cent, ques- 
 tion came up again under Louis Philippe's Government, on 
 the unauthorised initiative of the then Minister of Finance, 
 M. Humann. The effect was still more immediate in over- 
 throwing a ministry, and scarcely less permanently injurious 
 to the stability of the new dynasty than it had been to the 
 old, since it produced the first schism between the more and 
 the less popular sections of what might be termed the govern- 
 mental party under the House of Orleans — a schism which 
 came to a head in the successful parliamentary coalition in 
 which M. Guizot, not very consistently with his austere Con- 
 servatism, took an active part, against the Mole Ministry, in 
 1837-1839. M. Guizot has placed on record a conversation 
 he had with M. Bertin de Vaux, long the proprietor of that 
 highly influential newspaper, the ' Journal des Debats.' In 
 1824, M. Bertin de Vaux had called on the Prime Minister, 
 M. de Villele, to get him to make peace with Chateaubriand, 
 after his abrupt dismissal, by giving him the embassy to 
 Rome. On his refusal, the journalist threatened the minister 
 that he would upset his Government, as he had done preced- 
 ing ones ; and, with Chateaubriand's energetic collaboration, 
 in the end he kept his word. But the overthrow of the 
 Villele Ministry drew after it ultimately that of the elder 
 Bourbon dynasty, which neither Chateaubriand nor Bertin 
 
314 MONSIEUR GUIZOrS 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 de Vaux had deliberately wished to accomplish.. Accordingly, 
 when Guizot, Thiers, and the Cote Gauche declared open war 
 on the M61e Ministry, M. Bertin de Vaux frankly said to M. 
 Guizot, ' I feel assuredly as much friendship for you as I ever 
 did for Chateaubriand ; but the ' Debats' shall not follow you 
 into opposition. I will not set to work a second time to 
 undermine a government of which I wish to promote the 
 permanence aud stability. Once has been once too often.' 
 
 It is a circumstance more significant than edifying, as a 
 trait of character, that King Louis Philippe — who, as 
 M. Guizot tells us, was vehemently opposed to the measure 
 above referred to, for reimbursing the principal or reducing 
 the interest of the Five per Cents., " which he regarded," 
 says our memorialist, " as unjust in itself, injurious to his 
 Government, inconsistent with public faith, and even ques- 
 tionable in legality " — was himself a habitual purchaser, 
 with the annual savings from the portion of his civil list 
 appropriated to his own personal expenditure, of small 
 amounts of Five per Cent, stock. This M. Guizot does not 
 tell us, but we are told it by an authentic publication which 
 was made soon after the February Eevolution, under the 
 title of 'Kevue Retrospective,' of all the documents, whether of 
 a public or private nature, found in the palaces and bureaux 
 of the Orleans dynasty, which appeared to bear in any 
 manner on the character and policy of that dynasty. Few 
 houses, royal or unroyal, have been subjected to such sudden 
 and ruthless revelations — few perhaps would have stood such 
 with less serious damage. But certainly this habit of invest- 
 ing small savings in the Five per Cents, seems partly to explain 
 — as M. Taschereau, the editor of the 'Eevue Retrospective,' 
 observed at the time — the vehement opposition of the great 
 fundholder at the Tuileries to the sound financial measure of 
 reimbursement or reduction of the Five per Cents. 
 
 There is nothing very astonishing in this little trait of 
 fellow-feeling between the Citizen King and his bourgeois 
 brother-holders of Five per Cent, stock. What may seem 
 more so is the facile complaisance shown towards that feel- 
 ing by the Citizen King's Ministry of 1836, headed by the 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 315 
 
 Doctrinaire Dute de Broglie, and of whicli tlie Doctrinaire 
 M. Guizot Avas a subordinate member. Those ministers 
 thought the measure in question just, legal, and expedient. 
 Thej were backed — nay, pushed to its adoption — by a 
 majority of the Chamber of Deputies. And yet, apparently 
 in deference to the pensee immuahle of fund-holding royalty, 
 they threw their too honest Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 overboard, and were themselves — by a poetical justice one 
 can't help chuckling over, even at this distance of time — 
 overthrown by a vote of the Chamber of Deputies^ insisting, 
 and rightly insisting, on some distinct pledge for at least the 
 future adoption of a measure admitted to be just in principle, 
 and deemed urgent in practice to cut short the course of 
 that dynasty of deficits then just opening. M. Guizot 
 laments that the Louis Philippist majority never again re- 
 covered that force of cohesion in all its sections which it 
 lost — as the Royalist Restoration majority had lost before — 
 by a pitiful Five per Cent, schism. Pitiful enough, certainly ; 
 but to an English eye the weak point in French politics at 
 either epoch was not what M. Guizot thinks, the undue 
 stress laid on a mere matter of honest finance and sound 
 public economy, but, on the contrary, the carelessness of 
 public economy, which maintained predominance} and the 
 postponement of a clear practical public interest to party 
 passion, petty class interests j or royal influence — unavowed, 
 but not undetected. 
 
 There is sometimes a succession of untoward incidents in 
 public affairs which bears an aspect of little less than fatality, 
 and seems to recur more markedly in French politics than 
 in any other, from the epoch of the diamond necklace down- 
 ward. Such a ' run of ill luck ' befell the Orleans dynasty 
 in ' the last months of its existence, and laid it open to a 
 malignity of attack and aspersion almost without precedent. 
 M. Guizot makes a clean breast, in his last volume, of some 
 jobs of which he confesses himself to have been cognisant — 
 some little private bargains between friends for purchase and 
 sale of the ' tenant-right ' of certain places. M. Guizot 
 also records some graver scandals of official malversation, 
 
316 MONSIEUK GUIZOrS 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 which, as soon as detected, his Government handed over to 
 public justice. All, however, lielped to heap odium on an 
 already unpopular Ministry. Aristides the Just himself 
 would have fatigued the French Demos had he enjoyed, like 
 M. Guizot, an eight years' lease of power ; and it was a god- 
 send to have colourable pleas afforded from any quarter for 
 ostracising that ' austere intrigant,' as his enemies termed 
 him. There was grave menace for the monarchj' — sentence 
 of death for the Ministry, could Louis Philippe have read it 
 right — in the standing toast at the political banquets of 
 1847 — " A la prohite politique !" 
 
 We have now for the first time before us, in authentic 
 detail, the incidents which immediately preceded and 
 prompted the sudden change of Ministry made by Louis 
 Philippe under stress of street riot on the 23rd of February 
 1848. M. Guizot states with more distinctness, as well as 
 with more authority, than had been done before, the covert 
 or pronounced hostility which had gathered about his 
 Ministry in court circles, and in the royal family itself, in the 
 course of 1847^ when the crowded opposition banquets held 
 throughout the country had testified to the unpopularity of 
 the Government, and culminated in that project of a final 
 banquet in Paris which produced the fatal explosion. Under 
 these circumstances of formidable hostility out of doors to 
 his Cabinet and policy, and hardly less formidable mistrust 
 in-doors, M. Guizot tells us, and we give full credit to his 
 account, that he thought it his duty to lay before King Louis 
 Philippe, on the eve of the opening of the Chambers, where 
 the Guizot Ministry still commanded an assured majority, 
 the alternatives which the political situation offered, and the 
 readiness of the Cabinet to give way to a change of councillors. 
 " If a ministerial crisis " —the minister wisely and honestly 
 said to the Monarch — "must come, it is better, infinitely 
 better, that the question should be settled before the meet- 
 ing of the Chambers. To-day the King may change his 
 Cabinet as a measure of prudence — the struggle once com- 
 menced, the change would take place under the stress of 
 necessity." The King replied by declaring his firm resolu- 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 817 
 
 tiori to support his Ministers against all assaults and all 
 demonstrations, unless such as should be backed by a 
 parlianientHry majority. Few weeks had passed before he 
 abruptly dismissed that Ministry on the first alarm of a 
 portion of the !N"ational Guard showing itself on the mal- 
 content side, and joining in cries of " Vive la Reforme !" A 
 week or two earlier, the dismissal of an unpopular Ministry 
 might probably have saved his throne. His surrender of the 
 executive government to a movement of the Paris populace 
 overthrew it. When M. Guizot announced the retirement 
 of his Cabinet in the Chamber of Deputies, he tells us that 
 an opposition member, M. Calmon, slapped M. Muret de 
 Bord, a zealous Ministerialist, on the shoulder, saying, 
 " Citizen Muret de Bord, tell Citizeness Muret de Bord to 
 pack up — the Republic won't be too fond of you." At the 
 same sitting, another opposition member, M. Jules de Las- 
 teyrie, said to M. Duchatel, ex-Home Minister, " I earnestly 
 desired to see the fall of the Cabinet, but I had rather 
 have seen you stay in ten years longer than go out by that 
 door." 
 
 The remoter causes of the overthrow of a dynasty which 
 has fallen under internal enemies only, must, of course, have 
 been more important than the mere accidents which imme- 
 diately preceded it. But M. Guizot's disclosures of the last 
 days and hours of his Ministry, and of middle-class monarchy 
 in France, show that the main proximate cause at least 
 of that overthrow was a peculiarity in his late master's 
 character, noticed by him in his previous volumes, whicfe 
 rendered Louis Philippe's strongest opinions and firmest 
 resolutions liable to be shaken by sudden impressions from 
 unforeseen incidents. What he had seen of revolution, and 
 suffered from revolutionary violence in his long career, while, 
 on the one hand, rendering him very decided in his attitude 
 of resistance to all movements which he regarded as pointing 
 in that direction, had rendered him, on the other hand, 
 somewhat over-ready, at critical moments, to yield to popular 
 violence, or the sudden impression and apprehension of it, 
 more than could reasonably be demanded or prudently 
 
818 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 
 
 conceded. A remarkable trait of this kind is related by M. 
 Guizot in his second volume (p. 173) : — 
 
 Two days after the sacking of St. Germain I'Auxerrois (1831), 
 M. Laffitte [at that time Prime Minister], in one of his sudden 
 accesses of deference to demagogic passions, came to ask the King to 
 change the arms of France, and strike the fleurs-de-lis out of them. 
 The King yielded to this demand, not thinking himself in a position 
 to resist it. I believe that, in this sorry circumstance, he mistook 
 his course, and to this tyrannical proscription by the revolutionary 
 spirit of the armorial bearings of his house he might have said 
 no — at some risk doubtless, but not at great risk to his throne or 
 person.' 
 
 A little of our George III.'s insensibility to imminent 
 danger — a little, perhaps, of his dulness of political vision — 
 might have done Louis Philippe better service at some 
 critical moments than his own quicker sense and w^ider 
 views. The former monarch had an undoubting and unfear- 
 ing faith' in himself as chief hereditary representative of 
 national right and power, with which he laboured, with im- 
 perfect success, to inspire his trusted advisers, and which 
 was alike proof to revolt in America, hostile leagues in 
 Europe, menace of invasion from Trance, Protestant com- 
 bustion of London, and armed independence of Ireland. 
 Louis Philippe was quite as persuaded as George III. that 
 his personal policy was fighting the battle of all right-think- 
 ing persons and substantial householders, but he had not 
 that royal or imperial faith in himself, his function and 
 mission, which sometimes maintains a monarchy and some- 
 times erects an empire. Neither had he that other quality, 
 rarer still, and possessed so eminently by the late King 
 Leopold of Belgium, of exercising real power while avoiding 
 all personal assertion or ostentation of it — throwing, as it 
 were, the reins on the necks of parties, letting them fight 
 out their fight for power and of6.ce in the open parliamentary 
 arena, and find out a need of arbitrament not prematurely 
 thrust on them. Louis Philippe, according to M. Guizot, 
 was always a.fraid lest people should not give him credit for 
 his personal share in the policy pursued under his Govern- 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOX'S 'OWN TIME.' 319 
 
 ment. He got only too much credit given him for that 
 policy. 
 
 ' Indifference and silence,' says his ex-Minister, ' ai*e often very 
 useful and suitable royal habits. King Louis Philippe did not suffi- 
 ciently cultivate these. He was besides so profoundly convinced of 
 the wisdom of his own policy, and of the importance for the good of 
 his country of his success, that he grudged to see the merit of his 
 measures ascribed to others ; and could not be content without vindi- 
 cating his full share in them. This natural enough [tmkingly enough] 
 desire on his part, and the inexhaustible fertility and vivacity of his 
 conversation, gave him the appearance of continual interference and 
 exclusive preponderance in the national councils, which went far 
 beyond his intentions, and beyond the facts, as well as constitutional 
 convenances. I am convinced that his son-in-law, King Leopold, 
 infinitely more prudent and reserved as he was in his sentiments and 
 language, nevertheless exercised in the internal and external affairs of 
 Belgium more of personal influence than King Louis Philippe did in 
 those of France. But the one carefully avoided all ostentation of that 
 influence, while the other showed himself incessantly possessed by the 
 fear lest justice should not be done to his designs and efforts.' 
 
 Since the fall of Louis Philippe we have seen the 
 personal initiative of the sovereign assumed in France in a 
 style wholly without precedent in constitutional monarchies. 
 But, in truth, the occupant of a throne raised by a revolution 
 cannot rest tranquilly on it, nor play the part of roi faineant 
 to which parliamentary politicians instinctively seek to 
 confine constitutional monarchs. In such a position King 
 Log incurs more danger of dethronement than King Stork. 
 Perhaps, after all, it was not so much Louis Philippe's some- 
 what paraded personal action on the policy of his reign that 
 ultimately proved fatal to its duration, as the ostentatiously 
 conservative and pacific character of that action. 
 
 ' The idea of peace,' says M. Guizot, * in all its morality and all 
 its grandeur, had deeply penetrated the mind and heart of King 
 Louis Philippe. The miseries and iniquities which war inflicts on 
 mankind, often for motives the most frivolous and combinations the 
 most futile, revolted his humanity not less than his good sense. Of 
 all the great social aspirations — that I may not say all the bright 
 illusions— with which his epoch and education had fed his youth. 
 
320 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 that which had made more imprassion on him than any other, and 
 retained more hold of his mind and heart, was Peace.' (Vol. ii. 
 p. 258.) 
 
 Louis Philippe's policy may perhaps as often have been 
 right as wrong, in its declared aversion to whatever had an 
 adventurous character, whether abroad or at home. But, 
 in France, a policy which should have had more an air of 
 adventure, which should have seemed less studious of peace 
 at any price than the Citizen King's, which should have shown 
 game, on some field or other, to the restlessness which divides 
 the mind of the "French nation with love of rest and the 
 material advantages which attend it, might have had a better 
 chance of living, at least as long as its author. 
 
 '•There is a radical dif&culty in the government of this 
 country,' observed M. de Barante, writing to M. Guizot in 
 1843 ; ' it feels its need of rest ; it loves the statu quo ; it 
 sticks to its routines ; it keeps an eye to interest which has 
 nothing about it adventurous or restless. On the other hand, 
 there is a craving in men's minds to be occupied and amused 
 — les imaginations ne veulent pas etre ennuyees — recollections 
 are cherished of the Revolution and the Empire. Of these 
 two dispositionSj the first is more real and serious than the 
 second. M. Thiers himself makes no mistake on that point. 
 I think I have told you that he once wrote to me — ' I know 
 what France wants : she wants such an Administration as 
 the Cardinal de "Fleury's.' " 
 
 The throne of the barricades lost its best chance of dura- 
 tion by the deplorable accident which deprived it of a highly 
 promising heir-apparent in 1842. The Duke of Orleans seems 
 to have possessed more of a royal and more of a popular 
 spirit than his father — who, in describing his own fitness for 
 royalty, described himself wholly in respectable negatives. 
 ' He said to me one day,' says M. Guizot, ' I have no mis- 
 tresses and no favourite. I am addicted neither to war, nor 
 play, nor the chase. People say I have too much taste for 
 building ; but the treasury does not suffer from that taste 
 any more than morality.' The Duke of Orleans gave promise 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 321 
 
 of a character less confined to the morale hourgeoise, and 
 adapted for a less prosaic regime, than his father's mon- 
 archy of the middle class. 
 
 ' In politics,' says M. Guizot, ' he had a strong sympathy with the 
 national instincts, a waim devotion to the greatness of Prance a 
 complaisant coquetry for popular favour — not to say sometimes for 
 revolutionary passions and impulses. He had those brilliant, con- 
 fident, and bold qualities which please at popular crises, and rally 
 excitable and agitated nations round their chiefs. In the royal 
 family and the France of his day his death left an immense void — a 
 void the sad and just presentiment of which was felt at the moment 
 of its occurrence, even by those whom the presumed dispositions of 
 the prince inspired with some solicitude.' 
 
 If we had to characterise Louis Philippe's defects as a 
 king by a single expression, we should be disposed to say 
 that he had not enough of the kingly temper. He was a 
 very unexceptionable representative of all the well-to-do 
 business-men and sober and ranges family men in France,' 
 
 ' A curious instance of Louis Philippe's little family politics on the eve of 
 serious crises, and the somewhat exaggerated importance he attached to ' calls 
 reciprogues on both sides oftfie Cliannel,'' will be found in the following extract 
 from a letter addressed by him to his sister Madame Adelaide, at Brussels, on 
 July 2, 1840 — that is to say, barely a week or two before the conclusion of the 
 treaty of that month between England and three other great Powers, exclud- 
 ing France. At this epoch, as afterwards on the eve of the explosion of 
 February 1848, the royal entourrage were apparently more awake than the 
 King's sanguine self-confiderLce allowed him to be to the real state of aflEairs 
 and relations abroad or at home. We make the extract from autograph MSS. 
 in our possession (see Fortnightly Haeiem for May 1, 1866, Art. VII.) : — 
 
 ' J'ai compris paroe que tu me mandais qu'il y avait quelqu'importance k 
 decider le depart de Nemours pour que sa visite 3, la Eeine d'Angleterre eut 
 lieu le plus tot possible, et j 'y ai reussi, il partira de manifere k arriver ^ Londres 
 vendredi 10 ou samedi 11 au plus tard. La n6gociation n'etait pas facile. 
 J'ai ktk d'abord ohez la Eeine, ^ qui j'ai lu le Message dont le Eoi Leopold 
 t'avait chargg au nom de la Keine Victoria. . . . Je lui ai dit que d'abord 
 Nemours n'avait pas mSme un pretexte pour rester ici en ce moment, et ne pas 
 mettre plus d'empressement k se rendre ik I'aimable invitation de la Eeine 
 Victoria, que selon moi il aurait du y avoir ete pins tot, mais qu'4 present il 6tait 
 clair qu'il ne pouvait pas y aller au mois d'aoiit, que remettre h. septembre 
 etait non seulement maussade, mais probablement impossible, puisqu'il fitait 
 probable qu'il irait ^ Alger k cette fipoque, etc. Quand tout cela a ete senti 
 et compris, nous nous sommes transport's ohez Viotoire [the late Duchess de 
 Nemours], qui 'tait seule, Nemours n'etant pas revenu de Paris. Fort heur- 
 eusement, apr^s pourtant que j'avais fait un second deployement de mon 
 
 T 
 
322 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 
 
 who asked no more of any Government or dynasty than that 
 it would let them sit each under his own vine or under his 
 own fig-tree, unvexed by Jona-prophesies of the fall of 
 Nineveh, or by emeutes or ordonnances, which were sure, at 
 least, to produce a fall of the funds. William III. in Eng- 
 land, Napoleon III. in France, were each aspirants to thrones 
 in the name of ideas. Louis Philippe, according to M. 
 Guizot, was not, properly speaking, an aspirant to the throne 
 of France at all, though he held himself ready to become the 
 tenant of the Tuileries — mainly that he might not again be 
 evicted from the Palais Royal. ' Moderate and prudent' — so 
 he is described by his ex-Minister — ' he had long foreseen 
 the chances which might elevate him to the throne, but with- 
 out seeking, and rather inclined to dread than desire, that 
 elevation.' Such is not the temper required for reigning; a 
 more pronounced vocation, a niore inspired mission, befit the 
 'king of men,' who must represent something more than the 
 merely household interests either of his own family or of all 
 other families in established positions, whose support of a 
 Government is regulated by much the same principles as 
 might be their subscription to an insurance office. 
 
 Louis Philippe in early manhood was plunged by revolu- 
 tion to sink or swim, without corks or bladders, in the com- 
 mon element of the modern human struggle for fame — and 
 bread. The impressions made on him by that first struggle 
 for life (gallantly sustained) were indelible. 'He had 
 witnessed,' says M. Guizot in his Memoirs, ' such unforeseen 
 disasters, lived amidst such vast ruins, and himself under- 
 
 floquence, Chartres et Joinville y sont arrives. Aussitfit, j 'ai fait un troisi&me 
 (igployement qui h persuadg Chartres. II s'est tourng vers Joinville, et lui a 
 (Jit, Mais n'es-tii pas d'avis qu'ilfaut que Nemours aille a Londres sans retard? 
 Joinville en est convenu assez faiblemeut, mais il en est convenu, et ils sont 
 partis ensemble pour le bain, afin, clisait Chartres, d'endootriner Nemours, ce 
 qui ne sera pas facile. Alors j'fitais silr du suco^s, et en effet Chartres est 
 revenu pendant que j'etais dans le bain m'annoncer qu'il avait rSussi, et que 
 Nemours serait ^ Londres le 12. Je me suis recrig, Cest un dimanolie, il faut 
 qu'il y soit le 10, et tout s'est arrange aprfes le diner pour le 10 ou le 11 au 
 plus tard. J'ai recommandS a, Nemours d'^orire lui-m6me ^ la Reine Viotoriai 
 et il m'a dit qu'il le ferait. Malgrfi oela je desire que Louise ou le Hoi [King 
 Leopold] ou tous les deux ecrivent de leur c6t6 qu'il sera d, Londres le 10 ou 
 Je 11 au plus tard, et qu'on le lui mande, afin qu'il n'y ait pas de trainasseries.' 
 
MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 323 
 
 gone such, personal distresses, that there had remained in 
 his mind an extreme distrust of the future and a vivid appre- 
 hension of the fatal chances which might yet befall himself 
 and his family. Sometimes he recalled to recollection, with 
 just pride, the days of his early peregrinations and poverty ; 
 sometimes he spoke of them with recollections full of bitter- 
 ness and foresight full of alarm. In September 1843, during 
 Queen Victoria's first visit to the Chateau d'Eu, walking one 
 day in the chateau gardens, a,nd passing some espaliers 
 covered with fine peaches, the King picked a peach and 
 offered it to the Queen, who wished to eat it, but did not 
 know how to set about x^eeling it. The King took a Icnife 
 out of his pocket, saying, ' When one has been a poor devil 
 like me, living at forty sous a-day, one has always a knife in 
 one's pocket ; ' and he smiled, as did all the bystanders, at 
 this souvenir of his penury. On another occasion I was 
 alone with him, when he spoke to me of his domestic situa- 
 tion, of the future of his family, and the chances which still 
 impended over it. He entered on the details of the charges 
 he had to support, his debts, the absurd reports of his wealth, 
 and, warming with the subject, suddenly seized my hand and 
 said to me with an air of extreme anxiety, ' My dear Minister, 
 I assure you my children will not have bread ! ' At times when 
 he was under the dominion of such impressions, he would 
 seek eagerly for his family and for himself material guaran- 
 tees of the future ; and at the same time would exhale his 
 complaints and express his apprehensions with an abandon, 
 an intemperance of language, which astonished his hearers, 
 even the most friendly, furnished to his enemies rich 
 materials for their malignant credulity or mendacity, and 
 fomented in the public at large that distrustful disposition 
 with which we had to contend when we came to the Chambers 
 to claim for the royal family, in the name of justice and good 
 policy, those dotations which the King seemed to solicit for 
 himself in person in the character of a greedy and im- 
 portunate suitor.' 
 
 M. Guizot says, with truth, that no one would now think 
 "of repeating the inconceivable exaggerations and odious 
 
 T 2 
 
324 MONSIEUR GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 
 
 calumnies as to tlie fortune of the ex-King of the French, or 
 as to his sordid greed in matters of private interest, which 
 were everywhere propagated and accredited while he filled 
 the throne. But he says, with equal truth, that the incon- 
 siderate demeanour of Louis Philippe himself was one of the 
 main causes of the unfavourable posture of the public mind 
 towards him in this respect. ' No prince,' says M. Guizot, 
 ' I might almost say no man, was ever more in the habit of 
 bringing on himself burthens of blame which he did not 
 deserve, and giving himself the appearance of faults which 
 he did not commit.' 
 
 To know a man's character, one ought to know his ambi- 
 tion. There could be no mistake about that of Louis Napo- 
 leon, when — 'pauper et exsul ' — he would lounge into Herries' 
 bank in St. James's Street, and tell the clerks he should 
 one day be Emperor of France. But what then was Louis 
 Philippe's ambition ? Well, it was the usual one — to make 
 his way in the world by such means as a ruined family' (in 
 fame as in fortune) left open, in a revolutionised age, to its 
 eldest son. He had enrolled himself in the Jacobin club as 
 Egalite fils at the age of seventeen, and distinguished him- 
 self in the French Republican army when it first showed a 
 front to Europe. But Egalite _/?fe was soon involved in Jaco- 
 bin proscription with Egalite pere, and the royal protege of 
 Dumouriez had to take refuge with him from the Republican 
 in the Austrian ranks. A story is told of a reply of the young 
 Due de Chartres to some Austrian officers who expressed their 
 astonishment that he should have condescended to adopt, in 
 imitation of his too famous father, the burlesque name of 
 Egalite. ' I only took that name,' the young ex-Jacobin ex- 
 royal fugitive is said to have replied, ' pour mettre dedans les 
 badauds de Paris.' Whatever foundation there may have 
 been, or may not have been, for that anecdote, it is very 
 certain that Louis Philippe retained through life impressions 
 not less vivid of revolutionary ascendancy, as an ill-laid ghost 
 which might make sudden reapparition, than of poverty and 
 exile, as companions of youth which might revisit his age. 
 It is the day before revolutions, not the day after, that fosters 
 generous illusiors. 
 
MONSIEUE GUIZOT'S ' OWN TIME.' 326 
 
 Tlie question, Why did the Orleans dynasty fall ? has re- 
 ceived many and various answers. But it is sometimes for'- 
 gotten that there is another question to be asked respecting 
 that dynasty — viz. Why did it stand seventeen or eighteen 
 years first, before it fell? The restoration and the reign of 
 the House of Orleans, taken together, occupied a period 
 nearly extending to the term assigned a generation of man, 
 and the younger branch of the House of Bourbon reigned 
 during the better half of that period. We are entirely of 
 opinion with a reflective German politician,' that neither the 
 alleged excessive corruption nor arbitrary administration of 
 the Orleans Government account for its abrupt catastrophe. 
 ' How, indeed,' asked Tocqueville in a letter addressed to the 
 late Mr. Senior nearly half-a-year before the February Revo- 
 lution ; ^ ' how prevent a Government from carrying itself 
 on by corruption, when the parliamentary regime naturally 
 creates for it so much need to do so, and centralisation gives 
 it so many means ? The fact is we are trying to make two 
 things go on together which have never before, to my know- 
 ledge, been united — an elective assembly and a highly cen- 
 tralised executive power.' Tocqueville, however, pointed out 
 to his English friend, with prophetic insight, the singular 
 malaise and sense of instability in the existing order of things 
 which had for some time been creeping over men's minds in 
 France. The middle class, in his view, was gradually becoming, 
 in that of the rest of the nation, a, new aristocracy, petty, vul- 
 gar, and arrogant, by which it was beginning to seem shameful 
 to let themselves be govei-ned. Lamartine (we think) called 
 the Eevolution of February a ' revolution du mepris.' We 
 should be more disposed to call it a revolution of apathy, 
 ennui, and indifference. Of bribery and corruption in direct 
 and sordid shapes there was not a tithe of the amount in 
 French that there is in English elections. Of arbitrary 
 government we really think Louis Philippe's reign was not 
 more guilty than perhaps any Government which had gone 
 before or came after. He who rides the French ' democracy ' 
 
 > Von Usedom, Politisclw Briefe, kc, p. 84. 
 '^ Nbuvelle Corresj>ondance, p. 231. 
 
326 MONSIEUE GUIZOT'S 'OWN TIME.' 
 
 is, we suspect, more likelj to lose the saddle, if lie does not 
 make it feel bit and spur, than if he does. But then it must 
 be coaxed also, and given its head on certain occasions. 
 Louis Philippe was rather too apt to begin bj humouring 
 and end bj frustrating it of its will. ' It was the disposition 
 of that prince,' says M. Guizot, ' to associate himself heartilj 
 with patriotic emotions, without allowing them to get the 
 better of his calmer judgment. He was full of sympathy, 
 and even complaisance, for the national sentiment, yet re- 
 taining his own independence of mind; very capable of 
 participating to-day in its impulses, and of recognising to- 
 mori'ow the error and peril of those impulses.' 
 
 To the question, why Louis Philippe reigned so long, and 
 reigned no longer? it is sometimes, in substance, answered — 
 because, in his essential policy, he represented the prose of 
 the French people, and not its poetry. And yet he was ever- 
 lastingly aiming to do the poetical as an element of French 
 politics. As, at his entrance into life, the young Egalite 
 affected, with hereditary alacrity, to draw patriotic inspira- 
 tion from the sombre sources of Jacobinism, so as Citizen 
 King he sought a species of borrowed popularity by paying, 
 we must think, most impolitic tributes to the memories of 
 the First Empire on canvas, in stone, in second obsequies of 
 a warrior he would have done more wisely to leave quiet in ■ 
 his grave ; and in participating, or affecting to participate, 
 the French engouemeriit for a second Napoleon in the East, in 
 the shape of a semi-barbarous Turkish Pacha. All the young 
 Egalite's flirtations with Jacobinism (which stopped short of 
 complicity in its crimes) could not maintain his footing in 
 the Jacobinised armies of the French Republic. All his later 
 monumental and funereal homage to Napoleonism only in- 
 flamed passions to which his resolute peace policy refused sub- 
 stantial satisfaction. For a monarch who preferred to the most 
 brilliant war the most inglorious peace, it might seem some- 
 what superfluous to spend millions on millions in fortifying 
 a capital which certainly no unchallenged or unprovoked 
 enemy would care to attack —to incur deficit upon deficit in 
 increasing forces he was predetermined not to use. 
 
327 
 
 CjESAEISM in FRANCE RESUROENT— NAPOLEON THE 
 
 NEPHEW} 
 
 In tlie later editions of Archbishop Whately's well-known 
 satire, aimed at the German Egyptologists, and entitled 
 ' Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte,' the good 
 prelate added an ironically grave exposure of the m.onstrous 
 improbabilities involved in the commonly received report 
 that the mouldering bones of the first great French Emperor 
 had been shipped from St. Helena to France by the pious 
 care of a junior Bourbon king, the interest of whose dynasty 
 plainly would have suggested to him to leave those bones 
 where they were ; and an equally grave exposure of the later 
 legend that another Napoleon Bonaparte — ' a kind of new 
 incarnation of their Grand Lama ' — in the person of a 
 pretender claiming to be the nephew of the hero of the older 
 legend, was again at the head of the Government of France 
 under the title of President. But had the good Archbishop 
 lived to hear of that second Napoleon having played out, for 
 nearly a score of years, the play of a second Empire — to land 
 at last in a second St. Helena at Chislehurst — what a field 
 had opened to him for a fresh series of ' Historic Doubts ! ' 
 ' Here,' he might have urged, ' we have an Imperial nephew, 
 even more plainly and palpably mythical than the Imperial 
 Tin'cle — called, it would seem, into existence merely to point 
 the moral of an unappeased Nemesis, following into a second 
 generation the name and family of the first fabled hero.' 
 
 That this nephew of that uncle, all through youth and 
 well half through manhood, should have brooded over an 
 apparently hopeless day-dream of an Imperial throne, which, 
 ' Now first published. 
 
328 CiESAEISM IN FRANCE EESUEGENT — 
 
 won by the sword, had in turn been lost by the sword, seem- 
 ingly for CTer, at Waterloo— that this devoutest of self- 
 believers should have found, in the least believing of nations, 
 believers in him by millions, on the sole strength of his 
 l^apoleonic name ; and having, per fas aut nefan, made him- 
 self absolute master of France, should have set about re- 
 modelling Europe upon a system founded on the first Na- 
 poleon's posthumously published after-thoughts of general 
 European enfranchisement — all this our good Archbishop 
 might have adduced as the most conclusive evidence of the 
 legendary character of the second as of the first Napoleon, 
 And, he might have added, the most incredible part of the 
 later legend was, that the Napoleonic idea — the fabulous 
 legacy of the uncle — was described by that legend as having 
 been actually, in great part, realised during the nephew's 
 reign — realised indeed with consequences the last that would 
 have been desired whether by uncle or nephew. 
 
 Amidst all the differences of personal character and politi- 
 cal circumstance between the first and second crowned and 
 throned representatives of Napoleonic Ctesarism in France, 
 there is one point of resemblance — that each in turn based 
 his claim to rule on popular suffrage. 
 
 Omitting to observe this, moral essayists may amuse 
 themselves with invectives as empty as eloquent against 
 usurpation and tyranny. Such invectives will go but little 
 way towards accounting for the all but universal popular 
 acquiescence in usurpation and tyranny — towards explaining 
 how it "happened that, in the case of the second as of the 
 first Napoleon, the great unpolitical majority of the French 
 people added their voices to the acclaim with which the 
 army hailed its chosen imperator. To what purpose are 
 intermiuable denunciations of conspiracies in which all con- 
 spired? of usurpations in which all were accessaries before 
 the act — all assisting in its accomplishment ? 
 
 Of the recent publications illustrative of the reign and 
 character of the late Emperor of the French, the earliest in 
 date, and the most unpretending in form, though by no 
 means the least weighty in substance, is a little hrocJmre on 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 329 
 
 ' Napoleon III.,' in 1872, by the eminent historian Professor 
 von Sybel, whom we have already had occasion to quote. 
 To have been composed so soon after the triumph of his 
 country in the Franco-German war. Professor von Sybel's 
 biographical essay is singularly dispassionate in tone and 
 comprehensive in judgment. In these respects it has hardly 
 been excelled, if equalled, by anything that has appeared 
 since. There is nothing whatever in it about the Gallic 
 '■ Urlfeind' — about the superiority, moral and intellectual, 
 ' which nobody can deny ' to the German over all other races 
 of mortal men. Nothing of all this. Herr von Sybel, though 
 a German professor, is too much a world-philosopher to have 
 anything about him of the German professorial Imperial 
 Chauvinism which sometimes seems to threaten, in these 
 latter days, to out-Herod the French. His ' Napoleon III.' 
 is really a masterly sketch of the higher as well as the lower 
 qualities which marked the character and signalised the 
 reign of the late French autocrat. His rapid though dis- 
 criminating touch helps us better than we are helped by 
 some works of more volume and of more pretension to under- 
 stand to what was owing the duration (considerable, as 
 French dynasties go) of the late reign, and to what was 
 owing its disastrous close. 
 
 The most reliable — we may add, the most redoubtable — 
 witnesses against or in favour of any character are, firstlr, 
 those whose acquaintance with it has been derived from 
 early familiar companionship, and, secondly, those whose 
 opportunities have been best, and whose motives strongest, 
 for forming a correct judgirent of it in maturer years. 
 Amongst the former class of witnesses, much light is thrown 
 on the strong and weak points of the singular and reserved 
 character now under our review by a lady' who was foster- 
 
 ■ Madame Cornu. Of this lady M. de Coroelle gave the following account 
 to Mr. Senior in 1857: — 'She wrote for Louis Napoleon a great part oE his 
 book on artillery practice. She used.to read and make notes for him in the 
 BiUiathCque when he was at Ham. Two days after the cou^) d'Hat she was 
 to have breakfasted with the Princess Mathilde ; she sent word that she would 
 not go. The Grand Duchess Stephanie called on her in her cottage in the Rue 
 Eousselet to persuade her to change her mind ; she spoke out against Louis 
 
330 C^SARISM IN FEANCE EESUEGENT — 
 
 sister of Louis Napoleon, and his playfellow from childhood, 
 who was an assiduous purveyor to him of literary aids and 
 appliances during his long imprisonment at Ham, and with 
 whom his intimacy, broken off for a time by her patriotic 
 resentment of the December coup d'etat, was in a measure 
 renewed during the latter years of the Empire. Professor 
 von Sybel was the first to cite this lady, without naming 
 her, as having had a more intimate knowledge than most 
 people of the real character of the late Emperor of the 
 French. 
 
 ' About ten years ago,' says Professor von Sybel (writing in 1872), 
 ' I had the honour to make this lady's acquaintance. Some one 
 asked her, in the course of familiar conversation, whether the Emperor 
 had feeling. "Certainly," she said, "he has feeling, quite in the 
 German sense of the word Gemilth. He is of an affectionate, friendly 
 nature ; he would wish at all times to give pleasure to those around 
 him. But there is in his inner mind a sensitive place which no one 
 must touch, and that is the inalienable right and title of his dynasty. 
 If contradicted on that point, his passion breaks all bounds ; he is 
 transformed into a tiger." ' 
 
 ' In illustration of this trait of character, she mentioned an inci- 
 dent of her childhood. The Prince might have been about twelve 
 years old, when she was one day chattering with him in the garden 
 at Arenenberg, under the windows of the chateau. She happened to 
 chaff him about his dreams of one day becoming an Emperor. His eyes 
 flashed fire, but he restrained himself for the moment, and went on 
 chattering with her as before, till he had wiled her into the park to 
 some distance from the chateau, and when he had got her into a 
 lonely place, quite safe from observation, sprang suddenly upon her, 
 seized one of her arms with both hands, and exclaimed, hoarse with 
 rage : — " Retract, retract what you have said, or I will bi'eak your 
 arm ! " He had grasped it so tight that she could not move it freely 
 for a week.' 
 
 Napoleon and the coup d'etat with a violence which frightened the Duchess. 
 " Tell him," she said, " that the gipsy's prophecy will be fulfilled. He has 
 accomplished one half of it; the people will do the rest." Senior. — What 
 prophecy ? CoroelU. — It is a story well known in the family. Queen Hor- 
 tense, when he was a child, had his fortune told by a gipsy. She prophesied 
 that he woald rise to the highest eminence of power and of fame, and would 
 be killed by a bullet entering his forehead. The Grand Duchess delivered 
 the message. " Nothing is more probable," he answered.' 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 331 
 
 Mr. Jerrold, in his 'Life of Napoleon III.,' claims 
 authority to cite Madame Cornu's personal testimony in 
 contradiction of the above anecdote. But the Bonapartist 
 biographer does not think it necessary to observe accuracy 
 in his version of the incident which he desires, officiously if 
 not officially, to discredit. ' The little Prince Louis,' says 
 Mr. Jerrold, ' never heat Ms playmate Hortense [Madame 
 Cornu] because she laughed at his lofty conception of his 
 destiny.' Professor von Sybel never said that he beat her, 
 but only that he once squeezed her arm rather hard. 
 Mr. Jerrold is rash in referring his readers to Madame 
 Cornu's testimony to Louis Napoleon's invariably gentle 
 temper from childhood. That lady, in the conversations 
 placed on record by the late Mr. Senior, says, in 1863, of 
 her old playmate and foster-brother, ' He has a calm crust, 
 but furious Italian passions boil beneath it. As a child he 
 was subject to fits of anger such as I never saw in anyone 
 else. While they lasted he did not know what he said or 
 did.' In later years, however, Louis Napoleon acquired the 
 power, if not to conquer, at least to conceal his angry 
 passions. 
 
 Imaginative and romantic are the epithets which appear 
 to us, on the whole, most applicable to Napoleon III., as to 
 Napoleon I. 'What Nature,' said his early friend above 
 cited, Madame Cornu, ' intended him for was a poet. He 
 has an inventive, original, and powerful imagination, which 
 under proper guidance would have produced something 
 great.' ^ To the like effect we may cite the following testi- 
 mony of the late Leon Faucher, who was Minister of Louis 
 Napoleon during a critical period of his Presidency : — 
 
 His imagination predominates over Ms reason ; it is wild, 
 romantic (romanesque), and irregular. His fatalism is blinder than 
 his uncle's. When the Emperor [Napoleon I.] talked of his star 
 it was a metaphor. Louis Napoleon really believes in some astral 
 
 ' ' When we quarrelled,' said the same lady, in another conversation with 
 the same gentleman, 'he used to hite, not to strike. He used to say to me, " Je 
 ne t'ai jamais battu." I answered, " Non, mais tu m'as mordu." ' 
 
 » Senior's Conversations Tvith Thiers, Omzot, ^-c, vol. ii. p. 58. 
 
332 C^SAEISM IN FEANCE EESUBGENT — 
 
 agency presiding over his fate. Never was there a mind that more 
 reqaiired to be disciplined by advice, and example, and opposition, 
 and collision — in short, by free intercourse "with equals and superiors. 
 And few have enjoyed these advantages less. He began life in Italy 
 among a set of petty intriguing princes who lived in conspiracies ; in 
 one of them, directed against the Pope, his brother perished, and he 
 himself narrowly escaped. Another attempt and another escape at 
 Strasburg confirmed the propensity. Again he tried, and, though he 
 failed in his object, he again escaped with life at Boulogne. To a 
 mind like his few situations could be more unfavourable than his six 
 years' imprisonment at Ham. His strange theories about himself 
 and about France gained consistency and obstinacy in his solitary 
 meditations. And it must be confessed that the degree in which they 
 must appear to him to be in process of realisation might well have 
 turned a stronger head. 
 
 In Prince Albert's memorandum of his first visit to 
 Napoleon III. at Boulogne, the latter is stated to have 
 described as foUovrs his own scheme of government to the 
 late Duke of Newcastle : — ' Tormer governments tried to 
 reign by the support of perhaps one million of the educated 
 classes. I have tried to' lay hold of the other tiventy-nme.' 
 
 That was not the difficulty to the heir of the name of 
 Napoleon. The difficulty was to know what to do, in the 
 long run, with his twenty-nine millions when he had laid 
 hold of them. They had lent him their votes, and the 
 soldiery their arms, to suppress the sway of ' the educated 
 classes ' (so many as th^re might be of Such among the one 
 million) ; but how were they to be shown game, and found 
 work, permanently in their own way ? 
 
 ' Having deprived the people,' said Prince Albert, ' of 
 every active participation in the government, and having 
 reduced them to mere passive spectators, he is bound to 
 keep up the " spectacle " ; and, as at fireworks, whenever a 
 pause takes place between the different displays, the public 
 immediately grows impatient, forgets what it has just 
 applauded, and that new preparations require time.' 
 
 If to the physical force of the twenty-nine millions Louis 
 Napoleon had laid hold of could have been added the moral 
 force of the one million he set systematically at nought, the 
 
\ NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 333 
 
 problem he had tasked himself to solve might have been 
 solved more successfully. But this was impossible with the 
 Napoleonic ideas on which his system rested. On ne s'appuie 
 que sur ce qui resiste. 
 
 From the moment when Louis Napoleon's ' twenty-nine 
 millions ' made him a power in Europe, he lost no time in 
 putting forth feelers in all directions for European alliances. 
 These he might long have courted in vain but for the happy 
 accidents which made Nicholas of Russia his enemy and 
 England his ally in the everlasting Eastern quarrel. 
 
 His first authentic overture as President for a continental 
 alliance was made in the shape of a confidential rnission of 
 his fidus Achates, Persigny, to Berlin, shortly before his 
 coup d'etat of December 1851. This we cite on the autho- 
 rity of Professor von Sybel, and we take the Professor's 
 word with perfect confidence for the source whence he 
 derived it — from General von Radowitz himself, namely, 
 then a leading Prussian statesman who had been thrown 
 out of ofB.ce shortly before the epoch now under our review, 
 as one of the consequences of Austria's triumphant dictation 
 of Prussian policy at Olmutz. Now the French Prince- 
 President's overture was for an alliance with Prussia against 
 Austria ; the mollia tempora fandi were selected just after 
 Frederick William IV.'s submissive and complete surrender 
 to Austria at Olmutz, and the channel of communication 
 with the Prussian monarch was Von Radowitz, whose 
 counsels had just been thrown over for the temporising 
 and timid conservatism of ManteufPel. 
 
 This is the first instance among many in which the late 
 French ruler seems to have taken for granted that his idees 
 Napoleoniennes need only be proposed to triumph over what- 
 ever foregone conclusions might have been formed by any 
 parties or any potentates he had to deal with. 
 
 'His emissary,' says Professor von Sybel, 'made the fullest and 
 most detailed communication of the objects of this mission, as well 
 in official form as in private conversations, especially with General 
 Radowitz, through whose channel he had more hope of working 
 on King Frederick "William IV. than through that of his ministers. 
 
334 C^SARISM IN FEANCE BESURGENT — 
 
 Vague and imperfect notices only of these negotiations have, so far 
 as I know, hitherto obtained pubhcity. I propose, therefore, to give 
 them in some detail, as I have them from General von Eadowitz 
 himself, affording, as they do, indications in the highest degree charac- 
 teristic of the Napoleonic policy. " Our internal situation," said 
 Persigny to the Prussian General, "is altogether different from that 
 of Germany. Fifty years of revolution have shattered to atoms 
 amongst us all notions of right and law — material force alone retains 
 any ascendancy over us. But no force is effective except that which 
 is organised, and nothing amongst us is organised except the army and 
 the proletariat. Now the name of Napoleon gives us a hold of the 
 army. We shall get hold of the proletariat by finding them abundant 
 employment at advanced wages. "We cannot fail therefore of estab- 
 lishing our power on solid foundations.' 
 
 On the position of France in Europe M. de Persigny 
 remarked as follows : — 
 
 Napoleon the First prospered so long as he limited himself to the 
 natural vocation of France — hegemony of the Latin race in Southern 
 Europe. He fell by the unwise effort to bring Germany within the 
 sphere of his empire. Thereby also he perpetuated his breach with 
 England; but, as we have now learned by experience, though France 
 may win victories, she cannot finally triumph against England and 
 Germany united. In this the greatest of French genei'als failed, and 
 we have now no such generals. Our natural interest and ambition 
 point southward. We can endure no longer that Austria should rule 
 over all Italy. But A.ustria stands in your way in Germany as much 
 as in ours in Italy. Our mutual interests therefore directly point to 
 a compact alliance against a common enemy. 
 
 The question, what was to follow on the humiliation of 
 Austria, received the following answer : — 
 
 Our object is the establishment of solid and permanent external 
 relations. We neither desire, therefore, by indulging any blind lust 
 of aggrandisement, to array Europe against us, nor to wage war 
 against the nature of thiogs. But in Italy as in Germany, the 
 nature of things demands a national organisation. It will be a suffi- 
 cient gain for us to drive Austria out of Italy. If you will help us 
 to do this, it is understood between us that you shall constitute- 
 Germany in accordance with German national aspirations, neither 
 here nor there do we seek to secure for ourselves any material advan- 
 tage. 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 3-35 
 
 The last expression seemed to require, and received, a 
 more special explanation. 
 
 ' We aim,' Persigny reiterated, ' at no conquest. Prance has 
 power enough, rightly used, to lead and to rule the world ; whereas, 
 as conquerors, we should arm the world against us. We shall 
 earnestly aim to avoid appropriating to ourselves, if we can possibly 
 help it, so much as a spadeful of foreign tfirritory. We cannot be 
 sure indeed that we shall not find it necessary, for the satisfaction of 
 public opinion in France, to have something in the shape of material 
 gain to show for ourselves. Should that be so, we should look in the 
 direction of Savoy or Landau.' 
 
 ' These extraordinary communications,' says Professor 
 von Sybel, ' read like a chapter of the Idees NapoUoniennes, 
 and may be said to form a practical sequel and special appli- 
 cation of the principles of policy set forth in that work in 
 1839. They are presented in a form adapted to the point of 
 vievf of the Prussian interlocutor, while, at the same time, the 
 reiterated assertion of perfect disinterestedness is coupled, 
 in the concluding words of Persigny, with a shrewd com- 
 mentary.' 
 
 Professor von Sybel adds : — 
 
 These French overtures were courteously but categorically de- 
 clined on the part of Prussia. To lay such propositions before King 
 Frederick William IV. was indeed a strong thing to do, and the best 
 proof possible of the undoubting certitude with which Louis Napoleon 
 believed in the irresistible attractiveness of his system. Any states- 
 man, in the practical sense of the word, could have at once told him 
 that, at that epoch, just a year after the events of Olmutz, the King 
 was certain to reject with abhorrence the idea of Prussia plunging 
 into revolutionary courses to promote German national unity. 
 
 Austrian accounts say that Persigny, on his rebuff by Prussia, 
 instantly proceeded, and with no better success, to sound M. de 
 Prokesch, the Austrian ambassador at Berlin, on the subject of an 
 Austro-French alliance against Prussia. ' The thing,' adds Professor 
 von Sybel, ' is not impossible. It was always pronounced by the 
 first Napoleon a high point of policy to have two strings to your 
 how. Hitherto, however, no positive evidence has been produced on 
 the subject.' 
 
33(5 C^3ARISM IN FRANCE EESUEGENT — 
 
 Taking no account, as de non apparentihua, of overtures 
 at Vienna following on the repulse of those at Berlin, the 
 remark suggests itself, that President Louis Napoleon's 
 proposals to Prussia were not onlj in exact accordance with 
 the adventurous policy chalked out previously for himself in 
 exile by the future Emperor of the French, but with the 
 subsequent carrying out of that policy by his war with 
 Austria in 1859. At the latter epoch Napoleon III. em- 
 barked single-handed in that enterprise which, eight years 
 before, he had vainly courted the alliance of Prussia to aid 
 him in accomjjlishiug ; and its accomplishment by French 
 arms first helped Prussia gratis to drive Austria out of 
 G-ermany by aid of an alliance with the newly-liberated 
 Italy, and secondly, by no remote consequence, to unite 
 G-ermany in a national war against France. 
 
 ' Let's own, now that it can do no good on earth,' that 
 what was chimerical in the projects of the second French 
 Ca3sar for remodelling the map of Europe in the interest of 
 the Napoleonic dynasty, was chimerical rather as regarded 
 the projector's power to carry them out in that interest, than 
 in the nature of those projects themselves, which for the 
 most part have been carried out since in other interests 
 than in those of the name or house of Napoleon. How was 
 it that Louis Napoleon failed, while Otto Von Bismarck 
 succeeded, in remodelling the map of Europe to his mind 
 and the advantage of the Empire he represented ? Omitting 
 disputes of detail, the decisive difference between the French 
 Emperor and the Germaii Chancellor was difference of 
 character — difference of insight into actual situations and 
 circumstances — difference, above all, in promptitude, of 
 action to carry out matured design. Louis Napoleon, 
 whether as President or Emperor, was by no means deficient 
 in abstract power of thought ; but his thought was solitary 
 — the thought of the recluse of Aronenberg or the prisoner 
 of H3,m. He had passed through no training which could 
 give him a reliable faculty for adapting, from time to time, 
 the results of reflection to the real course of affairs. He 
 formed sufficiently clear conceptions of the general ends he 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 337 
 
 had in view ; and foremost always of those ends was the 
 recovery of the Imperial influence and political and military 
 preponderance of France in Europe. But he neither 
 measured the limits within which those ends were attain- 
 able, nor his means to compass them, nor the tempers and 
 interests he would have to deal with in third parties con- 
 cerned. 
 
 The map of Europe has actually been remodelled, to an 
 enormous extent, very considerably in consequence of the 
 policy, active or passive, of the (self-styled) third Napoleon. 
 As regards Italy and Grermany, it has been remodelled in 
 those interests of unity which the first jS'apoleon, when 
 finally relegated to his rock, affected to have always had in 
 view throughout that career of conquest in Central and 
 Southern Europe which — in the view of its victims — seemed 
 solely motived by ambition, and solely sustained by spolia- 
 tion. Italy has been remodelled with French Imperial aid, 
 but unluckily not remodelled into a federation of states of 
 manageable dimensions, with the Pope for Grand Vicar and 
 the Emperor of the French for Grand Protector. Germany 
 has been remodelled by French Imperial connivance, but 
 unluckily without reconstituting a confederation of the 
 Rhine under French dependence, or a surrender of its left 
 bank to France. The treaties of 1815, denounced at Auxerre, 
 have been torn up by Sadowa, but the territorial losses in- 
 flicted on France by Waterloo have been sorely aggravated 
 since Sedan. 
 
 A truth was told by our late Prince Consort to the 
 late Emperor of the French which the latter might wisely 
 have taken to heart for his future guidance — ' N'o monarch 
 has ever been great without having a great Minister.'' 
 
 The converse, indeed, would hardly hold. Eichelieu was 
 a grea,t Minister under Louis XIII. Bismarck has been a 
 great Minister under William I. But for a Minister to 
 achieve greatness, whether for himself or his country, it is 
 indispensable that his monarch should either be weak to resist 
 or strong to support him. The master of Eichelieu fulfilled 
 the former condition, the master of Bismarck the latter. 
 
 z 
 
338 O^SARISM IN PKANCE RESURGENT — 
 
 Napoleon III. made two great Ministers, but he made them 
 for other nations — Count Cavour and Count Bismarck. 
 
 Napoleon III. appeared to listen to Prince Albert, as he 
 always appeared to listen to words of wisdom, while for the 
 most part he was onlj' listening to his own familiar spirit, 
 whose whispers, inaudible to all ears but his own, he 
 obeyed as implicitly as Socrates did those of his Daemon, 
 It was in truth impossible that Napoleon III. should have 
 had a great Minister. His fixed idea was to be a great 
 monarch, whose greatness should be rivalled or eclipsed by 
 no Minister, and for whom therefore there could be no 
 possible prospect of having a great one. No independent 
 public man could long be Minister of Napoleon III. He 
 never gave his unreserved confidence to any Ministers, never 
 answered their arguments and never acted on their adv^ice, 
 unless it agreed with his own foregone conclusions. Even 
 before the coup d'etat — throughout those three years of 
 presidency during which Louis Napoleon may be said to 
 have been a dictator on trial — Alexis de Tocqueville, who 
 was for a short time his Minister, said of him, ' He has not 
 learned even the principles of parliamentary government.' 
 [It would have been more accurate to have said he syste- 
 matically refused to recognise them. J 'He is resolved not 
 only to be his own Prime Minister, but to be his own sole 
 Minister. Hence arises the anomaly that the leading men 
 in the Assembly vote against the Ministry, and yet refuse to 
 take office. They vote against the Ministry because they 
 fancy that they see in them the accomplices of an usurpa- 
 tion ; they refuse to take office, because they would incur 
 responsibility without having free agency.' 
 
 ' Louis Napoleon,' said Coiisin to Mr. Senior in 1853, 'has ex- 
 empted himself from all parliamentary influence ; he has forbidden 
 the press to tender him any advice ; he imposes silence on his Minis- 
 ters. He has often, while he was President, said to me, " I intend 
 to have no President du Conseil. I am responsible ; I choose to act ; 
 all that I ask from my Ministers is obedience and skill in details. 
 The outline of all my measures will be drawn by myself." Now what 
 but blunders on blunders can be the fruit of such blind self-conceit 1 ' 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 339 
 
 Omniscience and omnipotence would have been requisite 
 permanently to found an individual despotism in a civilised 
 age, and a despotism thinly disguised was the regime sought 
 to be founded by the second French Empire. The educated 
 ' one million ' were ready to have acquiesced in some sort of 
 temporary dictatorship, but it should have been a dictator- 
 ship suspending as little as possible the course of consti^ 
 tutional rule. The restoration of a Napoleonic dynasty 
 would have been accepted under constitutional conditiors, 
 but educated opinion revolted from the re-establishment by 
 violence of a Napoleonic despotism. ' But the President,' 
 said Alexis de Tocqueville shortly before the coup d'Stat, ' is 
 as proof against all constitutional ideas as Charles X. was. 
 He has his own legitimacy, and he believes as firmly in the 
 Imperial constitution as Charles X, did in divine right.' 
 
 What then was the radical and fatal vice of Louis 
 Napoleon's system ? II p6chait par la base, and that basis 
 was self-sufficiency. We do not use the word quite in 
 Cousin's sense, as synonymous with self-conceit. The self- 
 sufficingness {avrdpKsia) we ascribe to Louis Napoleon was 
 the product of his profound faith in his political religion — 
 that of Napoleonic Csesarism — which he had imbibed, as it 
 were, with his mother's milk. It rested on the assumption 
 that parliamentary government had been tried in France and 
 failed, and on the postulate that the sole available alterna- 
 tive was the restoration of Napoleonic autocracy. 
 
 Prince Albert's memorandum of his Boulogne visit ex- 
 poses in his Imperial interlocutor a strange compound of 
 Louis XIV.'s spirit of uncontrolled absolutism over his 
 Ministers and Louis XV.'s spirit of intrigue against them. 
 It is not surprising if no men of established reputation and 
 independent character could become, or at least continue for 
 any long period. Ministers of Napoleon III. 
 
 He said he did not allow his Ministers to meet or discuss matters 
 together — that they transacted their business solely with him. He 
 rarely told the one what he had settled with the other. He seemed 
 astonished when I told him that every despatch went through the 
 Queen's hands and was read by her, as he only received extracts from 
 
 z 2 
 
840 CjESAEISM IK FEANCE RESURGENT — 
 
 them and indeed appeared to have little time or inclination generally to 
 read. When I observed to him that the Queen would not be content 
 without seeing the whole of the diplomatic correspondence, he replied 
 that he found a full compensation in having persons in his own con- 
 fidence at the different posts of importance, who reported directly to 
 him. J could not but express my sense of the danger of such an 
 arrangement, to which no statesman — in England at least — would 
 consent, and which enabled the Foreign Minister (if he chose to cheat 
 his master) always to plead to foreign countries his ignorance of what 
 might have been done, or to throw the entire blame, in any difficulty 
 that might occur, upon these secret instructions. The Emperor 
 acknowledged all this, but pleaded necessity. 
 
 No man whose designs, real and supposed, gave others so 
 much to speak about, spoke so little himself as the late 
 Emperor Napoleon. It cannot indeed be said of him, as of 
 Count Moltke, that he was silent in seven languages. But 
 he was for the most part silent in all the languages he pos- 
 sessed, and of those legacies of Babel he possessed a share 
 somewhat above the average of ordinarily educated French- 
 men. 
 
 This habitual reticence of the late autocrat of Prance 
 contrasts very strikingly with the self-reliant, expansive 
 communicativeness of his imperial uncle. With the first 
 Napoleon M. de St. Aulaire told Mr. Senior he had once a 
 long conversation. 
 
 I was at the Tuileries with Pontanes. He drew us into a window 
 and talked uninterruptedly to us for an hour and a half, with won- 
 derful VBTve, fulness, and oidginality. Senior — ' What were his topics 1 ' 
 St. Aidaire — ' Everything ; history, art, administration, politics, 
 persons. He knew his forte and practised it ; so does his nephew. 
 His forte was talking; his nephew's is silence — a still rarer accom- 
 plishment.' 
 
 An accomplishment, however, the attendant evils of 
 which seldom came out more manifestly than in the case of 
 the late Emperor of the Erench. If he withdrew his weak 
 points from the observation of others, he deprived himself of 
 all aid from their strength. If he guarded against their 
 seeing into him, he missed seeing into them. As a conse- 
 quence of this uncommunicative and distrustful temper, he 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 341 
 
 surrounded himself with intellectual inferiors, and kept in- 
 tellectual equals and superiors at arm's length. This might 
 be (in his opinion it was) a necessity of his position ; in 
 that case his position was a false, and in the end an im- 
 becile one. Distrusting all men, he inevitably became dis- 
 trusted of all men. Europe was kept perpetually on the 
 qui vive by his supposed deep and dangerous projects. 
 
 The habit of saying nothing, as the best defence against 
 adverse arguments and opinions, was backed by a habit of 
 looking nothing, which seems to have been artificially 
 acquired by the late French Emperor. ' His long moustache,' 
 said his early friend Madame Cornu to the late Mr. Senior, 
 'is intended to conceal his mouth, and he has disciplined 
 his eyes. When I first saw him again in 1848, I asked him 
 what was the matter with his eyes. " Nothing," he said. 
 A day or two after I saw him again ; they had still an odd 
 appearance. At last I found that he had been accustoming 
 himself to keep his eyelids half closed, and to throw into 
 his eyes a vacant, dreamy expression.' 
 
 In a conversation with M. Guizot, likewise recorded by the 
 late Mr. Senior, this artificial expression (or rather no ex- 
 pression) of the eye — artificially produced, as we have seen 
 — was alluded to as follows : — ' His (the Emperor's) manner,' 
 said M. Guizot, ' is exceedingly good, simple, mild, and 
 gentlemanlike. The worst part of it is the false exfression 
 of his eye.' 
 
 This trait, detected by feminine acuteness in its first for- 
 mation, gives a clue to much in the late Emperor's character, 
 and his habitually guarded relations to all round him. 
 
 After all that has been written about the late Emperor 
 of the French, perhaps the fairest estimate of his mind and 
 character is that which was placed on record in a memor- 
 andum dictated to the late General Grey by Prince Albert 
 immediately after his return from his first visit to Napoleon 
 III. at Boulogne.' 
 
 'His general education,' said the Prince, 'appeared to me very 
 deficient, even on subjects which are of a first necessity to him ; I 
 ' Lifo nf Prince Consort, vol. iii. p. 108. 
 
342 C^SARISM IN jFRANCE EESUEOENT — 
 
 mean the political history of modern times, and political sciences 
 generally. He was remarkably modest, however, in acknowledging 
 these defects, and showed the greatest candour in not pretending to 
 know what he did not. All that refers to the Napoleonic history he 
 seems to have at his fingers' ends ; he also appears to have thought 
 much and deeply on politics, y&t more like an amateur politician, 
 mixing many very sound and many very crude notions together.' 
 
 Fifteen years later, during the German war with France, 
 the redoubtable Chancellor Bismarck (as published to the 
 world by his Boswell redivivus, Dr. Moritz Busch) expressed 
 repeatedly, with no mealy-mouthed reserve, and certainly not 
 with much remorseful sympathy, the stronger man's judg- 
 ment of the weaker — the conqueror's of the conquered. Yet 
 the testimonies from such different sources, delivered with 
 such different sentiments, will be found mainly concurrent 
 in substance on the character of their common subject, 
 though not in the contemptuous estimate of it which, from 
 the Berlin Man of Iron, was to be expected. 
 
 ' He ' [Napoleon III.], said Bismarck, ' is much better natured 
 than is commonly believed, and much less of a clever fellow [" kluge 
 Kopf "] than he has had credit for being. " That," said Lehndorff, 
 "is something like the judgment passed by some one on the first 
 Napoleon — a good, harmless man, but a simple fellow." " No," replied 
 the chief, " Napoleon is really good-natured, sympathetic, not to say 
 sentimental ; but neither his intelligence nor his knowledge have any 
 great range. In particular, he is not well up in geography, though 
 he was educated in Germany, and went to school there. Moreover, 
 he dwells in all sorts of fantastic visions. He has not the slightest 
 idea how matters stand with us. I had a conversation with him in 
 Paris after I had become Minister. He then expressed the opinion 
 that things could not go on long as they were going in Prussia. 
 There would be revolt in Berlin and revolution in the whole country, 
 and if a popular vote were taken, the King would have everyone 
 against him. I replied that, with us, the people raised no barri- 
 cades ; in Prussia it was kings only that made revolutions. If the 
 King would but hold firmly by his unpopular position three or four 
 years longer, he would win his game. If he did not get tired, and 
 throw me over, I should not fall, and even now, if the people were 
 appealed to, and their votes taken, he would have nine-tenths on his 
 side. I was told that after this conversation the Emperor said of 
 me, ' Ge n'est pas un homme sh-ieux.' Naturally I did not remind 
 him of this at the weaver's cottage at Donchery." ' 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 343 
 
 Prince Albert expressed himself to the same effect as 
 Count Bismarck on the natural mansuetude of the late auto- 
 crat. 'He is,' said our Prince, 'decidedly benevolent and 
 anxious for the good of his people, but has, like all [French] 
 rulers before him, a bad opinion of their political capacity.' 
 
 In the fourth volume of the ' Life of the Prince Consort ' 
 a marked change of tone is observable in English royal and 
 ofi&cial communications on the subject of the late French 
 Emperor. This is not surprising, considering the sudden 
 change brought about by Russian diplomacy at Paris, almost 
 immediately after the conclusion of the Crimean war, in the 
 attitude of Napoleon III. towards the late common enemy, 
 Russia ; a change of attitude which it was speedily found 
 had been effected at the expense of the late common ally, 
 Austria. In an interview with the English ambassador at 
 Paris in September 1858, Napoleon III. apologised as follows 
 for his new phase of policy : — 
 
 I am told that my policy is tortuous, but I am not understood. 
 I am blamed for coquetting with Austria one day and with Russia 
 the next, and it is inferred therefore that I am not to be depended 
 upon. But my policy is very simple. When I came to my present 
 position I saw that France wanted peace, and I determiaed to main- 
 tain peace, and to uphold the treaties of 1815 so long as France was 
 respected and held her own in the councils of Europe. But I was 
 equally resolved, if I was forced into war, not to make peace until a 
 better equilibrium was secured to Europe. I have no ambitious 
 views like the late Emperor, but if other countries gain anything, 
 France must gain somethiag also. Well, when driven iuto war 
 with Russia, I thought that no peace would be satisfactory which did 
 not resuscitate Poland, and I humoured Austria, in the hope that she 
 would assist me ia this great work. She failed me, and after peace 
 was made I looked to the ameHoration of Italy, and therefore drew 
 more closely to Russia. This is the whole secret of my policy. 
 
 We must interpose the remark that the late Emperor 
 of the French does not here observe the chronological order 
 of his day-dreams. His first dream, as we have seen, dating 
 from his Presidency, before the coup d'etat which elevated 
 the President to empire, was not the resuscitation of Poland 
 by aid of Austria, but the expulsion of Austria from Italy by 
 
84,4 C^SARISM IN FRANCE EESURGENT— 
 
 aid of Prussia. But we are quite prepared to admit that 
 ' tortuous ' is not the epithet we should consider primarily 
 most applicable to the policy of Napoleon III. It was first 
 of all romantic ; and only when he found that those whose 
 alliance he courted had romances or realities of their own 
 which conflicted with his, became tortuous, as he was tena- 
 cious of his ends and could -not choose his means. The 
 overthrow of Austrian preponderance in Italy was the object 
 he had from the first pursued more persistently than any 
 other. To accomplish it, he had early solicited Prussian 
 alliance, and solicited it in vain. • He next turned to Russia, 
 whose eagerness to avenge herself on Austrian ' ingratitude ' 
 fully disposed her to encourage France underhand to engage 
 in her liberal war in Italy. But the moment Germany 
 threatened to come into the field, Russia left Prance in the 
 lurch. ' The Emperor,' said Colonel Claremont in a letter 
 to Lord Cowley, ' questioned Schouvaloff much as to the 
 chance there was that Russia woiild make war upon Prussia 
 if the latter declared against Prance. The answer was. 
 None in the world.' 
 
 The truth is, Louis Napoleon's policy, tortuous or direct, 
 never had but one object — the aggrandisement of Prance as 
 a condition to the permanence of the Napoleon dynasty. 
 One successful and very telling step he made towards that 
 object — the annexation of Savoy. Two or three longer steps 
 in the same direction he meditated, without making, all 
 through his reign. But in compassing and imagining these 
 he sought no counsel at home and found no aid abroad. 
 The idea may be dismissed, though it sowed suspicions in 
 England, which sprang up armed volunteers, that he 
 cherished any sentimental or passionate impulse to take 
 vengeance of Waterloo. His passion, or imagination, was 
 that of regaining for Prance as much as might be of what 
 Waterloo had lost her. The aim he kept in view, with a 
 tenacity of purpose which justified the epithet of le doux 
 entete, was enlargement of the boundaries and enhancement 
 of the prestige of Prance, not revenge on the former enemies 
 of the House of Bonaparte. 
 
NAPOLEON THE NEPHEW. 345 
 
 Amongst the warning examples of the perils of autocracy 
 in mortal hands, alike to the one who holds and to the hosts 
 who bow to it, there are few so striking as the fact that both 
 the Napoleons who have reigned more or less absolutely over 
 France were, at decisive crises of their fate, unnerved by 
 disease, and rendered incapable, for the moment, of giving 
 that impulse to action which, without their accustomed 
 initiative, all around them had become incapable of supply- 
 ing. So early as 1806, after Jena, the first Napoleon, 
 suffering from violent pains of the stomach, was heard ' to 
 exclaim that he carried within him the seeds of premature 
 death, and should die of the same disease as his father. 
 The first of the crises at which the great Napoleon's ill- 
 health struck a blow to his fortunes was at the battle of the 
 Moskowa, in September 1812, which laid open the old 
 Muscovite capital to his army; the second was after the 
 great battle which drove back the allied armies from Dres- 
 den in August 1813. In the fii'st instance the Russian 
 autumn had struck a chill through his frame, which seems 
 to have rendered him, for the time, incapable alike of that 
 prompt decision and of that swift action to which he had 
 owed all the astounding successes of his past career. He 
 remained at a distance from the field of battle, which ren- 
 dered his unerring coup d'oeil unavailable, and apparently 
 accounted for the incomplete results of the murderous day 
 of the Moskowa. In the second instance, on the morrow 
 after the battle of Dresden, a recurrent attack of his old 
 internal enemy (which led those around him to suspect 
 poison) disabled him from following up in person the intimi- 
 dating effects of the defeat which he had inflicted on the 
 Allies the day before,^ gave them time to take breath, and 
 beat his lieutenants in detail — the master's eje and word 
 being for the moment withdrawn. 
 
 The second French Caesar, in like manner, at two decisive 
 crises of his fate, seems to have been physically incapable of 
 casting into the scale of events the weight of a decided will. 
 
 ' By Count Lobau. 
 
 ^ Sovrcnirs Militaires, par M, le Due de Fezensac, pp. 253-453. 
 
346 C^SAEISM IN FRANCE EESUEGENT. 
 
 At the moment when the question of peace or war with 
 Germany yet hung in suspense, if Napoleon III. had re- 
 mained master of himself — and others — he would scarcely 
 have suffered his hand to be forced by his entourage into 
 that disastrous conflict. The Gramonts and Lebceufs — the 
 coxcombs of court diplomacy and the bravoes of court 
 militarism — would scarcelj' have been suffered to substitute 
 their provocative swagger in the Chambers, and empty boasts 
 of preparedness ' down to every button of every gaiter ' in 
 the army, for the better grounded misgivings of a ruler who, 
 if no heaven-born king of men, had yet acquired faculties for 
 rule which had long preserved him in possession of rule in 
 France, and had long imposed respect — and ' fear of change, 
 perplexing monarchs ' — on Europe. 
 
 Twice, within the lifetime of two generations (1789- 
 1862) the wheel of revolution in France ran full circle through 
 anarchy to Csesarism. A third anarchy began to ' adventure 
 resurrection ' in the Paris Commune of 1871. It must be 
 hoped, though it may be too soon yet to hope confidently, that 
 the fatal sequence will this time be averted, and that France 
 is not again fated to submit herself to a third Csesarism 
 — a third recourse to autocracy as a preferred alternative 
 to ochlocracy — a poison administered to expel a poison — 
 Tyranny to get rid of Anarchy. This may be, and this in 
 France twice has seemed, a political necessity. Thrice 
 repeated, it could scarcely be regarded otherwise than as a 
 necessity of decadence. 
 
347 
 
 XL 
 
 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS} 
 
 1. Das Nevs Paris. Unsere Zeit, 1857. 
 
 2. Paris Novmeau et Paris Futiir. Par Victor Fournel. Paris, 1865. 
 
 3. Paris- Guide, Par les Principaux Ecrivains et Artistes de la France. 2 vols. 
 
 Paris, 1867. 
 i. Paris miter dem Zweiten, Kaiserreich. Vou Rudolf Gottschall. 4 Bde. 
 
 Leipzig, 1871. 
 5. Pwris, ses Organes, ses Fonctions et sa Vie dans la Seconde Moitie du XIX" 
 
 Sieole. 5 vols. 8vo. Par Maxime Duoamp. Paris, 1869-74. 
 
 ' Wheit I grope back among tlie dim recollections of my 
 Parisian childhood,' says the first of two German writers 
 who have successively treated of ' New Paris ' in ' Unsere 
 Zeit,' ' it seems to me as if I had known quite another Paris, 
 contrasting with Paris of to-day much as the fantastic city 
 scenery in Gustave Dore's "Wandering Jew" contrasts 
 with the architectural splendours of John Martin's Bible 
 pictures.' 
 
 Traits and traces of old Paris still stood out on all sides in un- 
 effaced sharpness, so that the romantic school of writers, of which 
 Victor Hugo was at the head, had no trouble in making palpable 
 to the sense how Paris might have looked in the middle ages. The 
 leading lines of the picture of old Paris had not then become irrecog- 
 nisable. Eelics of old constructions were nowhere as yet wanting ; 
 gabled fagades, low doors with penthouse roofs, projecting balconies 
 and turrets at street corners ; in the interior courts, winding stone 
 staircases, with dilapidated balustrades and landings ; old pumps 
 adorned with delicate and beautiful ironwork ; groups in relievo on 
 walls, images of saints in niches, old churches converted into depots 
 and magazines — vaulted halls inside, mutilated monsters of Gothic 
 sculpture outside. The municipal authorities were not then so inex- 
 orably rigid as they are now in requiring all houses to dress their 
 
 ' Now first published. 
 
348 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PAHIS. 
 
 ranks, and all projections beyond tlae ground-line to be cut away. 
 Paris bad tben its hUls and valleys. The bridges were not, as now, 
 broad and level thoroughfares, but steep and slippery passes. After 
 the slightest frost carriages could not surmount the steep acclivities of 
 the Pont Neuf, the Pont au Change, the Pont Marie, and the Pont 
 de la Toumelle. Eain of any continuance rendered the streets im- 
 passable. No regular provision was then made for carrying off the 
 rainfall from the gutters. Instead of the present lead and iron pipes 
 which carry it down the walls, old stone spouts stretched their necks 
 and arms over the streets, and plentifully bedewed the passengers. 
 The roofs shed their rainy tears without stint from every corner. 
 The kennels swelled in the twinkling of an eye into torrents. The 
 distant sewers had not gorge wide enough for the confluent streams. 
 Lakes were formed at their point of confluence, and the neighbouring 
 streets rapidly became river-beds. Tradesmen shut up their shops, 
 and did their best to shut out the deluge [as Mrs. Partington did to 
 sweep out the Atlantic]. When the rain ceased, the shutters were 
 again taken down, and the shop-boys busied themselves with big 
 sponges to mop up the moisture. By degrees the deluge subsided. 
 The jagged and irregular Ararats of pavement on each side the street 
 showed their summits. People re-emerged from the wide passages 
 and doorways, where they had sought refuge from the rain, and 
 picked their steps heedfully over the slippery ways. And now the 
 street ferryman or pilot brought out his planks, and bridged the 
 street rivers — a narrow, perilous bridge, which none but a dancing- 
 master or acrobat could cross without fear and trembling. Accord- 
 ingly those who did cross very commonly forgot their fee to the 
 ferryman — ' Passez, payez ! ' It would really seem as if I were 
 merely repeating in stumbUng prose what Boileau wrote in smooth 
 verse near two centuries back, and yet I paint simply after 
 nature. It is not my fault if Paris of 1834 in many points looked 
 exactly like Paris of 1693. 
 
 The transformation of Paris from a mediseval to a modem 
 city, achieved under tlie last Napoleon, tad for centuries 
 been the day-dream of amateurs and architects, and the 
 paper-project of governments, from Henri Quatre to Madame 
 de Pompadour, and from Tavannes to Voltaire. That pro- 
 phet of the French, prescient, it would almost seem, of a 
 Napoleon Emperor and a Haussmann Prefect, though 
 scarcely of a Paris incendiary Commune, wrote in 1749 as 
 follows : — 
 
THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 349 
 
 In less than, ten years Paris might be made the -wonder of the 
 world. It is high time those at the head of the administration of the 
 most opulent capital in Europe should make it also the most commo- 
 dious and the most magnificent. Heaven grant some man may arise 
 energetic enough to form such projects, firm enough to carry them 
 out, endowed with a mind enlightened enough to embrace them in 
 their whole extent, and possessed of the requisite credit and influence 
 to secure their success. 
 
 The Prince de Ligne, that spirituel and frivolous French- 
 man of Brussels, was more in earnest than usual in pressing 
 the most sweeping schemes for the transformation of Paris. 
 In a ^Memoire sur Paris,' written about the year 1780, he 
 put forward the following amongst other architectural 
 projects which have since been carried into execution : — 
 ' A grand place must be cleared from the Tuileries to the 
 old Louvre. Those wretched sheds and booths in the 
 Carrousel — that Rue Saint Nieaise — dishonour Paris by 
 petty methods of making money of everything. The truly 
 great economy is to consult economy not at all!' Further on 
 the Prince de Ligne indulges in a fresh burst of indignation 
 against all who might oppose to his projects ' ce vil mot 
 d'argent.' Napoleon the First said of Corneille — ' If he had 
 lived in my time, I would have made him a prince, 
 Napoleon the Third might have said of the Prince de Ligne 
 — ' If he had lived in my time, I would have made him a 
 member of my Municipal Commission.' There was a 
 curious proviso in the Prince de Ligne's projects for 
 embellishing Paris — viz. that if any new churches were built, 
 they should have no steeples. The Revolution soon shelved 
 that proviso after its own fashion. In the instance, indeed, 
 of the old church of Saint Jacques la Boucherie, it was the 
 church that was demolished while the tower was left stand- 
 ing, and converted into a patent shot manufactory. The 
 Second Empire re-converted it into a solitary piece de decora- 
 tion in the newly-formed square Saint Jacques. 
 
 It was predicted of the Second Empire by Alexis de 
 Toequeville, on its first establishment, ' Tl ne fonder a rien, 
 mais il dwrera.' One thing at least that Empire founded — 
 New Paris. 
 
8S0 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 
 
 It is amongst the grim jokes of history that the over- 
 throw of royalty in France in 1848 should have led, not 
 remotely, to the transformation of Paris into a ' city of 
 palaces.' Bat the process is plain enough. Any Govern- 
 ment which meant to be moi'e than ' Provisional ' after 
 that catastrophe, was under the double necessity of finding 
 employment for labour and restoring confidence to capital. 
 There is a Parisian proverb, that everything goes on well 
 when the building trade does. But if the building trade in 
 1848 was to go on at all, the initiative in setting and keep- 
 ing it at work must come from authority. This was felt so 
 immediately by the revolutionary tenants of power at popular 
 will, that a decree was passed by the Provisional Govern- 
 ment, in the first hours of its brief existence (February 28, 
 1848), for putting in hand the work so long talked of and 
 never done, the completion of the Louvre. Later in the 
 same year, under the Government of General Cavaignac, a 
 project of law for that purpose was brought before the Con- 
 stituent Assembly, accompanied with detailed plans by the 
 late architect Visconti, which, with some variations, have 
 since been put in esecution. The project in its main scope 
 was adopted by the committee to which it was referred, and 
 the details reserved for further consideration. It was 
 resolved, as a first indispensable preliminary to the great 
 work to be accomplished, to make a clean sweep of the whole 
 jungle of small streets and alleys which lay between the 
 Tuileries and the Louvre. That first great clearance, which 
 struck, as it were, the key-note of all that followed, was 
 decreed, as we have seen, by the Second Eepublic, and left 
 to be executed, with all subsequent clearances, by the Second 
 Empire. The completion within five years (1852-1857) of 
 the new Louvre, achieving what had been so long projected, 
 the connection of the Louvre with the Tuileries on the north 
 side, had been talked and written of (with revolutionary 
 pauses) ever since the days of Louis XV., and longer. With 
 the completed work before us, it is curious to turn back to 
 predictions like M. A. Bazin's in the ' Livre des Cent et Un ' 
 (1832). ' They talk about adding to the Louvre the wing it 
 
THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 351 
 
 now wants. That will do very well to talk about in the 
 debate on the civil list; but I fear no contradiction, either 
 by words or facts, when I affirm that no such miracle will be 
 witnessed by this century. The old palace of our kings 
 will remain a torso.' M. Bazin reckoned without his 
 Emperor and Prefect that were to be in the future — the 
 modern Aladdin in palace improvisation, and his slave of the 
 lamp. 
 
 What most excited admiration and what most provoked 
 censure in the external and structural transformation of 
 Paris under the Second Empire may be said to have been 
 alike due to the despotic despatch with which it was accom- 
 plished. The grandeur and decadence of Prefect Haussmann 
 kept exact and even pace with the grandeur and decadence 
 of the third Napoleon. It was natural that the grandiose 
 character of the results achieved should most strike 
 foreigners, and the arbitrary and costly processes of their 
 achievement should most be felt by natives. To build up a 
 new city it was first of all necessary to pull down an old one. 
 Shylock could no more cut next his debtor's heart without 
 shedding Christian blood, than Baron Haussmann could cut 
 into the heart of old Paris without cutting into the quick 
 of the habits as well as habitations of tens of thousands of 
 settled and contented citizens. No one could look round on 
 the scene of the sweeping Imperial demolitions which pre- 
 ceded those of the Commune, without involuntarily taking 
 a mental census of the myriads of modest existences which 
 must have been arbitrarily displaced by them during the 
 whole course of that edilical revolution. M. Edmond About, in 
 a paper in the ' Paris Guide '(1867) entitled ' Dans les Euines,' 
 draws a touching picture of the domestic virtues exercised, 
 the domestic affections cherished, and the humble fortunes 
 honestly raised in one of those little family nests which fell 
 thick and fast under the destructive and constructive vigour 
 of Baron ex-Prefect Haussmann. And M. Victor Eournel 
 tells of a friend who in ten years had been ten times com- 
 pelled to change his residence. ' When I first knew him, he 
 lived in the Eue des Mathurins Saint Jacques. From thence 
 
852 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 
 
 he was driven out by tlie Rue des Ecoles. Next he took 
 refuge in the Eue de la Harpe ; the Boulevard de Sebasto- 
 pol pulled his house down about his ears. Then he sought 
 a new retreat behind the Odeon ; the Rue de Medicis again 
 forced him to take flight. In despair of making good his 
 position on the left bank of the river, he crossed to the right. 
 To the right bank also the Boulevard Magenta, the Boule- 
 vard du Prince Eugene, and five or six others, followed and 
 routed him, for the tenth time, out of house and home.' 
 
 It is not, however, merely compulsory change of domicile, 
 but compulsory change of style of domicile, that became a 
 Parisian grievance under the Second Empire. Working men 
 en masse were driven beyond the barriers. All classes above 
 proletarism and below opulence, litterateurs, professional 
 men, and small rentiers — men to whom a pied-a-terre, at 
 least, in Paris, was, as it were, their hold of life — found them- 
 selves, if they would not follow the manual operatives beyond 
 the barriers, compelled by no remote consequence of the late 
 improvements to pay largely increased rents for diminished 
 comfort. M. Victor Eournel's friend, whose first lodging 
 was in the since demolished Rue des Mathurins Saint 
 Jacques, probably enjoyed in his old home a roomy and 
 comfortable interior without a showy street exterior. If he 
 had transferred himself to the new Rue des Ecoles, raised on 
 the ruins of his old Rue des Mathurins, he would have had to 
 pay (we do not speak without book) about lOOL a year for a 
 small set of chambers au deuseieme in that street. Now, to 
 old-fashioned Parisian notions of rent, in an old-fashioned 
 quarter, such a figure for small-sized unfurnished apartments 
 must appear raide. But it is evident that if half Paris was 
 to be pulled down, and half the space it stood upon left 
 vacant for the sake of opening fine broad lines of street in all 
 quarters, fashionable or unfashionable, the rents exacted for 
 sets of apartments in all quarters must be such as to repay, 
 firstly, the cost of pulling down the old streets ; secondly, 
 that of building the new ; and thirdly, the building value of 
 the space liberally left unoccupied. Otherwise the specula- 
 tion, so loudly proclaimed a good, necessarily must have 
 
THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 363 
 
 proved a bad one. But it was not so clear what value, 
 except in more extensive views from their front windows, the 
 surcharged locataires got for the increased rents they had to 
 pay. They did not get more ' comfortable lodgings ' in a 
 large proportion of cases — indeed, quite the contrary. The 
 fa9ades of all the new lines of streets have an aspect as 
 palatial as sculptured stone, zinc doing duty for bronze, and 
 profuse gilding can give them. ' Tout est parfaitement et 
 ennuyeusement beaw,' as some French traveller once said of 
 England — i.e. everything that meets the public eye. But 
 the interiors of this stately street architecture in many 
 instances are no more palatial than their inhabitants are 
 princely. Many of them are, in fact, from the economy of 
 space and material, supremely uncomfortable, as compared 
 with the more roomy and substantial, if less showy dwellings, 
 of which so many existed in old Paris, and a good few exist 
 still. M. Victor Fournel gives a serio-comic picture, con- 
 firmed by concurrent testimony from other quarters, of what 
 he calls ces ahominable cages parisiennes — modern Parisian 
 houses, laid out, from ground-floor to garret, with the utmost 
 economy of space and slightness of interior structure, in 
 sets of apartments confined within the most limited dimen- 
 sions practicable. And he sums up as follows : — 
 
 Parisian apartments, then, have the double demen't of being ex- 
 tremely dear and extremely inconvenient. One does not lodge there, one 
 roosts, one encamps, as it were, between earth and heaven, subjected 
 to all the constraints and all the servitudes imposed by the landlord, 
 the concierge, and the iellow-locataires ; one is always eager to leave 
 them, whether to sally forth and seek in the street a little air, quiet, 
 and repose — yes, really a little repose — or to vary one's afflictions by 
 changing one's lodgings. Have people ever seriously reflected on the 
 influence which this sort of habitation must inevitably exercise on 
 the temperament, physical and moral, of all Parisians 1 Is it really 
 believed that these things have no influence on that unquiet character, 
 that nervous irritability, which render them the most mobile and 
 capricious population in the world 1 Nothing is so sweet, refreshing, 
 wholesome to the mind and heart, nothing so soothing and benignant, 
 as the chez-soi. Without paradox, I am persuaded that the English 
 home — that interior life so peaceful and comfortable, so isolated from 
 
 A A 
 
354 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PAEIS. 
 
 all the tumults outside in the tranquil household enjoyments — plays 
 a great part in the prosperous social and political history of the 
 nation, as well as in the patriarchal fecundity of their marriages. 
 Where is the chez-soi possible at Paris ? Refresh and restore your- 
 self, if yoii can, in our card-board apartments, so transparent to noise, 
 so surrounded, and as it were penetrated, on all sides by the pressure 
 from "without ! Our municipal administration, in its laying out of 
 new Paris, has suppressed only the material means of revolutions by 
 removing paving-stones and the tangled intricacies of our old streets 
 and lanes ; but one principal moral cause of revolutions will be left 
 subsisting so long as Parisians shall continue to roost in these logis 
 compartitnents — so long as home shall not have been transplanted to 
 the banks of the Seine. 
 
 Without yenturing to accept as universally applicable 
 our author's complimentary tribute to English homes, or 
 exactly supposing that he meant to apply universally his 
 description of ' abominable cages ' to all Paris apartments, 
 we are inclined to think another description we have met 
 with of Paris streets as 'whited sepulchres' may be of 
 rather extensive application. Looking along these inter- 
 minable dressed lines of front as far as the eye can reach, 
 in all the new streets, avenues, and boulevards, it was im- 
 possible to suppress conjectures of what might sometimes 
 lurk behind their sculptured cornices and profusely gilt 
 balconies. It was impossible to suppose all their inhabitants 
 born to dwell in marble halls. But the Parisian at all times 
 might not be unwilling to suppose that this was supposed of 
 him, and would rather pay for appearance without reality 
 than for reality without appearance. Volenti nan fit injuria. 
 There is now only one street in Paris, says M. Victor Fournel 
 — the Eue de Eivoli. Not content with having pushed its 
 extended length from one end of the town to the other in one 
 direction, it reappears, disguised under innumerable aliases, 
 in every other. Yet a little while, and we shall no longer 
 have any streets at all ; there will be nothing but boulevards. 
 In effect, under Baron Haussmann's jurisdiction, it was a 
 mere question of time when every street still surviving 
 might be called upon to show cause why it was not an 
 avenue — every avenue why it was not a boulevard. 
 
THE KAPOLEONIO AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 355 
 
 It has been said with some truth that the real Louyres 
 of the present age — that is to say, the works into which the 
 present age has really thrown its distinctive spirit ajid cha^ 
 racter — are such works of the Second Empire as the Holies 
 Centrales (the great market), and the grand egout collecteur 
 (the great sewer of Paris). Next to the great market and the 
 great sewer we are disposed, with M. Pournel, to place the 
 great hotels and the great cafes as the works most really 
 monumental and palatial of the late Imperial regime — the 
 dynasty of international exhibitions. 
 
 The striking contrast between the impotence of the architecture of 
 these days when aiming at grand style, and its brilliant fertility of 
 resources when it aims only at ostentation and luxury — between the 
 art of the architect descending the rapid slope of decadence, and that 
 of the decorative upholsterer not less rapidly advancing to perfection — 
 is a contrast which often shows itself in the different aspects of the 
 same building. Sufficient evidence might be found of this contrast 
 in the new Louvre. Without, however, sending our readers back 
 there, it may be enough to send them to the two new theatres recently 
 erected in the Place du Chatelet, and to point their attention to the 
 striking difference between the exterior and interior architecture of 
 these buildings, between the deep decadence of architectural taste so 
 visible on the one side, and the progress of elegance, convenience, and 
 luxury so incontestable on the other. 
 
 ' I advise my readers,' says M. Fournel, ' to convince themselves 
 of this by paying a visit to the Cafe parisien behind the Chateau 
 d'Eau, the Grand Cafe on the ground floor of the Jockey Club, and 
 the Eldorado in the Boulevard de Strasbourg. The first of these, 
 with its vast dimensions, its statues, its caryatides, its marble walls, its 
 mirrors on all sides reflecting its myriR.d lights, its fine fountain whose 
 waters are ever playing on its rock of bronze, its joyous chimes which 
 fritter the hours for its careless habitues ; the second, decorated by the 
 elite of our young painters and most brilliant eleves of the school of 
 Rome; the third, with its/afacZe enlivened with sculptures, its splendid 
 comptoir set in a frame of delicately-carved wood- work, its two-storied 
 rotunda begirt by sixteen arcades resting on tall and graceful columns, 
 its gallery bordered by colossal figures with picturesque attributes, its 
 cupola with enriched dial-plate on which the hours are marked by 
 a circle of twelve nymphs, its balcony with open railings ornamented 
 with masques and medallions ; finally, its mouldings and gildings, dis- 
 playing from base to summit their glittering arabesques ; — these are 
 monuments not to be forgotten as characteristic of new Paris.' 
 
 4 A 2 
 
356 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 
 
 If monster hotels, cafes, and common sewers are to be 
 taken as the modern monnaie for palaces, bj parity of 
 reason a monster opera-house may be taken as change — and 
 no small change — for a cathedral. When the first Napoleon 
 (as the St. Helena memorials have placed on record) projected 
 the transfer of the Papal residence to the French metropolis, 
 and the travestissement of the Supreme Pontiff into Bishop 
 of Rome and Paris, he expressed regret that he could not 
 transport to Paris the church of St. Peter's also — 'il etait 
 clioquede la mesquinerie de Notre Dame.' If anyone as new to 
 European culture in the present century as Voltaire's Ingenu 
 in the last, were suddenly brought in front of that enormous 
 edifice the new Opera House, with its external enrichments of 
 marble, sculpture, and gilding, what could he think but that 
 he had stepped from the Boulevard des Capucines into the 
 ethnic forecourt of the metropolitan temple of modern 
 French religion ? Would he be far wrong ? Of the three 
 religions that divide Prance between them — the old creed of 
 Christendom, with Notre Dame for its central Galilean seat ; 
 the modern cult of Plutus, with its pagan peristyle of the 
 Bourse ; and that of Pleasure, where opera and ballet have 
 ample room and verge enough for their most advanced ritual 
 in the magnificent n.ew temple raised for it — which, is it sup- 
 posed, can boast, at this day in Paris, the most zealous and 
 regular votaries ? 
 
 M. Victor Fournel, the always acute and trenchant, if 
 somewhat cynical critic of the edilical exploits of the Second 
 Empire in Paris, refuses to recognise any other than strate- 
 gical motives for the main operations which have changed 
 old into new Paris — the broad and relentlessly rectilinear 
 lines of thoroughfare which have been driven through the 
 entire length and breadth of the mediseval capital. 
 
 ' Let anyone stiidy,' says M. Fournel, ' with, the map before him, 
 the general system of the new streets of Paris, he •will soon perceive 
 that it hsis been ordered expressly for the purpose of clearing the 
 approaches of those public monuments which may again become, as 
 they have often become before, rallying-points and strongholds of 
 insurrection — ^for the purpose of cutting through populous and popular 
 
THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PARIS. 367 
 
 quarters by lines along wliicli military forces could operate with 
 security — bringing all the parts of this great capital into easy com- 
 munication, and forming links and connections by new and broad 
 streets between all the important buildings, quays, bridges, interior 
 and exterior boulevards, and the gates of Paris. Ten years hence it 
 will be impossible to discover any point in any quaiter of the town 
 that is not confined, absorbed, annihilated between quadruple ranges 
 of boulevards, converging towards them on the right and left, before 
 and behind ; ample vomitories, where whole regiments may deploy 
 without difficulty, where artillery and cavalry may move and wheel 
 at ease, where cannon, raking d, pleine gueule these fine straight streets, 
 traced just as could be wished for artillery practice, will sweep the 
 stakes every stroke it plays. A goodly barrack will rise at every 
 point of junction, and the foi'ts will command the whole. The pro- 
 fessors of barricades have hencefoith rough work before them. The 
 trade is spoiled. The twin streets Saint Denis and Saint Martin 
 will never again, as in bygone days, lend themselves to facilitate the 
 communications of insurgent blou.ses, and bafile the operations of 
 regular troops. The Empire has been far too clever to pull down 
 these picturesque twin ^meute-tsLctories. But it has thrust between 
 them, throughout the whole breadth of Paris, from the Strasburg 
 railway terminus on the north to the Observatoire on the south, 
 that magnificent boulevard which, rejoicing in three successive desig- 
 nations, runs out its course, however, in one straight line, whether as 
 Boulevard de Strasbourg, Sebastopol, or Saint Michel. As the Rues 
 Saint Denis and Saint Martin, on the north side the river, are stra- 
 tegically neutralised by the Boulevard de Sebastopol cutting in between 
 them, so the Rue Saint Jacques on the south side, which was the 
 theatre of the most obstinate conflict between the regular and popular 
 forces on the days of June 1848, is reduced to similar insignificance, 
 in a military point of view, by the same grand line of. thoroughfare 
 running parallel to it under its third transfluvial designation of Boule- 
 vard Saint Michel. " This entire gigantic and splendid line of boule- 
 vard," says M. Budolf Gottschall, "may be regarded as a result of 
 the political and strategical lessons given by the never-to-be-forgotten 
 insurrection of June 1848 to all future French governments, and as 
 an efiective rectification of the unfavourable field for action on both 
 sides the Seine which alone gave insurrection its ground of vantage 
 against regular troops." " From this point of view," says the same 
 writer, " the new boulevard may be regarded as providing an extended 
 and unobstructed rifle-range at whatever moving targets along its 
 entire length Revolution may set up to be shot at. On this arena, at 
 all events, she is safe to be shot down." ' 
 
358 THE NAPOLEONIC AUGUSTAN AGE IN PAKIS. 
 
 ' But the Second Empire,' prophetically added the same 
 writer, ' is only thus secured from emeute, not from revolution. 
 Who can answer how soon after the demise of the present 
 Emperor (or a then unforeseen Sedan), these colossal boule- 
 vards may form the battle-field of Praetorians contesting the 
 disposal of Empire? — whether street-fights may not come 
 off there for the regency or the wax-portefeuille ? — whether 
 Seleucidse and Ptolemies may not throw the dice for the torn 
 imperial mantle in bloody conflict on this arena, cleared 
 for them by Imperial foresight ? ' 
 
 ' Heu hominum curas ! Heu quantum in. rebus inane est ! ' 
 
 Build walls to keep birds from cherry-trees — the birds will 
 find their way there, build you how strategically soever. 
 
359 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 1. Enquete Agncole. Ra/pprn't a Son Excellence Monsieur le Ilinistre Secretaire 
 
 d'6tat au Bepwrtement de V Agriculture, d%t, Commerce et des Travaux 
 Publics. Par le Directeur de I'Agriculture, Commissaire Oeneral de 
 FEnquete. Paris, Imprimerie Imperiale, 1868. 
 
 2. L' Agriculture et la Population. Par M. Lfionce de Lavergne, Membre de 
 
 rinstitut et de la Society Centrale d'Agrioultiire. 2° Edition, revue et 
 augmentee. Paris, 1865. 
 
 3. Economie Rwale de la France depuis 1789. Par M. Lfionce de Lavergne, 
 
 &c. 3' Edition, revue et augmentee. Paris, 1866. 
 
 4. La Reforme Sociale en France, deduite de l' Observation comparee des 
 
 Pewples Ewropeens. Par M. F. Le Play, Auteur des ' Ouvriers Europ^ens,' 
 Commissaire General aux Expositions Universelles de 1855, de 1862, et 
 de 1867 3" Edition, revue et oorrigiSe. 3 vols. Paris, 1867. 
 
 5. Des PriviUgies de VAneien Regime en France et des Privilegies du JVbuveau. 
 
 Par M. d'Esterno. 2 vols. Paris, 1867-68.' 
 
 No documents have issued from the official press of France 
 since the cahiers of instruction from the electoral assemblies 
 of 1789 to their deputies to the States- General, which have 
 set forth in such detail the complaints and claims of the 
 most important interest in the country, as the voluminous 
 returns and depositions now in process of printing as ap- 
 pendices to the official Report before us, which is addressed 
 to the head of his department by M. Monny de Mornay, 
 ' Director of Agriculture.' The instructed champions of 
 the French agricultural interest (for the masses of the cul- 
 tivators of the soil have hitherto shown themselves impress- 
 ible only through their popular instincts) had long pro- 
 claimed loudly that agriculture, regarded as a national pro- 
 ductive interest, was playing somewhat the part of dupe in 
 
 ' From the Qua/iierly Review, January 1870. 
 
360 THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 
 
 the grand military, financial, and commercial drama of the 
 Second Empire. It is now placed on official record as a 
 fact, that land in Prance has fallen in value during the last 
 twenty years, amidst the fabnlons and factitious rise of so 
 many speculative undertakings.' To us in England there is 
 nothing new in the spectacle of the sort of prosperity (and 
 its collapse) which builds itself up on overstrained credit and 
 anticipated resources. What is new in France, at least since 
 the days of Law and the Mississippi scheme, is the degree 
 in which the speculative spirit in all classes has been stimu- 
 lated to excess by the patronage given and the initiative 
 assumed in high places. What is newer still, and may in- 
 spire some hope of seeing the modern Idomeneus yet reign 
 over the modern Salentum in his second manner (!) is the 
 implied acknowledgment we have now before us, on the part 
 of the governing power itself, of the false direction hitherto 
 given to much of its past action, and the official recognition, 
 in the successive chapters of M. de Mornay's Report, of all 
 the principal agricultural wants and grievances which the 
 ablest representatives of French agriculture had been set- 
 ting forth, seemingly to no purpose, for these ten or fifteen 
 years. 
 
 There are some points of parallelism, though more of 
 contrast, in the past and present situation of the English and 
 French agricultural interests. Their position is so far paral- 
 lel, in relation to other productive and industrial interests, 
 that they have both touched hottom — have both lost, and have 
 both at length acquiesced in losing, every privilege for their 
 
 ' M. Monny de Momay, in his Report, wLile admitting the fall of value 
 sustained within the last twenty years by landed proprietors, of large or 
 middling size, in France, asserts — but cites no evidence and an experienced 
 inquirer (M. LSonce de Lavergne) says that all the evidence he has himself 
 collected is against it — that the value of small properties has not ceased to 
 advance during that period. It is not very easy to understand how this 
 should be, while the value of landed property in the larger portion of its 
 bulk has fallen, and while the numbers of competitors for the smaller lots of 
 landed property have been in rapid course of reduction during the same 
 period, in consequence of the artificially stimulated migration of the rural 
 population to the towns, and the not less artificially stimulated diversion of 
 their savings to other than landed investments. 
 
THE LAND aUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 361 
 
 products that could be represented in the invidious light of 
 monopoly. The most marked point of contrast between the 
 history and fortunes of English and French agriculture is 
 that, though the French more than the English have been 
 specially a people of cultivators, the agricultural interest had 
 ceased in modern times in France, while it has continued 
 through every age in England, to be a power in the country. 
 This was the effect of that perverted policy which trans- 
 formed the nobles of France into courtiers, and severed 
 every link of the natural relations between the lords of the 
 soil and its cultivators. The former may be said to have 
 sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, when they sub- 
 mitted to share the servile prodigalities of the court rather 
 than the prosperity of the country. The latter were 
 mostly severed and isolated — except in some remoter pro- 
 vinces, such as Anjou, where commenced the peasant war of 
 La Vendee — from those who should have felt it their honour, 
 no less than their interest, to act the part of their natural 
 patrons and protectors ; and found thrown on their shoulders 
 the double weight of the public burthens of the state, and 
 the local dues and feudal service to the nobles. The rural 
 classes were, in fact, the helpless and hopeless helots of the 
 whole piivileged classes above them. These latter consisted 
 not only of old nobles and new anohlis, but of all who had 
 scraped together sufficient capital to take refuge in the 
 towns. And here it may be noticed that France abounded 
 in towns, and especially in small towns, more than most 
 other countries in Europe, mainly owing to the manifold 
 oppressions of the country. The refugees from the rural 
 districts — th6ir tailles and corvees — invested the capital they 
 brought with them, which never found its way back to 
 the soil, in the purchase of some small oflSce. ' Whenever 
 your Majesty,' said a courtier to Louis XIV., ' creates an 
 office, God creates a fool to buy it.' One tribute only to the 
 primary importance of agriculture was paid by the Physio- 
 crats or Economists of the last century- — a tribute which 
 that poor down-trodden interest might well have spared, 
 or might well have regarded as insult heaped on injury. 
 
362 THE LAND QUESTION IN EEAi^CE (1870). 
 
 Quesnay and his followers considered agriculture as the 
 sole source of real and substantial wealth, and inferred from 
 that assumption that it should be the sole subject of taxation. 
 Justice has been done upon that theory by later generations 
 of political economists; but, after all, the best reductio ad 
 ahsurdum was made, at the epoch of its first appearance, by 
 the comic deductions drawn from it in Voltaire's 'Homme 
 aux Quarante Ecus.' 
 
 With the great Eevolution the day of revenge for ages 
 of isolation and oppression might seem to have dawned on 
 the cultivators of the French soil. And so it did, as far as 
 the range of their own conceptions went ; since they found 
 themselves encouraged by the revolutionary movements of 
 the capital — followed when they had not been preceded by 
 the other great towns — to wreak their smouldering sense of 
 wrong in wide-spread outrage and violence on the personal 
 representatives of the system under which they had suffered ;■ 
 to shake off the feudal and fiscal burthens which had weighed 
 so heavily on their shoulders ; and to seize the opportunity 
 of acquiring at a nominal price the lands thrown into the 
 market by the extensive confiscations of ecclesiastical and 
 emigrant property. It is a mistake, indeed, to suppose that 
 the widely-prevalent division of landed property amongst 
 petty proprietors now existing in France, first originated at 
 the Revolution : ' It is now known,' observes M. Leonce de 
 Lavergne, ' that the numbers of petty landed proprietors 
 have been much less increased since the Eevolution than 
 had been imagined.' Arthur Young, writing in 1789, states : 
 ' The number is so great that I am inclined to suppose more 
 than one-third of the kingdom occupied by them.' M. 
 L&nce de Lavergne, an eminent practical agricultural 
 authority, affirms that there, is not a greater extent so occu- 
 pied now. 
 
 This vast body of petty peasant proprietors, who under 
 the old regime had been the most embarrassed and burdened 
 class in the country, was the class that profited most imme- 
 diately by the Eevolution. While the depreciated assignats 
 virtually wiped out their debts, the purchases of land, paid 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 363 
 
 for in assignats, increased their property, and the famine 
 prices of their produce enriched them amidst general misery. 
 Economically and materially, therefore, this was the class 
 that gained most amidst the public confusion ; while the 
 bourgeoisie of the towns, who had shunned all contact with 
 it, and shifted all their burthens on its shoulders, were the 
 class that suffered most. But the same events, as Tocque- 
 ville has justly observed,' which were ruinous at the time to 
 the bourgeoisie, ' tended ultimately to place power in its 
 hands, and soon enabled it to convert a great part of the 
 public fortune to its sole use.' 
 
 Politically, the Revolution left the agriculturists no 
 farther advanced than it found them, and indeed threw 
 them back in point of public importance and influence by 
 decimating such natural chiefs as they had. The saying 
 that ' La Revolution a desosse la France ' was more applicable 
 to the landed interest than to any other. True, its aristo- 
 cratical backbone had stood it in little stead before the 
 Revolution ; but it may be said since to have had no back- 
 bone of class organisation at all — to have consisted mainly 
 of scattered and isolated ' uncountry gentlemen,' destitute 
 aUke of all rural occupation and political importance, and of 
 mere masses of manoeuvriers pro^rietaires, as a writer before 
 us terms the lowest class of peasant proprietors.^ This last 
 is the single type to which the theorists of infinite divisi- 
 bility of land would willingly reduce all landed property — a 
 type politically powerless, as necessitating all but total ab- 
 
 ' (Eniires Completes, vol. v. p. 286. 
 
 ^ M. Lgonce de Lavergne, in his Ecoaomie Rwale de la Franco (p. 371), 
 gives the following description of the actual condition of these maaiceuvners 
 pj'o^netai/res : — ' The population of the Puy-de-D6me has increased since 1789 
 from 400,000 to 600,000 souls or upwards. Before the Revolution, thirty- 
 seven farms, of an average extent of 80 or 100 acres, divided between them 
 the territory of the commune of Vensat. At the present day the same sur- 
 face belongs to six hundred proprietors, possessing on an average less than 6 
 acres. The middle class has disappeared from the district ; the whole popu- 
 lation cultivates the soil by manual, mostly spade labour — a painful toil 
 drawing after it rough and violent manners. The inhabitant cf the Limagne 
 is extremely laborious, but his efEective industry by no means equals his 
 bodily activity.' 
 
364 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 sorption in manual labour — witli no ambition but that of 
 annexing, by hook or crook, by toiling or borrowing, another 
 bit of land to cultivate without skill or capital — with no 
 politics but hazy traditions of taille and corvSes, and instinc- 
 tive devotion to the dynasty of the Napoleons, as somehow 
 connected with their liberation from those old oppressions, 
 and somehow securing Jacques Bonhomme against the still 
 dreaded spectre of their return. 
 
 The rule we shall proceed upon, in attempting to give 
 English readers some notion of the present situation of 
 French agriculture, in its main bearings on the entire indus- 
 trial and social economy of Trance, is to assume only such 
 evils existing in that situation as we find explicitly recog- 
 nised in the official Eeport before us. It may safely be taken 
 for granted that the high-placed author of that Report would 
 be rather disposed to extenuate than set down aught in 
 malice of the actual condition of the important interest 
 concerned. And, in fact, M. Monny de Mornay does his 
 best, as in official duty bound, to paUiate the darker traits 
 of that condition which have been brought out in evidence ; 
 and contents himself, for the most part, with enumerating 
 the various remedial measures which have been suggested, 
 without committing himself or his department to a choice 
 amongst those measures. There are only two points on which 
 M. Monny de Mornay hazards a decided judgment — and these 
 are, the progress made by French agriculture within the last 
 thirty years, and the ratification explicitly or implicitly given 
 by French agriculturists to the abolition of Protection on 
 their staple products of corn and cattle. Upon the former 
 of these points it is remarked by a leading agricultural 
 authority already cited,' that it is very true that French 
 agriculture has made great progress during the last thirty 
 years, but that the review of that progress should have been 
 extended to at least fifty. During the last half-century 
 French agriculture has doubled its products; but during the 
 twenty years succeeding the Eevolution of February 1848 
 agricultural progress has been very sensibly slackened. The 
 ' Leonce de Lavergne, Revue des Deux Mundes, November 1868. 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 365 
 
 proper business of the Enquete was to investigate and to 
 endeavour to trace to its causes the slackened progress of 
 that latter period. 
 
 Our readers may require some introduction to the authors 
 whom we shall have chiefly to cite in illustration of our pre- 
 sent subject. We begin with the one least likely to be 
 previously known to them — M. d'Esterno, the scope of whose 
 work, as may be partly gathered from its title, is to show 
 how privilege, when supposed to be slain in the overthrow 
 of the old privileged classes, only transmigrated into new 
 forms — forms still oppressive, though less unequally and 
 iniquitously oppressive to agriculture. M. d'Esterno is not 
 only an agricultural statistician, but a philosopher and 
 humourist ; his humour sometimes a little getting the upper 
 hand of his philosophy. He is, as he allows to peep out, by 
 descent a member of the old privileged class. There have 
 always been, he says, members of that class who have dis- 
 approved the enforced obligation of idleness on the old 
 noblesse. For example, Dulaure (the historian of Paris) 
 cites a 8ieur d'Esternod, gentilhomme etpoete under Louis XIII., 
 who, notwithstanding, or rather perhaps by reason of, that 
 double qualification, found himself temporarily reduced to 
 a state of embarrassment closely approaching indigence. 
 Necessity inspired him with evil thoughts, which, he says, 
 he resisted, but which he was not sorry, in his quality of 
 poet, to make known to posterity in the following rhyming 
 reflections, the style of which may account for the rest of 
 his poetry having been ' let die ' : — 
 
 ' Je maugr^ais mon etre, et detestais, en somme, 
 Le pfere qui m'avait fait naitre gentilhomme, 
 Disant que, si le ciel m'eut crii roturier, 
 Je saurais, miserable, au moins quelque metier.' 
 
 M. d'Esterno describes his two very noticeable volumes, 
 as the fruit of forty years of studies — studies which bear 
 evidence of having been followed in the open air fully as 
 much as by lamplight. He has in former years taken an 
 active part in the struggles of the agricultural interest with 
 
366 THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 
 
 the powers that he, and the powers that have been, in favour 
 of its representation in chambers of agriculture on a footing 
 of equality with chambers of commerce. He ascribes the 
 ill-success which has been experienced in effecting that 
 object, and other objects in the pure interest of agriculture, 
 to the manner in which that interest, under the elder Bour- 
 bons, mixed itself up with reactionary politics. 
 
 It was on the lordship of land that the privileges of the old regime 
 had heen founded ; the attempts made, under the Government of the 
 Eestoration, by the introduction of the double vote and other such 
 measures, to render the great landowners predominant in the elec- 
 tions, inspired universal distrust of all proposals from that quarter. 
 When a new generation — our generation — arose, declaring that it took 
 up the cause of agriculture solely as a productive interest, its repre- 
 sentatives received no credence. They were answered, ' You carry 
 the same flag ; you have put a new dye upon it, but the old coloiir 
 still peeps through. You give yourselves out for agriculturists, but 
 you are nothing better than aristocrats ! 
 
 King Louis Philippe was deeply imbued with this prejudice. From 
 his infancy he had found himself, and all related to him, objects of 
 hostility to the old privilegies of the soil ; and he had conceived a 
 profound aversion for the landed interest altogether, which he never 
 succeeded in separating in his mind from its ci-devant representatives. 
 Louis Philippe was the King of the tiers Hat — that is to say, of the 
 bankers, merchants, manufacturers and lawyers. I-Te regarded with 
 deep displeasure the establishment of the Central Congress of Agri- 
 culture in 1 844 ; and when it decided to hold regular annual sittings, 
 the King flew into a violent rage, sent for the Dnke Decazes, the 
 zealous President of that Congress, and said, amongst other things, to 
 him, ' Do you think I have not enough of two Chambers, and that I 
 want a third % ' Those who wished to please him never talked to him 
 of agriculture. The Count de Gasparin sometimes tried to introduce 
 
 the subject. This bored the King, who said one day to him 
 
 'Voyons, M. de Gasparin, laissez-nous done tranquille avec votre 
 agriculture ! ' 
 
 M. Leonce de Lavergne,' another of the authors we have 
 selected for citation on this subject, is already known to 
 agricultural inquirers in this country by a wood Eno-lish 
 translation of his Essay on the Rural Economy of England 
 
 ' Since dead. 
 
TETE LAND aUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 367 
 
 Scotland, and Ireland, with notes by a Scottisli Farmer.' 
 M. de Lavergne was stopped sLiort in the ojBficial and par- 
 liamentary career on which he had entered nnder the Orleans 
 dynasty by the events of February 1848, and again in his 
 professional labours in the Chair of Rural Economy at the 
 National Agronomical Institute, by its arbitrary suppression 
 in 1852, in the first days of the Imperial Government. Its 
 re-establishment in substance, if not in precise form, is now 
 generally demanded. To this demand the Government, it is 
 said, consents ; and a Commission, nominated by the Minis- 
 ter of Agricnlture, has prepared a project which fixes the 
 seat of the new institute at Paris. ' And thus the whirligig 
 of time brings in his revenges.' M. Leonce de Lavergne 
 might briefly be described as the Arthur Young of France, 
 and he would certainly take the description as a compliment. 
 Like his British precursor, an experienced agriculturist and 
 acute observer of the practical bearings of public policy or 
 impolicy on the progress or decline of agriculture, he has 
 repeated, under less perturbed circumstances, Arthur Young's 
 task of 1789, that of examining the actual condition of agri- 
 cultural and pastoral production in each of the great natural 
 divisions of the French territory, and of forming a compara- 
 tive estimate of their products with those of this country. 
 Like Arthur Young, he keeps his eyes resolutely fixed on the 
 soil, and regards political vicissitudes chiefly as they affect 
 the every-day interests of its cultivators. 
 
 While from these antecedents M. de Lavergne might be 
 supposed likely to fall naturally into the rule, more or less, 
 of a.frond6ur of the powers that be, M. Le Play — who figures 
 last, not least, on our list for citation — may be supposed, as 
 an International Exhibition Commissioner, a Councillor of 
 State, and finally a Senator, not less naturally to rank among 
 the satisfaits of the Second Empire. But he is none the 
 less disposed to be severely critical oh the whole modern 
 
 ' JSssai swr I'JiJconomie JluraU de V Angleterre, de VEcosse et de VIrlande. 
 Par M. Leonce de Lavergne. Quatri^me edition. Paris, 1863. We would 
 also refer our readers to an essay on this work by Mrs. Grote, in her Collected 
 Papers (London, 1862). 
 
368 THE LAND aUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 
 
 fabric of centralisation and bureaucracy. To the majority 
 of English readers M. Le Play is probably best known by his 
 successful superintendence of the arrangements of the great 
 Paris Exhibition of 1867. But he has earned higher dis- 
 tinction, among philanthropic inquirers into the industrial 
 and social condition of the most numerous classes throughout 
 Europe, by his persevering researches, during a long series 
 of years, into that condition. 
 
 In M. Le Play's first work, entitled ' Les Ouvriers Euro- 
 peens,' which was published in imperial folio in the first 
 French Exhibition year, 1855, and which received in the 
 following year the prize of Statistics from the Academy of 
 Sciences, he photographed, to use his own expression, the 
 most diversified types of operative life throughout Europe. 
 The volume contains thirty-six detailed delineations of work- 
 people in different countries, taken on the spot in the most 
 widely remote regions and social conditions — from the 
 shepherd on the slopes of the Ural, and the peasant of 
 Southern Russia, to the emigrant reaper of the Soissonnais, 
 the laundry-man of the Paris suburbs, and the chiffonnier of 
 the Paris streets. 
 
 The fairly favourable reception by French readers and 
 critics of M. Le Play's second work now before us — ' La 
 Eeforme Sociale en Prance ' (in -which he deduces from the 
 materials amassed in his first, many important conclusions as 
 to the prevalent evils of the present industrial and social 
 state of France, and their remedies) marks an epoch of pro- 
 gressive opinion and progressive tolerance on subjects on 
 which inveterate popular prejudice had hitherto seemed to 
 render all discussion useless. Political experiences, humiliat- 
 ing to political philosophy, within the last score of years, 
 have made French thinkers of all parties sadder and wiser 
 men, and have rendered them greatly more disposed than 
 formerly to listen to serious and sincere social doctrines from 
 any quarter, however contradictory to previous popular 
 shibboleths. 
 
 The first and the most important official admission in the 
 Eeport before us is that of an evil which may be regarded as 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 369 
 
 a principal source of almost all the other evils which especi- 
 ally afflict French agriculture and industry — the division of 
 landed property, at each succession, into portions often too 
 small for good cultivation, and often at some distance from 
 each other. ' In many departments,' says M. Monny de 
 Mornaj^, ' the average extent of separate portions of land 
 goes down to 20, 15, or 10 ares (ahout the 50th part of an 
 acre), and even less.' This is an old evil, the most incon- 
 testible (and the most contested) evil of French peasant pro- 
 prietorship. 
 
 From the excess of morcellement result loss of time and labour, 
 restraint of free rotation of crops and variety of culture, frequent 
 lawsuits between contiguous proprietors. These evils are sensibly 
 felt ; yet morcellement, far from being stayed in its course, is in con- 
 stant progress. There are many causes which conduce to this result : 
 first of all, the separate acqiiisition of small portions of land ; but 
 above -all, the compulsory division of landed property, which takes 
 place between the co heirs at each succession. 
 
 The evidence given before the Commission seems to be 
 quite unanimous as to the reality and seriousness of this evil, 
 whatever may be the differences of the witnesses as to the 
 remedy. M. Monny de Mornay proceeds to state in the 
 Eeport that — 
 
 Many of the depositions taken in the Nievre, the Allier, and the 
 Puy-de-D6me, claim entire liberty of testamentary disposition, leaving 
 fathers of families the discretionary power of dividing their property 
 in equal or unequal parts among their children. Others, without 
 going so far, have expressed the wish that a larger share of property 
 should be left at free disposal by will. Thus, in the departments of 
 Savoy, the recent recollections of the Sardinian code inspire regret 
 that those provisions of that code have been abolished which ex- 
 cluded absent sons and daughters from a share in succession to landed 
 property, while providing indemnification for them in money or 
 moveables. 
 
 It is often in vain to reason with national passions, and 
 the inveterate prejudices they implant. Otherwise it might 
 not be difficult to show that the revolutionary legislators of 
 1793, and the subsequent framers of the 826th article of the 
 
 B B 
 
370 ' THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870), 
 
 Code Napoleon, sliot quite beside and quite beyond their 
 mark ia their law of equal succession. 
 
 The law passed by the National Convention on March 7, 
 1 793, which entirely abolished the right of free testamentary 
 disposition of property iu France — a right which had been 
 unreservedly recognised only a year or two before by the 
 Constituent Assembly — is one of the few legacies of the 
 ' dreary dawn ' of the Eeign of Terror, which have been since 
 implicitly, and with a sort of unquestioning unanimity, 
 accepted by all Frenchmen, or, at least, by all Frenchmen 
 apprehensive of being suspected of retrograde or reactionary 
 politics. It is difficult to believe that this one legislative 
 specimen of democratic arbitrariness could have escaped the 
 reprobation passed on every other of the same epoch, had 
 not the subsequent policy of the First Empire and the Bourbon 
 Restoration given alarm to opinion by partial measures of 
 attempted aristocratioal reaction. The revival of rights of 
 primogeniture under the first Napoleon and the elder Bour- 
 bons, in the shape of majorats, created exclusively in favour 
 of the families of the new or old nobility and the possessors 
 of large estates, rallied opinion at once in support of the re- 
 volutionary law, which had at least the merit of applying 
 equally to la grande and to la petite propriete. It is one of 
 those subjects on which party spirit animates a whole nation, 
 and on which, till quite lately, few Frenchmen who desired 
 to retain a shred of Liberal reputation dared to speak reason, 
 or would endure to hear reason spoken. 
 
 Mr. (now Sir Henry) Maine remarks, in his able and 
 valuable treatise on ' Ancient Law,' on the whimsical manner 
 in which 1793 restored, in a supposed democratical interest, 
 those feudal entails which 1789 had just abolished. The 
 Constituent Assembly established entire testamentary free- 
 dom. The Convention substituted compulsory equal division 
 of all property amongst children. 
 
 There is no broader distinction than that whicli exists between 
 a'system of free testamentary disposition and a system like that of 
 the feudal land-law, under which property descends compulsorily in 
 prescribed lines of devolution. This truth appears to have been lost 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 371 
 
 sigM of by the authors of the French codes. In the social fabric 
 which they determiaed to destroy they saw primogeniture resbing 
 chieiiy on family settlements ; but they also perceived that tastaments 
 were frequently employed to give the eldest son precisely the same 
 preference which was reserved to him under the strictest of entails. 
 In order therefore to make sure of their work, they not only rendered 
 it impossible to prefer the eldest son to the rest in marriage arrange- 
 ments, but they almost expelled testamentary succession from the law, 
 lest it should be used to defeat their fundamental principle of an equal 
 distribution of property among children at the parent's death. The 
 result is, that they have established a system of small perpetual entails, 
 which is infinitely nearer akin to the system of feudal Europe than 
 would be a perfect liberty of bequest.^ 
 
 The reader is reminded of the failure of Jack in the ' Tale 
 of a Tub,' to make himself as unlike as possible to Lord 
 Peter, by tearing his coat to rags instead of simply stripping 
 it of superfluous trimmings : — 
 
 As it is in the nature of I'ags to bear a kind of mock resemblance 
 to finely, there being a sort of fluttering appearance in both, which is 
 not to be distinguished at a distance, in the dark, or by shortsighted 
 eyes; so, in those junctures it fared with Jack and his tatters, that 
 they offered to the first view a ridiculous flaunting, which, assisting 
 the resemblance in person and air, thwarted all his projects of separa- 
 tion, and left so near a similitude between them as frequently deceived 
 the very disciples and followers of both. 
 
 It is justly and acutely observed by M. Le Play, that the 
 French legislators of 1793 made a great mistake in their 
 method of carrying out the Jacobin programme, ' War to the 
 chateau — peace to the cottage ! ' Their law of succession, in 
 effect, made war on both ; and the cottage, in the long run, 
 proves the less able of the two to sustain such warfare. 
 
 The legislators — observes M. Le Play — who, in 1793 as 
 in 1803, instituted or confirmed a regime designed to under- 
 mine gradually la grande propri&te, did not establish a con- 
 servative system for la petite propriete: they did not even 
 leave it the benefit of those customs by which it had been 
 protected from time immemorial. More disposed in all direc- 
 
 ' Ancient Law, by H. S. Maine, p. 225. 
 E B 2 
 
372 THE LAND QUESTION IN EBANCE (I87O). 
 
 lions to destroy than preserve — not less powerful but more 
 equitable tlian the revolwtionary legislators of other countries 
 — they passed the whole of rural property under the levelling 
 rule oi forced division. The consequence, unforeseen yet in- 
 evitable, of this system could not be any other than the 
 simultaneous disorganisation not only of the proprietary, but 
 of the peasant classes. 
 
 In the old Constitution of the lie de France and the Orleanais 
 forced conservation was employed for the exclusive succession of pro- 
 perty in the possession of noble families, while forced division was 
 imposed on that of the families of the citizens and the peasantry. 
 That system, therefore, was instituted for the benefit of the higher 
 classes, and violated the principle of distributive justice in its very 
 foundation. It was otherwise in Normandy and in the provinces of 
 the centre and south of France, where the voluntary transmission 
 of landed property to the eldest son was a custom common to the 
 nobles, the bourgeois, and the peasantry ; where accordingly it did 
 not imply in the minds of any part of the population any idea of con- 
 straint, of caste, or privilege. In those provinces the recognition of 
 the droit d'ainesse, as regarded landed property, assumed for all fami- 
 lies alike a character eminently social and conservative. If in 1793 
 the legislators elected in those provinces had received from their con- 
 stituents the mission of creating a new regime, systematically planned 
 to pull down the great proprietors from their position of superiority, 
 they should have been led by that levelling principle to a totally 
 different mode of proceeding from that which was adopted under the 
 uispiration of Parisian opinion. They should have simply reversed 
 the previous application of the coutuine de Paris. In other words, 
 they should have applied the principle of forced division to the pro- 
 perty of the nobles, that of forced conservation to the property of the 
 bourgeois and the peasantry. Under those conditions, the . droit 
 d'ainesse yfov\A have indeed preserved the character of injustice which 
 it often had in the past ; but it would have attained the end aimed at 
 in its adoption. And this is precisely the order of things which has 
 prevailed in Russia, where the Government had long directed its 
 efforts to diminish the influence of the great proprietors. Forced 
 division has been imposed on these latter for estates as for titles, while 
 in the organisation of the village communes, which existed till 1863, 
 the peasants transmitted their property for the most part under a 
 i-egimen of forced conservation. Even in France it is thus that were 
 permanently preserved those little peasant properties which since the 
 Revolution have been partially absorbed into the great estates. 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 873 
 
 We must here, however, remark that the effect of the 
 French revolutionary law of succession is exaggerated by 
 supposing it, as M. Le Play does, to produce in the richer 
 parts of France that absorption of small into large properties, 
 which it proves itself, even by the admission of its apologists, 
 powerless to prevent. In a district of Normandy, with which 
 M. Le Play's descent and connexions make him well ac- 
 quainted, that absorption may be considered as a fact ac- 
 complished : — 
 
 In those parts of France in wMch the actual division of small 
 estates, on wMcli there are central residences and farm-buildings, 
 continues impracticable, the parties interested easily realise their 
 inheritance by dividing amongst them the price offered by capitalists 
 for the paternal domain. Under this form the whole population has 
 at length submitted itself to the constraint exercised by the law. 
 However, as the new purchasers can only turn their property to 
 account by farming it, the old race of little proprietors is gradually 
 supplanted by a race of small farmers. Sometimes small contiguous 
 holdings, bought by one CRpitalist, can be thrown to advantage into 
 one large farm ; and la petite culttire is destroyed at one blow with 
 la petite propriete. 
 
 The fertile plateau known by the name of pays de Caux, bounded 
 by the right bank of the river Seine and the shore of the Channel, 
 affords an example of a transformation of this kind accomplished 
 since the Revolution. The descendants of the old proprietors occupy 
 now only as farmers the soil of which the property has been acquired 
 by the rich moneyed men engaged in manufactures and maritime com.- 
 merce on the borders of this fertile region, in the towns of Rouen, 
 Louviers, Elbeuf, Bolbec, Havre, Fecamp, and Dieppe. The sales 
 effected on the occurrence of each succession prevent ruinous parti- 
 tions, cultivation continues to improve, notwithstanding these periodi- 
 cal mutations ; and the public treasury is replenished more than ever. 
 But this transformation of property has inevitably drawn after it the 
 disappearance of an ensemble of sentiments and social relations which, 
 growing mainly out of the social order of things, formed at bottom 
 the principal force of the country. Pauperism has introduced itself 
 in its most formidable character, while social harmony and family 
 fecundity have come to an end along with the old races of proprietor 
 cultivators. 
 
 This change in French agricultural economy, in some of 
 its most flourishing districts, seems no way distinguishable 
 
374 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (187»}. 
 
 from that which has taken place so extensiVely in England, 
 and to be referable precisely to the same cause. That cause 
 has been stated with perfect clearness by M. Leonce de 
 Lavergne in his instructive Essay on the Rural Economy of 
 England, already referred to. 
 
 ' With us a cultivator who possesses anything of his own,' says 
 M. Leonce de Lavergne, ' prefers in general to remain a proprietor 
 rather than become a farmer. It is the reverse in England. There were 
 formerly numerous small proprietors in that country, who formed an 
 important class in the State. They were called yeomen, to distin- 
 guish them from the country gentlemen, who were designated as 
 sqxiires. This class of yeomen has almost entirely disappeared ; but 
 it must by no means be supposed that a violent revolution has de- 
 stroyed them. They have sold their property and become farmers, 
 because they have discovered that they could turn their capital to 
 more profit by doing so. A time will come when a good many small 
 French proprietors will make the same discovery. [By M. Le Play's 
 account, they have made it already in a portion of Normandy.] As 
 landed capital returns at most 2 or 3 per cent., and farming capital, 
 if judiciously employed, should bring 8 or 10, the calculation is easily 
 made of the comparative advantages of the two investments.' 
 
 We have here, in few words, the whole rationale of the 
 absorption of smaller into larger landed properties, so far as 
 that absorption is a gradual, natural, and unforced process. 
 Under any law of succession the increase of commercial 
 wealth, the possessors of which are willing to pay something 
 of a fancy price for land, would have produced the same 
 result in the commercially prosperous parts of France as in 
 England. The ill effect of the French law of succession is 
 seen and felt less in the mere fact of absorption, as in 
 Normandy, of the smallest landed properties — which by our 
 author's own account is accompanied by improved cultiva- 
 tion, and therefore by prosperous farming — than in the 
 artificial and adverse circumstances under which that 
 absorption is often made to take place. Where it does not 
 take place, other sources of impoverishment are opened for 
 the poorest and most helpless classes of peasant-proprietors 
 by the uncalled-for action of law, and the intervention of 
 
THE LANB QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 375 
 
 legal fanctioiiaries in family arrangements which should be 
 left to family affections and interests. 
 
 ' The class of peasants d, famille instable,' says M. le Play [he uses 
 that designation in contrast with families permanently settled and 
 located], ' does not exist in countries where heads of families can trans- 
 mit their property freely. It appears in company with gens A' affaire, 
 wherever prevails the regime oi forced division, and wherever custom 
 and tradition have no longer sufficient force to maintain the hahit of 
 integral transmission of landed property. In France, before the Revo- 
 lution, ^instable petty proprietors had already become numerous under 
 the influence above indicated. Since the law of the 7th of March 
 1793 they have become more numerous than amongst any other 
 European people. They exist, however, in considerable numbers in 
 those districts of Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany con- 
 tiguous to our territory. They are to the present day almost iinknown 
 in the east, north, and centre of our continent. 
 
 ' Destitution of orphans,' says our author, ' does not take place in 
 France only in families living on the wages of their daily labour, but 
 in those which had succeeded in mounting the first steps of the ladder 
 of property ; and their ruin is caused precisely by the law and legal 
 formalities established, in distrust of parental dispositions, for the pro- 
 tection of minors. This deplorable consequence results every day 
 from our regime of succession under circumstances which are a deep 
 
 disgrace to our civilisation In the north and east of Europe 
 
 the succession to the property of a little proprietor leaving as his heirs 
 children in their minority is burthened by no public charge. When 
 the deceased parents themselves have not provided for its administra- 
 tion, an assembly of relations almost always takes place, which entrusts 
 to one of its members, or to some other friend of the family, the care 
 of administering without costs the paternal property till such time as 
 the children shall be of age to manage it themselves. In France the 
 legislator has not thought that the matter could be arranged so simply. 
 He has laid down as a principle that public functionaries afford better 
 guarantees than family friends for the preservation of the property of 
 minors. The result of this pseudo-parental solicitude, in the case 
 of small successions, has been the ruin of those on whose behalf it is 
 exercised.' 
 
 It is cnrions how a bad law may keep enlisted in its 
 favour a force of prejudice long invincible by reason, when 
 it has owed its origin to national passion, and finds its sup- 
 port in political tradition and prejudice and professional 
 
376 THR LAND QUESTION IN FEANGE (1870). 
 
 interest. ' The privileged classes of the old regime,' says 
 M. d'Esterno, 'had the mania of conforming landed property 
 to a single type — that of la grande propriete. It^ was not 
 thought fit by the bigots to that type that the peasant should 
 be a proprietor. At this day the opposite doctrine prevails ; 
 it is not thought fit by the new generation of exclusive 
 partisans of peasant proprietorship, th at there should be any 
 proprietors, or any cultivators, but peasants.' 
 
 We have now in France 600,000 landed proprietors, the average 
 taxation on whose properties does not exceed a halfpenny a yeai- ! 
 What can be expected of svich properties and such proprietors 1 There 
 are not in France more than 60,000 proprietors possessing 180?. of 
 income. Of the remaining 7,400,000 prop,rietors, 3,000,000, or two- 
 fifths, are exempted from personal taxation on the plea of indigence ; 
 the remaining 4,500,000 possess on an average 7 hectares (about 12 
 acres), and enjoy about 161. of income. So straitened a situation 
 precludes all possibility of intellectual culture ; the petty proprietor 
 is a manual agricultui-al labourer, constantly bent over his furi-ow, 
 living a life of privation, ignorant of the science or art of agriculture 
 beyond the simplest routine, and having no time to acquire the very 
 elements of stilled pursuit of his occupation. Such is the becni, ideal 
 of agricultural economy aimed at by legislators and legists — at this 
 day in great part attained — and which its admirers do not despair of 
 seeing attained completely. The net result may be given as follows 
 in few figures : — The simplest legal process costs in general from 161. 
 to 201. If the object litigated is worth, say 2,O0OZ., the law expenses 
 absorb the hundredth part of the value; if 2001. a tenth, if 201. the 
 whole. This is the perfection of the genre in the eyes of the men of 
 law. What, in fact, is the drift of the furious clamours of that class 
 against large or moderate properties 1 To bring them down to that 
 happy equality of morcellement which shall enable the lawyer to swal- 
 low them without chewing in one suit and at one mouthful. 
 
 M. Le Play gives an ofiBcial bill of costs, covering six or 
 seven pages of his Appendix, levied on a property of the 
 value of 900 francs left by a deceased peasant. After 
 defraying those costs, exactly 30 francs 37 centimes were 
 left for equal division among his children. 
 
 ' It is an unquestionable truth,' he concludes, ' that in small suc- 
 cessions of orphan minors forced division is a source of inevitable 
 ruin. The facts recounted are no accident — they form the rule. The 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 377 
 
 like abuse of legal Ibrmalities has been brought to my notice in all our 
 provinces, and the judicial statistics present it even under graver 
 aspects. It was stated, in the Report of the Garde des Sceaux to the 
 Emperor, in 18r)2, that^on 1980 sales of property under 500 francs of 
 deceased persons, made by official intervention, producing altogether 
 558,092 francs, the legal expenses had been 628,906 francs — that is to 
 say, 12 per cent, above the proceeds of the property thus forced to sale.' 
 
 Other evils take place where landed properties, already 
 Lilliputian, are still further divided ; any of the heirs being 
 entitled by the existing law to enforce such division. And 
 here we are enabled to put in the witness-box M. Leonce 
 de Lavergne, who is otherwise disposed, on grounds which 
 we cannot consider as quite consistent with his own admis- 
 sions, rather to pooh-pooh all agitation for testamentary 
 freedom in Prance. ' The real inconvenience of the law of 
 succession,' says M. Leonce de Lavergne, ' consists in the 
 indefinite division of small properties. Even here, however, 
 a modification of the law is scarcely necessary. Custom, 
 sound jurisprudence, and good sense suffice greatly to 
 attenuate the evil.' 
 
 Let it be granted, for the sake of argument, that the evil 
 of the law of succession may be greatly attenuated (as M. Le 
 Play shows that in some parts ot France it has been) by the 
 resistance perseveringly opposed to it by ' custom,' ' sound 
 jurisprudence,' and ' good sense.' Still, as that author also 
 shows, the resistance thus opposed has its fatal limits, and 
 the subaltern gens d'affaire, interested in working the law at 
 the cost of those concerned, are in the end too strong for 
 all three. Besides, when grave inconvenience is admitted 
 to result from an arbitrary enactment, the work of no less 
 arbitrary and violent authors, ifc would seem that ' good 
 sense' and 'jurisprudence' were best employed in joining 
 their forces for its repeal,' in order that ' custom ' might 
 
 ' A petition for the repeal of the present law of succession, and the estab- 
 lishment of entire freedom of testamentary disposition of property, was 
 presented to the French Senate in March 1866, to which are attached the 
 signatures of a hundred and thirty leading members of all the higher branches 
 of trade and manufactures at Paris. 
 
378 THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 
 
 resume its natural sway, and dictate testamentary disposi- 
 tions in harmony with family interests, as modified by local 
 circumstances, freed from the present pettifogging legal and 
 official intervention. But though M. Leonce de Lavergne, 
 in many passages of his instructive volumes on the rural 
 economy of France and England, concedes all the facts 
 adduced as constituting the case for repeal, he retains the 
 superstitious dread which has so long withheld French 
 Liberals of the old school from laying a sacrilegious hand on 
 this ark of the revolutionary covenant. ' The law of equal 
 division,' he exclaims, with a sentimental vehemence very 
 unusual to him, ' is the flesh and blood of France ; nobody 
 can lay a hand upon it without danger.' Yet presently he 
 says, *I am much struct with the inconveniences of forced 
 division as applied to properties of small or middling size. 
 1 believe that these periodical disturbances greatly contribute 
 to the periodical malaise of their possessors — to the debts 
 which weigh on them — to the forced sales to which they are 
 subjected. . . . Amongst the effects of the law of succession 
 there is one effect which cannot be condemned too strongly 
 — that is, la division parcellaire' — [the division of landed 
 property into small separate lots, often at a considerable dis- 
 tance from each other, and only accessible, as it were, by 
 trespass on the similar strips or parcels between them]. 
 ' For my own part,' he says elsewhere, ' I should see no 
 fundamental objection to a regime of unlimited freedom of 
 testamentary disposition. That regime has good effects in 
 England and the United States. If the French law on the 
 subject had to be re-made, it would be a doctrine deserving 
 consideration.' And why should not the French law be re- 
 m ade, or rather un-made, so far as it has overshot the 
 legitimate scope of legislation altogether ? What is there 
 in the date of March 7, 1793, which should taboo the sub- 
 ject of such legislation to all posterity ? 
 
 ' The state of inferiority,' says M. Le Play, ' in which agriculture 
 is kept by the whole effect of our political and social institutions (and 
 here we may remark that this inferiority has by no one been illus- 
 trated in more copious detail than by M. L6once de Lavergne himself. 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 379 
 
 in his comparison of the agriculture of Prance and England) is brought 
 out prominently in a characteristic trait of our present manners — in 
 the propensity of agriculturists amongst us to quit their profession. 
 There is a striking contrast on this point between modern France and 
 other great European States, the citizens of which latter, without 
 ceasing to be agriculturists, and without depriving themselves of the 
 repose necessary for advancing age, may raise themselves to the highest 
 degree of iafluence in the province or the State. 
 
 ' Those thinly scattered families of large landed proprietors, which 
 have preserved down to our days their existence on their domains, and 
 the relations established with the populations round them in the six- 
 teenth century, are, at the death of each head of a family, subjected 
 to periodical crises, and exposed by those crises to inevitable disinte- 
 gration and destruction. This dissolving influence acts moi'e ener- 
 getically still on families which have been .recently led to engage in 
 agriculture by the attraction offered by the possession of land to men 
 enriched in other professions. The proprietor of a rural domain has 
 not with us the power of attaching to himself an associate-heir ; he 
 would besides, in doing so, be making an unjust sacrifice of the inter- 
 est of this latter to that of his other children. These, in fact, after 
 having enjoj'ed since they quitted the paternal roof all the fruits of 
 their own independent labour, woiild be entitled to come in at the 
 death of their father, and claim a part in the improvements made on 
 the estate since the epoch of their departure ; the labour devoted to 
 those improvements and to the support of his old parents would there- 
 fore have been so devoted en pure perte by the heir. This flagrant 
 injustice of our law of succession creates an obstacle, at every step 
 of our agricultural industry, to the continuity of labour and domestic 
 traditions.' 
 
 According to our author, the effect o£ the forced division 
 of property is not less adverse to the permanence of commer- 
 cial than of agricultural traditions and establishments. The 
 natural authority of heads of houses is annulled by a lav? 
 which predestines, in spite of them, the house itself to be 
 broken up at the decease of its head. The natural growth 
 and gradual aggrandisement of families, carrying on concerns 
 founded by ancestral enterprise from generation to genera- 
 tion, is arrested by the iron grasp of the law, dividing their 
 capital and paralysing their indusirial or commercial power 
 at each succession.' In anticipation of these arbitrary inter- 
 ' The following statement, which we find in the Eeport of a Birmingham 
 
380 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 ventions of law and its myrmidons at the period of their 
 decease, fathers of families often prematurely wind up con- 
 cerns which they might otherwise have continued to con- 
 duct beneficially for themselves and their children, with the 
 aid of such of the latter as they might think fit to associate 
 with them as partners. Age loses the honour of prolonged 
 activity and utility ; youth loses the advantage of initiatory 
 association with the experience of age. 
 
 ' Our law of forced division,' says M. Le Play, ' opposes an insur- 
 mountable obstacle to the foundation of those powerful' commercial 
 houses which are more than ever one of the essential elements of the 
 prosperity of a nation. So long as this law subsists, we shall never 
 again see raise themselves amongst us those great individual existences 
 which developed themselves from time to time under our old regime, 
 notwithstanding influences of another order hostile to them under 
 that regime. 
 
 ' In commerce, more than in other branches of production, the 
 pres ent regime destroys in the germ all greatness which might found 
 itself on the accumulated efforts of several generations of commercial 
 men. A capitalist who buys a landed estate or manufacturing estab- 
 lishment at one of those sales which continually take place on the 
 death of the head of a family, finds on the soil, or amongst the sur- 
 rounding population, suflicient indications of the traditions he has to 
 follow ; but in commercial concerns those traditions are entirely lost 
 on the retirement or death of a merchant whom the law of his country 
 has deprived of the power to select and set up an heir to continue his 
 work. The new spirit so industriously inculcated on us by lawyers 
 opposes, therefore, a permanent obstacle to the extension of our com- 
 merce. A methodical inquiry would easily elicit abundant evidence 
 on this point. The two foremost commercial nations of our time 
 enjoy testamentary liberty; but amongst us, if there are still to be 
 found some houses raised to a high position by the labours of several 
 s ucc£ssive generations, we may be assured beforehand that that eleva- 
 
 Artisan to the Society of Arts on the Paris Universal Exhibition, may be 
 considered with some probability as connected with this subject : — 
 
 ' I was provided with an order to view the works of MM. Lefauoheux and 
 Co., extensive manufacturers of guns and pistols ; but here, where I antici- 
 pated the most instructive and interesting lessons of all, I experienced the 
 huge disappointment of finding the place closed, and not a man at work. A 
 death in the firm had thrown the concern into liquidation, and it was being 
 prepared for sale ; and as no other manufactory of the same extent existed 
 in faris, the only opportunity I had of the kind was lost.' 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FKANCE (1870). 381 
 
 tLon has been due to sentiments the source of which is no longer to 
 be found in our race. At Paris the richest banking-houses which 
 inherit the labours of successive generations are all of Jewish and 
 German origin, or else their members are descended from families ex- 
 pelled by the repeal of the Edict of Nantes, which had preserved in 
 foreign countries the old French traditions.' 
 
 The evil educational effects of the law of forced division 
 on the views and habits of youth are, according to M. Le 
 Play, not the least of their moral and social mischiefs. 
 
 It is the most important function of manhood and old age, broken 
 in as they have been to labour by the feeling of their social obligations, 
 to inculcate the same habits on young persons, by repressing in them 
 the instinct of idleness and sensual enjoyments. This result remains 
 always uncertain under the regime of forced division. Under that 
 regime the youth of the wealthier classes finds itself invested with 
 the right of dissipating in guilty sloth the resources accumulated by 
 their ancestors, so that the salutary influences of labour are preserved 
 only amongst the poor, who are not in a position to derive much use 
 from it for themselves and society. This has the additional incon- 
 venience of attaching the idea of constraint to labour, and of present- 
 ing exemption from labour in the light of an enviable condition. On 
 these several grounds it becomes a source of as fatal weakness for 
 our country as would be a conquest giving a hostile people the power 
 periodically to disorganise the whole economy of our workshops and 
 factories. 
 
 When we come to the chapters in the Official Report 
 before ns on Agricultural Capital and Credit, Labour and 
 Wages, Improvement of the Soil, and the general situation 
 of the several branches of agricultural production and the 
 several classes of the agricultural population, we find our- 
 selves still encountered everywhere by the effects of the same 
 826th Article of the ' Code Napoleon ' — the imperial second 
 edition of that revolutionary Law of Entail, as Sir H. Maine 
 characterises it — which, by enabling all the co-heirs of the 
 smallest peasant-property to demand the actual division of 
 the land amongst them, amounts, says M. Monny de Mornay, 
 to ' an abuse reproducing itself daily, and threatening to 
 render the cultivation of the land impossible ' (p. 16). Let 
 us just say in passing, however, that we do not quite see how 
 
382 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 a demand can be exactly termed abusive which is made 
 precisely in terms of an unrepealed law, and in fact only 
 carries out, a outrance, the precise object of that law. What 
 is indisputable is, that a cause which, so far as its operation 
 extends, threatens to render the cultivation of the land im- 
 possible, must to that extent deter capital from landed 
 investment, and must have favoured its diversion of late 
 years to all those many and various valeurs mohilieres, brought 
 out under such alluring forms and such influential patronage, 
 and which have since turned out, as we need not remind our 
 readers, in so large a proportion non-valeurs. 
 
 ' Whenever,' says M. L^once de Lavergne, ' it is proposed to import 
 the improved processes of EngUsh agriculture, we are stopped short 
 by the want of accumulated capital, which nothing but association 
 can furnish. Such great proprietors as we have left have for the most 
 part little taste for agricultural undertakings ; most of them have 
 more land than money ; and great fortunes, like all fortunes in France, 
 are subjected to those permanent causes of dislocation which reoider 
 persevering efforts difficult.' 
 
 M. Leonce de Lavergne proposes, in the last resort, joint- 
 stock associations, to imitate' the processes of agricultural 
 improvement employed in England, and for which in France 
 individual agriculturists fail to find capital. Strange that 
 agricultural authorities such as he is should evade looking the 
 question in the i-mce—Why do individual agriculturists in 
 France fail to find capital? ' The extreme division of t)ro- 
 perties,' says the Beport, 'and the morcellement, often exces- 
 sive, of the portions of land of which they consist, form great 
 obstacles to the execution of combined works of irrigation to 
 the extent that would be desirable, and the existing legislative 
 and administrative regulations impose forms too complicated, 
 and entail expenses too considerable.' The same thing may 
 be said of drainage, for the promotion of which the Imperial 
 Government offered the landowners a loan of 100,000,000 
 francs, only 500,000 of which have found employment. 
 
 The diminished amount of sheep-farming in France is 
 ascribed in the Eeport before us to the same cause which is 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 383 
 
 recognised in that document as obstructing all other agri- 
 cultural improvement on a large scale — the progressive mor- 
 cellement of property and the extension of la petite aidture, 
 which has rendered impossible, on many points of the terri- 
 tory, the formation and feeding of large flocks. ' It must 
 not be forgotten,' says M. Leonce de Lavergne, in his work 
 on the ' Rural Economy of the British Islands,' ' that this 
 valuable animal not only gives its meat and wool to the 
 farmer, but farther enriches him by its manure ; and all this 
 return is obtained while ameliorating the soil which pro- 
 duces it. This is, in some measure, the perfection of rural 
 economy.' 
 
 The publication of the Agricultural Statistics of the 
 United Kingdom for 1868 shows a marked increase in the 
 number of cattle and sheep over that of 1867, and, as regards 
 the latter, exhibits even a greater superiority of England to 
 France than when M. Leonce de Lavergne gave his agricul- 
 tural verdict on the same side. In the United Kingdom the 
 comparative numbers in 1868 were — 
 
 lu England— cattle, 9,083,416 ; steep, 35,607,812. 
 In France— cattle, 14,197,360 ; sheep, 33,281,592. 
 
 It must be remembered, as M. Leonce de Lavergne observed 
 in his work above cited, that 'the apparent equality, or 
 approach to equality [in the number of sheep], conceals a 
 serious inequality. The thirty- five millions of English sheep 
 live upon thirty-one millions of hectares, those of France 
 upon fifty-three. To have proportionately as great a number 
 as our neighbours, we should have sixty millions.' 
 
 It is but fair to add that the Eeport affirms an increase in 
 the number of milch cows, without, however, giving any statis- 
 tics of that increase. M. Leonce de Lavergne doubts the fact 
 of the increase of horned cattle generally, while he considers 
 that of corn cultivation within the last forty years as fully 
 established. In the south of France we find it stated by 
 the same authority that not half the number of cows or oxen 
 are kept which would be necessary for properly manuring 
 and ploughing the soil. In the south milh is a product 
 
884 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 even less in demand than m-eat. Milk and butter, however, 
 are beginning to enter into consumption instead of oil and 
 lard ; but it will be long before their use becomes general, 
 and in the meanwhile cattle-breeding in that division of the 
 country will lack those encouragements which have so 
 powerfully contributed to extend it in England and in tho 
 north of France. 
 
 But if the ovine race is necessary to the progress of agri- 
 cultural production, still more is the human race, ilen are 
 failing French agriculture even more than sheep, by the 
 confession of the Official Report before us : — 
 
 The diminution of the numbers of children in families is estab- 
 lished on very positive evidence a.s a general fact by the detailed in- 
 quiries made in all our departments, and more particularly in the 
 richer departments. Speaking generally, a progressive decrease in 
 the fruitfulness of marriages has been manifested for some time past 
 in the rural districts. The peasant-proprietor dreads to see his pro- 
 perty divided at his death amongst several children. He calculates 
 more than he former I3' did the burthens which would be entailed upon 
 him by having a numerous family to bring up, and he prefers to de- 
 prive himself of the aid be would receive from the labour of bis chil- 
 dren when grown up, uncertain as he is of keeping bis children 
 round him and of seeing them devote themselves to agricultural 
 labour. 
 
 This uncertainty is one of the ' effects defective ' of the 
 present law of succession, which forbids the father of a 
 family to transmit his landed property undivided to that one 
 of his children who might show himself best fitted to aid 
 and continue his agricultural labours. 
 
 To the direct effect of the French law of succession in 
 checking population (be that effect deemed good or evil) 
 Toequeville testified as follows in his Correspondence of 
 1857, with reference to the fact cited from the census of the 
 previous year, of an actual excess of deaths over births in 
 1854 and 1855, which, however, had been years of war and 
 scarcity : — ' I am convinced that amongst us the division of 
 the soil, and the law which enforces equal partition amongst 
 children, have had much to do with the slowness of develop- 
 ment of the population.' 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 385 
 
 Wlien the late Victor Cousin many years ago first visited 
 England, and saw the fields divided, as they had been from 
 time immemorial, by hedgerows, it is related of him that he 
 jumped at once with French agility to the conclusion — 
 ' Voila un peuple arrete ! Anyone who observes the present 
 operation of the ' repressive check ' in narrowly limiting the 
 numbers of French families may be tempted to repeat the 
 French philosopher's exclamation — ' VoUa un peuple arrete ! ' 
 If ultra- Malthusians, they will rejoice of course in the prac- 
 tical conquest over the pestilent principle of the ' geometrical 
 progression ' of human beyond vegetable production. But 
 intelligent Frenchmen of the present day have many mis- 
 givings whether Malthus may not be helping them (as St. 
 Antonio helped the traveller on his horse) toa much. 
 
 ' France,' says one of the artisans' whose Reports on the 
 late Paris Exhibition are published by the Society of Arts, 
 ' is degenerating in her procreative faculty. It is quite a 
 common occurrence (in the working class) to have no 
 children, generally only one, and quite a rarity to have two. 
 The flower of the land are sacrificed to military glory. All 
 suffer the conscription, and the authorities reject the feeble 
 and ailing, and retain the strong and florid to perish by the 
 multiplicity of accidents that beset a soldier's career.' 
 Military life, and to some extent artisan town life, is in 
 general vicious celibacy. Add to this, in its adverse effect 
 on population, that which, in the higher as well as lower 
 social strata, may be termed vicious marriage. M. Le Play 
 gives the following testimony respecting the habits of the 
 Paris work-people : — 
 
 At Paris, side by side with excellent types of operative character 
 one finds work-people abandoned to vices of which the idle rich had, 
 in former times the miserable monopoly. In particular, one finds 
 classes of work-people, who, preserving a sort of order in their disorders, 
 organise their existence independently of marriage, and impose on 
 their concubines a life of assiduous labour, while they spend daily at 
 the cabaret and in other places of still worse resort sums which would 
 sufiice to secure the wellbeing of a numerous family. Deeply imbued 
 with the revolutionary spirit, bitterly envying all social superiorities, 
 
 ' W. Bramhall, saw-maker, Sheflfield ; p. 47. 
 C 
 
386 THE LAND QUE3TI0JT liST FBiNCE (1870). 
 
 the J would admit no intervention of benevolent counsels by their em- 
 ployers to suggest a more judicious use of their wages. They rarely 
 even subscribe to a society of mutual assistance ; and rather than give 
 up any portion of their accustomed debauches, they expose themselves 
 unaided to every privation in times of sickness. But on the occur- 
 rence of periods of slack work, or in the advance of age, they criti- 
 cise bitterly the social organisation which leaves them in want. 
 Their favourite theme is censure of the egoism of the superior classes, 
 on whom with singular inconsistency they would impose the duty of 
 assistance, while refusing them the corresponding rights of direction 
 and control. The examples set by certain employers are no better ; so 
 that, even in the regime of labour, the elements of moral life begin to 
 fail in Paris, as in those capitals of antiquity which sank gradually 
 to extinction in their own disorders. 
 
 We liave dwelt chiefly, more than we meant at starting, 
 upon a single article of French civil legislation. Our 
 apology must be that we attach the first importance to that 
 article in its direct and indirect influences on French agri- 
 cultural and social economy, and that a like importance is 
 implied in the place of honour given to it amongst the topics 
 of the Report before us. 
 
 We must not, however, be supposed to represent equal 
 division of property amongst children as of mere revolu- 
 tionary origin in France, any more than peasant proprietor- 
 ship ; or either the one or the other, in themselves, as proper 
 objects of economical or political reprobation. All depends 
 on the economical and political circumstances of different 
 countries, or of different districts of the same country. 
 What we have denounced as mischievous, and what is 
 admitted as mischievous, with whatever reserves or quali- 
 fications, by all who have approached the subject with un- 
 prejudiced minds, whether in France or England, is the 
 gratuitous (no, not gratuitous) meddling of lawyers and 
 functionaries with arrangements best and most safely left 
 to heads of families themselves, and the arbitrary fitting of 
 all varieties of custom and circumstance to the same legisla- 
 tive bed of Procrustes — the same ' hard and fast ' rule of 
 nominal equality and real inequality. It is admitted by M. 
 Leonce de Lavergne himself, citing M. Le Play, that ' the 
 
THE LA.ISID aUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 387 
 
 dissolving action of the civil code exerts itself mucli less on 
 large properties than on small ones.' What worse can be 
 said for the action of a code, the authors of which contem- 
 plated the preservation of small properties and the sub^- 
 division of large ones ? 
 
 We may here remark that in France precisely that part 
 of the population which it might be most desirable should 
 augment its numbers, is that which refuses most resolutely 
 and systematically to do so ; while the part of the popula- 
 tion lowest in the scale, and least capable of enterprise, is 
 the part which continues Hibernically ' obedient to the first 
 command.' The stationary or retrograde peasant-proprietor 
 of the Creuse propagates his vegetable existence, multiplied 
 and deteriorated at each succession. The prudent and thriv- 
 ing Norman shrinks from submitting his little landed pro- 
 perty to compulsory cutting-up, by allowing himself more 
 than one or two children. 'It is generally,' says Toequeville, 
 ' in the most miserable families that are found the most 
 children. From the moment that a family begins to grow 
 rich, the number of children decreases. Parents desire to 
 leave their children the advantages they themselves possess, 
 and that each of them shall have a fortune about equal to 
 that which they have themselves acquired. For this pur- 
 pose, parents must not have m.ore than two or three children 
 at most.' 
 
 The exigencies of military service (in briefer phrase, the 
 conscription) are enumerated in M. Monny de Mornay's 
 Report as ' one of the incessant causes of the deficiency of 
 labouring hands in the rural districts,' and as ' withdrawing 
 from those districts for many years their youngest and most 
 robust labourers.' The emigration of the rural populations 
 to the towns is next enumerated as ' an evil still more veal, 
 and which has been signalised in a general manner as affect- 
 ing all parts of the country.' 
 
 As regards this latter evil, which is singularly asserted to 
 be more real than the conscription, we may observe that there 
 is nothing new or peculiar to France in the fact that the 
 present is 'the Age of great Cities,' or that great cities 
 
 2 
 
388 THE LAND aUESTION I^f FEANCE (1870). 
 
 attract in the present age a larger proportion than heretofore 
 of the population formerly scattered througioufc rural dis- 
 tricts. What is, however, peculiar to France under the 
 present reign, though not without precedent in the reign of 
 the last absolute successor of Louis XIV., is the artificial 
 development given of late years, by the acts of authority, to 
 urban at the expense of rural industry and existence. 
 
 "'It may safely be stated,' says Tocqueville,' 'that during the 
 sixty years which preceded the Revolution, the numbers of work- 
 people more than doubled at Paris ; and Louis XVI., by greatly ex- 
 tending the privileged exemptions of the Faubovirg St Antoine from 
 the fiscal legislation of those times, aided to the utmost of his power 
 the accumulation of an immense working population in that suburb, 
 never dreaming that his proletaire proteges were soon to strike the 
 decisive blows at his throne and head. ' 
 
 The old strongholds of revolt, St. Antoine, St. Denis, and 
 the Temple, have been new-boulevarded and bridled; and 
 Paris of the present day, well bitted and barracked, is no 
 longer the political mistress of France. But Paris is more 
 than ever, thanks to the prodigious public works of the 
 Second Empire, the metropolis of proletarism, the spoilt 
 child of administrative solicitude — more than ever populous, 
 multifarious, and omnivorous. 
 
 The consumption of Paris was estimated, more than ten 
 years back, from statistics published by the Prefecture of 
 the Seine, to amount to a full tenth of the total amount of 
 production of articles of food and drink in the whole of 
 France. From this estimate M. L6once de Lavergne drew 
 the inference that the average ration of eatables and drink- 
 ables per head in Paris was four times the average enjoyed 
 per head by the rest of Frenchmen. But if the average 
 feeding of the Parisians is equal or superior to that of any 
 other great town in Europe, the alimentation of the 
 peasantry, on the other hand, says the same writer, 
 
 is inferior to that of almost any other people. They neither get 
 
 meat, nor wheaten bread, nor wine ; rye-bread, black bread, potatoes, 
 
 and water, are the food of a good third of the population of France. 
 
 ' L'Ancien Rigiiiw et la Revolution. 
 
THE LAUD QUtSTJON IN FEANCE (1870). 389 
 
 It is true that, according to the official optimism of the Prefecttire of 
 the Seine, they find in the purity of the atmosphere, in the moderate 
 exercise of their muscular force, in the habit of taking regular and 
 temperate meals, elements extremely useful to the equilibrium of the 
 vital functions. Thanks much to the Prefecture of the Seine ! But 
 if to these advantages they could add a little modicum of meat and 
 wine, it is probable they might not find themselves the worfe for it. 
 Even that country air, for the purity of which they get credit, is 
 often vitiated by low and confined habitations, by the vicinage of 
 dung-heaps or of unwholesome marshes. 
 
 The altered proportion of the rural and town population 
 throughout Europe and America, so far as it is due to the 
 natural growth of wealth and commerce, is, as we have said, 
 not in itself to be complained of, but to be duly noted as 
 characteristic of the age. It can only form a grievance 
 when, as the Report before us admits to be the case in 
 Finance, an agricultural country finds itself, in addition to 
 the already exhausting drain of the flower of its rural youth 
 by the conscription, subjected to the powerful attraction of 
 the Ijest of its remaining labouring hands from the rural to 
 the urban labour-market by the unprecedented public ex- 
 penditure, under the Imperial regime, on the improvement, 
 or rather reconstruction, of Paris and other great towns. 
 ' There has been often expressed during the course of this 
 inquiry,' says the Report before us, 'the wish to see discon- 
 tinued, or at least considerably slackened, the public works 
 now carrying on in the towns, which certain ^persons even go 
 so far as to consider as unproductive.' When ministerial 
 departments ' go so far ' as to place such complaints on record 
 without protest, it would seem that they must have become 
 urgent, and hopes may be entertained that the balance of 
 administrative equity between town and country, so seriously 
 deranged, has at last some chance of being redressed.' 
 
 Paris is the land of promise (promise often broken — the 
 
 perennial source of revolutions) to the upper tens of 
 
 -thousands of white-handed aspirants to place, as well as the 
 
 lower hundreds of thousands of hard-handed aspirants to 
 
 light work and high wages. 
 
 ' Since this hope was expressed, Baron Haussmann has abdicated his 
 destructive and constructive omnipotence OTer the metropolitan prefecture. 
 
390 THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 
 
 The excessive multiplication of public oifices, combined with the 
 destruction of family professions, caused by compulsory division of 
 property, has profoundly modified the old state of things. Fathers 
 no longer able to transmit to their children the occupation they have 
 themselves followed, naturally cast their eyes on those official situa- 
 tions which are now numbered by thousands, and graduated in 
 scale to all ambitions and all appetites. At this day these situations 
 are the principal source of influence, and for the last three-quarters 
 of a century have alone created stable existences in a social state 
 periodically ravaged by revolutions. Private manners and feelings 
 by degrees follow, and even exaggerate the direction impressed on 
 the conduct of families by the force of law and policy. A young man 
 would seem to confess his own inferiority by following his father's 
 profession ; and if, in accordance with those deplorable principles 
 which govern the formation of Inarl'iage connexions amongst us, he 
 should seek to improve his fortune by a matrimonial alliance, he 
 would indeed put all the chances against him by following the 
 paternal profession, instead of soliciting for some official situation. 
 In this respect, as in niaUy others, French ofiers a marked contrast to 
 English opinion. In France prudent fathers, now that they are no 
 longer able themselves to create a career for theii' children in the 
 circle of the family connexion, must seek support from those who 
 have the disposal of official loaves and fishes. No circumstance has 
 more contributed to the abasement of the old character of the Franks. 
 Those who would raise that character in the esteem of other races 
 feel a sort of humiliation in the spectacle of successive French 
 governments, beset by this ' ugly rush ' to public functions, and 
 equally powerless to rejiress or satisfy this new species of mendicity. 
 (Le Play, vol. iii. p. 333.) 
 
 Tlie chapter in the Report before us on agricultural 
 capital and credit seems addressed to meet such, slashing 
 attacks on the make-believe measures adopted of late years 
 in aid of both, as we find, for instance, in M. d'Esterno's 
 first volume, and which have been widely echoed in the 
 evidence and returns received by the late Commission of In- 
 quiry. Next to the carrion-crow brood of local limbs of 
 bureaucracy and lawyers in the lowest walks of practice, who, 
 on the death of every French peasant proprietor, swoop down 
 on his poor landed leavings, and in too many cases divide 
 the oyster amongst them, leaving the simple co-heirs the 
 shells, M. d'Esterno's favourite aversion is la haute banque — 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (l870) 391 
 
 the banking monopoly held at Paris, and represented by the 
 Bank of France and its dog-in-the-manger attitude towards 
 the banking requirements of the provinces, which it will 
 neither supply itself nor suffer to be supplied by others. Of 
 the new privileged classes — bureaucrats, lawyers, bankers 
 — the last, according to M. d'Esterno, are not those who levy 
 the least tribute on the general community. They have con- 
 trived to maintain intact the moneyed monopoly conferred on 
 them — centred in the Banque de France— hj the old imperial 
 law of 1807, which prohibits as usurious the direct negotia- 
 tion between private individuals of loans at a rate of interest 
 above 5 per cent., reserving to themselves (the Parisian 
 banking interest) the privilege of making advances to com- 
 merce at whatever rate they please ! This law, as M. 
 d'Esterno justly says, is the palladium of usury, the tutelary 
 power of the privileged usurers of the haute banque. While 
 it prescribes a maximum price for a commodity (money) 
 fairly amenable to the laws of trade, like any other com- 
 modity, it exempts from observance of that maximum the 
 one special profession which deals habitually in that mer- 
 chandise ! The Bank of France, by its predominant influence 
 in high places, has hitherto succeeded in preventing the 
 establishment of provincial banking establishments on an 
 adequate scale, and with numerous branches, such as Scot- 
 land first set the example of in this country. 
 
 'In 1837,' says M. d'Esterno, 'I solicited the sanction of Louis 
 
 Philippe's Government for the establishment of the Bank of Dijon, 
 
 which would have included several towns in the same district. In 
 
 addressing myself to M. Lacave-Laplagne, then Minister of Finance, 
 
 I was innocent enough to point out that the union of several towns in 
 
 one sphere of operations would liberate provincial commerce from the 
 
 charge of commission hitherto incurred in the discount of its bills at 
 
 Paris. The banker-financier answered me at once in a very decided 
 
 tone, " But we don't want country banks to play the part of the Bank." 
 
 I had the simplicity to ask Why, and of course got no second 
 
 answer.' 
 
 The Eeport adventures neither attack nor defence of the 
 Bank of France, and consigns to its Appendix a modest and 
 
392 THE LAND QUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 passing notice of the repeal of the law of 1807 as one of the 
 measures suggested in the evidence taken before the Enquete. 
 But it administers in its text a valuable indirect lesson to the 
 monopolists of the Parisian banking system by a concise and 
 clear account of the banking system of Scotland, and the 
 similar system nearer at hand in the Channel Islands. ' The 
 Scotch banks,' writes M. Monny de Mornay, ' cover the 
 whole country with their branches, and those branches, 
 which in 1819 only numbered 96, had reached in 1864 the 
 imposing figure of 691 . For a population of three millions 
 and a half this gives a branch-bank for every 6,000 souls. 
 The like ubiquity of these establishments is to be found in 
 the island of Jersey, where 63 banks, or rather comptoirs of 
 deposit and discount, do not issue more than between two or 
 three millions [francs] of notes, but set in motion commer- 
 cial operations of ten times that amount.' 
 
 M. Leonce de Lavergne attaches only a secondary impor- 
 tance to the mere machinery of banking accommodation in 
 France. The artificial causes which withdraw capital from 
 landed investment lie deeper, in his opinion, than a.ny 
 defectiveness, confessed as it is, of that machinery. The 
 most powerful of these is the attraction held out of late 
 years to large and small capitals by 'public loans, whether 
 inviting subscriptions in the name of imperial or municipal 
 administrations. 'Five or six thousand millions of francs 
 have, during the last fifteen years, been diverted from their 
 natural destination to be spent unproductively in military 
 armaments or expeditions, and in works of luxury. These 
 loans to defray war establishments and town embellishments 
 have opened the wide and deep wounds through which has 
 flowed the life-blood of agricultural capital. Add to the 
 thousands of millions absorbed in these loans thousands of 
 millions more which have been sunk in all sorts of delusive 
 enterprises at home and abroad.' M. d'Esterno calls atten- 
 tion to the fact that the Credit Fonder, one of the two 
 associations started for the special purpose of making 
 advances of capital on landed securities, largely supported 
 by its advances the Societe Immohiliere of Paris in its 
 
THE LAND QUESTION IN FEANCE (1870). 393 
 
 enormous building speculations in that city. We all know 
 •what has become of its speculations and of its share- 
 holders. 
 
 The Credit Agricole is the most recent association founded 
 for the special aid of agriculture. Without going so far as 
 to say with M. d'Esterno that its sole object was rather to 
 prevent than promote agricultural credit, we must admit 
 that some of its clients and proteges were, to say the least, 
 rather curious representatives of the agricultural interest. 
 Amongst these were the directors of the French oj)era, the 
 Austrian railways, and the provision trade of Paris. M. de 
 Mornay adduces, in defence of the Credits Foneier and Agri- 
 cole, iigures to show that a very large proportion of the 
 advances have been made on provincial agricultural and 
 industrial securities. And he retorts on their assailants by 
 hinting that one main reason why agriculture has to pay 
 higher for the advances made to it than commerce, is that 
 agriculturists are not so punctual as mercantile men in ful- 
 filling their engagements. 
 
 We have dwelt thus at length upon the results of the 
 Agricultural Inquiry in France, not simply on account; of 
 the importance of the subject itself, but also on account of 
 the lesson derivable from the revolutionary experiments and 
 economical experiences of our nearest continental neigh- 
 bours. That lesson may be stated in few words as a lesson 
 of distrust of legislation aiming to revolutionise all existing 
 proprietary conditions — to produce an universal Utopia of 
 peasant proprietorship — in short, to reform by decapitating 
 the body of interests having a joint stake in the soil. What 
 the example of France shows is, that such legislation may 
 fail to render universal, or even to considerably increase, in 
 extent and prevalence, the form of property which it takes 
 under its exclusive protection, while it is pretty sure to pro- 
 duce such legal and administrative friction in its working as 
 in many cases to rub away altogether the petty properties it 
 was meant exclusively to establish, and to end in effecting 
 their ultimate absorption in larger estates — all the compul- 
 sory legal and fiscal intervention in the matter being dead 
 
394 THE LAND aUESTION IN FRANCE (1870). 
 
 loss to everybody, except indeed swarms of the lowest legal 
 and fiscal functionaries.' 
 
 ' In an article entitled ' Equality,' written by Mr. Matthew Arnold in the 
 Fortnightly Reviem for March 1878, to establish two positions, which English 
 readers, less French in their proclivities than he is, may be pardoned for think- 
 ing that he has not completely made out, viz. that one of the two great 
 obstacles to our civilisation is British nonconformity and the other British 
 aristocracy j he nevertheless arrives at the same conclusions respecting the 
 French law of succession to property as it has been the object of the fore- 
 going article to demonstrate. ' The faults and inconveniences,' he says, ' of 
 the French law of bequest are obvious. It tends to over-divide property ; it 
 is unequal in operation, and can be eluded by people limiting their families ; 
 it makes the children, however ill they choose to behave, independent of the 
 parent. To be sure, Mr. Mill and others have shown that a law of bequest, 
 fixing the maximum, whether of land or money, which any one individual 
 may take by bequest or inheritance, but in other respects leaving the testator 
 quite free, has none of the inconveniences of the French law, and is in every 
 way preferable. But evidently these are not questions of practical politics.' 
 
 • I have generally found,' says the late Nassau Senior, in his Conversations 
 with Distinguished Fm-sons, ' the system of forced division unpopular in Bel- 
 gium. They complain not only of its political but of its moral effects, as 
 diminishing parental influence. It does not, however, seem to be so mis- 
 chievous economically as it is in France. It is acted on with more good sense. 
 In France the co-heirs frequently divide every field and even every acre of 
 vineyard. In Belgium they generally sell the whole, and divide the price. 
 This, however, is expensive. The Government takes seven per cent, of the 
 purchase money for stamps ; the notary three per cent., or, if no bargain be 
 made with him, five per cent. more. It is seldom, I am told, that a purchase 
 can be made at an expense of less than ten per cent. And as two and a half 
 per cent, is considered a fair return, the four first years' revenue is absorbed 
 by the expenses of transfer.' 
 
395 
 
 xm. 
 
 PREVOST-PAHADOL AND THE PRANCO-GEliMAN WAR>* 
 
 1. EUsabeth et ffenri IV. 1595-1598, 
 
 2. BssaAs de Politique et de Litterdtii/ri. 3 vols. 
 
 3. Quelques Pagci d'Histoire Contemporaine : Lettres Politiques. 4 vols. 
 
 4. Za Franoe Nouvelle. Par M; Prevost-Paradol de rAcadSmle Fran9aisei 
 
 Dixi^me Edition. Paris, 1869.' 
 
 Peevost-PaRadol is tlie second of French diplomatists who 
 have died, within the last three- and-twehty years, by theif 
 own hands, and whose deaths have happened in coincidence 
 and in supposed connection with the presaged fate of 
 personal and dynastic policy. The first was M. Bressoiij 
 who had been French Minister at Madrid during Louis 
 Philippe's Spanish-marriage intrigues, pregnant with such 
 fatal consequences to the reigning houses of both France and 
 Spain. ^ In the second instance of strange and sudden death 
 
 ' From the QfaaitterVy Review, October IStO. 
 
 '^ Amongst the documents plrmdered from the Ftench palaces in February 
 1848, and published in M. Taschereau's Revue Retrospective of that revolution 
 year, was a very remarkable confidential letter of the Prince de Joinville to 
 the Duo de Nemours, dated from the fleet off Spezzia, November 7, 1847, 
 from which we translate the following passage : — ' The death of Bresson has 
 struck me like a fatality {jm^afmneste'], and I fancy it has had the same effect 
 on you. Setting aside the unfortunate effect produced at Naples, where the 
 laws are so severe against suicide, what I apprehend most is research into the 
 causes which may have produced this unhappy event. Bresson was not ill ; 
 he executed his purpose with the sang-froid of a man determined on death, 
 I have letters from Naples from Montessuy and others, which leave me in no 
 donbt about the matter. He was exasperated [ulcere] against U Pere [Kinpj 
 Louis Philippe]. He had held strange language about him at Florence : "the 
 King is inflexible, he no longer listens to any counsel — his will must carry 
 everything before it," &c. All this will not fail to be repeated, and — which 
 I regard as our great danger — the action le Pere exerts on all subjects will be 
 put in the strongest light — an action so inflexible that, when a public man 
 who has committed himself on our side cannot overcome it, he has no resource 
 left but suicide.' — Revile Retrospective, 1848, No. 31, p. 481. 
 
396 PREVOST-PABADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN "WAR. 
 
 now before us it is impossible to say what effect the startling 
 arrival of the war news from Europe may have had on a 
 sensitive mind, coupled with a frame already in a state of 
 suffering from unusually intense heat in a foreign climate. 
 Prevost- Paradox's published writings, however, of two years 
 previously, prove that he had long regarded war with Prussia 
 as a question only of time. Had his bodily health, under the 
 burning sun of Washington, been in its normal condition, it 
 is hard to believe that the mere fulfilment of his own pre- 
 dictions could have so affected his mind as to have driven 
 him to seek refuge in suicide from the possible consequences, 
 whether to his country or to himself, of military and 
 political calamities, which could not then be contemplated 
 as inevitable, least of all by Frenchmen. Whatever indeed 
 might ensue could only by the most malignant ingenuity be 
 made to reflect discredit on a man whose Liberal literary 
 antecedents had occasioned his selection by a professed 
 Liberal cabinet to bear the olive-branch from Imperial 
 Prance to the great transatlantic Republic. Even if the 
 new Minister at Washington had come to think M. OUivier's 
 Liberalism the hollow and broken reed it has since proved, 
 and his own position, by consequence, more or less a false 
 one, the late example of another literary Imperial convertite 
 relapsed might have assured him. that the French Liberals 
 would receive him with open arms again, whenever, like 
 Sainte-Beuve, he returned to his premiers amours. 
 
 From our passing notice of Prevost-Paradol's death we 
 turn to the labours of his life, which obtained for him before 
 the middle period of manhood the position of a great publicist 
 — to say nothing of that of an Academician — due mainly to 
 his brilliant contributions to the newspaper press. From 
 causes which perhaps may count amongst the perils of 
 French politics, but which are certainly sources of singular 
 distinction to French political writers, those writers exert an 
 individual influence, and acquire an individual reputation, to 
 which the system of anonjmousness precludes any parallel 
 in English journalism. The gradual recovery of its freedom 
 of late years by the French newspaper press has been due in 
 
PEEVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAE. 397 
 
 gi'eat. measure to the distinguished ability and independence 
 of individual journalists ; while the full recognition of those 
 qualities has in like measure been due to the publication of 
 the names of French newspaper writers at the foot of their 
 articles. That publication was rendered legally compulsory 
 by a law passed by the National Assembly of the short-lived 
 Eepublic of 1848, on the motion of a certain M. de Tinguy, 
 whose name is not otherwise illustrious. Whatever its origin, 
 we have always regarded its effect as favourable to the 
 individual weight and influence of the higher class of 
 writers, whose contributions to the press have mainly or 
 exclusively raised them to reputation. Of these, facile, 
 princeps in late years was Prevost-Paradol. 
 
 The peculiar faculties which fitted Prevost-Paradol for 
 his literary conflict with power have been a traditional dis- 
 tinction of French athletes in that arena from Pascal to Vol- 
 taire — from Voltaire to Paul Louis Courier (a name little 
 remembered now) and Cormenin, and from these (we should 
 have added before some late escapades) to Edmond About. 
 Frenchwomen were said to owe their tripping elastic step to 
 the dire necessity of acquiring the art of saving their delicate 
 chaussures from the pitfalls and puddles of French street- 
 pavement, as French street-pavement was of yore. In like 
 manner, French writers have had to learn the art of harass- 
 ing power by a light ironical handling of its perverse doc- 
 trines or more perverse practices. From the Provinciales 
 downwards, the best weapon of French polemics and politics 
 has been a keen and polished irony against authorities, 
 whether spiritual or secular, whose forte was not reasoning, 
 but silencing reason when it became seriously offensive. 
 Prevost-Paradol was the last of a long line of French writers 
 whose sarcasms cut with razor keenness into those who 
 wielded ' the axes and the rods which awe mankind.' It is 
 quite a peculiar art of writing, for which there is really no 
 demand in a free country, where neither writers nor readers 
 have had any occasion to acquire the skill or taste for in- 
 genious and indirect modes of conveying censure on powers 
 that be. As Frenchmen are the best cooks for extracting 
 
398 PREVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FEANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 exquisite flavours out of dubious viands — as they are the best 
 dancing-masters for extracting artificial graces out of move- 
 ments in which natural grace is no ingredient— so are they 
 the most accomplished literary artists in turning ' diseases 
 to commodity '—forging the most effective weapons against 
 power out of its own jealous restrictions, and telling it ses 
 verites in turns of phrase adroitly avoiding to call a spade a 
 spade or a rogue a rogue. Such literary fencing, indeed, 
 with the ' master of thirty legions ' generally ends one way : 
 those who are adepts in it are themselves apt to get tired of 
 tolerance, and wish to assure themselves that they have cut 
 their tyrants to the quick by provoking some hasty stroke of 
 vengeance from high places. Thus Chateaubriand, appa- 
 rently to refresh the public memory of his rupture with the 
 first Napoleon on occasion of the murder of the Duke 
 d'Enghien, got inserted in the ' Mercure de France ' (in 1807) 
 that covert but audacious parallel of the age of Napoleon 
 with the age of Nero (and, by implication, of Tacitus with 
 Chateaubriand) which caused the instant suppression of the 
 ' Mercure.' Thus Prevost-Paradol, in 1866, found in Gul- 
 liver's voyage to Laputa a prototype less stately, but not less 
 insulting to the Second Empire, of the depraved taste of 
 France for the Imperial regime and its organs, in the court 
 lady whose story is told in that voyage — 
 
 ' Tr6s belle, aimee par les plus galants hommes, qui s'enf uit pour 
 aller vivre avec un palefrenier. EUe est depouillee, battue, abetie 
 un peu plus tous les jours ; mais e'en est fait, elle y a pris gout et ne 
 peut ^tre arrach^e a cet indigne amant.' 
 
 This was followed, in like manner, by the instant sup- 
 pression of the ' Courrier du Dimanche,' a short imprison- 
 ment of the author, and moderate fines on himself and 
 publisher. It may be questioned whether either Chateau- 
 briand or Prevost-Paradol would have been quite pleased by 
 the policy of entire forbearance on the part of the power 
 attacked. 
 
 In a very brief biographical notice in a monthly periodical, 
 which has the merit of being founded on personal acquaint- 
 
PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FEANCO-GERMAN WAR. 399 
 
 ance with Prevost-Paradol, we find the following passage 
 from a letter written bj him to an English friend in 
 1868 :— 
 
 I envy your country, to be busy only with such questions as the 
 Irish difficulties and competition of Parliamentary parties ; while we 
 are here struggling for life in the midst of foreign and internal perils. 
 German unity abroad ; universal suffrage, domination of the illiterate 
 classes, and absolute power of a slumbering madman at home : such 
 are the diseases of my country, by the side of which your troubles 
 sink into insignificance. 
 
 Waiving all question as to our English exemption (since 
 1866) from ' the domination ' — potential at least — ' of the 
 illiterate classes,' we must say, with reference to the above ap- 
 plication of such a phrase as ' slumbering madman,' that Na- 
 poleon III., like every ruler of France since her revolutions, 
 had slumbering madness to manage in the French natiouj 
 and did manage it with success for a longer period than any 
 previous French ruler. If he failed at last, and wrecked his 
 dynasty in his failure, it was less by indulging any individual 
 mania of his own than by indulging a notoriously universal 
 and inveterate mania of his subjects. Whatever right dis- 
 passionate foreigners may have to visit with reprobation his 
 unprovoked raid on Germany, passionate Frenchmen — and 
 all patriotic Frenchmen were more or less inflamed with 
 passion in that direction — have no right to denounce it, and 
 in fact, speaking generally, have not denounced it, unless on 
 the score of deficient preparation and pretext. The deter- 
 mination to draw the sword on Germany rather than see 
 Germany complete her national union had been incessantly 
 inculcated by M. Thiers in the Legislature, and by Prevost- 
 Paradol in the press, for at least four years before, in an evil 
 hour, it was put in execution by the Emperor's Government. 
 Alexis de Tocqueville, whom we always have to quote for 
 calm speculation on the turbulent vicissitudes, remote or 
 recent, of French politics, declared repeatedly that, whenever 
 any ruler of France should give the word to march on the 
 Rhine with a definite aim of re-conquest, the whole nation 
 would rise and march on the Rhine, as it had done before. 
 
400 PEEVOST-PARADOL AND THE PEANCO-GEEMAN WAE. 
 
 la the sudden direction of the force of France again on the 
 Rhine, with an object which, if not defined, was understood 
 — and the more groundless the pretext the better understood 
 the purpose — Napoleon III., we repeat, made himself the 
 instrument of the known passions of his subjects (doubtless 
 with the view of diverting those passions from dangerous in- 
 ternal objects), much rather than made his subjects the 
 instruments of any passion of jealousy or appetite of aggrand- 
 isement arising spontaneously in his own breast. 
 
 Again, foreigners have a much better right than French- 
 men to bring the objection against the policy of Napoleon 
 III. that it was a policy of surprises. In a lively dialogue of 
 the date of 1864, in Prevost-Paradol's ' Quelques Pages 
 d'Histoire Contemporaine,' between A, representing the 
 public, and B, the author, the latter remarks that the designs 
 of the Imperial Government are a mystery, ' which neither 
 you nor I have power to penetrate, nor legal right to con- 
 trol.' 
 
 A. That's just what oppresses me with a constant sense of un- 
 certainty. I feel like a man rowing in a boat with his back to the 
 bow, without knowing where the steersman is taking him to — and 
 reduced to conjecture, from the expression of his countenance, what 
 rocks there may be ahead. For my part, I can form no conjecture 
 about it, and such a state of suspense is to me insupportable. 
 
 B. Are you quite sure of that ? I can't help thinking this state 
 of suspense does not oppress you quite so much as you say it does. 
 Aufond de voire dme you are, I suspect, divided between the fear of 
 some mischief and the hope of some novelty, which leaves an exciting 
 scope to imagination. You are afraid of accidents, but you are fond 
 of surprises ; and a regime which should exclude surprises would fail 
 to satisfy you, because it would leave the door open to ennui. You 
 tremble a little every morning when you open the ' Moniteur,' but 
 that very tremor has something in it that is not displeasing to your 
 levity and curiosity of temper ; and if you are deprived too long of 
 this sort of excitement, the world seems to you to stand stUl. 
 
 La France s'ennuie ! — formidable word — first uttered by 
 Lamartine, if we recollect right, in 1847 — the eve of the 
 deluge. 
 
PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 401 
 
 ' The most politically-stirring element of the French people,' says 
 Prevost-Paradol, ' though not the most enlightened — that part which 
 makes revolutions in a tour de main, while society stands by and lets 
 it make them — has two ruling passions : the first is the passion of 
 predominance, or the show of predominance, over Europe ; the second 
 is the passion of establishing a paradise upon earth, beginning with 
 the social regeneration of the French people, and proceeding to refoi-m 
 the rest of the world on that regenerate model. These two passions 
 could not but find a perennial source of irritation in the moderate 
 policy and modest language of the Government of I^ouis Philippe.' 
 
 And to these two passions v^as addressed that part of the 
 policy of Napoleon III. the most open to censnTe on general 
 grounds of principle and public policy. 
 
 Justice will not be done to Napoleon's III.'s singular 
 career and character, unless it be recognised that he really 
 had an ideal policy in view, which he sought to realise, and 
 which he had already set forth with sufficient explicitness in 
 his ' Idees Napoleoniennes.' M. G-uizot has observed some- 
 where in his ' Memoirs ' that men belong to their opinions, and 
 act as they think, more than they are themselves aware of. 
 Louis Napoleon's rooted conviction of the unworkableness 
 of parliamentary government, under the conditions of that 
 system in France, had been plainly enough expressed by him, 
 long before events put it in his power to muzzle parliamen- 
 tarism for nearly a score of years in that country. He con- 
 trasted France with England acutely and accurately at the 
 period when he wrote, as regarded the social circumstances 
 which submitted individual ambition in the latter country to 
 party discipline, and rendered parliamentary government 
 practicable, by placing political leadership, for the most part, 
 in the hands of men independent of official position for 
 personal or class importance, and not ready at any moment, 
 as in France, to hazard a revolution merely to overthrow a 
 Ministry. At the risk of scandalising ' earnest and decided 
 reformers,' we must confess that our own opinion of the 
 insufficiency of a popular parliamentary system — pure and 
 simple — to secure political stability in a country ' unboned 
 by revolutions,' like France, agrees very closely with the 
 
 D D 
 
402 PREVOST-PARADOL AND Til a FRAl^GO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 doctrine of Louis Napoleon's earlier writings. Parliamentary 
 government, as put in operation in France, had undergone a 
 succession of break-downs. It is an easy resource, in the 
 interest of popular politics, to ascribe those successive break- 
 downs solely to the anti-popular, anti- revolutionary attitude 
 of monarchs or ministers. No dispassionate reader of French 
 political history will fall into that facile mode of explaining 
 the failure of France to preserve and develop the essential 
 elements of constitutional government. No writer was less 
 disposed to fall into it than Prevost-Paradol. We may add, 
 none less disposed to make any individual personage mainly 
 or primarily responsible for the profound political apathy into 
 which France had been thrown by the recurrence of revolu- 
 tions without result — save that of preparing fresh revolutions. 
 Napoleon III.'s theory of government has had the singu- 
 lar advantage — so far as it is an advantage to it to "be 
 thoroughly known and strictly judged — of having first been 
 expounded very fully by himself in his earlier published 
 writings ; of having, secondly, been applied on the most im- 
 portant theatre of European politics ; and thirdly, of having 
 been watched and criticised in succession by two of the 
 aeutest intellects of the age— the late Alexis de Tocqueville 
 and the late Prevost-Paradol. Tocqueville was Louis Napo- 
 leon's Foreign Minister during part of his presidency — that 
 part, by the way, which included the siege of Rome and 
 re-establishment of the Papal government in 1849.' Prevost- 
 Paradol was the most vivacious, the most pertinacious, and 
 
 ' ' I am not bound,' said Tocqueville in a conversation with the late 
 Mr. Nassau Senior at Sorrento, in February 1851, 'to defend the Roman expe- 
 dition. It was no act of mine. "When I entered the Cabinet we were already 
 at Civita Vecchia. All that I could do was to impress on Oudinot the neces- 
 sity of so conducting the siege as to avoid injuring what is the property of 
 the whole Cliristian world — the monuments of Rome. In this attempt we 
 succeeded.' 
 
 Mrs. Simpson, daughter of the late Mr. Senior, has favoured the world, of 
 late years, with successive and very welcome publications, consisting of 
 copious extracts from her father's regularly kept diaries in France and Italy, 
 and carefully recorded and authenticated conversations with the most emi- 
 nent amongst foreign statesmen, during the fifteen years succeeding the Paris 
 Revolution of 1848. 
 
PEEVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 403 
 
 most formidable critic of the Imperial policy in the press 
 from 1858 to 1866. His leading articles in the 'Journal des 
 Debats,' and his fortnightly letters to the ' Courrier du 
 Dimanche ' (which latter at length provoked the final sup- 
 pression of that journal in 1866), have been collected and 
 republished in seven volumes, under the titles of ' Essais de 
 Politique et de Litterature ' and ' Quelques Pages d'Histoire 
 Contemporaine.' In his last publication in. 1868, entitled 
 ' La France Nouvelle,' he reproduced, in a more condensed 
 shape and with somewhat softened asperity, his general 
 views on the state and prospects of France, which, in the 
 light of after events, read scarcely short of prophetic. Pre- 
 vost-Paradol's relations with the Emperor ended, as Tocque- 
 ville's had commenced, with being official. Considering all 
 he had written of Napoleon III.'s external and internal 
 policy — writings which, together wibh Tocqueville's posthu- 
 mously-published Letters and Conversations, characterise 
 that policy in traits which must remain indelible — the 
 greater marvel is that Prevost-Paradol should have had an 
 important embassy offered him by the late Imperial Govern- 
 ment, than that he should have accepted it. But there had 
 been little that could be called pointedly personal, nothing 
 declaredly or irreconcilably anti-dynastic, in Prevost-Para- 
 dol's eight or ten years' warfare of the pen with the Govern- 
 ment. His opposition to it had been founded on the 
 principles of parliamentary government, impugned in the 
 'Idees Napoleoniennes,' repudiated in the first Imperial 
 Constitution of 1852, re-established partially and tentatively 
 by the decree of November 1860, and, as it appeared, 
 frankly and fully returned to in the programme of the late 
 Ollivier Ministry. 
 
 In the most instructive chapter of M. Prevost-ParadoPs 
 ' France Nouvelle,' which bears the title of ' Nos Echecs 
 depuis 1789,' the successful candidature of Prince Louis Bona- 
 parte, for the presidency in 1848 was justly designated as 
 tantamount td 'a declaration of war, if not a sentence of 
 death on the Republic' Now a declaration of war against 
 the Republic was precisely what the anti- Republican majority 
 
 B D 2 
 
404 PBEVOST-PARADOL AND THE FEANCO-GEEMAN WAR. 
 
 of the National Assembly of that Republic was well pleased 
 to put forth. The Napoleonic idolatry, which was still 
 prevalent amongst the peasantry, and which amongst the 
 simpler of them was said to have amounted to actual belief 
 that the Little Corporal had resiirged in propria persona — 
 little cocked hat, grey redingote, and all — was aided and 
 abetted in favour of the then Prince- President's candidate- 
 ship by the political passions of the several Royalist and 
 Conservative sections of the Assembly ; passions mingled 
 of alarm and anger, excited by the sudden overthrow of a 
 dynasty and the not less sudden explosion of Socialistic doc- 
 trines — an explosion, of course, laid to the charge of the 
 Republic, but certainly most unjustly visited on the 
 honest straightforward chief of that Republic, the late 
 General Cavaignac. The very fact that the Conservatives 
 of different colours had a decided majority in the Assembly 
 might have seemed a suflB.cient security for the moment 
 against la Republique demoaratique et sociale, to render it 
 unnecessary to rush headlong into Imperialism, which, after 
 all, has not been without its own Socialistic proclivities. No 
 one of political foresight could have regarded the presidency 
 of Prince Louis Napoleon in any other light than that of a 
 prelude to a second Napoleonic Empire. The support then 
 given by the Conservative leaders of the National Assembly 
 and their followers to a candidate for Chief Magistrateship, 
 who could only be rationally regarded as a pretender to 
 Empire, was, according to M. Prevost-Paradol, the fruit of 
 the still smouldering resentment of the surprise of February 
 — of the old personal animosities between the ex- monarchical 
 and Republican leaders — of the indignation, mixed with 
 fear, excited by the menaces of the insurgent Socialists — and ■ 
 lastly, perhaps of the covertly-cherished hope of restoring 
 constitutional monarchy at the end of the term of office of a 
 President who was then believed more capable of upsetting 
 a Republic than of erecting an Empire. 
 
 It was soon perceived that the man who held in his 
 hands the reins of the whole system of the completely cen- 
 tralised civil and military administration of France, was not 
 
PREVOST-rABADOL AND THE FEANCO-GERMAN WAR. 405 
 
 one to be led by mere deference to ihe text of the Constitu- 
 tion to lay them down again at the end of his four years' 
 term of office. Seeing this, the parliamentary majority took 
 perhaps the wisest course open to them, by attempting to 
 modify the new Republican Constitution so as to prolong the 
 presidential term of power, and stave off, as long as might 
 be, the struggle of rival ambitions and mortally opposed 
 opinions then foreseen as imminent. But here interposed 
 the text of the Constitution, which prohibited any change in 
 its provisions by a majority of less than three-fourths of the 
 National Legislature. A Eepublican minority of more than 
 one-fourth refused, as might have been expected, to give 
 what the Prince-President had the power and will to take, 
 and took accordingly : — 
 
 ' The ruins, then, of the second Republic,' says M. Prevost-Paradol, 
 ' were heaped over so many former ruins, which had been piling up 
 since the close of the last century. It is the monotonous spectacle of 
 all these successive catastrophes that has struck into the soul of our 
 nation, once so ardent, that mortal discouragement and profound 
 lassitude, which seem to have now become the very temperament of 
 France. After so many experiments that have failed — after so many 
 hopes deceived — there has been formed among us a sort of public 
 temper whicL may best he described by saying that it is as exactly as 
 possible opposite to the spirit of 1789. In the same degree as Prance, 
 at that epoch, was disposed to generous illusions, in the same degree 
 she is now disposed to distrust the most modest improvements. She 
 seems incapable henceforth of hatred as of love, dead to all political 
 passions, and disabused especially of all political hope. She regards 
 her governments, and all their efforts to cure or please her, much like 
 those desponding patients who listen to all their doctors with tran- 
 quil indifference, and receive them all with the same melancholy smile. 
 Foreigners mark with astonishment the slow and feeble pulsations of 
 the great heart of France, whose beating heretofore made itself felt to 
 the ends of the earth. Was it not our own history which the gi-eatest 
 of Roman poets prefigured in that of Sisyphus 1 — 
 
 Et semper victus tristisque recedit ; 
 Nam petere imperium, quod inane est, neo datur unquam, 
 Atque in eo semper durum sufferre lataorem, 
 Hoc est adverso nixantem traders monte 
 Saxum, quod tamen a summo jam vertice sursum 
 Volvitur, et plani raptim petit sequora campi. 
 
406 PREVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FKANCO- GERMAN WAR. 
 
 ' How many true patriots has this fatal rock, in vain rolled 
 upwards, crushed in its descent ! How many times has the French 
 people believed itself at length to hold in its grasp order combined 
 with liberty and equality — only to fall back with empty hands ! Et 
 semper victus tristisque recedit.' 
 
 'What makes me fear,' remarks the late Alexis de 
 Tocqueville, writing in 1858 to his early friend Gustavo 
 de Beaumont, 
 
 ' that nothing for a long time to come can make us free, is that we 
 have no serious desire to be so. Not that I am of the number of 
 those who say we are a decrepit and corrupt nation, predestined for 
 all future time to servitude. Those who in that view parade before 
 our eyes the vices of the old Roman Empire, and please themselves 
 with the notion that we reproduce those vices on a reduced 
 scale, seem to me to live in books, and not in the realities of their 
 time. 
 
 ' No, we are not a decrepit nation, but a fatigued nation, a nation 
 in dread of anarchy. We are indeed deficient in large and lofty con- 
 ceptions of liberty, but we are nevertheless worth something better 
 than our present destiny. We are not yet ripe to submit ourselves 
 to a definitively and regularly established despotism ; and our present 
 rulers will find this out, if their system should ever acquire sufficient 
 stability to discourage conspiracy, compel anarchical parties to lay 
 down their arms, and suppress them so effectually that they seem to 
 vanish from the political stage. In the midst of their triumph our 
 rulers will with surprise discover a whole nation of unknown and un- 
 suspected opponents under the dense stratum of complacent servitude 
 which covers the soil of France. I sometimes think that the sole 
 chance of witnessing the revival in France of a strong taste for liberty 
 may be the temporarily tranquil and apparently final establishment of 
 despotism. Look at the course all our successive revolutions have 
 run. The experience of France for the last seventy years has proved 
 that the people, though a necessary element of revolution, cannot by 
 itself make one. While isolated it is impotent, and only becomes 
 irresistible when a part of the enlightened classes make up their 
 minds to join it; and it is never till the moment when these classes 
 are no longer afraid of it, that they can be brought to lend it either 
 their moral or material co-operation. Thence it has happened that it 
 was just at the moment when each of our Governments in succession, 
 during more than sixty years, has seemed strongest, that it has been 
 
PEEVOST-PAHADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 407 
 
 struck by the disease by -whicli it was doomed to perish. The Resto- 
 ration began to die the very day when nobody any longer talked of 
 killing it. It was the same thing with the Government of July, and 
 I believe it will be the same with the present Government.' 
 
 Erom tlie Napoleonic position of the untrustworthiness of 
 the Many, represented in Parliament, as a governing- power, 
 or a power controlling government, Louis Napoleon had 
 made a tremendous leap to the trustworthiness of the One — 
 and that one, himself. Prevost-Paradol very successfully 
 shows the utter incompatibleness of personal responsibility 
 in the permanent Chief of an imperial executive with the 
 secure administration of the executive power itself, and the 
 free discussion of its measures. A Chief Magistrate, whose 
 functions are permanent and meant to be hereditary, cannot, 
 without public inconvenience and danger, proclaim himself 
 personally responsible for the acts of his Government, and 
 reduce his Ministers, as Napoleon III. did, to mere mecha- 
 nical instruments of his will. Personal responsibility implies 
 personal dismissal or punishment for misconduct, and either 
 is incongruous with a power permanent and meant to become 
 hereditary. ' That which is permanent,' says the Ghost of 
 Dr. Johnson, in the 'Eejected Addresses.' 'cannot be removed, 
 or, if removed, ceases to be permanent.' For a sovereign to 
 claim personal responsibility is to claim autocracy, since a 
 power too high and too fixed to be called to account for its 
 acts can be responsible only in name, and removable or 
 punishable only by revolution. 
 
 The self-proclaimed responsible Ruler of Prance had the 
 power of making war, or of making treaties independent of 
 Parliamentary sanction' ; and we have seen into what an 
 abyss the exercise of such powers may plunge their holder. 
 
 ' Thus understood and thus practised,' says M. Prevost-Paradol, 
 ' the right of war is certainly a prerogative of singular grandeur ; it 
 resumes that solemn, mysterious, and terrible aspect it had in the 
 world before the establishment of free and constitutional governments 
 
 ' The Senatus-consultum of September 8, 1869, nominally restored the 
 right of the Chambers to be consulted on questions of peace or war ; but the 
 manner of consulting them on the eve of the present war was a mere mockery. 
 
408 PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR, 
 
 — at the time when Nicole wrote with such depth and truth in the 
 reign of Louis XIV. — " A declaration of war is a sentence of death 
 pronounced by one prince against the subjects of another who has 
 opposed his will." But what the good and wise Nicole forgot to say 
 is, that the execution of that sentence of death involves some danger 
 to those charged with it by their sovereign, and implies, par contre 
 coup, the infliction of a similar sentence on a good many of his own 
 subjects . . . We have more and more accustomed ourselves to aim 
 at that false greatness which consists in making perpetual encroach- 
 ments on our neighbours, or keeping them continually on the qui vive, 
 and enjoying their inquietude as a tribute of due deference to our 
 assumed supremacy. We have become intoxicated with this barren 
 and pernicious pleasure, and we never could forgive those of our 
 sovereigns who neglected to purvey it for us.' 
 
 It has sometimes been made matter of reproacli to Eng- 
 land by Liberal Frenchmen that she showed herself so ready 
 to take the proffered hand of a Prince who had strangled a 
 Republic— the short-lived Republic imposed on France by 
 the Paris revolutionists of February 1848. But if England 
 had waited to renew her alliance with France till France 
 was ruled by statesmen who had faithfully adhered to Ee- 
 publica.nism, that alliance could not have been renewed at 
 all. No one of the leaders of the majority of the National 
 Assembly a,ffected such adherence to the Republic — no one 
 of them took the slightest pains to disguise aversion to it as 
 an unforeseen and unwished political catastrophe — a triumph 
 over national opinion, only won by surprise. No one of them 
 would have hesitated to take any opportunity that offered of 
 overthrowing a form of government which recalled remi- 
 niscences of mob-terrorism and dictatorship — a terrorism and 
 dictatorship which the language held by some of the most 
 prominent Republicans in 1848 showed that only the power 
 was wanting, not the will, to renew. When Napoleon III. 
 held out his hand to England and showed that preference 
 for her alliance which he has also shown since at some 
 critical epochs of English dominion as well as of French 
 policy, it would have been a strange political puritanism on 
 our part to reject as an ally a Prince whom France had 
 accepted as a Sovereign. 
 
PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THK FEANCO-GEEMAN WAE. 409 
 
 And here we may cite the independent testimony of 
 Prevost-Paradol to the truth that the extensive and deplor- 
 able disturbance of the peace of Europe which commenced 
 four years back with the break-up of the old German Band 
 and the campaign of Sadowa, may fairly be considered as in 
 no small degree traceable to an interruption of that alliance 
 between England and France which, while it can be main- 
 tained, has ever been the best security for European repose 
 and progress. England and France never can be united in 
 sincere alliance except on some broad and general ground of 
 European interest. And when they separate their policy, it 
 is because some smaller interest, or supposed interest, or 
 sentiment, or punctilio, intervenes to divide them. Such a 
 division had unfortunately taken place in 1864, at the criti- 
 cal moment when the united intervention of England and 
 Fra,nce could alone have deterred Prussia and Austria from 
 pushing to the last extremity the masterful injustice towards 
 poor Denmark, for which one of those two rival Powers so 
 soon took in hand the providential office of punishing the 
 other. When, at the crisis of the fate of Denmark, England 
 proposed to France to present a joint ultimatum to the 
 German Powers, which might have preserved to Denmark so 
 much of her territory as no colour of right could be pretended 
 even by German diplomatists or professors for taking from 
 her — France drew back with a parade of deference for 
 German popular sentiment, the fruitlessness of which in 
 conciliating any corresponding consideration for French 
 popular sentiment France soon learned by experience. Pre- 
 vost-Paradol wrote in 1868 with an earnestness which has 
 proved prophetic — 
 
 ' Yes, France will have to expiate, one way or other — with the blood 
 of her children, if she succeeds; with the loss of her greatness, perhaps 
 of her very existence, if she fails— the series of faults committed in 
 her name by her Government since the day when the dismemberment 
 of Denmark was commenced under her eyes — since the day when 
 France favoured that great disorder in the vain hope of profiting 
 by it.' 
 
410 PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FEANCO-GEEMAN WAR 
 
 The French refusal of joint action in the case of Den- 
 mark with England placed the latter power, as Prevosb- 
 Paradol justly remarks, in a similar mortifying position of 
 inability to follow up the ' prave 'ords ' of Lords Russell and 
 Palmerston by corresponding action, to that in which France 
 had found herself placed the year before by the English 
 refusal of joint action in the case of Poland. If any feeling 
 of rancour on that score, or on that of the previous non- 
 concurrence of the English Government in the Imperial 
 proposals for an European Congress, provoked the French 
 Government to leave England isolated at the Danish crisis, 
 that Government had good cause to rue the indulgence of 
 any such feeling, when it found itself isolated in turn two 
 years afterwards, in presence of the events which effaced 
 Austria a,s a German power, and confronted France with the 
 North German Confederation, and the northern and southern 
 German military alliance. 
 
 In the Preface to his fourth and last volume of ' Lettres 
 Politiques,' Prevost-Paradol traced with an unsparing hand 
 the genesis of the German question from the Danish. 
 
 'Now at length,' he exclaimed (1867), 'we find ourselves con- 
 fronted by that German question which at this day effaces all others, 
 and to which the national instinct assigns the first place in public soli- 
 citude. It called itself the Danish before it called itself the German 
 question, and history will place on record the opening of that Danish 
 question as the precise point of time at which France had it in her 
 power to take her choice between two opposite lines of policy, not 
 less freely, and with not less decisive consequences, than Hercules in 
 the famous legend had to take his choice between vice and virtue. 
 
 ' At the Conferences of London everything invited the French 
 Government to assume a firm and unequivocal attitude in favour of 
 Denmark. The sympathy of France for an old and faithful ally ; the 
 goodwill of England, who from the first to the last day of those 
 conferences pressed us to oppose a resolute " No " — pronounced in 
 common with her, and to be supported if necessary by joint action — 
 to the further progress of the iniquitous enterprise of the German 
 Powers ; lastly, the paramount and evident interest of France to 
 prevent the aggrandisement of Prussia from aggravating the effects 
 of the treaties of 181.5 in that part of them the most full of menace to 
 French greatness. 
 
PREVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 411 
 
 ' There was the path of virtue — a path easy if ever was path to 
 follow — and had it been followed, no effusion of blood would have, in 
 all probability, been necessary once more to demonstrate that the 
 sincere and complete union of France and England suffices at critical 
 epochs to preserve order and vindicate respect for law in Europe. 
 
 ' The French Government had adopted a different policy — the 
 precious policy of proportional and simultaneous aggrandisement of 
 France and Prussia. The deliberate surrender of Denmark to German 
 cupidity ; the unfortunate appearance of a secret understanding with 
 Prussia in Italy to force Austria by every possible means to war ; 
 finally, the precarious and degrading dependence on the loyalty and 
 moderation of Prussia, and the eventual necessity of entering the lists 
 ourselves, either to support Prussia and Italy if imperilled by Austria, 
 or to snatch from Prussia, victorious and probably faithless, the com- 
 pensation indispensable to French greatness ; or, in the last resort, at 
 our own risk and peril, to seek that compensation for ourselves at the 
 cost of inoffensive Belgium ; — such were the inevitable alternative 
 consequences of a tortuous policy, from which foresight of those con- 
 seqaences should have deterred the French Government.' 
 
 Let it be remembered that this keen prospect of the 
 future was taken in 1867, while the Krupp cannon were 
 yawning, innocent of shot or shell, on the festal Champ de 
 Mars, while the Benedetti rough drafts of treaty were 
 sleeping snugly in the pigeon-holes of the Berlin Foreign 
 OfiBce, and the disastrous war of 1870 was in the womb of 
 Time. 
 
 The best apology for what must be called .French 
 recreancy on the Danish question was the absorption of 
 French forces in Mexico at that most momentous crisis for 
 Europe. Mexico may, in fact, be considered to have com- 
 menced the ruin of the Second Empire, as Spain did of the 
 First. Less of a crime — though avoidable national blood- 
 shedding must be a crime at all times— the Mexican expe- 
 dition of Napoleon III. was a similar blunder, on a more 
 distant stage and on a smaller scale, to the unprovoked 
 Spanish invasion of Napoleon I. : the blunder of attempting 
 by mere military force, necessarily transient in its operation, 
 to subjugate alien and uncongenial races on their own soil. 
 Le jeu ne valait pas la chandelle, whether in Spain or Mexico ; 
 
412 PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 and in both cases la chandelle was in urgent requisition for 
 nearer use. 
 
 On the day, said Prevost-Paradol, when the separation 
 of policy between France and England gave the German 
 Powers free scope for the iniquitous spoliation of Den- 
 mart — 
 
 ' On that day Prussia and France were, so to speak, set in motion 
 against each other, like two trains on a railway, which, starting 
 simultaneously from opposite and distant points, meet each other at 
 length upon the same line. After a long circuit — shorter, however, 
 than might be supposed — the two trains suddenly come in sight of 
 each other. Alas ! they are not only each charged with the wealth 
 of nations, but many a heart beats in each animated by no national 
 enmity, and sensible only of the sweetness of life which they are 
 about to lose. How many tears will the blood cost which is thus 
 predestined to flow ! None wish this terrible shock to take place — 
 all exert themselves to prevent it. Steam is shut off, breaks are put 
 on. All in vain : the impulse has been given too far back, the mo- 
 mentum acquired is too great for resistance. It is inevitable that the 
 sacrifice to human folly should be consummated — to human folly 
 unhappHy armed with absolute power.' 
 
 If Prevost-Paradol illustrates by his retrospect of the 
 past the mispolicy which led to war, he illustrates it, we" 
 must add, not less vividly by showing his own share in it, 
 which made him, like M. Thiers, an accessary before the act 
 to the onslaught of Prance on Germany, at length determined 
 on in the Imperial councils. 
 
 ' They talk to us,' he said, in a letter to the ' Courrier du Dimanche ' 
 in 1866, ' of compensation for the approaching completion of German 
 unity. Sir, I know of no compensation but one, which can be worthy 
 of the head of a Government of France, whatever may be his name, 
 or origin, or title — whether be calls himself King, President, or 
 Emperor — and that is to die fighting sword in hand to prevent it.' 
 
 It would be unjust to the unfortunate Ruler of France, 
 whose declaration of war against Prussia rekindled into so 
 fierce a blaze from their embers of 1813—14 all those national 
 animosities which still smouldered in the German heart' — 
 
 ' 'I found in Rhenish Germany,' said Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in 
 18.54 to a young relative, Baron Hubert de Tocqueville, 'the same feelings 
 
PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE PEANCO-GEEMAN WAE. 413 
 
 to forget that politicians claiming the title of Moderate on 
 all other questions, and exercising such influence as that of 
 Thiers in the legislative body and Prevost-Paradol in the 
 press, had been declaring war, as far as words went, these 
 four years on the whole German nation, if it should dare to 
 complete its union under Prussian leadership or in Prussian 
 alliance. It was casus belli enough that an united German 
 nation should presume to form itself beside an united French 
 nation ; and it could only be a question of time, prudence, 
 and preparation, ivhen the Rhine should be crossed to crush 
 such insolent pretensions with the armed force of France. 
 The writer before us, indeed, shows the shrinking of humanity 
 from the horrors of the coming conflict, and the presentiment 
 of genius of the doubtful prospect of success. But in his 
 view the mere fact that Germany pretended to national unity 
 would justify France in drawing the sword to keep her, per- 
 force, divided. And the very doubt of victory exasperated 
 the feverish impatience which expected the combat. 
 Prevost-Paradol wrote, two years back, in his ' France 
 Nouvelle ' : — 
 
 Proceeding on the hypothesis of a war with Prussia — shall we 
 vanquish Prussia ? The mere fact that such a question can be 
 asked, shows too clearly the change which has been accomplished 
 within these two years in the relative position of France and 
 Germany.' 
 
 Prevost-Paradol stated, at that time with truth — 
 
 which you find prevalent at Vienna with regard to the French — feelings often 
 of alarm, almost always of hatred. How should it be otherwise 1 We turned 
 the world upside down, disturbed the peace of all nations, and stirred society 
 to its very foundations — all in the name of ideas, sentiments, and doctrines 
 we have ourselves miserably surrendered since. How can we wonder at the 
 opinion now entertained of us in Europe ? ' And again in ] 858—' All you tell 
 me of Germany agrees with what I thought and with what I knew of it. I 
 -returned from Germany three years ago, convinced that our neighbours across 
 the Ehine are our irreconcilable enemies, and that, whatever might be the 
 desire of their Governments to ally themselves with us, the people would 
 always draw off their chiefs to other alliances. It was the long, exhausting, 
 and, above all, insolent oppression exercised by the First Empire over Germany 
 that united it as one man against us, and lighted up passions which still sur- 
 vive, and will long survive, the causes which gave birth to them in the hearts 
 of the entire German populations.' — Correspondmice Inedite, pp. 325-481. 
 
414 PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FEANCO-GEEMAN "WAR. 
 
 It is not tliat the Prussian Government has any desire to pro- 
 voke, or the French Government to make war. Quite the contrary ; 
 it is notorious at the present time that, from different reasons, the 
 chiefs of those two states are sincerely disposed for peace. But, in 
 spite of the will of men, the force of things leads directly to war. 
 The reason is very simple ; it is all but impossible that Prussia, not- 
 withstanding her prudence, should not make some further step 
 towards the absorption of Germany. And it is impossible that the 
 French Government, notwithstanding its patience, should stand by 
 and see that step made without drawing the sword.' 
 
 Even on the hypothesis of French victory over Prussia, 
 Prevost-Paradol admitted the probability that ' the move- 
 ment towards German unity, stimulated even by defeat, 
 would soon resume its course, and the result would be 
 retarded, rather than finally averted, by a successful effort of 
 the valiant arm of Prance.' Then to what purpose any such 
 effort to arrest forcibly the operation of those general causes 
 which, in his own opinion, whatever might be the immediate 
 issue of an armed struggle, would continue to operate for the 
 ultimate achievement of German unity? 
 
 The vehement repugnance with which Prenchmen of all 
 parties since 1866 have regarded German progress towards 
 that achievement, doubtless was quite sincere. But to entitle 
 that repugnance to express itself sword in hand, Prenchmen 
 should have abstained from aspirations, the continually re- 
 curring avowal of which convinced Germans of all parties of 
 the necessity of closing their ranks and completing their 
 union. Prance should have shown herself a safe neighbour 
 to the German Confederation of 1815, to have entitled her 
 to quarrel with the German Confederation of 1866 for the 
 mere fact of its existence. The Prussian semi-official ' Pro- 
 vincial Correspondence,' in a recent remarkable manifesto, 
 has truly told the French people and Government that what 
 they have in this war asserted the right to resist sword in 
 hand in Germany is precisely the same process of consolida- 
 tion under one head of the disjecta membra of dominion 
 which was completed ages ago in Prance, and to which 
 France owes all her national greatness, ^d for Prance, of 
 
PEEVOST-PARADOL AND THE FB.ANCO-GEEMA.N WAR. 415 
 
 all nations, to pretend to arrest that process on the ground 
 of the treaties of 1815, might be endurable, if all her efforts 
 since 1848, and even since 1830, had not been directed to 
 throw contempt on those treaties, and nullify their provisions 
 at every possible opportunity. From the date of the severance 
 of Belgium from Holland to that of the ' revindication ' of 
 Savoy and Nice, all French parties have been ready to abet 
 all infringements on the treaties of 1815 which favoured 
 French interests. The French fixed idea of reclaiming the 
 Rhine frontier, which the wars of the Revolution had put in 
 their possession for the first time, was cherished as regard- 
 lessly of the treaties of 1815 as the German fixed idea of 
 national unity which she is now realising. So wise a man 
 as Tocqueville talked fifteen years ago, in his Correspon- 
 dence, of ' the great chimera of German unity ' as taking a 
 much firmer hold on the German imagination than the desire 
 for real liberty in each of the countries of which Germany is 
 composed. The two fixed ideas of the two nations have 
 come at last, as they could not but come at last, in collision, 
 and the French idea of re -conquest may be likened to bril- 
 liant and brittle Sevres china dashing itself, like the jar in 
 the fable, against Berlin iron. 
 
 It is a question which from time to time the course of 
 events forces on attention — How is it that all the wisdom of 
 France proves unequal to control her unwisdom ? At the 
 recent crisis of her fate, as at all former crises, there has 
 been enough in France of what Guizot somewhere calls the 
 vigueur rationnelle of political disquisition to set up all 
 Europe in wise saws and modern instances. There is enough, 
 for instance, in Prevost-Paradol's ' France Wouvelle ' 
 thoroughly to lay bare the main cause of what he calls ' nos 
 echecs depuis 1789,' which may be briefly indica.ted as the 
 ' perfervidum Gallorum ingenium,' ever overshooting the mark 
 of the practically attainable, and ever too impatient of any 
 powers confronting its will — however legitimately existing — 
 to come to any terms of compromise with them. Intolerance, 
 to the pitch of internecine conflict, of whatever thwarts it 
 at home or abroad, is the constantly-recurring character of 
 
416 PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 public action in France. Upon that rock have split, for the 
 last eighty years, all her best hopes of national and inter- 
 national peace and progress. 
 
 Prevost-Paradol's political imagination was too nimble 
 for the slow march of facts, like that of many highly-endowed 
 Frenchmen ; and when such an imagination, bodying forth 
 the forms of things unknown and events unborn, translates 
 itself into action, it is very apt to precipitate the worst evils 
 it prematurely anticipates. ' Le FranQais est une machine 
 tierveuse,' said the First Napoleon, with his keen unsym- 
 pathising insight into the weak points of the national 
 character. The Frenchman takes umbrage, or takes fright, 
 like a high-mettled charger, at whatever unexpectedly 
 crosses his path or affronts his amour propre. ' For a nation 
 which has known greatness and glory,' says M. Prevost- 
 Paradol, 'there is no alternative between maintaining its old 
 prestige or sinking into complete impotence.' Let this be 
 granted — it may still be affirmed that the old prestige of 
 nations is the last thing they lose, if they forbear from ex- 
 posing it to over-rude tests. The old prestige of the Spain 
 of Charles V. survived a succession of Philips. The old 
 prestige of the Venetian power and polity long outlived its 
 real vigour. The old prestige of Prance assuredly would 
 have been in no immediate peril from the pacific and there- 
 fore protracted process of German unification, which French 
 impatience has precipitated by the red-heat of warfare fusing 
 the Fatherland instantaneously into one. Prevost-Paradol's 
 passionate demand — 'What can become of France, with a 
 new military power of fifty- one millions of men at her doors ? ' 
 is best answered by another question — What wisdom was 
 there on the part of France in calling, by her armed attack, 
 that new power, which might long have remained dormant, 
 into sudden self-consciousness, and compelling it to energetic 
 action? What was to become of France with an united 
 Germany at her doors depended mainly on what degree of 
 genial heat France herself retained — of what internal and 
 external development France remained capable. If her 
 internal power of growth and expansion was decaying^— and 
 
PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 417 
 
 her all but stationary population at home, and failure to colo- 
 nise even so near a dependence as Algeria, must be admitted 
 to be shrewd symptoms of national senescence and torpor — 
 the causes of decline could only be aggravated by more arm- 
 ing and more fighting. Foremost amongst those causes, in 
 Prevost-Paradol's opinion — .in which opinion he stood by no 
 means single amongst serious French writers — is the slow 
 rate of progress of French population of late times compared 
 with that of her more progressive continental or insular 
 rivals. '^ We must consider as absolutely chimerical,' he says, 
 ' every project and hope of preserving for France her relative 
 rank in the world, if those hopes and projects do not take 
 this maxim as their point de depart — that the number of 
 Frenchmen must be made to increase with sufficient rapidity 
 to maintain a certain equilibrium of our numerical force with 
 that of the other great nations of the world.' Assuredly the 
 wars of the Second Empire, like those of the First, have run 
 directly counter to ' every project and hope of preserving for 
 France her relative rank in the world ' by preserving un- 
 exhausted her flower of manhood and function of officina 
 gentium. To that function England and Germanj' have 
 succeeded — the former in the direct work of planting new 
 colonies, the latter in furnishing immense contingents to the 
 invading forces best befitting these ages, which seek new 
 hemispheres, not to contend with rivals, but to conquer the 
 wilderness. 
 
 ' Forty millions of French,' said Prevost-Paradol, ' concentrated 
 on our own territory, are by no means sufficient to form a counter- 
 poise to fifty-one miUions of Germans, whom Prussia may perhaps be 
 able to unite on our frontier, and the increased population which 
 Russia mai/ be able to boast of at no distant period, 
 
 ' But how insignificant becomes this French figure of forty millions 
 if we take the census of all the populations of English tongue who 
 will cover the globe, when the United States of America^when the 
 Anglo-Saxon States of Oceania — shall have reached full development ! 
 How shall we assure ourselves of a proportionate increase of popula- 
 tion, indispensable, if it is hoped that the French name is still to count 
 for something in the world % ' 
 
 This question also may be replied to by another — How 
 
 E E 
 
418 PREVOST-PARADOL AND THE FRANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 could the youth, of France he driven by hundreds of thousands 
 into the life of camps, yet retained for the life of cottages 
 and the functions of fathers of families ? How could the 
 wealth of Prance be lavished by thousands of millions on 
 military adventures, yet husbanded for home-culture or for 
 peaceful colonization ? 
 
 Prevost-Paradol conceived a corresponding increase of 
 territory to be not less indispensable than the desired increase 
 of population to preserve the relative importance of France 
 in the scale of nations. He perceived, however, with the 
 good sense which struggled with his uneasy patriotism, that 
 France can no longer hope to found colonies at a distance 
 from her central seat of empire. In the first place, the A6s 
 ■jTov cTTOi is a demand now difficult to answer: the earth's 
 surface is for the most part pre-oceupied : "in the next place,- 
 Frenchmen in the present age seem to have lost the spirit of 
 distant colonial adventure. Prevost-Paradol therefore turned 
 his views to Algeria, which, though it has been a French 
 territorial possession these forty years, seems little nearer 
 becoming a French colony than at the date of conquest. ' A 
 hundred and twelve thousand Europeans, imperfectly guarded 
 by seventy-six thousand soldiers, in the midst of two millions 
 and a half of Arabs ever ready to take advantage of the 
 slightest negligence to rise in revolt against us — voila, 
 I'Algerie.' Pointing to the rapid progress of the young colony 
 of Queensland, Prevost-Paradol asked sorrowfully what would 
 it have been in the hands of France ? 
 
 ' "What Englishman would ever have been tempted to emigrate 
 thither 1 What else would have been seen there but a camp, a cafe, 
 a theatre, a prison 1 May the day soon come,' he exclaimed, ' when 
 our countrymen, finding themselves cramped for room in French 
 Africa (Frenchmen have hitherto formed an inconsiderable portion of 
 its scanty European population), will overflow over Morocco and 
 Timis, and at length lay the foundation of that Mediterranean 
 empire which will not only supply a satisfaction for our national 
 pride, but which, in the future state of the world, will certainly be- 
 come the last refuge of our national greatness.' 
 
 After all, has not every nation its bee in its bonnet? — 
 and may it not modestly be asked, whether the British buzzer 
 
PKEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FRANCO-GEEMAN WAE. 419 
 
 has not perhaps buzzed as idly in its time as any of its neigh- 
 bours? Amongst the titles of the chapters remaining un- 
 written of Arbuthnot's ' History of John Bull,' we find the 
 following — Chap. iv. : ' Of the methods by which John en- 
 deavoured to preserve peace among his neighbours ; how he 
 kept a pair of steelyards to weigh them, and by diet, purging, 
 vomiting, and bleeding, tried to bring them to equal bulk 
 and strength.' Of the schemes to preserve the European 
 balance of power which busied John Bull three centuries, it 
 may be observed that his apprehensions and his armaments 
 were almost always directed against objects of traditional 
 jealousy and enmity which had become antiquated, and long 
 after the real sources of danger should have been sought (if 
 such must needs be sought) elsewhere. Thus James I. lost 
 credit for seeking to be friends witli Spain, after Spain was 
 no longer dangerous a,s an enemy; and Cromwell gained 
 credit for the ' spirited ' foreign policy which sent a British 
 auxiliary force to Dunkirk to help France to substitute a 
 really formidable rising power for the safer neighbourhood of 
 a sinking power in the Spanish Low Countries. In John 
 Bull's slowly transferred apprehension, the French next suc- 
 ceeded the Spaniards in the traditional character of ' natural 
 enemies,' which they have only of late lost. By a whimsical 
 contradiction, while at the present time the old bugbear of 
 Antwerp (supposing it in the possession of France) being a 
 pistol presented, as the first Napoleon vaunted, at the breast 
 of England, has been revived in Parliament, and out of it, on 
 the provocation of recent disclosures, a month or two back 
 John Bull was begging the French Government to let him 
 lay out millions in constructing a I'rench port for steamers 
 of the largest size directly opposite Dover — furnishing funds, 
 in other words, for presenting the pistol to his own breast 
 formidably nearer than the Scheldt. 
 
 When Goethe accompanied the memorable Prussian cam- 
 paign of the Argonne in 1792 — a campaign commenced, in 
 M. Ollivier's phrase, a cmur Uger, and soon retreated from 
 with heavy hearts over heavy roads — he describes the sudden 
 awakening of the German excursionists into France from 
 
 E E 2 
 
420 PBEVOST-PARADOIi AND THE FKANCO-GERMAN WAR. 
 
 their dream of conquest, so similar to that of the French 
 excursionists into Germany seventy-eight years afterwards. 
 ' Everyone now,' said Goethe — -on the first rumour of intended 
 retreat — ' saw the situation ; none looked each other in the 
 face ; or, if they did, it was to curse their luck or their 
 leaders. Towards night we formed a circle in which few 
 seemed disposed to break silence ; but at length there was a 
 general appeal to me to know wliat I thought of it all. I 
 replied, " From this spot and from this day begins a new 
 epoch of world-history, and you will be able to say that you 
 were here to see it." ' 
 
 This time it is France, not Germany, that has rushed 
 into ' war for an idea,' and the idea she warred for was to 
 arrest by force of arms German national union, which her 
 declaration of war at once converted into an accomplished 
 fact. The baffled French belligerents of this year — carent 
 quia, vatesacro — are scarce likely perhaps to hear the sentence 
 which the great German poet prophetically uttered to his 
 comrades in the Prussiain campaign of the Argonne in 1792, 
 applied with equal frankness by French lips to the French 
 campaign of the Rhine in 1870 — 'From this day begins for 
 France and Germany a new epoch, and you may say you have 
 lived to see it.' 
 
 If we could imagine ourselves unconcerned spectators of 
 these European vicissitudes, there might be reserved for us 
 a rude awakening at no distant period. When Louis XI., 
 in ' Quentin Durward,' asks his astrologer if he can predict 
 his own death, he replies that it will happen ' twenty-four 
 hours before that of your majesty.' The present collapse of 
 a military power, which has marched abreast with our own 
 through so many eventful ages of European history, must 
 have something of consequence to teach us. And that some- 
 thing we cannot think to be exactly what Mr. Lowe says it 
 is, in his recent speech at Elgin : ' What we have been wit- 
 nessing ' is not precisely ' the destruction of a most gallant 
 standing army by what is not a standing army.' What ' we 
 think we hear ' — if we hear rightly — is not ' the knell of 
 
P EEVOST-PARADOL AND THE FEAKCO-GEEMAN WAE. 421 
 
 standing armies.' There is sometldng almost like what our 
 French neighbours call an amere derision, in terming the 
 Prussian military organisation, as remodelled since 1860, ' an 
 organisation mainly useful for defensive wars.' It was re- 
 modelled expressly for such purposes as it served in 1866 in 
 the war against Austria ; and that war was neither defensive, 
 nor, in its outset, otherwise than most unpopular. The in- 
 effectiveness of the calls made upon the Landwchr in 1830, 
 1848, and subsequent years, when Prussia was really playing 
 a defensive part in German and European politics, had 
 sufficiently shown that, unless at exceptional epochs of en- 
 thusiasm, such as 1813, Mr. Lowe's 'armed nation' was, 
 even for defensive purposes, a frail reed to trust to. 
 
 It was in direct defiance of popular predispositions, and 
 repeated parliamentary majorities, that King William and 
 Count Bismarck carried through that reorganisation of the 
 Prussian milita.ry system by which it has been, during the 
 last ten years, without losing its Landwehr reserve, approxi- 
 mated, as regards the regular forces kept on foot, to the 
 great standing armies of neighbouring rival Powers. 'The 
 Prussian Government,' says a well-informed French military 
 writer, just before the sudden outbreaking of the present 
 war,' ' from the beginning opposed to the discontent of the 
 doctrinaires of the Liberal party that placid indifference 
 which so long enabled it to sustain a chronic constitutional 
 conflict with the Chambers. All endowed with political 
 foresight anticipated with confidence that, on the day when 
 success should ratify the policy pursued by the Crown, the 
 democrates unitaires [ultra-Liberal partisans of German unity] 
 would be the first to applaud a policy from which they had 
 withheld their sanction, and would thus themselves, almost 
 without knowing it, be brought under discipline by the pre- 
 vailing military spirit.' 
 
 The governing power of Prussia is that ascribed to her 
 by Mr. Carlyle — drill — including under that name whatever 
 comes within the description of systematic scientific civil 
 and military administration. Her military organisation has 
 
 ' L''Armee Prvitdcnne en 1870, p. 20. 
 
422 PEEVOST-PAEADOL AND THE FKANCO-GEKMAN WAR. 
 
 always liad a strong royal and aristocratic backbone ; it is 
 tbis that is represented by King William and Count Bis- 
 marck at the present day ; but the unpopular stiffness of the 
 system has not prevented its superiority in science! and action 
 over the less rigid military hierarchies of Austria and France. 
 The English army, scanty as it has always been in numbers 
 compared with the work it has to do, has hitherto preserved 
 those solid qualities in its regimental system — those habits 
 of respected command and steady obedience, which the Trench 
 army was losing, by the testimony of General Trochu, three 
 years back,' even before the rude tests of this war. 
 
 If we want such lessons as Prussia got in bygone years, 
 and as France is now getting, to teach us how to make 
 effective military use of the men and material we have, we 
 are not unlikely to get them in our turn — perhaps at no dis- 
 tant day ; but national greatness and independence do not 
 always survive such lessons. 
 
 ' L'Armee Franqaue en 1867, p. 29. 
 
423 
 
 XIV. 
 
 BISMABOK, PBUS><^IA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM} 
 
 1. Das Buck vom Grafeii JBismarcli. Von George Hesekiel. In drei Abtheil- 
 
 ungen, reich illustrirt von namhaften Kiinstlern. Bielefeld und Leipzig, 
 1869. 
 
 2. Krieg und Friede. Zroei Brief e an Ernst Rena/n, nebst dessen Antmort auf 
 
 den ersten. Von David Friedrich Strauss. Leipzig, 1870. 
 
 3. tfnsere Grenzen. Von Wolfgang Menzel. Stuttgart und Leipzig, 1868. 
 
 4. Elsass und ZotJiringen. Naelimeis, ww diese Provdnxen dem JDeutselien Reiolie 
 
 verlmen gingen. Von Adolf Schmidt, ord. Prof, an der Univ. Jena. Dritte 
 vermehrte Auflage. Leipzig, 1870. 
 
 5. Elsass und Latlvringen, und ihre Wiedergeminnung fur Beutschland. Von 
 
 Prof. Dr. Adolph. Wagner. Funfte Auflage. Leipzig, 1870. 
 
 At tlie soldierly banquet given by King William I. to his 
 principal officers, on the brief rest-day which followed his 
 ' crowning mercy ' of September 2 last, at Sedan, champagne 
 was served in honour of the great events of the day before — 
 {yin ordinaire only, say the German chroniclers of the cam- 
 paign, having previously appeared at the royal table) — and 
 the King proposed a toast in the following terms : — 
 
 We must to-day, in gratitude, drink to the health of my brave 
 army. You, War-Minister Von E,oon, have sharpened our sword ; 
 you. General Von Moltke, have guided it ; and you, Count Von Bis- 
 marck, by your direction of the national policy for years, have brought 
 Prussia to her present pitch of elevation. Let us then drink to the 
 health of the army — of the three I have named in connexion with 
 that toast — and of every one present who has contributed, according 
 to his power, to the results now accomplished. 
 
 The qualities which raised Freiherr Otto Von Bismarck 
 ■ — Mad Bismarck, as he was called in early manhood — from 
 
 ' From the Quarterly Beview, January 1871. 
 
424 JBISMARCK, PRUSSIA, A'SD PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 the obscure activities, and equally obscure diversions and 
 dissipations of a land-improvingj sporting, and deep^drinking 
 Altmart Junker or Squire '^to bold the belm of state 
 during the eight last eventful years in Prussia, may be 
 regarded as in good measure identical vyith those which have 
 Won for Prussia herself, within half that period, ascendancy 
 over Germany and victory over Prance. The final moral of 
 the great international drataa must be left to the future. 
 The end is not yet, but the ends already compassed under 
 Count Bismarck's Ministry, and compassed with the ultimate 
 acquiescence and applause of his strongest popular opponents, 
 suf&ce to show that the audacious and pugnacious Minister 
 has well understood the instruments he had to use and the 
 parties he had to deal with. Much of what has appeared 
 the astounding audacity of his action in politics has really 
 resulted from his ' abnormal-sapient ' perception that wind- 
 bags were windbags, and that a very slight prick might 
 cause to collapse a very big bladder. The mistake apt to be 
 made on this side the Channel about the political career of 
 Bismarck is that of unconsciously crediting Prussia with the 
 parliamentary precedents and traditions of England. But 
 the most cherished Prussian traditions and precedents have 
 always been those of military monarchy and aristocracy. 
 These have been associated from first to last with all her 
 modern advances in the scale of nations. 
 
 When Oliver Cromwell made his first appearance in the 
 House of Commons, Lord Digby, according to the rather 
 apocryphal parliamentary legend, asked Hampden, ' Who 
 thai sloven ivas ? ' and received for answer — ' That sloven 
 whom you see before you hath no ornament in his speech: 
 
 ' "We learn from the BooJi of Bismaroli,, that when the Squire of Schoen- 
 hausen, having sown his wild oats, bethought himself at length of taking a 
 wife, he found his character as a marrjdng man did not stand much higher 
 with prudent parents than probably did that of Eitter Blaubart, after his too 
 frequent conjugal bereavements. The pious and decorous parents of FrSulein 
 Von Putkammer were horrified at the announcement of such a suitor ; but the 
 Frilulein herself stood firm to her choice. It has never been said since that 
 the lady of ' Mad Bismarck ' has had to suffer anything similar or analogous 
 to what a French critic of Perrault has called ' les angoisses tfoj) meriths id 
 Madame BarhoVleii.^ 
 
BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 425 
 
 that sloven, I say, if we should ever come to a breach with 
 the King (which God forbid !), in such a case, I say, that 
 sloven will be the greatest man in England.' 
 
 When Otto Von Bismarck made his first appearance as 
 deputy from the Saxon Provincial Ritterschaft in the 
 Prussian United Diet, convoked under the (soon repealed) 
 provisions of the late well-meaning Frederick William IV.'s 
 patent .of February 1847, he presented the aspect of a man 
 of powerful build of some three or four and thirty, thick 
 head of hair short-cropped, ruddy and healthy countenance, 
 bright eyes rather prominent — afleur de tete,, as the FreUch 
 say — and strong reddish beard. The new speaker stood bolt 
 upright, looked his audience in the face for a moment, and 
 then, addressed them in a plain, unadorned, and occasionally' 
 hesitating manner, with a sharp and not exactly agreeable 
 accent :■ — ' I feel myself constrained to contradict what has 
 so often been asserted, as well in this assembly as out of 
 doors, whenever the popular claims for a constitution have 
 come under discussion — viz. that the national movement of 
 1813 was made for that object, or from any other motive 
 than to deliver our country from the disgrace of a foreign 
 yoke.' 
 
 As might be anticipated, these few words of truth, 
 delivered against an assumption as unfounded in historical 
 fact as unnecessary to the practical objects of rational 
 reformers, raised a storm of indignation in the impatient 
 Liberal majority of that day against the unlucky Deputy of 
 the Saxon Provincial Ritterschaft. Amidst the hubbub of 
 articulate and inarticulate protests which saluted the new 
 and unpractised speaker, if anyone had asked, after the 
 fashion of Lord Digby, ' Who is that stammerer?' would there 
 have been a voice found to answer, as the story goes Hamp- 
 den did for Cromwell, ' That stammerer, who hath no orna- 
 ment in his speech- — if it ever comes in the course of events 
 (which God forbid !) to cementthefutureunity of Fatherland 
 by " blood and iron "■ — that stammerer will be the foremost 
 political personage in Prussia, in Germany, in Europe !' 
 
 Von Bismarck's first speech in the United Diet of 1847 
 
426 BJSMABCK, PEUSSIA, AND PAK-TEUTONISM. 
 
 struck the keynote of all his subsequent utterances in the 
 Second Prussian Chamber, under the revolutionary and 
 counter-revolutionary order of things which followed in rapid 
 succession the Berlin emeute of March 1848, to which the 
 weakness of Frederick "William IV. gave for the time all the 
 effects of a revolution. A military retreat before a metro- 
 politan populace made the days of March memorable — a 
 military rally in the face of the same populace reversed the 
 situation by TsTovember. After the dissolution of the Chambers 
 elected under the immediate effect of the events of March, 
 and the issue of the odroyee constitution of December, Von 
 Bismarck was elected as deputy for West Havelland to the 
 new Second Chamber. 
 
 The offer of the German Imperial Crown to Prussia by the 
 Frankfort Assembly which had substituted itself, by the 
 grace of the people, for the old Diet of the Confederation in 
 the Revolution year 1848, and the alternative propositions 
 for German union which found a mouthpiece in Von Eado- 
 witz, were strenuously combated by Vofl Bismarck with all 
 the determined outspokenness of his Prussian ' Junker- 
 Politik.' But there were hints in his language that he, too, 
 had in petto an alternative policy, which might possibly take 
 a substantive shape at some future day, when arguments 
 more cogent than parliamentary rhetoric should be available 
 to support it : — 
 
 ' I deny,' he said, ' that there exists anywhere among the Prussian 
 people any felt need for national regeneration after the Frankfort 
 pattern. Much has been said here about Frederick the Great ; and 
 his poHcy has even been identified with these projects for German 
 union. I am rather disposed to believe that Frederick the Great 
 would have addressed himself, in these cu-cumstances, to the distinc- 
 tive characteristic of Prussian nationality — to the warlike element 
 which forms so marked a character of it — and would have addressed 
 that character not without effect. He would have known that, in 
 these days, as in those of our fathers, the trumpet-sound summoning 
 Prussians under the banner of the Lord of their Land had not lost 
 its charm for their ears, whether the cause contended for be the de- 
 fence of our frontiers or the power and glory of Prussia. He would 
 have felt that he had the choice either of allying himself with our 
 
BISMAECK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 427 
 
 old comrade Austria, for the annihilation of the common enemy, 
 Revoltition, or of singly dictating to Germany what should he her 
 future constitution, at the rish of having to throw his sword into the 
 scale. Either of these courses might have furnished a national poUcy 
 for Prussia. Either in union with Austria or acting singly for her- 
 self, such a policy would have placed Prussia in the right position/or 
 helping Germany to that power which belongs to her hi Europe.' 
 
 Bismarck's evening solace, in his years of independent 
 me mbersliip, after days engrossed with, politics in the 
 Chamber, was — beer and tobacco. His first Boswellian 
 biographer, in ' The Book of Count Bismarck,' who chronicles 
 small beer not less punctually (as becomes a good German) 
 than greater matters, tells us that towards evening Bismarck 
 was wont to resort to Schwartz's beer-bouse, at the corner 
 of the Triedrich's and Leipziger Strassen, in Berlin — a house 
 which was then the chief rendezvous of the Conservative 
 party. At that establishment the ' little dog and all ' was 
 Conservative, and never failed to bark at any Democratic 
 intruder. One evening, however, either ' Spitz ' was off duty 
 or Bismarck had strayed into a less Conservative beer-house. 
 He had no sooner taken his seat than somebody at a neigh- 
 bouring table permitted himself to say something very 
 disparaging about some member of the royal family. Bis- 
 marck thereupon reared himself up to his full height and 
 thundered at the offender — ' Out of the room with you ! If 
 you are not out before I have drunk this glass out, I will 
 break it on your pate.' An angry tumult arose upon this 
 apostrophe, such as was wont to arise upon Bismarck's daily 
 Derhheiten in the Second Chamber. He went on, however, 
 quietly drinking his beer, and, when he had finished it, was 
 as good as his word in shying the beer-glass at the offender's 
 head. Deep silence ensued, and Bismarck called to the 
 waiter, as if nothing had happened, ' Kellner, what's to pay 
 for the broken glass?' The coup de verre had succeeded, 
 and the voice of the room was unanimous in a verdict of 
 ' Served right.' ' 
 
 ' Another, and it must be assumed authentic, version of the incident above 
 elated is given in Dr. Busoh's Graf Sismarcli und seine Leute during the 
 
428 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 ' Les liommes se prennertt par la douceur,' says the French 
 proverb. Such as above narrated — and it is not a solitary 
 trait — -were ihe douceurs by which Bismarck disarmed 
 opponeuts ' in his hot youth,' if that description is applicable 
 to a man between thirty and forty. Such traits almost 
 justify Mr. Grant Duff's remark, that 'the ground-tone of 
 Bismarck's character is v^pis.'^ A story less violent, but 
 not less characteristic, is told of him on arriving at Frank- 
 fort in 1861, to exercise his first political function under 
 his present imperial and royal master, namely, that of 
 Prussian representative at the Diet of the since dissolved 
 German Confederation. In that capacity Bismarck visited 
 the Austrian President of the Diet, Count Thun. The Count, 
 a '■vornelimer Cavalier,' with a sufBcient sense of his own 
 superior rank, received the representative of Prussia with 
 scant ceremony, went on smoking his cigar standing, and 
 did not ask his visitor to sit down. The new envoy showed 
 himself — as at all times — equal to the occasion, drew out his 
 cigar-case, and said with unruffled ease, 'May I ask your 
 Excellency for a light?' His Excellency was considerably 
 taken aback — imhochsten Grade verblufft — but gave Bismarck 
 his light. The latter smoked his cigar, took his seat with- 
 otit ceremony, and opene4 the conversation. 
 
 campaign in iTrance. ' May I ask yonr Escellency,' said his second Boswell 
 in the course of conversation, ' whether there is any truth in the story of the 
 beer-gla5s which you broke on somebody's head because he spoke ill of the 
 Queen, or would not pledge her health with you ? ' The great man replied 
 that such an incident had indeed occurred, but there had been no political 
 ingredient in it. A tipsy medical student had sought to fasten a quarrel on 
 Eitter Bismarck, simply because the latter sat quietly drinking his beer, and 
 would take no notice of his noise. He ended by coming up to Bismarck's 
 table, and threatening to throw his glass of beer in his face. Thereupon the 
 Hitter hit him such a blow with his fist as sent him to the wall, broke his 
 beer-glass, and loosened some of his teeth into the bargain. The hostess 
 coming up, Bismarck told her he would pay for the damage — i.e. the damage 
 to her property — and called the company to witness that he had acted solely 
 on the defensive. Being 'ganz verntinftige Leute,' they took the Eitter's part 
 against their tipsy comrade. Meeting two of them afterwards at the Bran- 
 denbm-g Gate, they told him the noisy student's teeth were all right again, 
 and he was only apprehensive lest the affair should be talked of, and come to 
 the ears of his authorities. 
 
 ' SIikHl's ill Eiirojxan Politics, p. 235. 
 
BISMAECK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 429 
 
 It niaj not be an uninstructipe subject of consideration 
 for Englishmen — why it was that, from the close of the 
 Revolution year, 1848, Prussian polities took a course' so 
 different from that which our own constitutional history has 
 led us to think the normal one. The organisation of the 
 army, due to Frederick William I. and Frederick II., had 
 begirt the throne with a military aristocracy founded on a 
 landed basis, and which has not been taken off that basis by 
 the modern reforms of the system. This has preserved that 
 species of modern feudalism in the Prussian army which 
 regards the obligation of loyalty to the Crown as paramount 
 to that of allegiance to any paper or parliamentary constitu- 
 tion. And the course of events has cut out work for the 
 army, the successful performance of which has finally justi- 
 fied, even in the eyes of Prussian popular politicians, the 
 stubborn adherence of the King and his Minister Bismarck 
 to their measures for increasing its strength, taken in direct 
 defiance of decided parliamentary majorities from 1862 to 
 1866. Count Bismarck has been sometimes compared to 
 Strafford ; and his position, during the first four years of his 
 ministry, towards the Prussian Second Chamber, was not 
 very dissimilar to that of the chosen Minister of Charles I. 
 The difference was, that the Prussian Strafford had for his 
 master a steady single-minded soldier, and that he was able 
 to achieve, as the first result of his policy, an ascendancy of 
 Prussia in G-ermany, to the exclusion of Austria, at which 
 every true Prussian had aspired as a consummation devoutly 
 to be wished. Now the ends of Strafford had been as much 
 abhorred as his means by the antagonists of Popery and pre- 
 rogative, who carried all before them in the Long Parlia- 
 ment ; and whereas, in England, Parliament was thus 
 predestined to success in its struggle with the Crown, in 
 Prussia the Crown was predestined to success in its struggle 
 with Parliament, because in the latter case that struggle 
 was finally seen by all parties to have had for its object what 
 had long been the object of Prussian popular ambition — 
 an ambition, it may be added, which was the natural o£f- 
 spring of the very conditions of Prussian national existence. 
 
430 BISMAECK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 ' Prussia,' wrote a Hanoverian statesman about the begin- 
 ning of the present century,' 'is not a country which 
 possesses an army, but an army which possesses a country.' 
 ' The Prussian G-overnment,' says a French writer, M. 
 Cherbuliez, ' sets its Chambers at defiance, because in Prussia 
 there is nothing really solid in the shape of institutions but 
 the administration u,nd the army.' In a pamphlet recently 
 published, ascribed to one of the leaders of the old Prussian 
 Conservative party. Von Gerlach,^ it is observed, 'The soul 
 of Prussia is Prussian royalty, and that royalty is essentially 
 military and feudal. The events of 1866 have proved that 
 there was nothing really popular amongst us but the King 
 and the army.' 
 
 In the interesting correspondence lately published between 
 Strauss and Renan, in which each asserts the cause of his 
 country with ardour so well tempered as to make us think 
 they both originally mistook their vocation in devoting them- 
 selves to polemics instead of politics. Dr. Strauss, after con- 
 fessing that, with his South German compatriots generally, 
 he is by no means particularly fond of the Prussians, goes 
 on, nevertheless, to ascribe to them political and military 
 points of superiority which render Prussian leadership, un- 
 popular as it is, still indispensable to Germany. 
 
 ' One thing,' he says, ' must be conceded to the North German — 
 to the Prussian especially — he is superior to the South German as a 
 political animal. This superiority he o w^es partly to the nature of his 
 country, -which, poor in natural resources, compels to labour rather 
 than allures to enjoyment, partly to his history — a history of hard 
 schooling under princes of stern energy — but above all to the general 
 obligation to military service. 
 
 ' This obligation renders the State, and the duty owing to the 
 State, ever present to the minds of every class of the population. 
 Every son growing up, every year bringing round the regular 
 season of military exercises, reminds every family in the most 
 direct manner of the State, and not only of the duty owing to the 
 State, but the honour of belonging to it. The war of 1866 had 
 already given our South Germans much to think of ; the present war, 
 it is to be hoped, will complete the maturing of their judgments. 
 
 ' Rehberg. ^ Deutsohland am A^enja/w; 1870. 
 
BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 481 
 
 They must see that, if they have lent their arms to the struggle, the 
 Prussians have found the head for it. They must feel that, with all 
 their goodwill and good heart, with all their vigour and manhood, 
 they could yet have achieved nothing against the French. An ex- 
 tended State system, exclusively put together of South German ele- 
 ments, might indeed form a full-fed and full-juiced but a puffy and 
 unwieldy body. While, on the other hand, elements exclusively 
 North German would go to the maldng of a firm and athletic but a 
 spare and dry one. Prussia will contribute to our future German 
 State her strong bones and stiff muscles, which South Germany will 
 fill and round with her richer flesh and blood. And now imagine, if 
 you can, that the one without detriment could dispense with the other 
 — doubt, if you dare, that both are destined to develop in union to a 
 full-grown State and nation ! ' 
 
 ' When two men ride on one horse,' says the proverb, ' one 
 must ride behind.' So long as Prussia remained content to 
 ride behind Austria in the old German Confederation, as she 
 had remained content to do throughout the whole period of 
 the ascendancy of the policy of immobility of the late Prince 
 Metternich, peace was preserved between the two great 
 Powers of Germany.' So soon as Prussia resolved (or Von 
 Bismarck resolved for her) not to ride behind, so soon war in 
 
 ' Sir Alexander Malet, in his instructive volume on Th£ Overthrow of the 
 Germanie Confederation in 1866, has the following observations on Bismarck's 
 earlier politics : — 
 
 ' There is little doubt that the earliest aspirations of M. de Bismarck, when 
 chosen by his Sovereign to represent Prussia in the Diet, were limited to 
 establishing parity between the two great German courts, and that he would 
 have been well satisfied with alternation in the presidency of the Diet, and 
 such a division of influence in the Confederation as that nominal equality 
 would have carried with it. When, however, the Prussian statesman found 
 that Austria would abate no iota of her pretensions, and that her influence in 
 the Diet was generally preponderant ; when, further, his clear insight into 
 the future saw only one mode of attaining his ends, and that the destinies his 
 patriotism conceived for his own country could no otherwise be accomplished 
 than by the humiliation of her rival, he at once threw himself into the task 
 with all the energy of his nature. M. de Bismarck's whole soul glowed with 
 the passionate resolve to expel Austria from Germany. It was not in his 
 nature to hesitate as to means ; and neither moral nor material obstacles 
 diverted him from his object. In fact, he entered on the contest unencum- 
 bered by scruples of any kind. To raise Prussia to the political status which 
 he thought his country ought to hold was his religion. He entered the path 
 of action with the fervour of a Mahomet enforcing a rival faith, and, like 
 Mahomet, succeeded.' 
 
432 BISMARCK, PEUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 Germany, whicli might be termed civil war, became imminent, 
 and Von Bismarck had long not obscurely indicated that he 
 should be prepared to face it. It may be regarded as due to 
 that daring Minister's temper and character that the situa- 
 tion, when it had become strained beyond pacific arbitra- 
 ment, was at once seen and accepted, and the quarrel was 
 fought out ' mit Blut und Eism ' — to borrow his own expres- 
 sion. But the seeds of that quarrel had been sowing for 
 centuries — ever since, in fact, the days of the Great Elector ; 
 and even if war between Austria and Prussia had been 
 avoided in 1866, situations strained to the very verge of war 
 would have recurred again and again, till the two rival 
 forces would have met at last in armed conflict, as they did 
 in that year, to decide which of the two should constitute 
 the armed force of Germany for all time within present 
 human prevision. 
 
 That dualism of power and influence in Germany which 
 has apparently come to an end, had formed the main source 
 of the whole recent action of Austria and Prussia in German 
 politics, from the abortive Austrian attempt at a new scheme 
 of Confederation in 1863, to the formation (excluding 
 Austria) of the North German Confederation of 1866. The 
 intervening episode of Prussian and Austrian participation 
 in the ' Federal execution ' on Denmark in 1864, was 
 prompted on both sides by the same motive of rivalry, no idea 
 of German right or European interest having anything to do 
 with it. This was abundantly proved, as regarded the suc- 
 cessful partner in that operation, by Prussia at last resting 
 her title to the territory wrung by treaty from Denmark on 
 the transfer of the Danish title to that territory ; whereas 
 the ' Schleswig-Holstein ' war had been commenced on the 
 German popular plea that Denmark had no title to hold, nor 
 therefore to cede that territory. What the astute Prussian 
 Minister himself had thought at a previous period of the 
 German popular plea for the repeated raids on Denmark, had 
 been expressed by him sixteen years before, in a speech he 
 made in 1848 in the character of an independent member of 
 the Prussian Second Chamiber, when he stigmatised the first 
 
BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 433 
 
 armed attack on Holstein, in that year, as ' a most unjust, 
 frivolous, and pernicious enterprise, undertaken to support a 
 revolution without legitimate motive.' In 1852 Von Bismarck 
 accepted from the late King of Denmark the Grand Cross 
 of the Order of the Dannebrog, conferred in recognition of 
 his activity in the pacification of the Danish duchies. At 
 that latter epoch, Von Bismarck was acting as the repre- 
 sentative of Prussia at the Frankfort Diet. To do him 
 justice, he has never pretended any special sympathy with the 
 popular pretexts on which the last invasion of Denmark was 
 perpetrated. He struck into it on the part of Prussia to 
 take it out of the hands of the Middle States and Austria ; 
 to get possession of the oyster, and leave the other claimants 
 the shells. Why Austria made herself also an accomplice in 
 the Danish raid, can only be explained on the motive assigned 
 with little of decent reserve by her own diplomatists. For- 
 sooth Austria could not afford to forfeit her share of German 
 popularity, by refusing to lead the march of the minor 
 German States, on the much besung ' Schleswig- Holstein ! ' 
 And, above all, she felt herself as usual ' bound ' (in American 
 phrase) to prevent Prussia from acquiring an accession of 
 territory — which Prussia has acquired in spite of her. 
 
 When Austria appealed to the vote of the Frankfort Diet, 
 to frustrate the aforesaid purpose of Prussian acquisition of 
 Danish territory, Prussia, under Count Bismarck's Govern- 
 ment, at once treated that vote as a casus helli, seceded from 
 the Confederation, and made her short and decisive campaign 
 of Sadowa. And thus the old Austro-Prussian dualism came 
 to its tragic termination. 
 
 As Austria would not accept Prussian hegemony in 
 Germany, so France would not accept German ascendancy in 
 Europe without an appeal to the God of Battles. We speak 
 of France as France was lately represented, not only by the 
 Imperial Government, but by the parliamentary and extra- 
 parliamentary organs of popular opposition. 
 
 Five years back few would have singled out Count Bis- 
 marck as the Sphinx destined to devour an empire that could 
 not read his riddle. Napoleon III. had hitherto been the 
 
 F P 
 
434 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 great propounder of enigmas in recent European politics. 
 Everyone was attent to hearken to that which Louis the 
 Silent thought fit to utter at rare intervals. 'He thinks 
 reticence is his talent,' Count Bismarck is reported to have 
 said in 1865 to a Spanish retired statesman, sojourning, like 
 himself at Biarritz. The reverse of reticence certainly is the 
 talent of the North German Chancellor. To know distinctly 
 what he is driving at, and to drive straight at it, when cir- 
 cumstances appear favourable, is a main element of his power 
 — a species of straightforwardness not by any means exclud- 
 ing simulation or dissimulation, as there may be occasion for 
 either, but decidedly excluding all superfluous subtleties 
 and aimless irresolutions. The main object which Count 
 Bismarck's policy has effected had been the main object of 
 German popular aspirations for a whole generation. That 
 object is unity of national organisation and national force. 
 The Prussian Minister's past successes and present ascend- 
 ancy are chiefly owing to the clearness with which his eight 
 years' embassy to Frankfort led him to discern that object, 
 and the boldness and decision for which his accession to 
 power gave scope in pursuing it. Quand on sait ce qu'on 
 veut, et qu'on le veut vite et Men,' says a French historian,' 
 ' on I'obtient toujours ' — always with the proviso that what one 
 wills shall lie' in the direction of the natural course of events, 
 and shall take due account of the nature of men and things. 
 Von Bismarck had soon surmounted as a speaker the 
 stammering hesitation of his first parliamentary appearances ; 
 but he never acquired that even, uninterrupted flow of words 
 which generally indicates no high pressure of thought or 
 passion forcing its way to utterance. In the marshalling of 
 his topics there is not much parade of parliamentary logic — 
 still less much display, smelling of the lamp, of parliamentary 
 rhetoric. What is chiefly perceptible in Von Bismarck's 
 speeches, from first to last, is the speaker's ever-present sense 
 of the logic of the situation. It was this which sustained 
 him during his foiir years' struggle with parliamentary ma- 
 jorities — it was this which he probably succeeded in convey- 
 
 ' Mignet. 
 
BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTOJSISM. 435 
 
 ing some sympathetic sense of, even to those majorities. 
 ' When the King's Government,' he said on one occasion 
 (the refusal of a vote of 6,000 thalers by the Chamber of 
 Deputies to defray the charge of a military envoy at St. 
 Petersburg) ' shows itself obstinate apparently for a trifle, in 
 an exceptional case of this kind, you may be assured that, 
 after mature examination, and following the dictates of its 
 duty, it could not do otherwise than maintain this post, and 
 refuse to consent to its suppression.' On another occasion 
 (the discussion of the affairs of the Danish Duchies) Yon Bis- 
 marck told the Chamber — ' For the last year and a half, if we 
 could have openly declared the object at which we were aim- 
 ing, I believe, gentlemen, you would not have met us with 
 so much opposition. ... If you were better initiated in the 
 technical part of diplomatic affairs, it would not happen to 
 you to put such pressure upon us as to reduce the Ministry 
 to the alternative either of seeming by its silence to admit 
 the justice of your censures, or, in refuting them, of express- 
 ing openly what, for political reasons, were better left to be 
 understood.' 
 
 In the first period of Yon Bismarck's Ministry, during 
 whieb he represented what might be called His Majesty's 
 Opposition to his Second Chamber, he stood upon his un- 
 doubting and determined confidence in the tenableness of 
 his position as the King's Minister — no matter against what 
 majority of the popular Chamber. If that Chamber would 
 not pass the military budget — why, they were only one power 
 out of three whose concurrence was required for its passing, 
 and thus there was no more reason why the Crown and the 
 Upper House should give way to the Second Chamber, than 
 that the latter should come to some terms of compromise 
 with the two other co-ordinate powers. If the President of 
 the Chamber took upon him to call the King's Minister to 
 order, the King's Minister refused to recognise the Pre- 
 sident's right to do so. It is an edifying example of German 
 phlegm and German longanimity, that this strained state of 
 relations between the legislative and executive powers could 
 go on for four years without terminating in some more 
 
 F r 2 
 
436 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 violent situation or total rupture. ' All the Talents ' in the 
 Lower Chamber were firing away as incessantly at the King's 
 Minister as the Paris forts have been doing lately at the 
 Prussian positions, and the Minister was opposing an im- 
 perturbable front to all their verbal artillery, and telling 
 them with cutting conciseness, and often happy humour, 
 leurs verites in return. After the conflict had terminated, in 
 consequence of the events of 1866, in the sort of compromise 
 which he had declared throughout could be its only possible 
 termination, we find Count Bismarct, in the newly-convoked 
 ' Reichstag ' of the JSTorth German Confederation, in 1867, 
 quietly replying as follows to an old antagonist in the Prussian 
 Chamber (Duncker) who again met him in the new arena 
 with the old topics ' : 
 
 Since the last speaker has expressed a certain degree of surprise 
 that I should have spent perhaps the best years of my public life in 
 combating the parliamentary right of discussing the budget, I will 
 just remind him t'nat it may not be quite certain that the army which 
 gained last year's battles, would have possessed the organisation by 
 which it gained them, if, in the autumn of the year 1862 (the date of 
 Von Bismarck's accession to power), no one had been found ready to 
 undertake the conduct of affairs according to His Majesty's orders, and 
 putting aside the resolution passed by the Chamber of Deputies on 
 the 23rd September of that year (viz. the vote which rejected — a vote 
 repeated and disregarded for four years in succession — the miUtary 
 budget brought forward and adhered to by his Majesty's Govern- 
 ment). 
 
 Prussia possesses three Parliaments and one Bismarck ; 
 and the one Bismarck has hitherto been more than a match 
 for the three Parliaments. Whether coercing or creating 
 Parliaments — ignoring all constitutional control by those 
 existing, or inaugurating universal suffrage for those newly 
 called into existence, Count Bismarck's eight years' ad- 
 
 ' There is a story told, charaoteristic of Count Bismarck's shrewd humour, 
 on occasion of the first meeting of the newly-constituted North German Diet. 
 The British Ambassador at Berlin having expressed some surprise to him that 
 there should be so many ' Particularists ' in that Assembly, Count Bismarck's 
 answer was, — ' Oh, you don't know the Germans : if every German had money 
 enough, every German would keep a particular King all to himself.' 
 
BISMABCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 437 
 
 ministration of Prussia militant is something unprecedented 
 in history. One governing principle may be traced through- 
 out his conduct of affairs — the principle of repudiating Parlia- 
 mentarism as a master while using it as an instrument. In 
 carrying out that principle |?er /as aut nefas, through evil or 
 good report, he may be said to have boldly staked his life, 
 and to have barely saved it. Not to mention the five revolver 
 shots of young Blind, delivered Unter den Linden on the eve 
 of Count Bismarck's war upon Austria in 1866; not to 
 mention the grave risk of parliamentary impeachment, and 
 its possible consequences, if his Austrian war had turned out 
 a failure instead of a triumph,' the successive sessions of the 
 three Prussian Parliaments nearly killed him in 1868. The 
 ' Prussian Landtag,' which had opened in the previous 
 November, closed on February 23 ; the North-German 
 ' Reichstag ' opened on March 23 ; and, shortly after, the 
 ' Zoll Parliament.' By June the overtasked Minister- 
 President was fairly thrown on his back, and lay for months 
 at his country house at Varzin, like Chatham at Hayes, 
 unable to talk to anyone on business or to open a letter. 
 The ' Book of Bismarck ' places on record his obstinate 
 nervous sleeplessness, against which his admirers and sym- 
 pathisers amongst the public sent him all sorts of specifics. 
 Amongst others, an old soldier advised him to smoke daily a 
 pound of Porto Eico tobacco. Bismarck in reply presented 
 the hrave with a pipe and sundry pounds of the kindly 
 prescribed narcotic, requesting him to have the obligingness 
 to smoke it for him. The shaken nerves of the all-powerful 
 Minister, whose unsparing sayings and doings had shaken 
 the nerves of so many parliamentary Liberals, may in some 
 sort be regarded as the Nemesis of Parliamentarism. 
 
 Edgar Quinet, the veteran and very honest apostle of ' the 
 principles of 1789,' wrote in his ' Allemagne et Ttalie,' at a 
 date so far back as October 1831 : — 
 
 ' Bismarck's first Boswellian chronicler, Mr. George Hesekiel, reports him 
 to have often said among friends — ' There are circumstances in which death 
 on the scaffold is as honourable as death on the battle-field.' ' I can Sgnre to 
 myself worse modes of death than capital execution.' 
 
438 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 This [German] race is ranging itself under the dictatorsHp of a 
 people not more enlightened than its other populations, but more 
 acquisitive, more ardent, more exacting, more versed in affairs. To 
 the charge of that people it confides its ambitions, its rancours, its 
 rapines, its ruses, its diplomacy, its violence, its glory, its external 
 force and aggrandisement — reserving to itself the honest and obscuie 
 exercise of its internal liberties. Since the close of the Middle Ages 
 the force and initiative of the German States passes from Soutb to 
 North along with the whole movement of modem civilisation. It is 
 Prussia then that Northern Germany is beginning to make its instru- 
 ment of aggrandisement ? — Yes ! — and if let alone, North Germany 
 will push Prussia slowly forward to the murder of the old kingdom of 
 France. 
 
 Then follows a passage which has acquired portentous 
 import since the date at which it was written : — 
 
 Tn proportion as the Germanic system reconstitutes itself in its 
 interior, it exercises a powerful influence on the population of the 
 sam^e language and origin which had been detached from that system 
 by force in past ages. We must not disguise from ourselves that the 
 old wound of the treaty of Westphalia, and the cession of the provinces 
 of Alsace and Lorraine, still bleed at the heart of Germany, as the 
 treaties 0/ 1815 at the heart of France. That old wound, amongst a 
 people who ruminate so long over their recollections and aspirations, 
 is still traceable in all their ambitions and all their rancours which 
 date but of yesterday. It has long been a grievance of the popular 
 party in North Germany against the German governments that they 
 did not force back those provinces from France in 1815, and, in their 
 own phrase, did not hold the fox fast when they had him in their net. 
 What durst not be attempted in 1815 has since become a sort of fixed 
 idea of German national ambition. 
 
 It is only a short time ago that one of the great objects 
 of apprehension amongst all who amused themselves with 
 casting the horoscope of European futurity was Pan-Slavism. 
 In the future, as in the past, the empire of the air, and the 
 dominion of ideas, were assigned by comiaon consent to 
 Germany; and Pan-Teutonism rever occurred for a moment 
 as a word of menace of war and conquest to Europe. It 
 must be frankly owned, however, nobody ever took Prussia 
 for a realm of ideology, nor Count Bismarck for a dreamer 
 of dreams or seer of visions. What he sees and handles is 
 
BISMARCK, PEtTSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 439 
 
 men and things in the concrete ; he is no devotee of ' Geist,' 
 no professorial apostle of ' the Idea.' (lu onr younger days 
 it used to be called ' the Divine Idea ' — the ' Divine ' has 
 somehow dropped out of the vocabulary of later German 
 philosophism.) That Germany should dream dreams, and 
 Prussia lend her military strength and skill to realise them, 
 was a combination which only of late years presented itself 
 to prophetic forecast. Nothing could seem less substantial 
 in matter-of-fact foundation than the ' Schleswig-Holstein ' 
 enthusiasm of six or seven years back in Germany. Nothing 
 could have been used more dexterously as the stepping-stone 
 to substantial Prussian aggrandisement. Nothing can now 
 seem wilder than the Pan-Teutonic readings of European 
 history since Charlemagne, with which the German pro- 
 fessorial-political press is at this moment teeming. But if 
 these readings find faith with the youth of Germany, the 
 rank and file are thus found for armies ready to place 
 themselves under Prussia's command for future wars of 
 conquest. 
 
 The French fixed idea of ' natural boundaries ' is fairly 
 transcended in extravagance by the notions now zealously 
 disseminated in Germany of what is termed German nation- 
 ality, as the only legitimate basis of dominion for the future, 
 wherever any vestige of that nationality is extant. The 
 most comprehensive and complete form in which we have 
 met with the German claims to something like universal 
 dominion founded on these notions, is in a pamphlet entitled 
 " Unsere Grenzen,' by Wolfgang Menzel. We give prece- 
 dence of notice to this publication because it made its 
 appearance before the war of 1870, and also because it lays 
 a basis broad enough to support whatever rights of conquest 
 and dominion Pan-Teutonism can ever have to assert over 
 the mixed and mongrel races which, according to the author, 
 and all his Pan-Teutonic followers in the German press, have 
 coirupted and degraded their blood and language by Latin, 
 Celtic, or Sclavonic admixtures. Herr Wolfgang Menzel, 
 then — a popular periodical Polyhistor, much read fpr many 
 years by Ffahlhurger and Philistines in all parts of Germany 
 
440 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 — proclaims modem Germany the legitimate inheritrix of 
 the right of conquest made good by ancient Germany over 
 the enervated and corrupted Roman Empire. All those 
 races which have mixed their blood and enriched their 
 language with the surviving populations and traditions of 
 the antique culture and civilisation — just in proportion as 
 they have drawn from other fountains than ' the pure well 
 of German undefiled ' — are themselves defiled and corrupted, 
 and unworthy of empire in Europe. The modern English 
 language, the modern French race, have alike been cor- 
 rupted by such admixtures. It might perhaps be worth 
 asking Herr Wolfgang Menzel if he is quite certain whether 
 Norman energy may not have made on the whole, in 
 England, a mixture rather vigorous than otherwise with 
 Saxon solidity — whether Prussia herself may not partly owe 
 her ascendancy over the purer German races to the fact that 
 the Prussian border people, warlike from age to age, is not 
 pure German? 
 
 What we have ventured to designate as the Pan-Teutonic 
 creed widely preached throughout Germany may be shortly 
 summarised as follows : — Whatever portions of Europe are 
 inhabited by populations sprung from the same stock as the 
 great German nation, especially if they ever acknowledged 
 any sort of allegiance to the never compact and now long 
 defunct so-styled Holy Roman Empire, are to be regarded 
 without exception as wrongfully wrenched from German 
 dominion ; and it is a question of time only, and policy, when 
 Germany is to claim them back again. The more successful 
 the graft of any scion of the old German stock on any other 
 non-German national body, the more complete, the assimila- 
 tion to such other body of the population of any province 
 which, at any period since the days of Charlemagne, owed 
 allegiance (however indifferently paid) to the Holy Roman 
 Empire, or the more triumphantly, throughout a long course 
 of ages, any such province may have vindicated an indepen- 
 dent national existence for itself — the more heavy the arrear 
 of wrong demanding reparation to the aggrieved German 
 Fatherland— the more guilty all accessaries to the protracted 
 
BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 441 
 
 degradation and corruption wliich must have been undergone 
 by any race wbicli has been made to cease to be German ; 
 nay, worse, to become something else. It does not seem 
 clear that England may not be called to account for having 
 suffered Norman to spoil the good work of Saxon invasion, 
 and the importation of ' Welsch ' idioms to adulterate the 
 purity of the language of the Nibelungen Lied. 
 
 But if the reconquest of England is adjourned indefinitely 
 by the moderation of Herr Wolfgang Menzel, that of German 
 Switzerland, Flemish Belgium, and Holland are regarded as 
 mere questions of time by the more impetuous mind of Dr. 
 Adolph Wagner, who writes since Sedan. Not that he would 
 resort, at present, to force of arms, to recover for Germany 
 these ' abtriinnige ' members of the much-mutilated Pan- 
 Teutonic body. All he would stipulate for immediately are 
 certain rectifications of frontier at the expense of Switzer- 
 land, Belgium, and perhaps Holland. But he tells the Swiss, 
 Flemings, and Hollanders alike, that they are a set of stupid 
 ' Particularists' for fancying they have any valid claims to 
 separate existence which can be opposed for a moment to 
 the paramount claim of the Mighty Mother of all Teutons, 
 to call them back at some future auspicious day under her 
 eagle wings. Swiss heroism is fabulous ; Swiss republicanism 
 takes saucy airs on itself, not to be tolerated in the neigh- 
 bourhood, now drawing closer, of the Prussian drill-sergeant. 
 Dutch nationality might, it is reluctantly admitted, have 
 had some excuse for asserting itself in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries against the Houses of Austria and 
 Bourbon, but can have no prospect of permanently asserting 
 itself now against the House of HohenzoUern. It is the 
 ' manifest destiny ' of great states to annex little ones in 
 their neighbourhood, especially if the latter have the mis- 
 fortune to be derivable by professorial antiquarian research 
 from a common race. If they object to absorption, that 
 only shows the more plainly their perverse ' Particularism,' 
 and makes it the more necessary that they should be 
 brought betimes for their good under the Prussian drill- 
 sergeant. 
 
 G G 
 
442 BISMARCK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 When we see Germany, to repeat tlie words of Edgar 
 Quinet, ' confiding to the charge of Prussia its ambitions, its 
 rancours, its rapines, its ruses, its diplomacy, its violence, its 
 glory, its external force and aggrandisement,' we are in- 
 voluntarily reminded of the horse in the fable ' who had 
 the whole range of a meadow to himself, but a stag coming 
 and damaging the pasture, the horse, anxious to have his 
 revenge, asked the man if he could not assist him in punishing 
 the stag. " Yes," said the man, " only let me get a bit in 
 your mouth, and get on your back, and I will fi.nd the 
 weapons." The horse agreed, the man mounted accordingly, 
 and the horse has been from that time forward the slave of 
 man.' 
 
 We leave the moral of the fable to the consideration of 
 the German ' Hengst ' or ' Horsa.' It is certain he has put 
 a man on his back, and run down the Gallic stag. Remains 
 the question — Having got the man on his back, when is he 
 likely to get him off again ? The future conquests of Pan- 
 Teutonism are no more to be made, than Count Bismarck 
 predicted the past were to be made, by parliamentary 
 speeches, but by ' blood and iron.' It is for the German 
 'Hengst' or 'Horsa' to bethink himself how much of the 
 blood may be his, how much of the iron may enter into his 
 own soul. 
 
 What is an Emperor? A personage at any rate as 
 different as possible from the former French doctrinaire 
 definition of a constitutional king^viz. a chief of the State 
 who reigns but does not govern. An emperor of the 
 Augustus-Csesar type was a disguised despot, who pretended 
 not to be what he was — what his honester uncle had openly 
 proclaimed himself (and was therefore assassinated) — viz. 
 perpetual Tmperator, in the city as well as the camp. An 
 emperor of the Charlemagne or Otho type was a Prankish or 
 German sovereign, who pretended (with papal consecration) 
 to be what he was not — a legitimate successor to the world 
 sovereignty of the Csesars, as the popes pretended to be heirs 
 (by forged testaments) to the Roman dominion of those 
 Csesars. An emperor of the modern Prussian type is a 
 
BISMARCK, PJRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM, 443 
 
 soldier-king, invited chiefly by three minor kings to call 
 himself emperor, because it would not have suited those 
 three minor kings, not yet ' improved out of existence,' to 
 bow down to him as a feudal or federal superior, under any 
 designation of less dignity than the newly-revived imperial 
 title. 
 
 Will the Prussian Empire be peace ? The future answer 
 to that question must depend on the degree in which the 
 general German character may have digestive vigour suffi- 
 cient to absorb and assimilate to itself the particular Prussian 
 character. While Prussian partisans have never been tired 
 of denouncing ' Particularism ' in all other quarters, Prussia 
 is herself the great exemplar of Particularism in German 
 history. To this very day her spokesmen Cannot celebrate 
 the unity of Germany without finishing off with a flourish of 
 trumpets on the exaltation of Prussia. At Longchamps her 
 soldiers acclaimed their new Emperor as Pmssia's King. 
 The question of the future is, whether the imperial title — 
 awarded with reluctant alacrity to this great Cuckoo in 
 Mother Germania's nest, by the fluttering councils of those 
 of the lesser nestlings which still keep their place in it be- 
 side that terribly mauvais coucheur — will permanently express 
 the military power and policy of Prussia, or whether that 
 domineering individuality military and political, may haply 
 by degrees merge and lose itself in the United Germany 
 of the future, whose natural development the friends of 
 European peace and progress would fain look forward to as 
 likely to be pacific rather than warlike. 
 
 We should be sorry to charge on Prussian policy now the 
 conscious intention of keeping open the hereditary' feud — 
 the Erbfeindschaft — with France, as the best guarantee for 
 the consolidation and aggrandisement of the Prussian mili- 
 tary system. But so long as France shall wince under the 
 enormous securities to keep the peace now exacted of her, 
 and so long as Germany shall retain possession of Metz as a 
 ' standing menace,' and conspicuous evidence of national 
 humiliation to France, so long may Prussia look forward to 
 the future with well-grounded confidence that it will cut out 
 
444 BISMAECK, PRUSSIA, AND PAN-TEUTONISM. 
 
 work for lier wliicli Germany can transfer to no other arms. 
 The progress of Prussia to empire has been throughout 
 military, and it would seem that no otherwise than in the 
 shape of undivided military command, to which national 
 necessities, in the future as in the past, shall secure 
 obedience, can she very long retain undisputed possession 
 of that imperial position which a good moiety of Germany, 
 with its ' Particularist ' sympathies and antipathies, would 
 otherwise refuse her. For our own part we have some 
 difficulty in conceiving by what other qualities Prussia can 
 retain empire than those by which she has gained it. 
 Assuredly, neither with rose-water nor Cologne water were 
 the immense displacements of power in Europe effected iia 
 favour of Prussia, which have been witnessed within the last 
 lustre of European history. Austria struck down — France 
 struck down — Prussia is perforce recognised in her achieved 
 supremacy. But is it possible to suppose the .military 
 aristocracy and their monarch — who have placed Prussia 
 where she stands — unconscious of the sustained efforts which 
 will be required to keep her at that pitch of pre-eminence ? 
 They are not going to step off the Prussian pedestal of their 
 present ascendancy j and that pedestal is cast from the 
 bronze of the captured cannon of every Power which has 
 thrust itself athwart Prussia in her path to empire. She 
 has fought her way up to the military command of Germany ; 
 and she well knows she cannot let the arms rust by which 
 that command was won. 
 
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INDEX. 
 
 Abbey &• Overton's English Church History 15 
 
 Abney's Photography 11 
 
 Acton's Modem Cookery. 21 
 
 Alpine Club Map of Switzerland 18 
 
 Guide (The) 18 
 
 Atnos's Jurisprudence ". 5 
 
 Primer of the Constitution S 
 
 Fifty Years of the English Con- 
 stitution 5 
 
 Anderson: s Strength of Materials it 
 
 .^>-fferfTOK/j Organic Chemistry 11 
 
 ^rao/ii'i (Dr.) Lectures onModem History 2 
 
 ■ Miscellaneous Works 7 
 
 Sermons 15 
 
 (T. ) English Literature 6 
 
 ' Authors 6 
 
 Amott's Elements of Physics 10 
 
 Atelier (The) du Lys 19 
 
 Atlierstone Priory 19 
 
 Autumn Holidays of a Country Parson ... 7 
 
 ^j're'j Treasury of Bible Knowledge 21 
 
 Bacon's Essays, by Whately 6 
 
 Life and Letters, by .S/fiifi/zwj' ... 5 
 
 Works 5 
 
 Bagehot's Biographical Studies 4 
 
 Economic Studies 21 
 
 Literary Studies 6 
 
 Bailey's Festus, a Poem 19 
 
 Bain's Mental and Moral Science 6 
 
 on the Senses and Intellect 6 
 
 Emotions and Will 6 
 
 Baker's Two Works on Ceylon 17 
 
 5a//'j Alpine Guides iS 
 
 Elements of Astronomy 11 
 
 Barry on Railway AppUances 11 
 
 Bauermnn'sMmQvslogj 10 
 
 Beaconsfield's (Lord) Novels and Tales 18 cS: 19 
 
 Becker's Charicles and Gallus 8 
 
 Beesly's Gracchi, Marius, and Sulla 3 
 
 Black's Treatise on Brewing 21 
 
 BlackUy's German-English Dictionary 8 
 
 iJtew'j Rural Sports 19 
 
 Bloxani s M.t.\sSs, 11 
 
 Bolland and Lan^s Aristotle's Pohtics 5 
 
 Boultbee on 39 Articles 15 
 
 -s History of the English Church... 15 
 
 Bourne's Works on the Steam Engine 14 
 
 Bowdler's Family Shakespeare 19 
 
 Bramley-Moore' s Six Sisters of the Valleys . 19 
 Brande's Dictionaryof Science, Literature, 
 
 and Art 12 
 
 Brassey on Shipbuilding 14 
 
 Brassey's Sunshine and Storm in the East . 17 
 
 Voyage of the 'Sunbeam' 17 
 
 Browne's Exposition of the 39 Articles ij 
 
 .8tok)k«z^j Modern England 3 
 
 Buckle's History of Civilisation 2 
 
 Buckion's Food and Home Cookery 21 
 
 Health in the House 13 
 
 Town and Window Gardening... 12 
 
 Bull's Hints to Mothers 21 
 
 Maternal Management of Children . 21 
 
 Bunsen's Angel-Messiah 16 
 
 Burgomaster's Family (The) 19 
 
 Buried Alive 18 
 
 Bttrkc's Vicissitudes of Families 4 
 
 Cabinet Lawyer,. 21 
 
 Ca/ej'i Age of the Antonines 3 
 
 Early Roman Empire 3 
 
 Carlyle's Reminiscences 4 
 
 Ca;'«j 'j Biographical Dictionary 4 
 
 Caj'/^y^ Iliad of Homer 19 
 
 Changed Aspects of Unchanged Truths ... 7 
 
 Chesney's Waterloo Campaign 2 
 
 Church's Beginning of the Middle Ages ... 3 
 
 Colenso on Moabite Stone &o 17 
 
 's Pentateuch and Book of Joshua. 17 
 
 Commonplace Philosopher 7 
 
 Comte's Positive Polity 5 
 
 Conder's Handbook to the Bible ..". 15 
 
 CoM^ei/c'j Politics of Aristotle 5 
 
 Conington's Translation of Virgil's .lEneid 19 
 
 Miscellaneous. Writings 6 
 
 Contanseau's Two French Dictionaries ... 8 
 
 Conybeare and Howson's St. Paul 16 
 
 Cordery's Struggle against Absolute Mon- 
 archy 3 
 
 Cotta on Rocks, by Lawrence 12 
 
 Counsel and Comfort from a City Pulpit... 7 
 
 Co;^' J (G. W.) Athenian Empire 3 
 
 ' Crusades 3 
 
 i Greeks and Persians 3 
 
 Creighton's Age of Elizabeth 3 
 
 England a Continental Power 3 
 
 Shilling History of England... 3 
 
 Tudors and the Reformation 3 
 
 Cresy's Encyclopaedia of Civil Engineering 13 
 
 Critical Essays of a Country Parson 7 
 
 Craoto'i Chemical Analysis 13 
 
 Culley's Handbook of Telegraphy 14 
 
 Curteis's Macedonian Empire 3 
 
 Davison's Thousand Thoughts 7 
 
 De Caisne and Le Maout' s 'Bota.-ay 12 
 
 De TocquevilU s Democracy in America... g 
 
 Dixon's Rural Bird Life 12 
 
 Doyle's [R.) Fairyland 13 
 
 ZJkh'j American Food and Farming 21 
 
 Eastlake's Foreign Picture Galleries 13 
 
 Hints on Plousehold Taste 14 
 
 Edwards on Ventilation &c 21 
 
 Edwards's Nile 17 
 
 £&'MWi Scriptiire Commentaries i5 
 
 Lectures on Life of Christ IS 
 
 Elsa and her Vulture 19 
 
 Epochs of Ancient History 3 
 
 English History 3 
 
 Modem History 3 
 
 Ewalds History of Israel 16 
 
 Antiquities of Israel i5 
 
 Fairbairn's Applications of Iron 14 
 
 Information for Engineers 14 
 
 Mills and Millwork 14 
 
 Farrar's Language and Languages 7 
 
 Francis's Fishing Book ig 
 
 Freeman's Historical Geography 2 
 
 Froude's Csesar 4 
 
 English in Ireland i 
 
 History of England i 
 
 Short Studies 6 
 
 Gairdner's Houses of Lancaster and York 3 
 
 Ganot's Elementary Physics 9 
 
 Natural Philosophy 9 
 
 Gardiner's Buckingham and Charles I. ... 2 
 Personal Government of Charles I. 2 
 
WORKS published by LONGMANS &• CO. 
 
 23 
 
 Gardiner's Puritan Resolution 3 
 
 Thirty Years' War 3 
 
 German Home Life 7 
 
 GiiwKj Cavalier's Note Booli 7 
 
 Goethe's Faust, by Birds 19 
 
 by Selss 19 
 
 by Webb 19 
 
 Goodeve's Mechanics 11 
 
 Mechanism 14 
 
 Gore's Electro-Metallurgy 11 
 
 Gospel (The) for the Nineteenth Century . 16 
 
 Grant's Ethics of Aristotle 6 
 
 Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson...... 7 
 
 GrsfjV/a'j Faiths and Fancies 6 
 
 Journal i 
 
 Griffin's Algebra and Trigonometry 11 
 
 Griffith's A B C of Philosophy S 
 
 Grpve on Correlation of Physical Forces... 10 
 
 Gwilt's Encyclopaedia of Architecture 14 
 
 .ffa/e'i Fall of the Stuarts 3 
 
 Hartwig's Works on Natural History and 
 
 Popular Science 11 
 
 Hassall's Climate of San Remo 17 
 
 Haughton's Physiol Geography 11 
 
 Hawthorne's Fairy Stories 18 
 
 //flyzejflrif'j Selected Essays 6 
 
 Heer's Primeval World of Switzerland 12 
 
 Helmholtz on Tone 10 
 
 Helmholtz' s Scientific Lectures 10 
 
 HerscheTs Outlines of Astronomy 9 
 
 Hillelrand's Lectures on German Thought 6 
 
 Hotson's Amateur Mechanic 14 
 
 //i7/>5z?zj'j Christ the Consoler 17 
 
 Horses and Roads 20 
 
 /Tw/So/ii'j Engineer's Valuing Assistant ... 14 
 
 HullaKs History of Modern Music 12 
 
 Transition Period 12 
 
 Hume's'Kssajs 6 
 
 Treatise on Human Nature 6 
 
 Ihne's Rome to its Capture by the Gauls... 3 
 
 History of Rome ". 2 
 
 Ingelow's Poems 19 
 
 Jamesons Sacred and Legendary Art 13 
 
 Memoirs by Macpherson 4 
 
 Jenkins Electricity and Magnetism 11 
 
 Jerrold's Life of Napoleon i 
 
 Johnsons Normans in Europe 3 
 
 Patentee's Manual 21 
 
 Johnston's Geographical Dictionary 8 
 
 "Jukes's Types of Genesis i5 
 
 ya/Sw on Second Death 16 
 
 jfa/zVcA'j Bible Studies 16 
 
 Commentary on the Bible 16 
 
 Path and Goal S 
 
 Keller's Xuske Dwellings of Switzerland.... 12 
 
 Kerls Metallurgy, by Crookes and Rohrig. 13 
 
 XzKgsetfs AlkahTrnde 13 
 
 Animal Chemistry 13 
 
 Knatchbull-Hugessen' s Fairy-Land 18 
 
 Higgledy-piggledy 18 
 
 Landscapes, Churches, &o 7 
 
 Latham's English Dictionaries 8 
 
 Handbook of English Language 8 
 
 Lecky's History of England i 
 
 European Morals 3 
 
 Rationalism 3 
 
 Leaders of Public Opinion 4 
 
 Z«'j Geologist's Note Book 12 
 
 Leisure Hours in Town 7 
 
 Leslie's Essays in Political and Moral 
 
 Philosophy 6 
 
 Lessons of Middle Age 7 
 
 iejjie/j History of Philosophy 3 
 
 i«K;2j on Authority 6 
 
 Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicons 8 
 
 Lindley and Moore's Treasury of Botany '... 20 
 
 Lloyd' s yi&ga&Wsm 10 
 
 Wave-Theory of Light 10 
 
 Longman's (F. W.) Chess Openings 21 
 
 Frederic the Great and 
 
 the Seven Years' War „ 3 
 
 German Dictionary ... 8 
 
 (W.) Edward the Third , 2 
 
 Lectures on History of England 2 
 
 Old and New St. Paul's 13 
 
 Loudon's Encyclopaedia of Agriculture ... 15 
 
 ^— Gardening 12 
 
 Plants 13 
 
 Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation 12 
 
 Ludlow's American War of Independence 3 
 
 Lyra Ger^ianica 17 
 
 Afcca/eVz'c/j Vertebrate Animals 11 
 
 Macaulay's (Lord) Essays i 
 
 History of England ... i 
 
 Lays, Illustrated Edits. 13 
 
 — ^— Cheap Edition... 19 
 
 Life and Letters 4 
 
 Miscellaneous Writings 7 
 
 Speeches »... 7 
 
 Works I 
 
 Writings, Selections from 7 
 
 MacCzcllagh'sTrAcis 10 
 
 McCulloch's Dictionary of Commerce 8 
 
 Macfarren on Musical Harmony 13 
 
 Macleod's Economical Philosophy 5 
 
 Economics for Beginners 21 
 
 Theory and Practice of Banking 21 
 
 Elements of Banking 21 
 
 Macnamara's Himalayan Districts of British 
 
 India 17 
 
 Mademoiselle Mori ig 
 
 Mahaffy's Classical Greek Literature 3 
 
 A/izrjy%OT(ZK'j Life of Havelock 4 
 
 Martineau's Christian Life 1 17 
 
 Hours of Thought 17 
 
 Hymns 17 
 
 Maunders Popular Treasuries 20 
 
 Maxwells Theory of Heat 11 
 
 Mays History of Democracy 2 
 
 History of England 2 
 
 Melville's (Whyte) Novels and Tales 19 
 
 Mendelssohn s Letters 4 
 
 Merivale's Fall of the Roman Republic ... 2 
 
 General History of Rome a 
 
 Roman Triumvirates .^. 3 
 
 Romans under the Empire 2 
 
 MerrifieMs Arithmetic and Mensuration... n 
 
 Miles on Horse's Foot and Horse Shoeing 20 
 
 on Horse's Teeth and Stables 20 
 
 Mill (J.) on the Mind S 
 
 Mills (J. S.) Autobiography 4 
 
 Dissertations & Discussions 5 
 
 Essays on Religion 15 
 
 Hamilton's Philosophy 5 
 
 --Liberty 5 
 
 Political Economy g 
 
 Representative Government s 
 
 Subjection of Women g 
 
 System of Logic 3 
 
 Unsettled Questions s 
 
 Utilitarianism 5 
 
 Miller's Elements of Chemistry 13 
 
24 
 
 WORKS published by LONGMANS &^ CO. 
 
 ^////^r' J Inorganic Chemistry ii 
 
 Wintering in the Riviera 17 
 
 Mills's Blues and Buffs 18 
 
 Minto (Lord) in India 2 
 
 Mitchells Manual of Assaying 15 
 
 Modern Novelist's Library 18 & 19 
 
 /I/otzc/J'j Logic 6 
 
 Monsells Spiritual Songs 17 
 
 Moore's Irish Melodies, Illustrated Edition 13 
 
 Lalla Rookh, Illustrated Edition.. 13 
 
 Morris' s Age of Anne 3 
 
 Mailer's Chips from a German Workshop. 7 
 
 Hibbert Lectures on Religion ... i5 
 
 Science of Language 7 
 
 Science of Religion 16 
 
 Selected Essays 7 
 
 Ne'isono'a.\h& Moon -. 9 
 
 A'efe/t'j Horses and Riding 20 
 
 Newmans Apologia pro Vita Su4 4 
 
 Nicols's Puzzle of Life 12 
 
 jVor/y^coZ/'j Lathes & Turning 14 
 
 Ormsby s Poem of the Cid 19 
 
 Overton's 'Life, &c. oi Law 4 
 
 Owen's Comparative Anatomy and Phy- 
 siology of Vertebrate Animals II 
 
 Ozuot'j Evenings with the Slieptics 7 
 
 Paye7i's Industrial Chemistry 14 
 
 Pewtner's Comprehensive Specifier 21 
 
 /'zW^i^V Art of Perfumery 15 
 
 Poles Gzxaeoi Whist 21 
 
 Powells Early England 3 
 
 Preece & Sivewright's Telegraphy 11 
 
 Present-Day Thoughts 7 
 
 /'rfJc/orV Astronomical Works 9 
 
 Scientific Essays (Two Series) ... 12 
 
 Public Schools Atlases 8 
 
 ^azfZ/wjo/z'j Ancient Egypt 3 
 
 Sassanians 3 
 
 Recreations of a Country Parson 7 
 
 lieynolds's Experimental Chemistry 12 
 
 .ffscA'j Dictionary of Antiquities 3 
 
 Kighy'i Letters from France, &c. in 1789... 18 
 
 ^z2/£?-j'j Orchard House 12 
 
 Rose Amateur's Guide 12 
 
 Rogers's Eclipse of Faith 15 
 
 ' Defence of Eclipse of Faith 15 
 
 Roget's English Thesaurus 8 
 
 Ronalds' Fly-Fisher's Entomology 20 
 
 i?02<;/«y,f Rise of the People 3 
 
 Settlement of the Constitution ... 3 
 
 Russia and England i 
 
 Before and After the War i 
 
 Pulley's Study of Rocks 11 
 
 Sandars's ]\i%t\m^.n'5 Institutes 5 
 
 *Sc«^(7y'j Sparta and Thebes 3 
 
 Savile on Apparitions 7 
 
 Seaside Musings 7 
 
 Scott's Farm Valuer 21 
 
 Rents and Purchases 21 
 
 Seeiohm's Oxford Reformers of 1498 2 
 
 Protestant Revolution 3 
 
 SewelVs History of France 2 
 
 Passing Thoughts on Religion ... i5 
 
 ■ Preparation for Communion 16 
 
 Private Devotions 16 
 
 Stories and Tales 18 
 
 Thoughts for the Age 16 
 
 Shelley's Workshop Appliances ii 
 
 ,S/w/-«'i Flight of the ' Lapwing ' 17 
 
 SAor^'j Church History 15 
 
 Skelton's Crookit Meg 18 
 
 Smith's (Sydney) Wit and Wisdom 7 
 
 (Dr. R. A.) Air and Rain g 
 
 (R. B.jCarthage&theCarthaginians 2 
 
 Rome and Carthage 3 
 
 (J.) Voyage and Shipwreck of 
 
 St. Paul 16 
 
 Southey's PoeticalWorks 19 
 
 Stanley's Familiar History of Birds it 
 
 5^^^/ on Diseases of the Ox 29 
 
 5<«//««'j Ecclesiastical Biography 4 ■' 
 
 Stonehenge, Dog and Greyhound 20 
 
 5/»Kg/ on Strains 14 
 
 5?aMyj Early Plantagenets 3 ■ 
 
 Sunday Afternoons, by A. K. H.B 7 
 
 Supernatural Religion 16 
 
 Swijibourne' s Picture Logic 6 
 
 Tancock's England during the Wars, 
 
 1778-1820 3 
 
 Taylor's History of India 2 
 
 Ancient and Modern History ... 4 
 
 (Jeremy) Works, edited by Eden 17 
 
 Text-Books of Science ir 
 
 Thomi's Botany 11 
 
 Thomson's Laws of Thought 6 
 
 Thorpe's Quantitative Analysis 11 
 
 Thorpe and Muir's Qualitative Analysis ... 11 
 
 Thudichuni s Annals of Chemical Medicine 13 
 
 Tilden's Chemical Philosophy 11 
 
 Practical Chemistry 12 
 
 Todd on Parliamentary Government 2 
 
 To::er's Armenia and Asia Minor 17 
 
 Trench's Realities of Irish Life 17 
 
 7';-etr/ra«'i Life of Fox 2 
 
 Trollofe's Warden and Barchester Towers 18 
 
 Twiss's Law of Nations S 
 
 Tyndalls (Professor) Scientific Works ... 10 
 
 Unawares 19 
 
 f/«TO/re'i Machine Design 11 
 
 Ures kx\s. Manufactures, and Mines 14 
 
 Venn's Life, \>y Knight 4 
 
 Ville on Artificial Manures 15 
 
 Walker on Whist 21 
 
 Walpok's History of England I 
 
 Warburtori s Edward the Third 3 
 
 H^ato«'j Geometery 11 
 
 Watts' s Dictionary of Chemistry 13 
 
 Webb's Celestial Objects 9 
 
 Civil War in Herefordshire 2 
 
 Veil of Isis 6 
 
 I'Fe&'j Sacred Palmlands 17 
 
 Wellington's Life, by Gleig 4 
 
 WAu^e/y'j English Synonymes 8 
 
 Logic 6 
 
 Rhetoric 6 
 
 Pf/ji'/e'j Four Gospels in Greek 16 
 
 and Riddle's Latin Dictionaries ... 8 
 
 Wz/wc^yj Sea-Fisherman 20 
 
 M/i//za»zj'j Aristotle's Ethics 5 
 
 Wilsons Resources of Modern Countries... 21 
 Wood's (J. G.) Popular Works on Natural 
 
 History 11 
 
 Woodward' s Qeo\o^ I2 
 
 Yonge's English-Greek Lexicons 8 
 
 Koaa^/ on the Dog and Horse 20 
 
 Zeller'sGreek Philosophy 3 
 
 Spottiswoode &' Co. Printers, Neiv-street Sij-itnrc, London.