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human observer is able to take almost a similar point of view. He has this, too, in his favor. The lives of revolutionists, as well as of robbers, are generally short; their names are written laconically and in blood-their characters are intensified, and sharply defined by death-their footsteps are the few but forcible stamps of desperate courage and recklessness; and the artist, if at all competent for the task of depiction, is helped by the terrible unity and concentration of his subject. If, besides, he be fond of "searching dark bosoms," where are to be found darker bosoms than those of revolutionists ?—if he loves rock scenery, what rock like the Tarpeian, toppling over its Dead Sea ?-if he loves to botanize among the daring flowers of virtue, which border the giddiest precipices of guilt, let him come hither-if he wishes to brace his nerves and strengthen his eyesight, and test his faith by sights and sounds of woe, here is his field-if he wishes to be read, and to send down a thrill from his red-margined page into the future, let him write worthily of revolutionists. The "History of Cataline's Conspiracy" has survived less from its intrinsic merit, than because it records the history and fate of one who aspired to be a revolutionist on a large scale, although he succeeded only in becoming the broken bust of one.

One motive in the present series is somewhat different from any we have now stated. We formerly drew portraits of God's selected and inspired men. To bring out, by contrast, the color and tone of these, we are tempted now to draw faithfully, yet charitably, the likenesses of some generally supposed to be the Devil's selected and inspired men. Nor are we indifferent, at the same time, to the moral purposes which such painting, and the contrast implied in it, may serve.

We begin with Mirabeau, the first-born of the French Revolution-a revolution in himself. In any age and country, Mirabeau must have been an extraordinary man. We may wish-the more because we wish in vain-that he had lived in an age of religious faith, when the solar centre of the idea of a God might have harmonized and subdued his cometary powHad he lived in the time of the Reformation, he had been either a Huguenot of the Huguenots, or a fiercer Guise; but, thrown on an age and a country of rampant denial and licentiousness, he must deny and be lewd on a colossal scale,

ers.

He was not, we must remark, of that highest order of minds whose individualism, approaching the infinite, stands alone in whatever age, and which rejects or selects influences according to its pleasure. Mirabeau belonged to that class whose mission is to exaggerate with effect the tendency and spirit of their nation and period, and thus to precipitate either their sublimation or their reductio ad absurdum. In him the French beheld all their own peculiarities, passions, and powers magnified into magnificent caricature, even as they had seen them exhibited on a miniature scale in Voltaire; and hence their intoxicated admiration, and their wild sorrow at his death. When he fell, it was as the fall of the statue on the summit of their national column.

Some of Mirabeau's admirers speak of him as if he were something better than a French idol-as if he partook of a universal character as if a certain fire of inspiration burned within him, classing him with Burns, and elevating him far above Burke. We cannot, we must confess, see any such stamp of universality on his brow, or rod of divination in his hand. Of all Frenchmen (and he was hardly one,) Rousseau alone appears to us to have so risen out of French influences as to have caught on his wings an unearthly fire, not indeed streaming down from heaven, but streaming up from hell. His was a Pythonic frenzy. He spake to the ear of humanity falsely often, but earnestly and powerfully always. His dress might be that of a harlequin, but his bosom was that of a man fanatically in earnest. He was the most sincere man France ever reared. To a pitch of prophetic fury, Mirabeau neither rose by nature like Rosseau, nor, like Burke, was stung by circumstances. He could at all times manage his thunderbolts with consummate dexterity, could husband his enthusiasm, and never allowed himself to be carried away all-powerful in his very helplessness upon the torrent he had stirred. He had genius hung up on the armory of his mind, and could upon occasion take down the bright weapon and dye it in blood; but genius never had him like a spear in its blind and awful

grasp.

Which quality of the Frenchman was wanting in Mirabeau? The versatility, levity, brilliance, instability, irritability, volubility, the enthusiasm of moments, the coldness of years, the

immorality, now springing from tempestuous passions, and now from the cool conclusions of atheism, the intuitive understanding, the declamatory force of the genuine Gaul, were all found in him, but all expanded into extraordinary dimensions through the combustion of his bosom, and all pointed by the romantic circumstances of his story. His originality, like Byron's, lay principally in that wild dark blood which had run down through generations of semi-maniacs, till in him it was connected with talents as wondrous as it was hot.

Mirabeau, as the basis of his intellectual character, possessed intuitive sagacity, and sharp common sense. He was "all eye." His very arm outstretched, and finger up-pointed, seemed to see. No gesture, no motion of such a man, is blind or insignificant. His very silence is full of meaning; his looks are as winged as the words of others. Mirabeau's insight was sharpened by experience, by calamity, by vice, by the very despair which had once been the tenant of his bosom. "The glance of melancholy is a fearful gift." Add the intellect of a fallen demi-god to the savage irritation of a flayed wild beast, and the result shall be the exasperated and hideous penetration of a Mirabeau. The rasping recollections of his persecuted childhood and wandering youth, the smouldering ashes of his hundred amours, the "sweltered venom" collected in his long years of captivity, along with his uncertain prospects and unsettled principles, had not only hardened his heart, but had given an unnatural stimulus to his understanding, which united the coherence of sanity with the cunning, power, and fury of madness. This wondrously endowed and frightfully soured nature was by the Revolution-its incidents, adventures, and characters-supplied with an abundance of food sure to turn to poison the moment it was swallowed, and to nourish into keener activity his perverted powers.

To counterbalance this strongly-stimulated, self-confident, and defiant intellect, there was little or no moral sense. Whether, as we have heard it alleged of certain characters, omitted in his composition, or burned out of him by the combined fires of cruelty on the part of his father, and excess on his own, we cannot say, but it did become microscopically small. Indeed, it seems to us to have been a most merciful arrangement for Mirabeau's fame, that he died before the revo

lutionary panic had come to its height. In all probability, he would have acted the sanguinary tyrant on a larger scale than any of the terrorists; for France had come to such an apoplectic crisis, that blood must relieve her. All that was wanted was a hand unprincipled and daring enough to apply the lancet. Who bolder and more unprincipled than Mirabeau ? And who had passed through such an indurating and imbittering process? Possessed of a thousand wrongs, steeled by atheism, drained of humanity, he had undoubtedly more wisdom, culture, and self-command, than his brother revolutionists, and would have been a butcher of genius, and scattered about his blood (as Virgil is said to do his dung in the Georgics) more elegantly and gracefully than they. But in him, too, slumbered the savage cruelty of a Marat, and in certain circumstances he would have been equally unscrupulous and unsparing.

Mirabeau's imagination has been lavishly panegyrised. It does not, we think, so far as we have been able to judge from the specimens we have seen, appear to have been very copious or creative. Its figures were striking and electrical in effect rather than poetical; they were always bold, but never beautiful, and seldom, though sometimes, reached the sublime. The grandest of them will be familiar to our readers: "When the last of the Gracchi expired, be flung dust towards heaven, and from this dust sprung Marius! Marius, less great for having exterminated the Cimbri, than for having prostrated in Rome the power of the nobility." A little imagination goes a far way in a Frenchman. Edmund Burke has in almost every page of his "Regicide Peace," ten images as bold and magnificent as this, not to speak of his subtle trains of thinking which underlie, or of those epic swells of sustained splendor, which Mirabeau could not have equalled in madness, in dreams, or in death.

The oratory of Mirabeau seems to have been the most imposing of his powers. Manageable and well managed as a consummate race-horse, it was fiery and impetuous as a lion from the swelling of Jordan. In the commencement of his speeches, he often hesitated and stammered; it was the fret of the torrent upon the rock, ere it rushes into its bed of wrath and power; but once launched, "torrents less rapid and less

rash." His face as of a "tiger in small-pox"-his eye blazing with the three-fold light of pride, passion, and genius-his fiery gesticulation-his voice of thunder-the strong points of war he blew ever and anon-the strong intellect, which was the solid basis below the sounding foam-all united to render his eloquence irresistible. His audiences felt, that next to the power of a great good man, inspired by patriotism, genius, and virtue, was that of a great bad man, overflowing with the Furies, and addressing Pandemonium in its own Pandemonian speech. Even the dictates and diction of mildness, sense, and mercy, as they issued from such lips, had an odd and yet awful effect. It was, indeed, greatly the gigantic but unludicrous oddity of the man that enchanted France. Having come from prison to reign, smelling of the rank odors of dungeons, with nameless and shadowy crimes darkening the air around him, with infamous books of his composition, seen by the mind's eye dangling from his side, there he stood, rending up old institutions, thundering against kings, and deciding on the fate of millions. What figure more terribly telling and piquant could even France desire? Monster-loving she had ever been, but no such magnificent monster had ever before sprung from her soil, or roared in her senate-house. Voltaire had been an ape of wondrous gifts; but here was a Creature from beyond chaos come to bellow over her for a season, and unable and afraid to laugh, she was compelled to adore.

As an orator, few form fit subjects for comparison with Mirabeau, because few have triumphed over multitudes in spite of, nay, by means of, the infamy of their character, added to the force of their genius. Fox is no full parallel. He was dissipated, but his name never went through Europe like an evil odor, nor did he ever wield the condensed and Jove-like power of Mirabeau. He was one-and not the brightest-of a constellation: the Frenchman walked his lurid heaven alone. Sheridan was a dexterous juggler, playing a petty personal game with boy-bowls; Mirabeau trundled cannon-balls along the quaking ground. Sheridan was common-place in his vices; Mirabeau burst the limits of nature in search of pleasure, and then sat down to innoculate mankind, through his pen, with the monstrous venom. As the twitch of Brougham's nose is to the tiger face of the Frenchman, so the eccentricity of the

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