lies over Danton's dead body;" and not utterances amid all the wild eloquence one of them had passed on. He repented, the Revolution produced. His curses are afterwards, of his conduct, and was, in fact, of the streets, not of Paris, but of Pandethe first martyr to a milder regime. Not monium; his blasphemies were sublime as one of his personal enemies perished in those heard in the trance of Sicilian seer, that massacre: hence the name "butcher" belched up from fallen giants through the applied to him is not correct. He did smoke of Etna, or like those which made not dabble in blood. He made but one the "burning marl" and the "fiery gulf" fierce and rapid irruption into the neigh-quake and recoil in fear. bourhood of the "Red Sea," and returned Such an extraordinary being was Dansick and shuddering therefrom. ton. There was no beauty about him, His person and his eloquence were in but there were the power and the dreadkeeping with his mind and character. We ful brilliance, the rapid rise and rapid subfigure him always after the pattern of sidence, of an Oriental tempest. Peace Bethlehem Gabor, as Godwin describes the peace of one of the monsters of the him his stature gigantic, his hair a dead Egyptian desert, calm-sitting and colossal, black, a face in which sagacity and fury amid long desolations and kindred forms struggle for the mastery-a voice of of vast and coarse sublimity-be to his thunder. His mere figure might have ashes! saved the utterance of his watchword- It is lamentable to contemplate the "We must put our enemies in fear." His fate of such a man. Newly married, face was itself a "Reign of Terror." His sobered into strength and wisdom, in the eloquence was not of the intellectual, nor prime of life, and with mildness settling of the rhetorical cast. It was not laboured down upon his character, like moonlight with care, nor moulded by art. It was the on the rugged features of the Sphinx, he full, gushing utterance of a mind seeing was snatched away. "One feels," says the real merits of the case in a glare of Scott of him, "as if the eagle had been vision, and announcing them in a tone of brought down by a 'mousing owl.'" absolute assurance. He did not indulge More melancholy still to find him dying in long arguments or elaborate declama-"game," as it is commonly called-that tions. His speeches were Cyclopean cries, is, without hope and without God in the at the sight of the truth breaking, like world-caracoling and exulting, as he the sun, on his mind. Each speech was plunged into the waters of what he a peroration. His imagination was fertile, deemed the bottomless and the endless rugged, and grand. Terrible truth was night; as if a spirit so strong as his could sheathed in terrible figure. Each thought die-as if a spirit so stained as his could leaped into light, like Minerva, armed escape the judgment-the judgment of with bristling imagery. Danton was a a God as just as he is merciful; but also true poet, and some of his sentences are blessed be his name!-as merciful as he the strongest and most characteristic | is just. VERGNIA U D. ELOQUENCE, like many other powers of city in the earth or sky. Genius is natus the human mind, lies often dormant and haud factus; but eloquence is often facta unsuspected, till it be elicited by circum- haud nata. Rouse ordinary men to the stances. The quantity of silent eloquence very highest pitch, and they never even awaiting deliverance in a nation, is only approach to the verge of genius, because to be calculated by those who can com- it is the unsearchable and subtle result pute the amount of undeveloped electri-of a combination of rare faculties with rare temperament; but any man, touched to Vergniaud, the most eloquent of the to the quick, may become, for a season, as "eloquent of France," the facile princeps eloquent as Demosthenes himself. The of the Girondins-that hapless party child, when struck to a certain measure who, with the best professions and the of brutality, utters screams and words, most brilliant parts (parts not powersand assumes attitudes, of high eloquence, the distinction is important, and so far and every sob of her little heart is an explains their defeat), committed an egre"Oration for the Crown." How eloquent gious and inexpiable mistake: they misthe pugilist, when his blood is up, and took their age and their work, and, as the full fury of the fray has kindled they did not discern their time, their around him, and made his very fists seem time revenged itself by trampling on inspired! What speeches have sometimes them as it went on its way. come from the gutter, where a drunk The most misplaced of this misplaced Irishman is leaving Curran far behind, in party was Vergniaud. But no more than the grotesque combinations of his mad- his party was he fitted, as some would dened fancy and the "strange oaths" of have it, for those Roman days to which his infuriated passions! And how many he and they incessantly reverted their dull men has the approach of death gaze. Sterner, stronger spirits were then stirred up into an almost superhuman required, as well as in the times of the tide of eloquence, as if both soul and French Revolution. The Girondins were tongue were conscious that their time but imitative and emasculate Romans at was short! Perhaps the most eloquent the best. Vergniaud would have been in words ever spoken by man were those of his element in the comparatively peaceJackson, the Irish rebel, who, having ful atmosphere of Britain. There, a swallowed poison ere his trial commenced, called his advocate to his side when the pleading was over, and gasped out, as he dropped down dead, in a whisper which was heard like thunder (using the language of Pierre, in "Venice Preserved"), "We have deceived the Senate." Charles Grant on a larger scale, he might have one-third of the day "sucked sugarcandy," the other third played with children, and in the evening either sat silent or poured out triumphant speeches, as he pleased. But in France, while he was playing at marbles, others were playing at human heads. His speeches were very brilliant; but they wanted the point which Robespierre's always had - the edge of the guillotine. And for want of that terrible finish, they were listened to, admired, but not obeyed. Upon this principle, we need not be surprised that revolutions, while developing much latent genius, have inspired far more of genuine eloquence. A collection, entitled the "Oratory of Revolutionists," would contain the noblest specimens of human eloquence. What the speeches "Slaves," says Cowper, "cannot breathe of Cicero, compared to those of Cataline in England." We may parody his words or Cethegus! What poor things, in mere thus, "Whigs cannot breathe in France." eloquence, the long elaborate orations of Britain has long been their element; but Pitt and Fox, to the electric words, the France demands either colder or hotter spoken signals, the sudden lightning spirits. That balancing of opinions, that strokes, to even the mere gestures, of avoidance of all extremes, that reverence Mirabeau and Danton! And has not for the past modified by respect for the the recent Italian revolution-quenched present, by the exercise of which party though it has been-roused one orator differences have been so frequently reconworthy of any age or country, Gavazzi ciled in this country, seem mere trifling the actual of Yendys' ideal and magnifi- or impertinence to the torrid revolutioncent "Monk," the tongue of Italy, just ary hearts in France, or even to those as Mazzini is its far-stretching and iron extreme royalist natures in her, of whom hand? we may say that the "ground burns frore, and frost performs the effect of fire." And Such remarks may fitly introduce us such a French Whig was Vergniaud: pos- | the gingerbread imitation of the Romans, sessed of an impetuous and ardent na- the factitious virtues, the elegant platiture, a fiery eloquence, and an impulsive tudes of language, and the affected refineintellect, all running in the narrow chan-ments of the saloons of the Girondins. nel of his party. In Britain, he would He smelt blood, with his large distended have been counted a "Whig, and some- nostril, amid all their apocryphal finery. thing more." In France, he was reckoned Had they succeeded, they might have Revolutionist, and something less;" gilded the guillotine, or substituted in other words, a weak Revolutionist some more classical apparatus of death; the most fatal and miserable of all forms but no other cement than blood could of weakness. A timid flash of lightning, they or would they have found for their a remorseful wave in an angry ocean, a power at that crisis. At this they aimed; drivelling coward among a gang of despe- but, while the Jacobins fought with bare radoes, a lame and limping wolf among rapiers, the Girondins fought with butthe herd descending from the Apennines toned foils; while the one party threw upon the snow-surrounded village-such away the scabbard, the other threw away are but figures for the idea of one who the sword. pauses, halts, stammers, and makes play, Vergniaud lives on account of the traamid the stern, earnest, and rushing rea-ditionary fame of his cloquence; his elolities of a revolution. quence itself can hardly be said to be alive. The Girondins were, we suspect, as a party, a set of fantastic fribbles, filled with a small fallacious thought, and without the unity or the force to impose even a shred of it upon the world. In the fine image of Grattan, "after the storm and tempest were over, they were the children of the village come forth to paddle in the streamlets." Barbaroux seems a brilliant coxcomb. Brissot was an unarmed and incapable ruffian, "who," said the dying Danton, "would have guillotined me as Robespierre will do." Condorcet was a clear-headed, cold-hearted, atheistic schemer. Roland was an able and honest prig. Louvet was a compound of sentiment and smut. The only three redeeming characters among the party were Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, and Vergniaud; and yet, sorry saints, in the British sense, any of these make, after all: being nothing else than an elegant intriguante, with a brave heart and a fine intellect within her, a beautiful maniac, and an orator among a thousand, without the gifts of common energy or common sense. "They sought," says Carlyle, "a republic of the virtues, and they found only one of the strengths." Danton thought otherwise, when he said, "they are all Brothers-Cain." His robust nature and Cyclopean eyesight made him recoil from The extracts which remain are, on the whole, diffuse and feeble. Even his famous prophecy, Ezekiel-like, of the fall of thrones, is tame in the perusal. What a contrast between his sonorous and linked harangues, and the single volcanic embers issuing from the mouth of Mirabeau or Danton, or even the nasal "I pronounce for doom," which constituted the general oratory of Robespierre! Vergniaud neither attained to the inspired monosyllables of the one, nor to the infernal croakings of the other. His speeches were, indeed, as powerful as mellifluous. It was a cataract of honey which poured from his lips. Their effect for the time was irresistible: like the songs in Pandemonium, they, for a season, suspended hell, and took with ravishment the thronging audience;" but it was only for a season. When the orator ceased to be seen and heard, his words ceased to be felt. Hence he was only able to pronounce the funeral oration of his party, not to give it any living or permanent place in the history of his country. He had the tongue, but he wanted the profound heart and the strong hand to be the deliverer of France. He broke at last, as breaks a wave of ocean-the most beautiful and eloquent of the deep, starred with spray, diffuse in volume upon a jagged rock, which silently receives, repels, and extinguishes know the great secret," is an incongruous the bright invader. The echoes of his conception. He must speak and sing, eloquence still linger, like ghosts amid laugh and speculate, upon the brink of the halls of history, but his name has the abyss. Might not, by the way, a long since faded into partial insignificance, panoramic view of national deathbeds, and, in comparison with his manlier and and how they are met and spread, tell us stronger foes, has not even the sound something about national character, and which that of Eschines now bears beside about things more important far? that of Demosthenes. He fell, and being the weaker, he could not but have fallen in the death-and-life struggle. Having been compelled, shortly but severely, to express our notion of Vergniaud and his abortive party, we are not, at the same time, disposed to part with either in anger. They did their best; they did their no work in an elegant and artistic manner; and now, like the Gracchi of ancient Rome, they are honourable, more for what they were reputed to be, than for what they effected. Let the hymn of the "Marseillaise," which the Girondists sung at the foot of the scaffold, in ghastly gradation, waxing feebler and fainter, till it died away in one dying throat, be their everlasting remembrancer and requiem. The account of his and the other Girondists' last night in prison is pronounced by Carlyle "not edifying." And yet, as with all last scenes, noble elements are mingled with it. They sing "tumultuous songs;" they frame strange, satiric dialogues between the devil and his living representatives; they discourse gravely about the happiness of the peoples; they talk, too, in wild and whirling words, of the immortality of the soul, and the scenes so near, beyond the guillotine and the grave. Vergniaud, like Hannibal, had Such an act of music! Conceive it secreted poison, but as it is not enough well! The yet living chant there—the for his friends as well as himself, there- chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samfore "to the dogs-he'll none of it." son's axe is rapid; one head per minute, His eloquence, too, bursts out, like an or little less. The chorus is worn out. expiring flame, into glorious bravuras. If Farewell, for evermore, ye Girondins! not edifying, surely this was one of the Te Deum! Fauchet has become silent; most interesting of scenes. Who can or Valaze's dead head is lopped; the sickle dare reproduce it to us in words? Where of the guillotine has reaped the Girondins now the North capable of this "Noctes?" all away-the eloquent, the young, the We think Carlyle himself might, twenty beautiful, and brave! O Death, what years ago, have given it us, in a rough feast is toward in thy ghastly halls?" and rapid manner. As it is, "for ever undescribed let it remain." kr "Such," says Carlyle, was the end of Girondism. They arose to regenerate France, these men, and have accom It was intensely French. They never die like the wolf described by Macaulay-plished this. Alas! whatever quarrel we "Which dies in silence biting hard, Among the dying hounds.' They must go out either in splendour or in stench, but both must be palpable and ostentatious. A Vergniaud, quiet, serene, meditative, lost in contemplation of the realities before him, or even saying, quietly, like Thistlewood to Ings, "We shall soon So had with them, has not their cruel fate NAPOLEON. bellous—of the dramas, novels, tales, and poems-in which he has figured, in primary or in partial display. Surely the man who has borne such discussion, endured such abuse, sustained such panegyric, and who remains an object of curiosity, wonder, and inquiry still, must have been the most extraordinary production of modern days. He must have united profundity and brilliance, splendour and solidity, qualities creating fear and love, and been such a compound of the demigod and the demon, the wise king and the tyrant, as the earth never saw before, nor is ever likely to behold again. A VERY interesting book were a history | Channing, in the name of the freedom of of the histories of Napoleon-a criticism the western world, has impeached him on the criticisms written about him-a before high Heaven-Emerson has anasketch of his sketchers! He, who at one tomised him, with keenest lancet, and period of his life had the monarchs and calmly reported the result-Carlyle has ambassadors of Europe waiting in his proclaimed him the "Hero of Tools"antechamber, has enjoyed since a levee, and, to single out two from a crowd, larger still, of the authors, orators, and Thiers and Alison have told his history poets of the world. Who has not tried with minute and careful attention, as his hand at painting the marvellous well as with glowing ardour of admiramannikin of Corsica-nature's pride and tion. Time would fail us, besides, to shame-France's glory and ruin-who speak of the memoirs, favourable or liwas arrested and flung back, when he was just vaulting into the saddle of universal dominion? What eminent author has not written either on the pros or the cons of this prodigy of modern men? To name only a few: Horsley has tried on him the broad and powerful edge of his invective Hall has assailed him with his more refined and polished indignation -Foster has held up his rugged iron hands in wonder at him-Byron has bent before him his proud knee, and become the laureate of his exile Hazlitt has fought his cause with as much zeal and courage as if he had belonged to his Old Guard-Coleridge has woven his meta- This, indeed, is the peculiarity of Naphysic mazes about and about him poleon. He was profound, as well as Wordsworth has sung of him, in grave, brilliantly successful. Unlike most consolemn, and deprecatory verse-Southey querors, his mind was big with a great has, both in prose and rhyme, directed thought, which was never fully developed. against him his dignified resentment- He was not raised, as many have stupidly Scott has pictured him in Don Roderick, thought, upon the breath of popular triand written nine volumes on his history umph. It was not "chance that made -Brougham, Jeffrey, and Lockhart, have him king," or that crowned him, or that united in fascinated admiration or fine- won his battles. He was a cumulative spun analysis of his genius Charles conqueror. Every victory, every peace, Philips has set his character in his most every law, every movement, was the step brilliant antithesis, and surrounded his of a giant stair, winding upward toward picture with his most sounding common-universal dominion. All was systematic. places-Croly has dashed off his life with All was full of purpose. All was growhis usual energy and speed-Wilson has ingly progressive. No rest was possible. let out his admiration in many a glorious He might have noonday breathing-times, gush of eloquence-the late B. Syminons has written on him some strains the world must not let die (his "Napoleon Sleeping" is in the highest style of art, and on Napoleon, or aught that was his, he could not choose but write nobly) - - but there was no nightly repose. "Onwards" was the voice ever sounding behind him: nor was this the voice of his nation, ever insatiate for novelty and conquest; nor was it the mere "Give, give" of his restless ambition; it was the voice |