MIRABEAU. NOTHING is more remarkable in the long period of the French Revolution, than its dearth of eminent men. It abounded in able men in all ranks of the state-the whole race, marshalled under the general name of talent. But the Revolution exhibited but two men of genius, and but one of those was a Frenchman. Napoleon, the Corsican, threw a light round him that extinguished all the contemporary lustres of military France. Mirabeau, the Frenchman, equally threw all its civil names into obscurity. It is remarkable, too, that each equally owed a large portion of his triumphs to his dissimilitude from the national character. Napoleon was, in all things, Italian. No man was more remote from the passionate impetuosity, and wild caprice of the Frenchman. He had an impetuosity and wildness of his own, but he had the subtlety and the steadiness, that alone can combine them into the materials of assured success. His silence, his reserve, and his resentments, were all Italian. He loved the ostentation of power, but he loved the power itself more. His vanity was keen, but it was never suffered to resist his interests. would not have thrown away upon fireworks and feux-de-joie, a single grain of the gunpowder that he could expend upon blasting his highway through the barriers of Europe. secret of impressing the hearts of nations. Till then, France had but rhetoricians, and those the rhetoricians of the pulpit. Panegyrized as they are, we look in vain, in the Massillons, Bourdaloes, and Bossuets, for the diviner mind of oratory. We find extravagant appeals, violent contortions of language, florid figure; the false taste of the Court, blazoned by the frigid imaginations of the cloister. Yet all is not failure. We find occasional bursts of vivid thought flashing through the clouds of an overcharged and obscure phraseology; and the shape of human nature is sometimes seen under all the pomps and vanities of the harangue made for the glory of the King and his courtiers. But Mirabeau first gave the example of that powerful instrumentality by which the great orator masters the mind at once. He had the signal advantage over all his predecessors, that he had real business to do; his language had the reality of business; its general tone was clear, firm, and forcible; a powerful stream of thought flowing onward without winding round its object, but driving all obstacles before it by its volume. He But there were times when all the passion of his bitter and inflammable heart kindled; and the stream was suddenly turned into fire. He was then no longer the ancient orator, with his grace and gravity,-nor the Englishman, with his strong simplicity and force of nature, nor even the Frenchman, with his eccentric vividness, and glittering declamation. He had the intenseness, the keenness, and unhappily the malignity of a fiend. And his motives were worthy of his power of evil. Like all the worshippers of faction, he had been a hypocrite from the beginning. No man hated the rabble more; yet no man panegyrized them with more lavish adulation. No man cherished every prejudice of noble birth more; yet his whole profession of faith was a strenuous scorn of nobility. If he had a feeling of ancient reverence in his soul, it was for the throne; yet his was the first hand, among the circle of conspirators, that struck the dagger Mirabeau was cast in another mould. He, too, had the impetuosity and the wildness, but they were at once chastised and strengthened by his new adoption of character. At a period when youth, misfortune, and passion had awakened all that was susceptible in his fierce nature, he was driven to England. His mind was in a state of fusion. It instantly took the shape into which it was thrown. Retaining the early fire, and the early ambition, it reappeared in France with the resolute, composed, and stern physiognomy of the land of freedom. An orator by nature, he had returned from the only school of manly oratory in the world, and had learned from the immortal men of that day the true into the heart of the monarchy, and flung it bleeding at the foot of the statue of Jacobinism. His oratory was the great instrument by which this singular ascendency was achie ved. It had no rival and no successor in France. Surrounded as he was from the beginning of his career by a multitude of able and accomplished minds, all equally emulous of his distinctions, and all struggling to rise by the same appeals to popular passion, all not merely fell short of his influence, but shewed themselves unable to wield his weapons. The eloquence of the Girondists was the eloquence of the schools, contrast ed with the daring and concentration of Mirabeau; theirs were the lightning and thunders of the stage; all could distinguish them from the true flash and peal, the true birth of the tempest of the mind. Happier in one instance than Napoleon, he died in the fulness of his fame; he was not left to dig his own grave, and see his renown buried in it, before it closed over his corpse. Happier still, if it be true, that in his last hours, he reviewed his triumphs with human regret, and determined to make the restoration of the throne the price of his repentance. But he was denied so glorious a conclusion to a life stained by habitual error. There was to be no serene and evening splendour for a day of such perpetual cloud and whirlwind. poleon died, after the final failure of a project for the tyranny of all nations, the condensation of all power in his person, and the ruin of all liberty among mankind;-a project, for the vastness of its ambition, and the depth of its selfishness, worthy less of a mortal than of the prince of the power of the air. He perished, and his work followed him. He was broken by a blow which sent his empire rolling in fragments over his head. He fell from his throne, "like the lightning falling from heaven;" -the only figure that could express his height, his splendour, and his malignity. The last hours of Mirabeau were on the field of the great battle for monarchy, and he died with the lamentations of a chieftain who finds himself mortally wounded in the heat of the conflict, and finds life ebbing from him drop by drop, while the battle is still raging, which Na he had hoped to decide, and which his fall gives over to the enemy. The lives of both those great spirits of the Revolution are still to be written; but it must not be for fifty years to come. We must wait until their monuments are freed, by the natural course of time, from all the temporary memorials raised round them to insignificant parties and men, by vanity or friendship, or that fraud upon history which gives fame to the creatures of popular clamour. It may be still longer before they are written; for they must find a kindred genius, and one not merely kindred, but initiated in the same career. No man but a warrior can write the history of Napoleon; no man but a statesman can write the history of Mirabeau; and none but a mind of the highest penetration into human motives, of the keenes, sensibility to all the impulses that stir powerful natures, and capable of all their triumphs, and perhaps of all their errors, can do historic justice to either. Genius alone can mould that perfect stamp and identity of character, which alone deserves a place in the gallery of the illustrious dead, and compels every passer-by to exclaim, This was the man! The simple outline of Mirabeau's career shews how broad a field is open in his biography. He was the descendant of a line in which opposition to the existing order of things seems to have been hereditary. His ancestors, the Riquetti family, had fled, or were exiled, from Florence, in the fourteenth century. They settled in the south of France, then much connected with Italy and Italian politics. His father, Victor Riquetti, Marquis de Mirabeau, distinguished himself, about the middle of the last century, by his adoption of the theories of the Economistes, his adherence to the reveries of the ingenious and visionary Quesnay, to whom France owed so much real mischief, and the world so much baseless speculation, and pushed his zeal to the hazardous extent of assailing the Ministry in a work on taxation, of which the result was an imprisonment in the Bastile. He died, on the eve of seeing the consummation of all his fantasies; in the memorable year 1789, the first of the Revolution. His more famous son, Honore Gabriel Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, was born in 1749. Like all the nobles of France, he commenced his career in the army, and served in Corsica. But no man was less made for the routine of a regimental life; he soon grew weary of the service; and seized, probably, with the rage for a philosophical life, and the French fashionable vanity of imitating Cicero in his Tusculum, or Cincinnatus at his plough, he withdrew, to labour in the cultivation of his fields in the Limousin. But the conversation of the sages of the farm-yard was found to leave a blank, which could be filled up only by a return to the world. He flew to Paris, fell in love, and, though remarkably unprepossessing in his exterior, captivated an heiress, one of the handsomest women of the Court. He now plunged into dissipation; and foremost in all things, outshone Paris, and in less than three years was a bankrupt. His extravagance now proceeded so far towards final ruin, that his father, adopting a parental privilege, common in the families of the nobles, yet strangely adverse to his own theories, applied for an order for his exile from Paris, which ended in a lettre de cachet to confine him in one of the royal castles. After successive transfers from fortress to fortress, he was suffered to go at large in Franche Comté; where he signalized his liberty by carrying off the wife of the President of the Parliament of Besançon, and fled with her to Holland. Justice was now let loose upon him, he was convicted par contumace, and sentenced to lose his head in effigy. The French power was too influential on the Continent to be safely defied even in Holland, and Mirabeau and his Sophie pre pared to escape from Amsterdam to that New World which, once the refuge of the saints, has since opened its expansive hospitality to so many of the sinners of Europe. He was arrested on the eve of his flight, and imprisoned from 1777 to 1780 in the Castle of Vincennes. He came to London in 1784. At this period the public mind of France was agitated by the rebel opinions of the soldiery who had returned from America, by the debates in the British Legislature, and by the violent struggles of the French Provincial Parliaments against the royal prerogative. Mirabeau felt that his time was come. The career which neither the army, nor philosophy, nor dissipation, had opened to his natural powers, was open in faction, and he instantly took his side. The nobles of Provence, scandalized by his life, and justly suspecting his political tendencies, had refused to return him as a deputy to the StatesGeneral. But a resolution like his, equally regardless of its means, and fixed in its determination, was not to be thus baffled. What he could not accomplish as a noble, he accomplished as a roturier. To the astonishment and indignation of his order, he opened a linen-draper's shop, and by virtue of his trade was returned for the Commons of Aix. Once in the National Assembly, his course was inevitable. In the midst of all that France boasted of intelligence, he suddenly assumed the highest rank, and his supremacy was scarcely ap proached, to the last never shaken. If France shall ever erect a pillar to the Revolution, its base should be the tomb of Mirabeau. It was by him that the famed and fatal decree was carried, which produced the coalition of the Nobles and Clergy with the Commons, thus throwing the whole Government into the hands of faction. By him was pronounced the memorable answer to the King's command for the dissolution of the Assembly-an answer which, by denying the royal right, virtually abolished the monarchy. In all the perilous revolutionary tactique of the time, he was the acknowledged leader; and he supported his rank by a succession of the most powerful speeches ever heard under the roof of a French Assembly. It has been asserted that the materials of those distinguished efforts were supplied by others, and the late publications of Dumont seem to point out some of those sources. But what is the history of all the great labours of public men? That the ruder work is done by others; but, to give order, dignity, and beauty to the pile, is the work of the master-mind. As well might the slaves who quarried the stones of the Acropolis, assume to themselves the perennial glory of the architecture. As well might the grinder of Michael Angelo's colours vindicate to himself the immortality of the Sistine Chapel. The true question in all cases of mental preeminence is, not the means, but the result; not by what levying and equipment of the troops the battle was gained, but the extent of the victory. Of all talents, the talent most distinctive of great men, is this faculty of absorbing the thoughts, studies, and labours of others into their own, till they give them a new essence and power; not a new shape, but a new nature; and send forth the feeble, the various, the contradictory, and the inapplicable, condensed and assimilated into force, singleness, and utility. This was the work of the mind to which Dumont, and the crowd of men like Dumont, administered; the powerful, intellectual alembic which sublimated all their various infusion, and out of the dross and compound, forced upwards a spirit, fit alike to invigorate or madden nations. During Mirabeau's residence in England, he had corresponded largely with his friends in France; and bis letters contain the irrefragable evidence, that no Frenchman can ever comprehend English habits, principles, or feelings. One reason for this singular anomaly is, that no Frenchman is ever satisfied with seeing things as they are. He always adds or diminishes, he always labours to find theatrical effect, he always scorns the light of day, and desires to see life through the glare of the stage lamps. Thus, even the strong understanding of Mirabeau imputed to the whole English nation a character of profound melancholy, which he branches instantly into all the conduits of national action; to their melancholy he imputes their virtue, their vice, their force of thought, their eccentricity, their patriotism, their venality, their wealth, their poverty, their patience, their suicide, their every thing. Their religion is the grand source of their melancholy, because it does not give them shows, festivals, pictures in the churches, embroidery on the priests' garments, and forbids plays and balls on Sunday evenings; religion in the mind of the foreigner being, of course, nothing more than an established puppet-show. The English Sunday is "dull beyond all bearing," because the shops are shut, the troops are not reviewed, the public gardens are not especially lighted up, and all the playhouses are not flourishing with all their trumpets for that night above all others. The Frenchman comprehending nothing of the grateful feeling of a day's rest after a week's labour,-of the necessity of having a period of tranquillity for the mind to look to higher concerns than the mere toil and traffic of the world,of the real pleasure of gathering the domestic circle in peace, and the duty of rendering some portion of gratitude and duty to the actual and only source of happiness and security. But all these are nothing without the pleasure of gazing on the shop-windows on the seventh day, which we have been gazing on for the six days before. The walk into the country is triste, for no Frenchman ever walks further than the coffee-house; and the gentle social evening round the fireside is more intolerable still, for no Frenchman ever has any other fireside than the stove in the billiard-room, or any other society but the card-party, or the pit in the theatre. Even on the question of national melancholy, we may fairly doubt whether the Frenchman is not much the more melancholy personage of the two,-for which is the more melancholy, the man who, when alone, can forget his loneliness in some vigorous employment of his mind, or the man who cannot endure his own company for five minutes together; the man who, in this vigorous tension of the intellect, can absolutely do without the external world, or the man who, when left to himself, dies of ennui, is miserable the moment he feels dependent on his own thoughts, and flies to every trivial resource, a vaudeville, a mime, or a monkey, to escape the wretchedness of his empty and frivolous appetite for excitement? We might as well pronounce the man who cannot live without perpetual drams the gayest of mankind. As far as the question of true sociality goes, the English are the most sociable people upon earth in reference to their means. The taxes, and other expenses of living in England, are the true bar to English association. But there is not one household in ten in London, that does not expend more in actual hospitality in a month, than many a Peer of France expends in a year. The Englishman does not feel gratified by gathering a crowd round him for an hour in the evening, and dismissing them with a smile and a glass of eau sucré. He gives his friends the best entertainment that he can, and while they are with him, enjoys their society, and returns the enjoyment with ten times the genuine gaiety of a rambler from one coterie to another, the lounger in the dressing-rooms of actresses, or the eternal conteur of a circle of dilapidated belles, who have dropped from being the subjects of scandals into being their propagators. But when Mirabeau talks of English politics, he talks of a subject to which the prejudices of a Frenchman had not been turned; and his opinions exhibit the force of his natural faculties. In one admirable letter, he states his reasons for concluding the prosperity of England to be more secure of permanency than that of France or Spain. To give due credit to the writer's sagacity, we are to remember that this letter was written fifty years ago. "The maritime power of England is not the wayward child of an absolute monarch, who determines to be potent in every element; it is the slow natural growth of more than two hundred years, which has stood many an attack, and weathered many a storm. Another circumstance which has continued and increased every advantage, is the peculiar felicity of the English constitution. All the great kingdoms of Europe, except England, have lost their liberty. Liberty has carried her trade, agriculture, manufactures, wealth, and navy, to a pitch which they could otherwise never have attained. Another point of vast importance is the uncommon union of trade with agriculture. The amazing commerce of England is equal to that of the most famous states that have ever been great by commerce alone. And this vast trade has been carried on, not by a knot of unhappy men, like the Dutch, who were forced to be traders, or nothing, but by a great landed nation, among whom trade enlivened agriculture, and agriculture yielded immense products for trade. Lastly, the period of these various circumstances coming into play, was at a time when the rival nations had passed the meridian of their grandeur, so that England was the rising, France the setting sun. No other power arose to dispute the palm of equality. She had not then a France succeeding Spain in great power, to draw her off, and waste her strength with fresh contests. "All these are reasons for conjecturing that this country will, in her turn, be the first power of the Christian world. She cannot aim at universal monarchy; and that moderation will save her from efforts beyond her strength, and from alliances from the rest of Europe to pull down her power. It will, therefore, be more stable, and far more prosperous than that of either France or Spain. This view of the affairs of Britain does not take notice of her internal state,' particularly her debts, and some other circumstances, from which newspaper politicians are always predicting her ruin. The national debts of this country are certainly very considerable. But it seems preposterous to predict ruin to the State, because the right hand owes to the left. And, as for the debt due to foreigners, it is comparatively little. The power of England is much too great to have any thing to fear from the united force of all her enemies. And they must be shallow politicians who are deceived by minutiæ into an opinion, that she is in any danger of falling under the power of France. I cannot by any means subscribe to the opinion, that the public revenues of England are carried to the utmost height of which they are capable. On the contrary, I apprehend that there are several reasons for supposing them capable of great increase, without burdening the people, so as to destroy industry. There is an uncertainty in every thing that concerns taxation, which is too dark for the acutest genius to clear up. In every countrywe find it mathematically proved, that if another million be raised, the people must clearly be undone. Two or three millions are then levied, and the prophecy is repeated. The |