be brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have been better em ployed in concerting military measures which might have repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress of the enemies of the Revolution in the west.”—(Vol ii. p. 312.)

Now it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority, which is quite decisive. Buonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to disguise the truth, who had the best oppor

his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an interest in the fate of his wife's kins woman, distinctly affirmed that Robespierre opposed the trying of the queen.* Who, then, was the person who really did propose that the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be tried? Full infor mation will be found in the Monteur. From that valuable record it appears that, on the first of August 1793, an orator deputed by the Com. mittee of Public Safety addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it," he cried, "be cause we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the

would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then are here refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been thrown on Barère he does not even notice. In such cases, of course, judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things which happened before he emerged from ob-tunities of knowing the truth, and who, after scurity, and after he had again sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never been within | the tropics does not know what a thunder-storm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and peculiarly impudent; and among the Mendacia Vascomica, the Mendacium Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is, indeed, a superb variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wrax-race of our ancient tyrants? It is time that allianum, for example, though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a moment. Seriously, we think that M. Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than ourselves in the history of the Convention, a history which must interest him deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He must, therefore, he perfectly aware that many of the most important statements which these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as Corneille's Dorante, or Molière's Scapin, or Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would have been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed, from holding M. Hippolyte Carnot answerable for Barère's want of veracity. But M. Hippolyte Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has introduced them to the world by a laudatory preface, has described them as documents of great historical value, and has illus-ters and their armies have committed." The trated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the reader.

We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances of Barère's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as follows:-"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should

this unwise apathy should cease; it is time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic .he last roots of royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages for the Re public. The charge of their maintenance shall be reduced to what is necessary for the food and keep of two individuals. The public treasure shall no longer be lavished on creatures who have too long been considered as privileged. But behind them lurks a womas who has been the cause of all the disasters of France, and whose share in every project adverse to the Revolution has long been known National justice claims its ghi over her. It is to the tribunal appointed for the trial of con spirators that she ougnt to be sent. It is only by striking the Austrian woman that you can make Francis and George, Charles and Wil liam, sensible of the crimes which their minis

speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the French territory. The mo tion was carried without debate.

Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was Barère himself. It is clear, then, that Barère attributed his own mean insolence and barbarity to one who whatever his crimes may have been, was in

* O'Meara's Voice from St. Helena, ii. 170.
Moniteur, 2d, 7th, and 9th, of August, 1793.

Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barère speaks with just severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the legislators of the Republic. He complains that distinguished deputies, who ought to have been re-admitted to their seats in the Convention, were sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day of mourning for France. It mutilated the national repre. sentation; it weakened the sacred principle, tha the delegates of the people were inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had," he says, "the patience to go through the Moniteur, extracting all the charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a charge against any of my colleagues, of Brumaire, in the year 2.

came a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent atro city of his character, she could no longer en dure him, refused to see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine, that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding-day.

in one venerable institution, called the Acade- | ed his domestic life till some time after he be my of the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting, which was a subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad poets. Barère does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of these preci- In 1788, Barere paid his first visit to Paris, ous flowers; but one of his performances was attended reviews, heard Laharpe at the Lyca mentioned with honour. At Montauban he um, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, was more fortunate. The academy of that stared at the envoys of Tippoo Saib, saw the town bestowed on him several prizes, one for royal family dine at Versailles, and kept a jour a panegyric on Louis the Twelfth, in which the nal in which he noted down adventures and blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the speculations. Some parts of this journal are French nation were set forth; and another for printed in the first volume of the work before a panegyric on poor Franc de Pompignan, in us, and are certainly most characteristic. The which, as may easily be supposed, the philo- worst vices of the writer had not yet shown sophy of the eighteenth century was sharply themselves; but the weakness which was the assailed. Then Barère found an old stone in- parent of those vices appears in every line. scribed with three Latin words, and wrote a His levity, his inconsistency, his servility, were dissertation upon it, which procured him a seat already what they were to the last. All his in a learned assembly, called the Toulouse opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite like a weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the Literature. At length the doors of the Acade- very impressions which he receives through my of the Floral Games were opened to so his senses are not the same two days together. much merit. Barère, in his thirty-third year, He sees Louis the Sixteenth, and is so much took his seat as one of that illustrious brother-blinded by loyalty as to find his majesty handhood, and made an inaugural oration which some. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a was greatly admired. He apologizes for re-lively curiosity on his fine countenance, which counting these triumphs of his youthful genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes offered by provincial academies, is indeed no very useful or dignified employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barère had always been so employed.

In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled Melancholy Pages, which was written in 1797, Barère avers that his marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished. "My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs, he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barère, at the time of his marriage, was himself a royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize by flattering the throne, and another by defending the church. It is hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion should have embitter

I thought open and noble." The next time that the king appears, all is altered. His majesty's eyes are without the smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought up. It is the same with more important questions. Barère is for the parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday, for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One day he admires the English consti tution: then he shudders to think that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house and the commons in another. If the houses differ, the king has the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the principles of this sublime and beautiful consti tution. To admit deputies of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither more or less than to admit enemies of the na tion into the legislature.

In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he had just looked, did Barère enter into public life. The statesgeneral had been summoned. Barère went down to his own province, was there elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to Paris in May 1789.

A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country, we conceive, have in

In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the Point du Jour, in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.

tellectual freedom and political servitude ex- | from bombast down to buffoonry, was not isted together so long as in France, during the wholly without force and vivacity. He had seventy or eighty years which preceded the also one quality which, in active life, often last convocation of the orders. Ancient abuses gives fourth-rate men an advantage over firstand new theories flourished in equal vigour rate men. Whatever he could do, he could do side by side. The people, having no constitu- without effort, at any moment, in any abun tional means of checking even the most flagi- dance, and on any side of any question. There tious misgovernment, were indemnified for op- was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his pression by being suffered to luxuriate in moral character and his intellectual character. anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule His temper was that of a slave; his abilities every principle on which the institutions of the were exactly those which qualified him to be a state reposed. Neither those who attribute the useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was downfall of the old French institutions to the utterly incapable; but he had wonderful readi public grievances, nor those who attribute it to ness in arranging and expressing thoughts furthe doctrines of the philosophers, appear to us nished by others. to have taken into their view more than onehalf of the subject. Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the viziers and sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writ He at first ranked by no means among the ings of Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as violent reformers. He was not friendly to idle as the question whether it was fire or gun- that new division of the French territory powder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. which was among the most important changes Neither cause would have sufficed alone. Ty-introduced by the Revolution, and was espe ranny may last through ages where discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London with a government like that of St. Petersburg, and the inevitable effect will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France. Despotism and license, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed hope and terror, that agonizing travail and that portentous birth.

cially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was entrusted with the task of framing reports on the woods and forests. Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the veto, or the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barère, in order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn, that Barère was afterwards accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of Among the crowd of legislators which at this the public to the tastes of the court. To one conjuncture poured from all the provinces of of these reports he had the inconceivable folly France into Paris, Barère made no contempti- and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virble figure. The opinions which he for the mo-gil, fit only for such essays as he had been in ment professed were popular, yet not extreme. the habit of composing for the Floral GamesHis character was fair; his personal advan"Si canimus sylvas, sylvæ sint Consule dignæ." tages are said to have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed to these This literary foppery was one of the few things Memoirs, and which represents him as he ap-in which he was consistent. Royalist or Gipeared in the Convention, we should judge that rondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always his features must have been strikingly hand-a Trissotin. some, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad, if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would, however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of taste,

As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barère gradually estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for a time closely connected with the family of Orleans It is certain that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela, afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais Royal.

At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assem bly commenced.

It had been enacted that no member of the National Assembly should sit in the Legs

insight into politics, produce an effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha. "Those," he said, “who have framed a constitution for their country, are, so to speak, out of the pale of that social state of which they are the authors; for creative power is not in the same sphere with that which it has created."

M. Hippolyte Carnot has noticed this untruth, and attributes it to mere forgetfulness. We leave it to him to reconcile his very charitable supposition with what he elsewhere says of the remarkable excellence of Barère's memory.

Many members of the National Assembly were indemnified for the sacrifice of legislative power, by appointments in various departments of the public service. Of these fortunate persons Barère was one. A high Court of Appeal had just been instituted. The court was to sit at Paris; but its jurisdiction was to extend over the whole realm, and the departments were to choose the judges. Barère was nominated by the department of the Upper Pyrenees, and took his seat in the Palace of Justice. He asserts, and our readers may, if they choose, believe, that it was about this time in contem plation to make him minister of the interior, and that, in order to avoid so grave a responsi bility, he obtained permission to pay a visit to his native place. It is certain that he left Paris early in the year 1792, and passed some months in the south of France.

lative Assembly; a preposterous and mischievous regulation, to which the disasters which followed must in part be ascribed. In England, what would be thought of a parliament which did not contain one single person who had ever sat in parliament before? Yet it may safely be affirmed, that the number of Englishmen who, never having taken any share in public affairs, are yet well qualified, by knowledge and observation, to be members of the legislature, is at least a hundred times as great as the number of Frenchmen who were so qualified in 1791. How, indeed, should it have been otherwise? In England, centuries of representative government have made all educated people in some measure statesmen. In France, the National Assembly had probably been composed of as good materials as were then to be found. It had undoubtedly removed a vast mass of abuses; some of its members had read and thought much about theories of government; and others had shown great oratorical talents. But that kind of skill which is required for the constructing, launching, and steering of a polity was lamentably wanting; for it is a kind of skill to which practice contributes more than books. Books are indeed useful to the politician, as they are useful to the navigator and to the surgeon. But the real navigator is formed by the waves; the real surgeon is formed at bedsides; and the conflicts of free states are the real school of constitutional statesmen. The National Assembly had, however, now served an apprenticeship of two laborious and eventful years. It had, indeed, by no means finished its education; but it was no longer, as on the day when it met, altogether rude to political functions. Its later proceedings contain abundant proof that the members had profited by their experience. Beyond all doubt, there was not in France any equal number of persons possessing in an equal degree the qualities necessary for the judicious direction of public affairs; and, just at this moment, these legislation. In the Legislative Assembly were men tors, misled by a childish wish to display their own disinterestedness, deserted the duties which they had half learned, and which nobody else had learned at all, and left their hall to a second crowd of novices, who had still to master the first rudiments of political business. When Barère wrote his Memoirs, the absurdity of this self-denying ordinance had been proved by events, and was, we believe, acknowledged by all parties. He accordingly, with his usual mendacity, speaks of it in terms implying that he had opposed it. There was, he tells us, no good citizen who did not regret this fatal vote. Nay, all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty; and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is, that Barère, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of those who most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the tribune as wise and magnanimous; and that he assigned, as nis reasons for taking this view, some of those phrases in which orators of his class delight, and which, on all men who have the smallest

In the mean time, it became clear that the constitution of 1791 would not work. It was, indeed, not to be expected that a constitution new both in its principles and its details would at first work easily. Had the chief magistrate enjoyed the entire confidence of the people, had he performed his part with the utmost zeal, fidelity and ability, had the representative body included all the wisest statesmen of France, the difficulties might still have been found insuperable. But, in fact, the experi ment was made under every disadvantage. The king, very naturally, hated the constitu

of genius and men of good intentions, but not a single man of experience. Nevertheless, if France had been suffered to settle her own affairs without foreign interference, it is possi ble that the calamities which followed might have been averted. The king who, with many good qualities, was sluggish and sensual, might have found compensation for his lost preroga tives in his immense civil list, in his palaces and hunting-grounds, in soups, Perigord pies, and Champagne. The people, finding them selves secure in the enjoyment of the valuable reforms which the National Assembly had, in the midst of all its errors, effected, would not have been easily excited by demagogues to acts of atrocity; or, if acts of atrocity had been committed, those acts would probably have produced a speedy and violent reaction. Had tolerable quiet been preserved during a few years, the constitution of 1791 might, per haps, have taken root, might have gradually acquired the strength which time alone can give, and might, with some modifications which were undoubtedly needed, have lasted down to the present time. The European coalition against the Revolution extinguished