some of his early popularity. He had, indeed, never been in that province since the downfall of the monarchy. The mountaineers of Gascony were far removed from the seat of government, and were but imperfectly informed of what passed there. They knew that their countryman had played an important part, and that he had on some occasions promoted their local interests; and they stood by him in his adversity and in his disgrace, with a constancy which presents a singular contrast to his own abject fickleness. All France was amazed to learn, that the department of the Upper Pyrenees had chosen the proscribed tyrant a member of the Council of Five Hundred. The council which, like our House of Commons, was the judge of the election of its own members, refused to admit him. When his name was read from the roll, a cry of indignation rose from the benches. "Which of you," exclaimed one of the members, "would sit by the side of such a monster ?"—"Not I, not I!" answered a crowd of voices. One deputy declared that he would vacate his seat if the hall were polluted by the presence of such a wretch. The election was declared null, on the ground that the person elected was a criminal skulking from justice; and many Severe reflections were thrown on the lenity which suffered him to be still at large. He tried to make his peace with the Directory by writing a bulky libel on England, entitled, The Liberty of the Seas. He seems to have confidently expected that this work would produce a great effect. He printed three thouand copies, and, in order to defray the expense of publication, sold one of his farms for the sum of ten thousand francs. The book came out; but nobody bought it, in consequence, if Barère is to be believed, of the villainy of Mr. Pitt, who bribed the Directory to order the reviewers not to notice so formidable an attack on the maritime greatness of perfidious Albion. Barère had been about three years at Bordeaux when he received intelligence that the mob of the town designed him the honour of a visit on the ninth of Thermidor, and would probably administer to him what he had, in his defence of his friend Lebon, described as substantia! justice under forms a little harsh. It was necessary for him to disguise himself in clothes such as were worn by the carpenters of the dock. In this garb, with a bundle of wood shavings under his arm, he made his escape into the vineyards which surround the city, lurked during some days in a peasant's hut, and, when the dreaded anniversary was over, stole back into the city. A few months later he was again in danger. He now thought that he should be nowhere so safe as in the neighbourhood of Paris. He quitted Bordeaux, hastened undetected through those towns where four years before his life had been in extreme danger, passed through the capital in the morning twilight, when none were in the streets except shopboys taking down the shutters, and arrived safe at the pleasant village of St. Ouen on the Seine. Here he remained in seclusion during some months. In the mean time Bonaparte returned from Egypt, placed himself at the head of a coalition of discon tented parties, covered his designs with the authority of the Elders, drove the Five Hundred out of their hall at the point of the bayonet, and became absolute monarch of France under the name of First Consul. Barère assures us that these events almost broke his heart; that he could not bear to see France again subject to a master; and that, if the representatives had been worthy of that honourable name, they would have arrested the ambitious general who insulted them. These feelings, however, did not prevent him from soliciting the protection of the new government, and from sending to the First Consul a handsome copy of the Essay on the Liberty of the Seas. The policy of Bonaparte was to cover al the past with a general oblivion. He belonged half to the Revolution and half to the reaction. He was an upstart, and a sovereign; and had, therefore, something in common with the Jaco bin, and something in common with the royalist. All, whether Jacobins or royalists, who were disposed to support his government, were readily received-all, whether Jacobins or royalists, who showed hostility to his government, were put down and punished. Men who had borne a part in the worst crimes of the Reign of Terror, and men who had fought in the army of Condé, were to be found close together, both in his antechambers and in his dungeons. He decorated Fouché and Maury with the same cross. He sent Aréna and Georges Cadoudal to the same scaffold. From a government acting on such principles Barère easily obtained the indulgence which the Directory had constantly refused to grant. The sentence passed by the Convention was remitted, and he was allowed to reside at Paris. His pardon, it is true, was not granted in the most honourable form; and he remained, during some time, under the special supervision of the police. He hastened, however, to pay his court at the Luxembourg palace, where Bonaparte then resided, and was honoured with a few dry and careless words by the master of France. Here begins a new chapter of Barère's history. What passed between him and the con sular government cannot, of course, be so accurately known to us as the speeches and reports which he made in the Convention. It is, however, not difficult, from notorious facts, and from the admissions scattered over these lying Memoirs, to form a tolerably accurate notion of what took place. Bonaparte wanted to buy Barère: Barère wanted to sell himself to Bonaparte. The only question was one of price; and there was an immense interval between what was offered and what was demanded. Bonaparte, whose vehemence of will, fixedness of purpose, and reliance on his own genius, were not only great, but extravagant, looked with scorn on the most effeminate and dependent of human minds. He was quite capable of perpetrating crimes under the infla ence either of ambition or of revenge; but he had no touch of that accursed monomania, that craving for blood and tears, which raged in some of the Jacobin chiefs. To proscribe | When depravity is placed so high as his, the the Terrorists would have been wholly incon- | hatred which it inspires is mingled with awe sistent with his policy; but of all the classes His place was with great tyrants, with Critias of men whom his comprehensive system in- and Sylla, with Eccelino and Borgia; not with cluded, he liked them the least; and Barère hireling scribblers and police runners. was the worst of them. This wretch had been "Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; branded with infamy, first by the Convention, But shall the dignity of vice be lost?" and then by the Council of Five Hundred. So sang Pope; and so felt Barère. When i The inhabitants of four or five great cities had was proposed to him to publish a journal in attempted to tear him limb from limb. Nor defence of the consular government, rage and were his vices redeemed by eminent talents for shame inspired him for the first and last time administration or legislation. It would be un- with something like courage. He had filled as wise to place in any honourable or important large a space in the eyes of mankind as Mr. post a man so wicked, so odious, and so little Pitt or General Washington; and he was coolly qualified to discharge high political duties. At invited to descend at once to the level of Mr. the same time, there was a way in which it Lewis Goldsmith. He saw, too, with agonies seemed likely that he might be of use to the of envy, that a wide distinction was made be government. The First Consul, as he after- tween himself and the other statesmen of the wards acknowledged, greatly overrated Ba- Revolution who were summoned to the aid of rère's powers as a writer. The effect which the government. Those statesmen were rethe reports of the committee of public safety quired, indeed, to make large sacrifices of prinhad produced by the camp-fires of the republi- ciple; but they were not called on to sacrifice can armies had been great. Napoleon himself, what, in the opinion of the vulgar, constitutes when a young soldier, had been delighted by personal dignity. They were made tribunes those compositions, which had much in com- and legislators, ambassadors and counsellors mon with the rhapsodies of his favourite poet, of state, ministers, senators, and consuls. They Macpherson. The taste, indeed, of the great might reasonably expect to rise with the rising warrior and statesman was never very pure. fortunes of their master; and, in truth, many His bulletins, his general orders, and his pro- of them were destined to wear the badge of clamations, are sometimes, it is true, master- his Legion of Honour and of his order of the pieces in their kind; but we too often detect, Iron Crown; to be arch-chancellors and archeven in his best writing, traces of Fingal, and treasurers, counts, dukes, and princes. Baof the Carmagnoles. It is not strange, there- rère, only six years before, had been far more fore, that he should have been desirous to se- powerful, far more widely renowned, than any cure the aid of Barère's pen. Nor was this of them; and now, while they were thought the only kind of assistance which the old worthy to represent the majesty of France at member of the committee of public safety foreign courts, while they received crowds of might render to the consular government. He suitors in gilded ante-chambers, he was to pass was likely to find admission into the gloomy his life in measuring paragraphs, and scolding dens in which those Jacobins whose constancy correctors of the press. It was too much. was to be overcome by no reverse, or whose Those lips which had never before been able crimes admitted of no expiation, hid them- to fashion themselves to a No, now murmured selves from the curses of mankind. No en- expostulation and refusal. "I could not"terprise was too bold or too atrocious for minds these are his own words-"abase myself to crazed by fanaticism, and familiar with misery such a point as to serve the First Consul and death. The government was anxious to merely in the capacity of a journalist, while so have information of what passed in their se- many insignificant, low, and servile people, cret councils; and no man was better qualified such as the Treilhards, the Ræderers, the Leto furnish such information than Barère. bruns, the Marets, and others whom it is superFor these reasons the First Consul was dis-fluous to name, held the first place in this posed to employ Raière as a writer and as a spy. But Barer was it possible that he This outbreak of spirit was of short duration. would submit to such a degradation? Bad as Napoleon was inexorable. It is said indeed he was, he had played a great part. He had that he was, for a moment, half inclined to ad. belonged to that class of criminals who fill the mit Barère into the Council of State; but the world with the renown of their crimes; he had members of that body remonstrated in the been one of a cabinet which had ruled France strongest terms, and declared that such a nomi with absolute power, and made war on all Eu- nation would be a disgrace to them all. This rope with signal success. Nav, he had been, plan was therefore relinquished. Thenceforth though no the most powerful, yet, with the Barère's only chance of obtaining the patronsingle exception of Robespierre, the most con-age of the government was to subdue his pride, spicuous member of that cabinet. His name had been a household word at Moscow and at Philadelphia, at Edinburgh and at Cadiz. The blood of the Queen of France, the blood of the greatest orators and philosophers of France, was on his hands. He had spoken; and it had been decreed, that the plough should pass over the great city of Lyons. He had spoken again, and it had been decreed, that the streets of Toulon should be razed to the ground. government of upstarts." to forget that there had been a time when, with three words, he might have had the heads of the three consuls, and to betake himself, humbly and industriously, to the task of compos. ing lampoons on England and panegyrics on Bonaparte. It has often been asserted, we know not on what grounds, that Barère was employed by the government, not only as a writer, but as a censor of the writings of other men. This im. putation he vehemently denies in his Memoirs; but our readers will probably agree with us in thinking, that his denial leaves the question exactly where it was. scribes his letters with "Health and Frater. nity." Into the ears of this sturdy politician our friend pours forth a long series of com plaints. What evil times! What a change since the days when the Mountain governed France! What is the First Consul but a king under a new name? What is this Legion of Honour but a new aristocracy? The old su perstition is reviving with the old tyranny. There is a treaty with the Pope, and a provi sion for the clergy. Emigrant nobles are returning in crowds, and are better received at the Tuileries than the men of the tenth of August. This cannot last. What is life without liberty? What terrors has death to the true patriot? The old Jacobin catches fire, bestows and receives the fraternal hug, and hints that there will soon be great news, and that the breed of Harmodius and Brutus is not quite extinct. The next day he is close prisoner, and all his papers are in the hands of the government. Next, the indefatigable servant of the state falls in with an old republican, who has not changed with the times, who regrets the red cap and the tree of liberty, who has not unThus much is certain, that he was not re-learned the Thee and Thou, and who still substrained from exercising the office of censor by any scruple of conscience or honour; for he did accept an office, compared with which that of censor, odious as it is, may be called an august and beneficent magistracy. He began to have what are delicately called relations with the police. We are not sure that we have formed, or that we can convey, an exact notion of the nature of Barère's new calling. It is a calling unknown in our country. It has, indeed, often happened in England, that a plot has been revealed to the government by one of the conspirators. The informer has sometimes been directed to carry it fair towards his accomplices, and to let the evil design come to full maturity. As soon as his work is done, he is generally snatched from the public gaze, and sent to some obscure village, or to some remote colony. The use of spies, even to this extent, is in the highest degree unpopular in England; but a political spy by profession, is a creature from which our island is as free as it is from wolves. In France the To this vocation, a vocation compared with race is well known, and was never more nume- which the life of a beggar, of a pickpocket, of rous, more greedy, more cunning, or more sav- a pimp, is honourable, did Barère now descend age, than under the government of Bonaparte. It was his constant practice, as often as he enOur idea of a gentleman in relations with rolled himself in a new party, to pay his foot. the consular and imperial police may perhaps ing with the heads of old friends. He was at be incorrect. Such as it is, we will try to con- first a royalist; and he made atonement by vey it to our readers. We image to ourselves watering the tree of liberty with the blood of a well dressed person, with a soft voice and Louis. He was then a Girondist; and he affable manners. His opinions are those of made atonement by murdering Vergniaud and the society in which he finds himself, but a lit- Gensonné. He fawned on Robespierre up to tle stronger. He often complains, in the lan- the eighth of Thermidor; and he made atoneguage of honest indignation, that what passes men. by moving, on the ninth, that Robespierre in private conversation finds its way strangely should be beheaded without a trial. He was to the government, and cautions his associates now enlisted in the service of the new moto take care what they say when they are notnarchy; and he proceeded to atone for his sure of their company. As for himself, he republican heresies by sending republican owns that he is indiscreet. He can never re- throats to the guillotine. frain from speaking his mind; and that is the reason that he is not prefect of a department. In a gallery of the Palais Royal he overhears two friends talking earnestly about the king and the Count of Artois. He follows them into a coffee-house, sits at the table next to them, calls for his half-dish and his small glass of cognac, takes up a journal, and seems occupied with the news. His neighbours go on talking without restraint, and in the style of persons warmly attached to the exiled family. They depart, and he foilows them half round the Doulevards till he fairly tracks them to their apartments, and learns their names from the porters. From that day every letter addressed to either of them is sent from the post-office to the police, and opened. Their correspondents become known to the government, and are carefully watched. Six or eight honest families, in different parts of France, find themselves at once under the frown of power, without being able to guess what offence they have given. One person is dismissed from a public office; another learns with dismay that his promising son has been turned out of the Po.ytechnic school. Among his most intimate associates was a Gascon named Demerville, who had been employed in an office of high trust under the committee of public safety. This man was fanatically attached to the Jacobin system of politics, and, in conjunction with other enthu siasts of the same class, formed a design against the First Consul. A hint of this design escaped him in conversation with Barère. Barère carried the intelligence to Lannes, who commanded the Consular Guards. Demerville was arrested, tried, and beheaded; and among the witnesses who appeared against him was his friend Barère. The account which Barère has given of these transactions is studiously confused and grossly dishonest. We think, however, that we can discern, through much falsehood and much artful obscurity, some truths which he labours to conceal. It is clear to us that the government suspected him of what the Italians call a double treason. It was natural that such a suspicion should attach to him. He hau, in times not very remote, zealously preached the Jacobin doctrine, that he who smites a tyrant deserves higher praise than he who saves a citizen. Was it possible that the member of the committee of public safety, the king-killer, the queen-killer, could in earnest mean to deliver his old confederates, his bosom friends, to the executioner, solely because they had planned an act which, if there were any truth in his own Carmagnoles, was in the highest legree virtuous and glorious? Was it not more probable that he was really concerned in the plot, and that the information which he gave was merely intended to lull or to mislead the police? Accordingly spies were set on the spy. He was ordered to quit Paris, and not to come within twenty leagues till he received further orders. Nay, he ran no small risk of being sent, with some of his old friends, to Madagascar. He made his peace, however, with the government so far, that he was not only permitted, during some years, to live unmolested, but was employed in the lowest sort of political drudgery. In the summer of 1803, while he was preparing to visit the south of France, he received a letter which deserves to be inserted. It was from Duroc, who is well known to have enjoyed a large share of Napoleon's confidence and favour. The First Consul, having been informed that Citizen Barère is about to set out for the country, desires that he will stay at Paris. "Citizen Barère will every week draw up a report of the state of public opinion on the proceedings of the government, and generally on every thing which, in his judgment, it will be interesting to the First Consul to learn. "He may write with perfect freedom. "He will deliver his reports under seal into General Duroc's own hand, and General Duroc will deliver them to the First Consul. But it is absolutely necessary that nobody should suspect that this species of communication takes place; and, should any such suspicion get abroad, the First Consul will cease to receive the reports of Citizen Barère. "It will also be proper that Citizen Barère should frequently insert in the journals articles tending to animate the public mind, particularly against the English." himself conspicuous even among the crowd of flatterers by the peculiar fulsomeness of his adulation. He translated into French a contemptible volume of Italian verses, entitled "The Poetic Crown, composed on the glorious accession of Napoleon the First, by the Shepherds of Arcadia." He commenced a new series of Carmagnoles very different from those which had charmed the Mountain. The title of Emperor of the French, he said, was mean; Napoleon ought to be Emperor of Eu rope. King of Italy was too humble an appcllation; Napoleon's style ought to be King of Kings. But Barère laboured to small purpose in both his vocations. Neither as a writer nor as a spy was he of much use. He complains bitterly that his paper did not sell. While the Journal des Debats, then flourishing under the able management of Geoffroy, had a circulation of at least twenty thousand copies, the Memorial Antibritannique never, in its most prosperous times, had more than fifteen hundred subscribers; and these subscribers were, with scarcely an exception, persons residing far from Paris, probably Gascons, among whom the name of Barère had not yet lost its influence. A writer who cannot find readers, generally attributes the public neglect to any cause rather than to the true one; and Barère was His old no exception to the general rule. hatred to Paris revived in all its fury. That city, he says, has no sympathy with France. No Parisian cares to subscribe to a journal which dwells on the real wants and interests of the country. To a Parisian nothing is so ridiculous as patriotism. The higher classes of the capital have always been devoted to England. A corporal from London is better received among them than a French general. A journal, therefore, which attacks England has no chance of their support. A much better explanation of the failure of the Memorial, was given by Bonaparte at St. Barère," said he to Barry O'Meara, Helena. "had the reputation of being a man of talent; but I did not find him so. I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie wrapped up in high-scunding language." During some years Barère continued to discharge the functions assigned to him by his master. Secret reports, filled with the talk of coffee-houses, were carried by him every week The truth is, that though Barère was a man to the Tuileries. His friends assure us that he of quick parts, and could do with ease what took especial pains to do all the harm in his he could do at all, he had never been a good power to the returned emigrants. It was not writer. In the day of his power, he had been his fault if Napoleon was not apprised of every in the habit of haranguing an excitable audi murmur and every sarcasm which old mar-ence on exciting topics. The faults of his quesses who had lost their estates, and old cler-style passed uncensured; for it was a time of gymen who had lost their benefices, uttered against the imperial system. M. Hippolyte Carnot, we grieve to say, is so much blinded by party spirit, that he seems to reckon this dirty wickedness among his hero's titles to public esteem. Barère was, at the same time, an indefatigable journalist and pamphleteer. He set up a paper directed against England, and called the Memorial Antibritannique. He planned a work entitled, "France made great and illustrious by Napoleon." When the imperial government was established, the old regicide made literary as well as of civil lawlessness, and a patriot was licensed to violate the ordinary rules of composition as well as the ordinary rules of jurisprudence and of social morality. But there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy, so was there a revival of classical taste. Honor was again paid to the prose of Pascal and Masillon, and to the verse of Racine and La Fontaine. The oratory which had de lighted the galleries of the Convention, was not only as much out of date as the language of Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated | weekly to the Tuileries till the year 1807. At length, while he was actually writing the two hundred and twenty-third of the series, a note was put into his hands. It was from Duroc, and was much more perspicuous than polite. Barère was requested to send no more of his reports to the palace, as the emperor was too basy to read them. in the public mind with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the Restoration. Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces the Reign of Terror, had now ceased to fear even the shell of the tortoise; and the contempt them. He was all-powerful and at the height of the court was felt to the quick even by the of glory; they were weak and universally ab- callous heart of Barère. He had humbled horred. He was a sovereign, and it is probable himself to the dust; and he had humbled himthat he already meditated a matrimonial alli- self in vain. Having been eminent among the ance with sovereigns. He was naturally un- rulers of a great and victorious state, he had willing, in his new position, to hold any inter- stooped to serve a master in the vilest capaci course with the worst class of Jacobins. Had ties; and he had been told that, even in those Barère's literary assistance been important to capacities, he was not worthy of the pittance the government, personal aversion might have which had been disdainfully flung to him. He yielded to considerations of policy; but there was now degraded below the level even of the was no motive for keeping terms with a worth-hirelings whom the government employed in less man who had also proved a worthless the most infamous offices. He stood idle in writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to the market-place, not because he thought any his feelings. Barère was not gently dropped, office too infamous; but because none would not sent into an honourable retirement, but hire him. spurned and scourged away like a troublesome dog. He had been in the habit of sending six copies of his journal on fine paper daily to the Tuileries. Instead of receiving the thanks and praises which he expected, he was dryly told that the great man had ordered five copies to be sent back. Still he toiled on; still he cherished a hope that at last Napoleon would relent, and that at last some share in the honours of the state would reward so much assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He was bitterly undeceived. Under the imperial constitution the electoral college of the departments did not possess the right of choosing senators or deputies, but merely that of presenting candidates. From among these candidates the emperor named members of the senate, and the senate named members of the legislative bodies. The inhabitants of the Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to Barère. In the year 1805, they were disposed to present him as a candidate for the senate. On this Napoleon expressed the highest displeasure; and the president of the electoral college was directed to tell the voters, in plain terms, that such a choice would be disgraceful to the department. All thought of naming Barère a candidate for the senate was consequently dropped. But the people of Argelès ventured to name him a candidate for the legislative body. That body was altogether destitute of weight and dignity; it was not permitted to debate; its only function was to vote in silence for whatever the government proposed. It is not easy to understand how any man, who had sat in free and powerful deliberative assemblies, could condescend to bear a part in such a mummery. Barère, however, was desirous of a place even in this mock legislature; and a place even in this mock legislature was refused to him. In the whole senate he had not a single vote. Such treatment was sufficient, it might have been thought, to move the most abject of mankind to resentment. Still, however, Batère cringed and fawned on. His letters came Yet he had reason to think himself fortunate; for, had all that is avowed in these Memoirs been then known, he would have received very different tokens of the imperial displea sure. We learn from himself, that while publishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, and while carrying weekly budgets of calumny to the Tuileries, he was in close connection with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, then by no means favourably disposed towards France, employed to watch all that passed at Paris; was permitted to read all their secret despatches; was consulted by them as to the temper of the public mind and the character of Napoleon; and did his best to persuade them that the government was in a tottering condition, and that the new sovereign was not, as the world supposed, a great statesman and soldier. Next, Barère, still the flatterer and talebearer of the imperial court, connected himself in the same manner with the Spanish envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government; that they met twice a day, and that their conversation chiefly turned on the vices of Napoleon, on his designs against Spain, and on the best mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barère's baseness was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found cut lower deeps. It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among syco phants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; the vilest spy is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native land. From 1807 to 1814 Barère lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his craven cowardice would permit against the imperial administration, and coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons returned, he, as might be expected, became a royalist, and wrote a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the Restora tion had delivered France, and magnifying the |