Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated 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. 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 busy to read them. Contempt, says the Indian proverb, picrces even the shell of the tortoise; and the contempt of the court was felt to the quick even by the callous heart of Barère. He had humbled himself to the dust; and he had humbled him. self in vain. Having been eminent among the rulers of a great and victorious state, he had stooped to serve a master in the vilest capaci ties; and he had been told that, even in those capacities, he was not worthy of the pittance which had been disdainfully flung to him. He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the government employed in the most infamous offices. He stood idle in the market-place, not because he thought any office too infamous; but because none would hire him. Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of the Reign of Terror, had now ceased to fear them. He was all-powerful and at the height of glory; they were weak and universally abhorred. He was a sovereign, and it is probable that he already meditated a matrimonial alliance with sovereigns. He was naturally unwilling, in his new position, to hold any intercourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had Barère's literary assistance been important to the government, personal aversion might have yielded to considerations of policy; but there was no motive for keeping terms with a worthless man who had also proved a worthless writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to his feelings. Barère was not gently dropped, not sent into an honourable retirement, but spurned and scourged away like a troublesome Yet he had reason to think himself fortudog. He had been in the habit of sending six nate; for, had all that is avowed in these Mecopies of his journal on fine paper daily to the moirs been then known, he would have received Tuileries. Instead of receiving the thanks and very different tokens of the imperial displea praises which he expected, he was dryly told sure. We learn from himself, that while pubthat the great man had ordered five copies to lishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, be sent back. Still he toiled on; still he che- and while carrying weekly budgets of calumny rished a hope that at last Napoleon would to the Tuileries, he was in close connection relent, and that at last some share in the with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, honours of the state would reward so much then by no means favourably disposed towards assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He France, employed to watch all that passed at was bitterly undeceived. Under the imperial Paris; was permitted to read all their secre constitution the electoral college of the depart- despatches; was consulted by them as to the ments did not possess the right of choosing temper of the public mind and the character senators or deputies, but merely that of pre- of Napoleon; and did his best to persuade senting candidates. From among these can- them that the government was in a tottering didates the emperor named members of the condition, and that the new sovereign was not, senate, and the senate named members of the as the world supposed, a great statesman and legislative bodies. The inhabitants of the soldier. Next, Barère, still the flatterer and Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to talebearer of the imperial court, connected Barère. In the year 1805, they were disposed himself in the same manner with the Spanish to present him as a candidate for the senate. envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had On this Napoleon expressed the highest dis- relations which he took the greatest pains to pleasure; and the president of the electoral conceal from his own government; that they college was directed to tell the voters, in plain met twice a day, and that their conversation terms, that such a choice would be disgraceful chiefly turned on the vices of Napoleon, on to the department. All thought of naming his designs against Spain, and on the best Barère a candidate for the senate was conse-mode of rendering those designs abortive. In quently dropped. But the people of Argelès truth, Barère's baseness was unfathomable. 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 egislature; 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, Barère cringed and fawned on. His letters came In the lowest deeps of shame he found cut lower deeps. It is bad to be a sycophant; i is bad to be a spy. But even among sycophants and spies there are degrees of mean. ness. 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 re. turned, 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 wisdom and goodness which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis, he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of ancient monarchs, assures us with great complacer.cy, that "in this work monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly expressed." By this apostacy he got nothing, not even any additional infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened. when compared with those which were de During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the Chamber of Representatives. But though that assembly was composed in a great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with indulgence, he found himself an ob-sided there, forgotten by all mankind, till the ject of general aversion. When the President first informed the Chamber that M. Barère requested a hearing, a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of Waterloo, Barère proposed that the Chamber should save France from the victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of Thermopyla, and the Lacedæmonian custom of wearing flowers in times of extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last of the Carmagnoles. year 1830. After the Revolution of July he was at liberty to return to France, and he fixed his residence in his native province. But he was soon involved in a succession of lawsuits with his nearest relations-"three fatal sisters and an ungrateful brother," to use his own words. Who was in the right is a question about which we have no means of judging, and certainly shall not take Barère's word. The courts appear to have decided some points in his favour and some against him. The natural inference is, that there were faults on all sides. The result of this litigation was, that the old man was reduced to extreme poverty, and was forced to sell his paternal house. The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of Representatives, As far as we can judge from the few facts after burlesquing during a few weeks the pro- which remain to be mentioned, Barère conceedings of the National Convention, retired tinued Barère to the last. After his exile he with the well-earned character of having been turned Jacobin again, and, when he came back the silliest_political assembly that had met into France, joined the party of the extreme left France. Those dreaming pedants and praters in railing at Louis Philippe, and at all Louis never for a moment comprehended their posi-Philippe's ministers. M. Casimir Périer, M. tion. They could never understand that Europe must be either conciliated or vanquished; that Europe could be conciliated only by the restoration of Louis, and vanquished only by means of a dictatorial power entrusted to Napoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet they would not hear of the only measures which could keep him out. They incurred the enmity of all foreign powers by putting Napoleon at their head; yet they shackled him, thwarted him, quarrelled with him about every trifle, abandoned him on the first reverse. They then opposed declamations and disquisitions to eight hundred thousand bayonets; played at making a constitution for their couniry, when it depended on the indulgence of the victor whether they should have a country; and were at last interrupted in the midst of their babble about the rights of man and the Sovereignty of the people, by the soldiers of Wellington and Blucher. A new Chamber of Deputies was elected, Ho bitterly hostile to the Revolution, that there was no small risk of a new reign of terror. it is just, however, to say that the king, his Juinisters, and his allies, exerted themselves to restrain the violence of the fanatical royalists, and that the punishments inflicted, though in our opinion unjustifiable, were few and lenient de Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers, in par ticular, are honoured with his abuse; and the king himself is held up to execration as a hy pocritical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barère had no scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a thousand francs a year from the privy purse of the sovereign whom he hated and reviled. This pension, together with some small sums occasionally doled out to him by the de. partment of the Interior, on the ground that he was a distressed man of letters, and by the department of Justice, on the ground that he had formerly held a high judicial office, saved him from the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues of the re nowned committee of public safety, and almost all his colleagues of the Convention, he died in January 1841. He had attained his eighty. sixth year. We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add any thing for the purpose of assisting their judg ment of his character? If we were writing about any of his colleagues in the committee of public safety, about Carnot, about Robes. pierre, or St. Just, nay, even about Couthon, Collot, or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a full examination of the arguments which have been employed to vindicate or to | Terror. Violence, and more violence, blood excuse the system of Terror. We could, we and more blood, made up their whole policy. think, show that France was saved from her In a few months these poor creatures succeeded foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, in bringing about a reaction, of which none of but in spite of it; and that the perils which them saw, and of which none of us may see, were made the plea for the violent policy of the the close; and, having brought it about, they Mountain, were, to a great extent, created by marvelled at it; they bewailed it; they exe that very policy. We could, we think, also crated it; they ascribed it to every thing bu show that the evils produced by the Jacobin the real cause-their own immorality and their administration did not terminate when it fell; own profound incapacity for the conduct of that it bequeathed a long series of calamities great affairs. to France and to Europe; that public opinion, These, however, are considerations to which, which had during two generations been con- on the present occasion, it is hardly necessary stantly becoming more and more favourable for us to advert; for, the defence which has to civil and religious freedom, underwent, dur- been set up for the Jacobin policy, good or bad, ing the days of Terror, a change of which the it is a defence which cannot avail Barère. traces are still to be distinctly perceived. It From his own life, from his own pen, from his was natural that there should be such a change, own mouth, we can prove that the part which when men saw that those who called them- he took in the work of blood is to be attributed, selves the champions of popular rights had not even to sincere fanaticism, not even to compressed into the space of twelve months misdirected and ill-regulated patriotism, but more crimes than the kings of France, Mero- either to cowardice, or to delight in human vingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian, had per- misery. Will it be pretended that it was from petrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was public spirit that he murdered the Girondists? regarded as a great delusion. Men were will- In these very Memoirs he tells us that he al ing to submit to the government of hereditary ways regarded their death as the greatest princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of calamity that could befall France. Will it be priests; to any government but that of philo- pretended that it was from public spirit that he sophers and philanthropists. Hence the im- raved for the head of the Austrian woman? perial despotism, with its enslaved press and In these very Memoirs he tells us that the time its silent tribune, its dungeons stronger than spent in attacking her was ill-spent, and ought the old Bastile, and its tribunals more obse- to have been employed in concerting measures quious than the old parliaments. Hence the of national defence. Will it be pretended that restoration of the Bourbons and of the Jesuits, he was induced by sincere and earnest abhor. the Chamber of 1815, with its categories of rence of kingly government to butcher the living proscription, the revival of the feudal spirit, and to outrage the dead; he who invited Na the encroachments of the clergy, the persecu-poleon to take the title of King of Kings, he tion of the Protestants, the appearance of a new breed of De Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth century. Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the war waged by the old soldiers of the tri-colour against the liberties of Spain. Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present day, the most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of the French representation are regarded by those who are especially interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Half a century has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of depravity and madness has left on the noblest of causes. Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M. Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while they declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has produced and is still producing much evil, is perfectly true. But what produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesman who strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the rebound. But sach calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the authors of the Reign of who assures us, that after the Restoration he expressed in noble language his attachment to monarchy, and to the house of Bourbon? Had he been less mean, something might have been said in extenuation of his cruelty. Had he been less cruel, something might have been said in extenuation of his meanness. But for him, regicide and court-spy, for him who patronized Lebon and betrayed Demerville, for him who wantoned alternately in gasconades of Jacobinism, and gasconades of servility, what excuse has the largest charity to offer? We cannot conclude without saying something about two parts of his character, which his biographer appears to consider as deserving of high admiration. Barère, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle; but in two things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity, and in his hatred to England. If this were so, ve must say that England is much more beholden to him than Christianity. It is possible that our inclinations may bias our judgment; but we think that we do not flatter ourselves when we say, that Barère's aversion to our country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his mind was capable of entertaining. The value of this compliment is, indeed, somewhat diminished by the cir cumstance, that he knew very little about us. His ignorance of our institutions, manners, and history, is the less excusable, because, accord. ing to his own account, he consorted much, during the peace of Amiens, with Englishmen of note, such as that eminent notieman Lord We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent and constant zeal for religion, which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot, distinguished Barère; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonour on religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, induiged a hope that Barère was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a sceptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is a pious treatise, entitled, "Of Christianity and of its Influence." Another consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doultless greatly console and edify the church. Greaten, and that not less eminent philosopher | mote the honour of our country; but that little Mr Mackenzie Cofhis. In spite, however, of he did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, his connection with these well-known orna- traitor, slave, coward, liar, slanderer, murderer ments of our country, he was so ill informed hack-writer, police-spy-the one small service about us as to fancy that our government was which he could render to England, was to hate always laying plans to torment him. If he her: and such as he was may all who hate was hooted at Saintes, probably by people her be. whose relations he had murdered, it was because the cabinet of St. James had hired the mob. If nobody would read his bad books, it was because the cabinet of St. James had secured the reviewers. His accounts of Mr. Fox, of Mr. Pitt, of the Duke of Wellington, of Mr. Canning, swarm with blunders, surpassing even the ordinary blunders committed by Frenchmen who write about England. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two different reigns. Mr. Pitt's sinking fund was instituted in order to enable England to pay subsidies to the powers allied against the French Republic. The Duke of Wellington's house in Hyde Park was built by the nation, which twice voted the sum of £200,000 for the purpose. This, however, is exclusive of the cost of the frescoes, which were also paid for out of the public purse. Mr. Canning was the first Englishman whose death Europe had reason to lament; for the death of Lord Ward, a relation, we presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr. Cofhis, had been an immense benefit to mankind. This makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended in Barère. But one thing was still wanting, and that M. Hyppolyte Carnot has supplied. When to such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added, the effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this beatified athlete of the faith, Saint Bertrand of the Carmagnoles. Ignorant, however, as Barère was, he knew enough of us to hate us; and we persuade our selves that, had he known us better, he would have hated us more. The nation which has combined, beyond all example and all hope, the blessings of liberty with those of order, might well be an object of aversion to one who had been false alike to the cause of order and to the cause of liberty. We have had amongst us intemperate zeal for popular rights; we Something more we had to say about him. have had amongst us also the intemperance of But let him go. We did not seek him out, and loyalty. But we have never been shocked by will not keep him longer. If those who call such a spectacle as the Barère of 1794, or as themselves his friends had not forced him on the Barère of 1804. Compared with him, our our notice, we should never have vouchsafed fiercest demagogues have been gentle; com- to him more than a passing word of scorn and pared with him, our meanest courtiers have abhorrence, such as we might fling at his been manly. Mix together Thistlewood and brethren, Hébert and Fouquier Tinville, and Bubb Dodington, and you are still far from Carrier and Lebon. We have no pleasure in having Barère. The antipathy between him seeing human nature thus degraded. We turn and us is such, that neither for the crimes of with disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos his earlier, nor for those of his later life, does of the fiction; and the filthiest and most spite our language, rich as it is, furnish us with ade-ful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble creature quate names. We have found it difficult to relate his history without having perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary of baseness. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct in the Convention, without using those amphatic terms, guillotinade, noyade, fusillade, nitraillade. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct under the consulate and the empire, without borrowing such words as mouchard and mouton. when compared with the Barère of history But what is no pleasure, M. Hyppolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is no light thing, that a man in high and honourable public trust, a man who, from his connections and position, may not unnaturally be supposed to speak the sentiments of a large class of his countrymen, should come forward to demand approbation for a life, black with every sort of wickedness, and unredeemed by a single virtue. This M. We, therefore, like his invectives against us Hippolite Carnot has done. By attempting to much better than any thing else that he has enshrine this Jacobin carrion, he has forced written; and dwell on them, not merely with us to gibbet it; and we venture to say that, remplacency, but with a feeling akin to grati- from the eminence of infamy on which we tude. It was but little that he could do to pro-have placed it, he will not easily take it down MR. ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S POEMS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, APRIL, 1830.] THE wise men of antiquity loved to convey | worth the telling, lies on the surface. The instruction under the covering of apologue; writer evidently means to caution us against and, though this practice of theirs is generally the practices of puffers,-a class of people thought childish, we shall make no apology for adopting it on the present occasion. A generation which has bought eleven editions of a poem by Mr. Robert Montgomery, may well condescend to listen to a fable of Pilpay. who have more than once talked the public into the most absurd errors, but who surely never played a more curious, or a more difficult trick, than when they passed Mr. Robert Montgomery off upon the world as a great poet. A pious Brahmin, it is written, made a vow In an age in which there are so few readers that on a certain day he would sacrifice a that a writer cannot subsist on the sum arising sheep, and on the appointed morning he went from the sale of his works, no man who has forth to buy one. There lived in his neighbour-not an independent fortune can devote himself hood three rogues who knew of his vow, and to literary pursuits, unless he is assisted by laid a scheme for profiting by it. The first met patronage. In such an age, accordingly, men him and said, "Oh, Brahmin, wilt thou buy a of letters too often pass their lives in dangling sheep? I have one fit for sacrifice."-"It is at the heels of the wealthy and powerful; and for that very purpose," said the holy man, all the faults which dependence tends to pro"that I came forth this day." Then the im- duce, pass into their character. They become postor opened a bag, and brought out of it an the parasites and slaves of the great. It is unclean beast, an ugly dog, lame and blind. melancholy to think how many of the highest Thereon the Brahmin cried out, "Wretch, who and most exquisitely formed of human inteltouchest things impure, and utterest things un-lects have been condemned to the ignominious true, callest thou that cur a sheep?"-"Truly," answered the other, "it is a sheep of the finest fleece, and of the sweetest flesh. Oh, Brahmin, it will be an offering most acceptable to the gods." Friend," said the Brahmin, "either thou or I must be blind." labor of disposing the commonplaces of adulation in new forms, and brightening them into new splendour. Horace invoking Augustus in the most enthusiastic language of religious veneration,-Statius flattering a tyrant, and the minion of a tyrant, for a morsel of bread,Ariosto versifying the whole genealogy of a niggardly patron,-Tasso extolling the heroic virtues of the wretched creature who locked him up in a mad-house,-these are but a few of the instances which might easily be given of the degradation to which those must sub. mit, who, not possessing a competent fortune, are resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read. Just then one of the accomplices came up. "Praised be the gods," said this second rogue, "that I have been saved the trouble of going to the market for a sheep! This is such a sheep as I wanted. For how much wilt thou sell it?" When the Brahmin heard this, his mind waved to and fro, like one swinging in the air at a holy festival. "Sir," said he to the new comer, "take heed what thou dost; this is no sheep, but an unclean cur."-"Oh, Brah- This evil the progress of the human mind min," said the new comer, "thou art drunk or tends to remove. As a taste for books becomes mad!" more and more common, the patronage of indiAt this time the third confederate drew near.viduals becomes less and less necessary. In "Let us ask this man," said the Brahmin, the earlier part of the last century a marked "what the creature is, and I will stand by what change took place. The tone of literary men, he shall say." To this the others agreed; and both in this country and in France, became the Brahmin called out, “Oh, stranger, what higher and more independent. Pope boasted dost thou call this beast?"—"Surely, oh, Brah-that he was the "one poet" who had "pleased min,” said the knave, “it is a fine sheep." Then the Brahmin said, "Surely the gods have taken away my senses," and he asked pardon of him who carried the dog, and bought it for a measure of rice and a pot of ghee, and offered it up to the gods, who, being wroth at this un-The explanation of all this is very simple. clean sacrifice, smote him with a sore disease in all his joints. Thus, or nearly thu, if we remember rightly, runs the story of the Sanscrit Esop. The noral, like the moral of every fable that is * The Omnipresence of the Deity, a Poem. By ROBERT MONTGOMERY. Eleventh Edition. London. 1830. 3 Satan, a Poem. By ROBERT MONTGOMERY. Second Edition. London. 1930. by manly ways;" he derided the scft dedica tions with which Halifax had been fed,asserted his own superiority over the pen sioned Boileau,-and glorified in being not the follower, but the friend, of nobles and princes. Pope was the first Englishman who, by the mere sale of his writings, realized a sum which enabled him to live in comfort and in perfect independence. Johnson extols him for the magnanimity which he showed in inscrib ing his Iliad, not to a minister or a peer, but to Congreve. In our time, this would scarcely be a subject for praise. Nobody is astonished when Mr. Moore pays a compliment of this |