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tism, in its day of vengeance, tramps rough-shod,-shod in sabots! Highbred Seigneurs, with their delicate women, and little ones, had to fly half-naked,' under cloud of night: glad to escape the flames, and even worse. You meet them at the tables-d'hôte of inns; making wise reflexions or foolish that 'rank is destroyed;' uncertain whither they shall now wend. The métayer will find it convenient to be slack in paying rent. As for the Tax-gatherer, he, long hunting as a biped of prey, may now find himself hunted as one; his Majesty's Exchequer will not 'fill up the Deficit,' this season: it is the notion of many that a Patriot Majesty being the Restorer of French Liberty, has abolished most taxes, though, for their private ends, some men make a secret of it.

'The

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophesy; whither all delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven's Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour; 'sign of a Grand Seigneur being landlord,' says the vehement plain-spoken Arthur Young, 'are wastes, landes, deserts, ling : 'go to his residence, you will find it in the middle of a forest, peopled with deer, wild boars and wolves. The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery. To see so many millions of hands, that would be industrious, 'all idle and starving: Oh, if I were legislator of France for 'one day, I would make these great lords skip again!' O Arthur, thou now actually beholdest them skip;-wilt thou grow to grumble at that too?

came.

For long years and generations it lasted; but the time Featherbrain, whom no reasoning and no pleading could touch, the glare of the firebrand had to illuminate : there remained but that method. Consider it, look at it! The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner; a perfumed Seigneur, delicately lounging in the Eil-de-Bœuf,

has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third nettle, and name it Rent and Law: such an arrangement must end. Ought it not? But, O most fearful is such an ending! Let those, to whom God, in his great mercy, has granted time and space, prepare another and milder one. French Revolution, vol. i., p. 270.

THE ORATOR OF THE HUMAN RACE.

It occurred to the mind of Anacharsis Clootz, that while so much was embodying itself into Club or Committee, and perorating applauded, there yet remained a greater and greatest; of which, if it also took body and perorated, what might not the effect be: Humankind namely, le Genre Humain itself! In what rapt creative moment the Thought rose in Anacharsis's soul; all his throes, while he went about giving shape and birth to it; how he was sneered at by cold worldlings; but did sneer again, being a man of polished sarcasm; and moved to and fro persuasive in coffeehouse and soirée, and dived down assiduous-obscure in the great deep of Paris, making his Thought a Fact: of all this the spiritual biographies of that period say nothing. Enough that on the 19th evening of June, 1790, the sun's slant rays lighted a spectacle such as our foolish little Planet has not often had to show: Anacharsis Clootz entering the august Salle de Manège, with the Human Species at his heels. Swedes, Spaniards, Polacks; Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, dwellers in Mesopotamia; behold them all; they have come to claim place in the grand Federation, having an undoubted interest in it.

"Our Ambassador titles," said the fervid Clootz, CC are not "written on parchment, but on the living hearts of all men." These whiskered Polacks, long-flowing turbaned Ishmaelites, astrological Chaldeans, who stand so mute here, let them plead with you, august Senators, more eloquently than eloquence could. They are the mute representatives of their tongue-tied, befettered, heavy-laden Nations; who from out

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of that dark bewilderment gaze wistful, amazed, with halfincredulous hope, towards you, and this your bright light of a French Federation: bright particular daystar, the herald of universal day. We claim to stand there, as mute monuments, pathetically adumbrative of much.-From bench and gallery comes 'repeated applause;' for what august Senator but is flattered even by the very shadow of Human Species depending on him? From President Sieyes, who presides this remarkable fortnight, in spite of his small voice, there comes eloquent though shrill reply, Anacharsis and the 'Foreigners' Committee' shall have place at the Federation; on condition of telling their respective Peoples what they see there. In the meantime, we invite them to the 'honours of the sitting, honneur de la séance.' A long-flowing Turk, for rejoinder, bows with Eastern solemnity, and utters articulate sounds: but owing to his imperfect Knowledge of the French dialect, his words are like spilt water; the thought he had in him remains conjectural to this day.

French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 60.

THE MILITARY GRIEVANCES.

Over and above the general quarrel which all sons of Adam maintain with their lot here below, the grievances of the French soldiery reduce themselves to two. First, that their Officers are Aristocrats; secondly, that they cheat them of their Pay. Two grievances; or rather we might say one, capable of becoming a hundred; for in that single first proposition, that the Officers are Aristocrats, what a multitude of corollaries lie ready! It is a bottomless ever-flowing fountain of grievances this; what you may call a general rawmaterial of grievance, wherefrom individual grievance after grievance will daily body itself forth. Nay there will even be a kind of comfort in getting it, from time to time, so embodied. Pecuation of one's Pay! It is embodied; made tangible, made denounceable; exhalable, if only in angry words.

For unluckily that grand fountain of grievances does exist: Aristocrats almost all our Officers necessarily are; they have it in the blood and bone. By the law of the case, no man can pretend to be the pitifullest lieutenant of militia till he have first verified, to the satisfaction of the Lion-King, a Nobility of four generations. Not nobility only, but four generations of it: this latter is the improvement hit upon, in comparatively late years, by a certain War-Minister much pressed for commissions. An improvement which did relieve the overpressed War-minister, but which split France still further into yawning contrasts of Commonalty and Nobility, nay of new Nobility and old; as if already with your new and old, and then with your old, older and oldest, there were not contrasts and discrepancies enough; -the general clash whereof men now see and hear, and in the singular whirlpool, all contrasts gone together to the bottom! Gore to the bottom or going; with uproar, without return; going everywhere save in the Military section of things; and there, it may be asked, can they hope to continue always at the top? Apparently, not.

It is true, in a time of external Peace, when there is no fighting, but only drilling, this question, How you rise from the ranks, may seem theoretical rather. But in reference to the Rights of Man it is continually practical. The soldier has sworn to be faithful not to the King only, but to the Law and tle Nation. Do our commanders love the Revolution ? ask all sodiers. Unhappily no, they hate it, and love the Counter-Revoltion. Young epauletted men, with quality-blood in them, poisoned with quality-pride, do sniff openly, with indignation struggling u become contempt, at our Rights of Man, as at some new-faigled cobweb, which shall be brushed down again. * * *

Ask Captain Dampmartin; an authentic, ingenious litrary officer of horse; who loves the Reign of Liberty, after asort: yet has had his heart grieved to the quick many times, in the hot South-Western region and elsewhere; and has seer riot, civil battle by daylight and by torchlight, and anarchy hatefuller than death.

How insubordinate Troopers, with drnk in

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their heads, meet Captain Dampmartin and another on the ramparts, where there is no escape or side-path; and make military salute punctually, for we look calm on them; yet make it in a snappish, almost insulting manner: how one morning they'leave all their chamois shirts,' and superfluous buffs, which they are tired of, laid in piles at the captain's doors; whereat 'we laugh,' as the ass does eating thistles: nay how they 'knot two forage-cords together,' with universal noisy cursing, with evident intent to hang the Quartermaster:-all this the worthy Captain, looking on it through the ruddy-and-sable of fond regretful memory, has flowingly written down. Men growl in vague discontent; officers fling up their commissions, and emigrate in disgust.

Or let us ask another literary Officer; not yet Captain; Sub-lieutenant only, in the Artillery Regiment La Fère: a young man of twenty-one, not unentitled to speak; the name of him is Napoleon Buonaparte. To such height of Sublieutenancy has he now got promoted, from Brienne School, five years ago; being found qualified in mathematics by La Place.' He is lying at Auxonne, in the West, in these months; not sumptuously lodged-' in the house of a Barber, to whose wife he did not pay the customary degree of respect; or even over at the Pavillon, in a chamber with bare walls; the only furniture an indifferent 'bed without curtains, two chairs, and in 6 the recess of a window a table covered with books and papers: 'his Brother Louis sleeps on a coarse mattress in an adjoining 'room.' However, he is doing something great writing his first Book or Pamphlet, -eloquent vehement Letter to M. Matteo Buttafuoco, our Corsican Deputy, who is not a Patriot, but an Aristocrat, worthy of Deputyship. Joly of Dôle is Publisher. The literary Sublieutenant corrects the proofs; sets out on foot from Auxonne, every morning at four o'clock, 'for Dôle after looking over the proofs, he partakes of an extremely frugal breakfast with Joly, and immediately pre'pares for returning to his garrison; where he arrives before noon, having thus walked above twenty miles in the course of 'the morning!'

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