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Lamotte: a Queen shall consider if the basest of women ever, by any accident, darkened daylight or candle-light for the highest. The Portrait answers: Never!'-(Sensation in the audience.)

- Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and ye other five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that de'stroyedst Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer 'Limbo which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE OF 'IMPOSTURE waver? Burst there, in starry sheen, updart'ing, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks 'and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in death-throes? 'Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens, -lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hell-fire! IMPOSTURE is in flames, Imposture is burnt up: 'one Red-sea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois Mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and -ha! what see I?-all the Gigs of Creation all, all! Woe is me! Never since Pha'raoh's Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind.

'Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The mental Images are molten; the marble Images be*come mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the Earth: not to return 'save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up for a time. The World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green? The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Woe to them that shall be born then!-A 1 See Campan.

King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; 'flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Oliva's Husband was hurled in; Iscariot Egalité; thou grim De Launay, 'with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five 'millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End 'of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning-up, with unquench'able fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth!'. Here the Prophet paused, fetching a deep sigh; and the Cardinal uttered a kind of faint, tremulous Hem!

Mourn not, O Monseigneur, spite of thy nephritic cholic and many infirmities. For thee mercifully it was not unto 'death. O Monseigneur (for thou hadst a touch of good'ness), who would not weep over thee, if he also laughed? 'Behold! The not too judicious Historian, that long years 'hence, amid remotest wildernesses, writes thy Life, and 'names thee Mud-volcano; even he shall reflect that it 'was thy Life this same; thy only chance through whole 'Eternity; which thou (poor gambler) hast expended so: and, even over his hard heart, a breath of dewy pity for thee shall blow. O Monseigneur, thou wert not all ignoble: thy Mud-volcano was but strength dislocated, fire 'misapplied. Thou wentest ravening through the world; 'no Life-elixir or Stone of the Wise could we two (for want 'of funds) discover: a foulest Circe undertook to fatten 'thee; and thou hadst to fill thy belly with the east wind. 'And burst? By the Masonry of Enoch, No! Behold, has not thy Jesuit Familiar his Scouts dim-flying over the 'deep of human things? Cleared art thou of crime, save 'that of fixed-idea; weepest, a repentant exile, in the Mountains of Auvergne. Neither shall the Red Fire-sea itself consume thee; only consume thy Gig, and, instead of Gig

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1 Rohan was elected of the Constituent Assembly; and even got a compliment or two in it, as Court-victim, from here and there a man of weak judgment. He was one of the first who, recalcitrating against 'Civil Constitution of the Clergy' &c., took himself across the Rhine.

Sleep finally, The Cardinal

(0 rich exchange !), restore thy Self. Safe beyond the Rhine-stream, thou livest peaceful days; savest many from 'the fire, and anointest their smarting burns. in thy mother's bosom, in a good old age!' 'gave a sort of guttural murmur, or gurgle, which ended in 'a long sigh.

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'O Horrors, as ye shall be called,' again burst forth the Quack, why have ye missed the Sieur de Lamotte; why 'not of him, too, made gallows-carrion? Will spear, or 'swordstick, thrust at him (or supposed to be thrust), through 'window of hackney-coach, in Piccadilly of the Babylon of Fog, where he jolts disconsolate, not let out the imprisoned 'animal existence? Is he poisoned, too? Poison will not 'kill the Sieur Lamotte; nor steel, nor massacres.2 Let him drag his utterly superfluous life to a second and a third

1 See Lamotte's Narrative (Mémoires Justificatifs).

-

Lamotte, after his wife's death, had returned to Paris; and been arrested, not for building churches. The Sentence of the old Parlement against him, in regard to the Necklace Business, he gets annulled by the new Courts; but is, nevertheless, retained in confinement,' (Moniteur Newspaper, 7th August 1792). He was still in Prison at the time the September Massacre broke out. From Maton de la Varenne we cite the following grim passage: Maton is in La Force Prison.

At one in the morning' (of Monday, September 3), writes Maton, 'the grate that led to our quarter was again opened. Four men in uniform, 'holding each a naked sabre and blazing torch, mounted to our corridor; a turnkey showing the way; and entered a room close on ours to investi'gate a box, which they broke open. This done, they halted in the gal'lery; and began interrogating one Cuissa, to know where Lamotte was; who, they said, under pretext of finding a treasure, which they should 'share in, had swindled one of them out of 300 livres, having asked him to dinner for that purpose. The wretched Cuissa, whom they had in their power, and who lost his life that night, answered, all trembling, that he remembered the fact well, but could not say what had become of the prisoner. Resolute to find this Lamotte and confront him with Cuissa, they ascended into other rooms, and made farther rummaging there; but apparently without effect, for I heard them say to one another: Come, search among the corpses, then; for, Nom de Dieu! we must 'know what is become of him." (Ma Resurrection, par Maton de la Varenne; reprinted in the Histoire Parlementaire, xviii. 142.)- Lamotte lay in the Bicêtre Prison; but had got out, precisely in the nick of time, --and dived beyond soundings.

'generation; and even admit the not too judicious Historian 'to see his face before he die.

'But, ha!' cried he, and stood wide-staring, horror-struck. as if some Cribb's fist had knocked the wind out of him: "O horror of horrors! Is it not Myself I see? Roman Inquisition! Long months of cruel baiting! Life of Giu'seppe Balsamo! Cagliostro's Body still lying in St. Leo "Castle, his Self fled-whither? Bystanders wag their 'heads, and say: "The Brow of Brass, behold how it has 'got all unlackered; these Pinchbeck lips can lie no more!" "Eheu! Ohoo!'. - And he burst into unstanchable blubbering of tears; and sobbing out the moanfullest broken howl, sank down in swoon; to be put to bed by De Launay and others.

:

Thus spoke (or thus might have spoken), and prophesied. the Arch-Quack Cagliostro and truly much better than he ever else did for not a jot or tittle of it (save only that of our promised Interview with Nestor de Lamotte, which looks unlikelier than ever, for we have not heard of him, dead or living, since 1826) - but has turned out to be literally true. As indeed, in all this History, one jot or tittle of untruth, that we could render true, is perhaps not discoverable; much as the distrustful reader may have disbelieved.

Here, then, our little labour ends. The Necklace was, and is no more the stones of it again circulate in Commerce,' some of them perhaps in Rundle's at this hour; and may give rise to what other Histories we know not. The Conquerors of it, every one that trafficked in it, have they not all had their due, which was Death?

This little Business, like a little cloud, bodied itself forth in skies clear to the unobservant: but with such hues of deep-tinted villany, dissoluteness and general delirium as, to the observant, betokened it electric; and wise men, a Goethe for example, boded Earthquakes. Has not the Earthquake come?

MIRABEAU.1

[1837.]

A PROVERB says, 'The house that is a-building looks not as the house that is built.' Environed with rubbish and mortar-heaps, with scaffold-poles, hodmen, dust-clouds, some rudiments only of the thing that is to be, can, to the most observant, disclose themselves through the mean tumult of the thing that hitherto is. How true is this same with regard to all works and facts whatsoever in our world; emphatically true in regard to the highest fact and work which our world witnesses, the Life of what we call an Original Man. Such a man is one not made altogether by the common pattern; one whose phases and goings-forth cannot be prophesied of, even approximately; though, indeed, by their very newness and strangeness they most of all provoke prophecy. A man of this kind, while he lives on earth, is unfolding himself out of nothing into something,' surely under very complex conditions: he is drawing continually towards him, in continual succession and variation, the materials of his structure, nay his very plan of it, from the whole realm of Accident, you may say, and from the whole realm of Free-will: he is building his life together in this manner; a guess and a problem as yet, not to others only but to himself. Hence such criticism by the bystanders; loud no-knowledge, loud mis

1 LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, No. 8. Mémoires biographiques, attéraires et politiques de Mirabeau; écrits par lui-même, par son Père, son Oncle et son Fils Adoptif (Memoirs, biographical, literary and political, of Mirabeau; written by himself, by his Father, his Uncle and his Adopted Son). 8 vols. 8vo. Paris, 1834-36.