torious: but now the means of doing it? By what thricedivine Franklin thunder-rod shall miraculous fire be drawn out of Heaven; and descend gently, life-giving, with health to the souls of men? Alas, by the simplest: by two hundred Shaven-crowned Individuals, 'in snowwhite albs, with tri-colored girdles,' arranged on the steps of Fatherland's Altar; and at their head for Spokesman, Soul's-Overseer Talleyrand-Périgord! These shall act as miraculous thunder-rod,—to such length as they

can.

"O ye deep azure Heavens, and thou green all-nursing Earth; ye Streams ever-flowing; deciduous Forests that die and are born again continually, like the sons of men; Stone Mountains that die daily with every rainshower, yet are not dead and leveled for ages of ages, nor born again (it seems) but with new world-explosions, and such tumultuous seething and tumbling, steam halfway to the Moon; O thou unfathomable mystic All, garment and dwelling place of the Unnamed; and thou, articulate-speaking Spirit of Man, who mouldest and modelest that Unfathomable Unnameable even as we see, -is not there a miracle: That some French mortal should, we say not have believed, but to pretend to imagine that he believed that Talleyrand and Two Hundred pieces of white Calico could do it!"

But the genteel comedy, got up with such rare Thespian skill, and with all the stage-properties, is a transformation-piece, and all at once changes into a broad farce. The heavens send down, instead of gentle dews of blessing, something very different, and altogether unprayed for by Bishop Talleyrand and his assisting two hundred :

THE TRANSFORMATION-SCENE.

“Here, however, we are to remark, with the sorrowing Historians of that day, that suddenly, while Episcopus Talleyrand, long-stoled, with mitre and tri-colored belt, was yet but hitching up the Altar-steps to do his miracle, the material Heaven grew black; a north-wind, moaning cold moisture, began to sing; and there descended a very deluge of rain.

"Sad to see! the thirty-staired seats all around our Amphitheatre, get instantaneously slated with mere umbrellas, fallacious when so thick set: our antique Cassolettes become water-pots; their incense-smoke gone hissing, in a whiff of muddy vapor. Alas, instead of vivats, there is nothing now but the furious peppering and rattling. From three to four hundred thousand human individuals feel that they have a skin; happily impervious. The General's sash runs water: how all military banners droop; and will not wave, but lazily flap, as if metamorphosed into painted tin banners! Worse, far worse, those hundred thousand, such is the Historian's testimony, of the fairest of France! Their snowy muslins all splashed and draggled; the ostrich-feather shrunk shamefully into the backbone of a feather: all caps are ruined; innermost pasteboard molten into its original pap: Beauty no longer swims decorated in her garniture, like Love-goddess hidden-revealed in her Paphian clouds, but struggles in disastrous imprisonment in it, for the shape was noticeable'; and now only sympathetic interjections, titterings, teeheeings, and resolute good-humor will avail. A deluge; an incessant sheet or fluid-column of rain ;-such that our Overseer's very mitre is but a filled and leaky fire-bucket on his reverend head! Regardless of which, Overseer Talleyrand performs his miracle: the Blessing

of Talleyrand, another than that of Jacob, is on all the Eighty-three Departmental Flags of France; which wave or flap with such thankfulness as needs. Toward three o'clock the sun beams out again: the remaining evolutions can be transacted under bright heavens, though with decorations much damaged."

THE FINALE OF THE DRAMA.

"On Wednesday our Federation is consummated: but the festivities last out the week, and over into the next. Festivities such as no Bagdad Caliph or Aladdin with the Lamp could have equaled. There is a Jousting on the River, with its water-somersets and haha-ing. Abbé Fauchet, Te Deum Fauchet preaches, for his part, in the rotunda' of the Corn-market, a funeral harangue on Franklin, for whom the National Assembly has lately gone three days in black. The Motier and Lepelletier tables still groan with viands; roofs ringing with patriotic toasts. On the fifth evening, which is the Christian Sabbath, there is a universal Ball. Paris, out of doors and in, man, woman, and child, is jigging it, to the sound of harp and four-stringed fiddle.

"To the Champs Elysées-Fields well named Elysian -all feet tend in the evening. It is radiant as day with festooned lamps; little oil-cups, like variegated fire-flies, faintly illumine the highest leaves: trees there are all sheeted with variegated fire, shedding far a glimmer into the dubious wood. There, under the free sky, do tightlimbed Federates, with the fairest new-found sweethearts, elastic as Diana, and not of that coyness and tart humor of Diana, thread their jocund mazes all through the ambrosial night; and hearts were touched and fired; and seldom had our old Planet, in that huge conic shadow

of hers, which goes beyond the Moon and is named Night,' curtained such a Ball-room. If, according to Seneca, the very gods look down on a good man struggling with Adversity, and smile; what must they think of Five-and-twenty million different ones victorious over it,-for eight days and more?"

Perhaps such a description hardly accords with the so-called "dignity of history"; but, to our mind, for a few such we could well spare many hundreds of pages of official protocols and manifestoes, of debates in parliaments and congresses and diets, of marchings, counter-marchings, and cannonadings, and the like, which clutter up our libraries.

Carlyle is, as far as we know, the first Englishwriting historian who has even attempted to write with anything like fairness of what has come to be known as the "Reign of Terror." Consult your Alison, for instance, and you will be told in effect that the streets of Paris swam in blood, and that the guillotine sheared off the heads of the noblest in France-those of them, at least, who were not fusilladed or noyaded. Let us, with Carlyle, take a fair view of the matter, and of some others akin to it :

THE REIGN OF TERROR.

"It was the frightfulest thing ever born of Time? One of the frightfulest. The Convention, when it had grown Antijacobin, did, with an eye to justify and fortify

itself, publish Lists of what the Reign of Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined. 'The Lists,' cries the splenetic Abbé Montgalliard, were not complete.' They contain the names of-How many persons thinks the Reader?-Two thousand all but a few. There were above Four thousand,' cries Montgalliard : 'So many were guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine hundred were women.' It is a horrible sum of human lives, M. l'Abbé:-some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te Deum. It is not far from the two-hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven-Years' War. By which Seven-Years' War did not the great Fritz wrench Silesia from the great Theresa; and a Pompadour, stung by epigrams, satisfy herself that she could not be an Agnes Sorel? The head of man is a strange vacant sounding-shell, M. l'Abbé; and studies Cocker to small purpose.

"But what if History somewhere on this Planet were to hear of a Nation, the third soul of whom had not, for thirty weeks each year, as many third-rate potatoes as would sustain him? History, in that case, feels bound to consider that starvation is starvation; that starvation from age to age presupposes much. History ventures to assert that the French Sansculottes of Ninety-three, who, roused from their long death-sleep, could rush at once to the frontiers, and die fighting for an immortal Hope and Faith of Deliverance for him and his, was but the second-miserablest of men! The Irish Sans-potato, had he not senses then; nay, a soul! In his frozen darkness, it was bitter for him to die famishing; bitter to see his children famish. It was bitter for him to be a beggar, a liar, and a knave. Nay, if that dreary Greenland-wind