of benighted want, perennial from sire to son, had frozen him into a kind of torpor and dumb callosity, so that he saw not, felt not, was this, for a creature with a soul in it, some assuagement; or the cruelest wretchedness of all?

"Such things were; such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably :-and Sansculottisms follow them. History looking back over this France through long times, back to Turgot's time for instance, when dumb Drudgery staggered up to the King's Palace, and, in wide expanse of sallow faces, squalor, and winged raggedness, presented hieroglyphically its Petition of Grievances; and for answer got hanged on a 'new gallows forty feet high,' confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with in which the general Twenty-five millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name the Reign of Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units, who shrieked and published and made the world ring with their wail, as they could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The frightfulest Births of Time are never the loud-speaking ones, for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from century to century! Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon die."

The moral and conclusion of the whole matter is that which Carlyle iterates and reiterates throughout the best parts of his subsequent works; but nowhere better and upon more fit occasion than here at the close of the Reign of Terror:

THE MILL OF THE GODS.

"Wherefore let all men know what of depth and height is still revealed in man; and with fear and wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it and appropriate it; and draw innumerable influences from it. This inference, for example, among the first: That, if the gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent as Epicurus's gods, with the living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger weltering uncared-for at their feet, and smooth Parasites preaching 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace,' then the dark Chaos, it would seem, will rise; -has risen, and O Heavens! has it not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no second Sansculottism on our Earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let rich and poor of us go and do otherwise."

But,

Carlyle closes his History with the "whiff of grape-shot" by which Bonaparte put down the mutinous sections of Paris. The true close of the Revolution, in our judgment, is when he as First Consul became virtual Dictator of France. to have brought his History down to that point, he would have had to make Bonaparte the central and indeed the only important figure; and Carlyle had early taken what he would have called a 66 scunner" against Bonaparte, and could never have fairly represented him. In one of his talks, as we have seen, he characterizes him as "the great highwayman of history, his habit being to

clutch king or kaiser by the throat, and swear by the Eternal, 'If you don't stand and deliver instantly, I'll blow your brains out!' A profitable trade he did at this sort of thing, until another man-Arthur, Duke of Wellington by namesucceeded in clutching him, and there was the end of him."

This dislike of Napoleon, indeed, crops out almost everywhere when he has occasion to speak of him. The best thing which, as far as we recall, Carlyle has ever suffered himself to say of Napoleon, is said almost incidentally in the essay upon Walter Scott :

CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON.

"A great man is ever, as the Transcendentalists speak, possessed with an idea. Napoleon himself, not the superfinest of great men, and ballasted sufficiently with prudences and egoisms, had nevertheless, as is clear enough, an idea to start with: The idea that Democracy was the Cause of Man, the right and infinite Cause. Accordingly he made himself the armed Soldier of Democracy'; and did vindicate it in a rather great manner. Nay, to the very last he had a kind of idea, that, namely, of 'La carrière ouverte au talens, the tools to him who can handle them'; really one of the best ideas yet promulgated on that matter; or, rather, the one true central idea, toward which all the others, if they tend anywhere, must tend. Unhappily it was in the military province only that Napoleon could realize this idea of his; being forced to fight for himself the while. Before he got it tried to any considerable extent in the civil

province of things, his head by much victory grew light (no head can stand more than its quantity); and he lost head, as they say, and became a selfish ambitionist and quack, and was hurled out; leaving his idea to be realized in the great civil province of things by others."

Carlyle seems from the very outset to have imbibed a strong dislike, not unmingled with contempt, for most Frenchmen. He has indeed some patronizing pats on the shoulder for Voltaire and Rousseau; but the only Frenchmen of whom we recall his speaking with anything approaching hearty liking are Mirabeau and Danton.

To

Robespierre he is, in our judgment, persistently unfair-we do not like to say dishonest. Throughout the History he is scarcely mentioned without a sneer. And, in the essay on Mirabeau, Robespierre is thus contemptuously dealt with:

MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE.

"Consider Maximilien Robespierre; for the greater part of two years what one may call Autocrat of France. A poor sea - green (verdâtre), atrabiliar Formula of a man, without head, without heart or any grace, gift, or even vice beyond common, if it were not vanity, astucity, diseased rigor (which some count strength) as of a cramp; really a most poor sea-green individual in spectacles; meant by Nature for a Methodist parson of the stricter sort, to doom men who departed from the written Confession; to chop fruitless shrill logic; to contend and suspect, and ineffectually wrestle and wriggle; and, on the whole, to love or to know, or to be (properly speak

ing) Nothing; this was he who, the sport of the wracking winds, saw himself whirled aloft to command la première nation de l'univers, and all men shouting long life to him; one of the most lamentable, tragic, sea-green objects ever whirled aloft in that manner, in any country, to his own swift destruction and the world's long wonder."

We, for our own part, and not without considerable consideration and meditation, believe that (Oliver Cromwell not excepted) there is no other man who has played a great part in troublous times whom History has so persistently and cruelly maligned and misrepresented; and we believe that some day the man will arise who will secure for the memory of the French Autocrat that meed of justice which Carlyle has secured for the memory of the great English Lord Protector. Carlyle himself in the end, when describing the terrible tragedy of the death of Robespierre, almost seems inclined to do something like tardy justice to the

man:

THE DEATH OF ROBESPIERRE.

"Robespierre lay in an anteroom of the Convention Hall, while his Prison-escort was getting ready; the mangled jaw bound up rudely with bloody linen: a spectacle to men. He lies stretched on a table, a deal box his pillow; the sheath of the pistol with which he had shot himself, is still clenched convulsively in his hand. Men bully him, insult him: his eyes indicate intelligence; he speaks no word. . . . The death-tumbrils with their motley batch of Outlaws, some twenty-three or so, roll