refore Droz added a volume on the parliamentary
career of Mirabeau, and called it an appendix, so as to remain true to
his original theory of the fatal limit. We know the great orator
better than he could be known in 1842, and the value of Droz's
excellent work is confined to the second volume. It will stand
undiminished even if we reject the idea which inspired it, and prefer
to think that the cause might have been won, even when it came to
actual fighting, on the 10th of August. Droz's book belongs to the
small number of writings before us which are superior to their fame,
and it was followed by one that enjoyed to the utmost the opposite
fate.

For our next event is an explosion. Lamartine, the poet, was one of
those legitimists who believed that 1830 had killed monarchy, who
considered the Orleans dynasty a sham, and set themselves at once to
look ahead of it towards the inevitable Republic. Talleyrand warned
him to hold himself ready for something more substantial than the
exchange of a nephew for an uncle on a baseless throne. With the
intuition of genius he saw sooner than most men, more accurately than
any man, the signs of what was to come. In six years, he said, we
shall be masters. He was mistaken only by a few weeks. He laid his
plans that, when the time came, he should be the accepted leader. To
chasten and idealise the Revolution, and to prepare a Republic that
should not be a terror to mankind, but should submit easily to the
fascination of a melodious and sympathetic eloquence, he wrote the
_History of the Girondins_. The success was the most instantaneous and
splendid ever obtained by a historical work. People could read nothing
else; and Alexandre Dumas paid him the shrewd compliment of saying
that he had lifted history to the level of romance. Lamartine gained
his purpose. He contributed to institute a Republic that was pacific
and humane, responsive to the charm of phrase, and obedient to the
master hand that wrote the glories of the Gironde. He always believed
that, without his book, the Reign of Terror would have been renewed.

From early in the century to the other day there was a succession of
authors in France who knew how to write as scarcely any but Mr. Ruskin
or Mr. Swinburne have ever written in England. They doubled the
opulence and the significance of language, and made prose more
sonorous and more penetrating than anything but the highest poetry.
There were not more than half a dozen, b