and none could be found. But there was a priest who sat
outside the door, waiting to offer the last consolations of religion
to the men about to die. Fifty years later he was still living, and
Lamartine found him and took down his recollections. An old Girondin,
whom Charlotte Corday had requested to defend her, and who died a
senator of the Second Empire, Pontecoulant, assured his friends that
Lamartine had given the true colour, had reproduced the times as he
remembered them. In the same way General Dumas approved of Thiers's
10th of August. He was an old soldier of the American war, a statesman
of the Revolution, a trusted servant of Napoleon, whose military
history he wrote, and he left memoirs which we value. But I suspect
that these lingering veterans were easily pleased with clever writers
who brought back the scenes of their early life. There may be truth in
Lamartine's colouring, but on the whole his Girondins live as
literature not as history. And his four volumes on the National
Assembly are a piece of book-making that requires no comment.

Before the thunder of the Girondins had rolled away, they were
followed by two books of more enduring value on the same side. Louis
Blanc was a socialist politician, who helped, after 1840, to cement
that union of socialists and republicans which overthrew the monarchy,
and went to pieces on the barricades of June 1848. Driven into exile,
he settled in London, and spent several years at work in the British
Museum. It was not all a misfortune, as this is what he found there:
it will give you an encouraging idea of the resources that await us on
our path. When Croker gave up his house at the Admiralty on the
accession of the Whigs, he sold his revolutionary library of more than
10,000 pieces to the Museum. But the collector's fever is an ailment
not to be laid by change of government or loss of income. Six years
later Croker had made another collection as large as the first, which
also was bought by the Trustees. Before he died, this incurable
collector had brought together as much as the two previous lots, and
the whole was at last deposited in the same place. There, in one room,
we have about five hundred shelves crowded, on an average, with more
than one hundred and twenty pamphlets, all of them belonging to the
epoch that concerns us. Allowing for duplicates, this amounts to forty
or fifty thousand Revolution tracts; and I believe that there is
nothing equal to it at Par