d no other effect on my recollection, than raising my estimate of
his genius. I admit, too, that in judging of an extraordinary man, time
may exalt the image as well as confuse the likeness. The haze of years
may magnify all the nobler outlines, while it conceals all that would
enfeeble their dignity. To me, his eloquence now resembles those
midsummer night dreams, in which all is contrast, and all is magical.
Shapes, diminutive and grotesque for a moment, and then suddenly
expanding into majesty and beauty; solitudes startling the eye with
hopeless dreariness, and at a glance converted into the luxury of
landscape, and filled with bowers of perpetual spring. The power of his
contrasts still haunts me; Aladdin's palace, starting from the sands,
was not more sudden, fantastic, or glittering. Where all seemed barren,
and where a thousand other minds would have traversed the waste a
thousand times, and left it as wild and unpeopled as ever; no sooner had
he spoken the spell, than up sprang the brilliant fabric of fancy, the
field was bright with fairy pomp, and the air was filled with genii on
the wing.

Next morning, I was on my road to London.

LEBRUN'S LAWSUIT.

In France, even before the Revolution, less regard was paid to the
decisions of a court of law, than to public opinion. That tyrant of our
modern days had already seized the throne, and his legitimate authority
and divine right were never doubted by the most anti-monarchical of the
sons of liberty. The only check on the insolence of the noblesse, and
the only compensation for the venality of the judges, was found in a
recourse to the printer. A marquis was made to imitate the manners of a
gentleman by fear of an epigram; a defeated party in a lawsuit consoled
himself by satirizing the court; and from Voltaire down to Palissot, all
the people who could write, and could borrow ink and paper, had pen in
hand, ready to appeal from prejudiced juries, overbearing nobles, or
even _lettres de cachet_ and the Bastile itself, to the reading,
talking, gossiping, laughing, quick-witted, cold-hearted citizens of
Paris. The consequence was that the whole city was overrun with
pamphlets. Ministers of state, marshals, and princes of the blood, were
as busy as any Grub-street garretteer. Literary squabbles employed the
lifetime of all the literary men--and some of them, indeed, are only
known by their squibs and lampoons on their more popular brethren. But
so great at