habits but at will, and shall be cast out! For, in
these days of convulsion and disjection, not even the dust of the dead
is permitted to rest. Voltaire's bones are, by and by, to be carried
from their stolen grave in the Abbey of Scellieres, to an eager stealing
grave, in Paris his birth-city: all mortals processioning and perorating
there; cars drawn by eight white horses, goadsters in classical costume,
with fillets and wheat-ears enough;--though the weather is of the
wettest. (Moniteur, du 13 Juillet 1791.) Evangelist Jean Jacques, too,
as is most proper, must be dug up from Ermenonville, and processioned,
with pomp, with sensibility, to the Pantheon of the Fatherland. (Ibid.
du 18 Septembre, 1794. See also du 30 Aout, &c. 1791.) He and others:
while again Mirabeau, we say, is cast forth from it, happily incapable
of being replaced; and rests now, irrecognisable, reburied hastily at
dead of night, in the central 'part of the Churchyard Sainte-Catherine,
in the Suburb Saint-Marceau,' to be disturbed no further.

So blazes out, farseen, a Man's Life, and becomes ashes and a caput
mortuum, in this World-Pyre, which we name French Revolution: not the
first that consumed itself there; nor, by thousands and many millions,
the last! A man who 'had swallowed all formulas;' who, in these strange
times and circumstances, felt called to live Titanically, and also to
die so. As he, for his part had swallowed all formulas, what Formula is
there, never so comprehensive, that will express truly the plus and the
minus, give us the accurate net-result of him? There is hitherto none
such. Moralities not a few must shriek condemnatory over this Mirabeau;
the Morality by which he could be judged has not yet got uttered in the
speech of men. We shall say this of him, again: That he is a Reality,
and no Simulacrum: a living son of Nature our general Mother; not a
hollow Artfice, and mechanism of Conventionalities, son of nothing,
brother to nothing. In which little word, let the earnest man, walking
sorrowful in a world mostly of 'Stuffed Clothes-suits,' that chatter and
grin meaningless on him, quite ghastly to the earnest soul,--think what
significance there is!

Of men who, in such sense, are alive, and see with eyes, the number is
now not great: it may be well, if in this huge French Revolution itself,
with its all-developing fury, we find some Three. Mortals driven rabid
we find; sputtering the acridest logic; baring their breast to