any other age or country it would have been thought
unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still more unfit
for state papers. It might, perhaps, succeed at a meeting of a
Protestant Association in Exeter Hall, at a Repeal dinner in Ireland,
after men had well drunk, or in an American oration on the Fourth of
July. No legislative body would now endure it. But in France, during the
reign of the Convention, the old laws of composition were held in as
much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble
diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities
of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of
ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular, sprang
from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new
superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries
of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient
Church; even so, out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence sprang
new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars
and dictionaries were necessary. The same innovating spirit which
altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns
and Peters into Scaevolas and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sunday and
Monday, January and February, Lady-day and Christmas, from the calendar,
in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Nivose and Pluviose, Feasts
of Opinion and Feasts of the Supreme Being, changed all the forms of
official correspondence. For the calm, guarded, and sternly courteous
language which governments had long been accustomed to employ, were
substituted puns, interjections, Ossianic rants, rhetoric worthy only of
a schoolboy, scurrility worthy only of a fish-wife. Of the phraseology
which was now thought to be peculiarly well suited to a report or a
manifesto Barere had a greater command than any man of his time, and,
during the short and sharp paroxysm of the revolutionary delirium,
passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was considered as
what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent elocution,
with no originality, with little information, and with a taste as bad as
his heart. His Reports were popularly called Carmagnoles. A few months
ago we should have had some difficulty in conveying to an English reader
an exact notion of the state papers to which this appellation was given.
Fortunately a noble and disti