The
higher classes of the capital have always been devoted to England. A
corporal from London is better received among them than a French
general. A journal, therefore, which attacks England has no chance of
their support.

A much better explanation of the failure of the Memorial was given by
Bonaparte at St. Helena. "Barere," said he to Barry O'Meara, "had the
reputation of being a man of talent: but I did not find him so. I
employed him to write; but he did not display ability, he used many
flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but _coglionerie_
wrapped up in high-sounding language."

The truth is that, though Barere was a man of quick parts, and could do
with ease what he could do at all, he had never been a good writer. In
the day of his power he had been in the habit of haranguing an excitable
audience on exciting topics. The faults of his style passed uncensured;
for it was a time of literary as well as of civil lawlessness, and a
patriot was licensed to violate the ordinary rules of composition as
well as the ordinary rules of jurisprudence and of social morality. But
there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was
again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy,
so was there a revival of classical taste. Honor was again paid to the
prose of Pascal and Massillon, and to the verse of Racine and La
Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the
Convention was not only as much out of date as the language of
Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind with
images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the
guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his
conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had
become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the
Restoration.

Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of the Reign of Terror, had now
ceased to fear them. He was all-powerful and at the height of glory;
they were weak and universally abhorred. He was a sovereign; and it is
probable that he already meditated a matrimonial alliance with
sovereigns. He was naturally unwilling, in his new position, to hold any
intercourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had Barere's literary
assistance been important to the government, personal aversion might
have yielded to considerations of policy; but there was no motive for
keeping terms with a worthless man