e of coincidences!

Of the twenty years that followed, bringing Mirabeau to the footsteps of
the revolution, and within two years of his death, it was the odd fate
of this gay and gifted noble, guilty of no offense against the state,
nor in a legal sense against society, to pass more than the moiety of
his time in the sad role of a state prisoner; and the main incidents in
the unhappy sequence of wrong and suffering, the inevitable but
unrecognized logic of Providence, were briefly, and in succession, a
profitless marriage with the most distinguished heiress of his province,
carried off from twenty more eligible rivals by the superior strategy
of seduction and defamation, pecuniary extravagance, dissipation, debts,
sequestration of property, marital separation, successive imprisonments
by paternal intervention, deadly hate with the father, permanent
alienation from his adulterous wife and only child, licentious
connection with a friend's wife, with whom he abandoned his country,
exile in Switzerland, Holland, and England, successive litigations
self-conducted, a ministerial spyship in Prussia, and a career more or
less stormy, as a _litterateur_, in France.

Entombed in one of the horrid dungeons of Vincennes, solitary, hopeless,
almost without a sympathy, though in the very spring-tide of his rich
youth and activity, the angel of consolation, never far from us in our
darkest hour, came down, and in the genial guise of literature, visited
in his dungeon this man of infamies and suffering. It must, however, be
confessed against him that, maddened by the severity of a despotism
without appeal, in the wrong--and from that hand, too, whence he might
fairly have hoped a kinder gift, even the wholesomeness of books became
poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched
pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured
name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man
degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency
are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.

But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness
of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing
influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave
us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those
extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among
much else that is great in lite