rature or in event, the three works on
"Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."

To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any
lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances.
Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a
vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their
publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The
first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics
of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the
asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes.
Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in
style--cogent, daring, powerful in matter.

The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in
his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or
improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles
of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the
career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a
Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive
profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an
advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a
strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great,
sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time
in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general
rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the
practical, the statesman-like are the dominating qualities. We must not
look for the artist in Mirabeau as a writer: he is above that: nor,
whatever the range of thought we may justly concede him, may we,
therefore, expect the sublime; he is below that. With the eloquence of
an impassioned imagination, united to the unornamented vigor of a ready,
versatile, and comprehensive reason, he reminds one of some colossal
engine in forceful, though not always in graceful action.

In Holland, occupied in literature and the society of literary men, and
subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel
Romilly, and Wilkes--among whom be it said, _en passant_, he acquired
the reputation of an habitual liar--a thousand circumstances must have
presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom,
seriousness, and activity he saw around