only resource that
could surely be wanting to so enormous a compound of intellectual
strength, I mean the power of oratory, he was fated to acquire in his
lengthened trials for the recovery of his wife and legal rights.

Opposed by Alps of difficulties, the moral greater than the legal, for
the suits ploughed deeply into all the crimes or errors that had
dishonored his career, and would necessarily turn up masses of
documentary evidence, which on no less authority than that of his
father, must carry the tale of his infamy to every eye; yet his audacity
dared, as his genius surmounted, every disadvantage, and after fixing
the admiration of a province--to him a sufficient compensation--by the
ingenuity, the power, and the extraordinary resources of his eloquence
in a path so new to him, he succeeded in re-establishing his civil
rights, and but failed in the second, and, perhaps, less important suit,
by the accident of a technicality.

Passing by his double election as Deputy, at Aix and Marseilles, marked
by excitement, insurrection and all the stirring incidents that, in a
moment of great public agitation, might be expected to accompany the
_debut_ of a daring and accomplished demagogue, we are now brought to
the greatest epoch of France, and, therefore, of Mirabeau--the meeting
of the States General; and the observation is naturally suggested that,
if this extraordinary succession of circumstances, marvelous as
_incidents_, but still more marvelous as _coincidents_, had not
specially moulded the man for his work, it might well be doubted that
the French revolution could have happened, or at all events, in such
gigantic proportions. Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage,
as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution. His Saturn of a
father had trained him, from his youth upward, into the executionership
of his order; and Heaven itself, as if seconding some such inscrutable
design, seems to have stooped to lead by the hand this servant of
Nemesis, through paths the most devious and unfrequented, but, of all
others, the most fitted to form and conduct him to the emergency.

A change, it is true of some kind in French Government, accompanied by
more or less confusion and bloodshed, had been long inevitable. Genius,
good sense, suffering, luxury, oppression, contumely, unprincipledness,
and folly, each boon of nature, each wrong of man, had concurred, after
more than a century of struggle, in necessitating