ad been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless
tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the
Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the
utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names
of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to
_complete_ the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his
throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy,
and a discontented and impoverished people, the robed Louis the
Sixteenth seemed but the calf of atonement of the Scriptures decked for
sacrifice, and doomed to expiate a century of court gayeties and crimes
in which he had had no part!

Mirabeau began the revolution with a thousand vague hopes and
expectations, and the conviction, communicated to his friend Mauvillon,
that "it was not given to human sagacity to devise where _all this_
would end." A living conflict of passions and principles, of low needs
and high ambitions, of lofty genius and infamous repute, a demagogue by
policy, an aristocrat by vanity, a constitutionalist by conviction, his
public conduct anxiously and perpetually brought in evidence one or
other of these conflicting agencies; but beyond the personal aim of
recovering his rank, and winning some sort of greatness at any price, he
was without one pervading or dominant public purpose, save that of
extinguishing the despotism that had injured him. Above all policies,
_abstractedly_ considered, this was the one dear to his heart. "I come
here to grant, not to ask pardon," was his reply, in a voice of angry
defiance, to some oratorical assurance that a life of usefulness might
secure the pardon of his earlier delinquencies. A horrid, but too
natural vindictiveness had interwoven the hate of arbitrary power into
every fibre of his brain. It was a passion or sentiment that he never
abandoned: it may be even doubted if he could have been purchased out of
it. Despite all the evils and mischances of life, there stood erect in
his soul this one small altar to virtue, or something that resembled it,
which he would have thrown down but under the direst necessity.

But of all the circumstances glanced at as furnishing the key to many of
the paradoxes of his public conduct, one of the most important, though
perhaps the least appreciated, is the dishonor of his repute. It is
difficult, with his present position in history, especially when taken
i