of facts has begun
to dissipate the mists of the French legend of 1789. Even Republican
writers of repute now disdain to concern themselves more seriously with
the so-called histories of Thiers, of Mignet, and of Lamartine than with
the _Chevalier de Maison-Rouge_ of Alexandre Dumas and the _Charlotte
Corday_ of M. Ponsard.

Of course the legend dies hard--all legends do. Even the whipping of
Titus Oates at the cart's tail through London did not kill the legend of
Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey and the Popish Plot. The Republicans of the
Third Republic have not scrupled to set up a statue to Danton. People
who might easily learn the truth still speak, and not in France only,
about Robespierre and Madame Roland in terms which really justify M.
Bire in anticipating a time when Raoul-Rigault maybe celebrated as a
patriot and Louise Michel as a heroine. No longer ago than in 1888
certain people, perhaps relying on the fact that M. Casimir Perier, the
actual owner of the chateau at Vizille in which the famous meeting of
the Estates of Dauphiny was held in 1788, is a Republican, actually
undertook to 'ring up the curtain' on the Centennial of 1789 by
representing Barnave and Mounier as clamouring in 1788 for a republic at
Vizille! Of all which let us say with Mr. Carlyle, 'What should
Falsehood do but decease, being ripe, decompose itself, and return to
the Father of it?' To whom, alas! I fear, under this inexorable law must
in due time revert too many of the fuliginous word-pictures of Mr.
Carlyle's own dithyrambic prose concerning the 'French Revolution'!

The giants who stalked through his inflamed imagination like spectres on
the Brocken, may be seen to-day in the Musee de la Revolution at Paris,
shrunken to their true proportions--a dreary procession, indeed, of
dreamers, madmen, quacks and felons! How can that be called a 'Great
Revolution,' of which it is recorded that before it had filled the brief
orbit of a decade, it had made an end of the life or of the reputation
of every single man conspicuous in initiating or promoting it? The men
who began the English Revolution of 1688 organised the new order to
which it led. The men who began the American Revolution of 1776
organised the new nation which it called into being. This must have been
as true of the French Revolution had it been really an outcome of the
'principles of 1789,' or of any principles at all. But it was nothing of
the kind. It was simply a carnival of incapa