alike insensible of pity, alike bent on havoc. But, while they murdered, one of them frowned and canted, the other grinned and joked. For our own part, we prefer Jean qui pleure to Jean qui rit.

In the midst of the funereal gloom which overhung Paris, a gaiety stranger and more ghastly than the horrors of the prison and the scaffold distinguished the dwelling of Barère. Every morning a crowd of suitors assembled to implore his protection. He came forth in his rich dressing-gown, went round the antechamber, dispensed smiles and promises among the obsequious crowd, addressed himself with peculiar animation to every handsome woman who appeared in the circle, and complimented her in the florid style of Gascony on the bloom of her cheeks and the lustre of her eyes. When he had enjoyed the fear and anxiety of his suppliants, he dismissed them, and flung all their memorials unread into the fire. This was the best way, he conceived, to prevent arrears of business from accumulating. Here he was only an imitator. Cardinal Dubois had been in the habit of clearing his table of papers in the same way. Nor was this the only point in which we could point out a resemblance between the worst statesman of the monarchy and the worst statesman of the Republic.

of the Girondists, in the murder of the Queen, in the destruction of Lyons, he durst not show himself within that sacred precinct. At one meeting of the society, a member complained that the committee to which the supreme direction of affairs was intrusted, after all the changes which had been made, still contained one man who was not trustworthy. Robes. pierre, whose influence over the Jacobins was boundless, undertook the defence of his colleague, owned there was some ground for what had been said, but spoke highly of Barère's industry and aptitude for business. This seasonable interposition silenced the accuser, but it was long before the neophyte could ven ture to appear at the club.

At length a masterpiece of wickedness, unique, we think, even among Barère's great achievements, obtained his full pardon even from that rigid conclave. The insupportable tyranny of the committee of public safety had at length brought the minds of men, and even of women, into a fierce and hard temper, which defied or welcomed death. The life which might be any morning taken away, in conse quence of the whisper of a private enemy, seemed of little value. It was something to die after smiting one of the oppressors; it was something to bequeath to the surviving tyrants a terror not inferior to that which they had themselves inspired. Human nature, hunted and worried to the utmost, now turned furiously to bay. Fouquier Tinville was afraid to walk the streets; a pistol was snapped at Collot D'Herbois; a young girl, animated ap parently by the spirit of Charlotte Corday, attempted to obtain an interview with Robes pierre. Suspicions arose; she was searched; and two knives were found about her. She was questioned, and spoke of the Jacobin domination with resolute scorn and aversion. It is unnecessary to say that she was sent to the guillotine. Barère declared from the tribune that the cause of these attempts was evident. Pitt and his guineas had done the whole. The English government had organ. ized a vast system of murder, had armed the hand of Charlotte Corday, and had now, by similar means, attacked two of the most eminent friends of liberty in France. It is needless to say, that these imputations were not only false, but destitute of all show of truth. Nay, they were demonstrably absurd; for the assassins to whom Barère referred rushed on certain death, a sure proof that they were not hirelings. The whole wealth of England would not have bribed any sane person to do what Charlotte Corday did. But when we consider her as an enthusiast, her conduct is perfectly natural. Even those French writers who are childish enough to believe that the English government contrived the inferna! But though Barère succeeded in earning the machine, and strangled the Emperor Paul. honourable nicknames of the Witling of Terror, have fully acquitted Mr. Pitt of all share in and the Anacreon of the Guillotine, there was the death of Marat and in the attempt on Roone place where it was long remembered to bespierre. Yet on calumnies so futile as those his disadvantage, that he had, for a time, talked which we have mentioned, did Barère ground the language of humanity and moderation. a motion at which all Christendom stood That place was the Jacobin Club. Even after aghast. He proposed a decree that no quarter he had borne the chief part in the massacre' should be given to any English or Hanoverian

Of Barère's peculiar vein of pleasantry a notion may be formed from an anecdote which one of his intimate associates, a juror of the Revolutionary Tribunal, has related. A courtesan who bore a conspicuous part in the orgies of Clichy, implored Barère to use his power against a head-dress which did not suit her style of face, and which a rival beauty was trying to bring into fashion. One of the magistrates of the capital was summoned, and received the necessary orders. Aristocracy, Barère said, was again rearing its front. These new wigs were counter-revolutionary. He had reason to know that they were made out of the long fair hair of handsome aristocrats who had died by the national chopper. Every lady who adorned herself with the relics of criminals might justly be suspected of incivism. This ridiculous lie imposed on the authorities of Paris. Female citizens were solemnly warned against the obnoxious ringlets, and were left to choose between their head-dresses and their heads. Barère's delight at the success of this facetious fiction was quite extravagant; he could not tell the story without going into such convulsions of laughter as made his hearers hope that he was about to choke. There was something peculiarly tickling and exhilarating to his mind in this grotesque combination of the frivolous with the horrible, of false locks and curling-irons with spouting arteries and reeking hatchets.

lains. Not an Englishman whom the republi cans could reach is now living. How many prisoners should you guess that we have made? One single prisoner is the result of this great day."

oldier. His Carmagnole was worthy of the roposition with which it concluded. "That e Englishman should be spared, that for the ves of George, for the human machines of York, the vocabulary of our armies should contain such a word as generosity, this is what And now this bad man's craving for blood the National Convention cannot endure. War had become insatiable. The more he quaffed, to the death against every English soldier. If the more he thirsted. He had begun with the last year, at Dunkirk, quarter had been refused English; but soon he came down with a proto them when they asked it on their knees, if position for new massacres. "All the troops," our troops had exterminated them all, instead he said, "of the coalesced tyrants in garrison of suffering them to infest our fortresses by at Condé, Valenciennes, Le Quesnoy, and Lantheir presence, the English government would drecies, ought to be put to the sword unless not have renewed its attack on our frontiers they surrender at discretion in twenty-four this year. It is only the dead man who never hours. The English, of course, will be admit comes back. What is this moral pestilence ted to no capitulation whatever. With the which has introduced into our armies false English we have no treaty but death. As to ideas of humanity? That the English were the rest, surrender at discretion in twenty-four to be treated with indulgence was the philan- hours, or death, these are our conditions. If thropic notion of the Brissotines; it was the the slaves resist, let them feel the edge of the patriotic practice of Dumourier. But hu- sword." And then he waxed facetious. "On manity consists in exterminating our enemies. these terms the Republic is willing to give No mercy to the execrable Englishman. Such a lesson in the art of war." At that jest, some are the sentiments of the true Frenchman; for he knows that he belongs to a nation revolu. tionary as nature, powerful as freedom, ardent as the saltpetre which she has just torn from the entrails of the earth. Soldiers of liberty, when victory places Englishmen at your mercy, strike! None of them must return to the servile soil of Great Britain; none must pollute the free soil of France."

The Convention, thoroughly tamed and silenced, acquiesced in Barère's motion without debate. And now at last the doors of the Jacobin Club were thrown open to the disciple who had surpassed his masters. He was admitted a member by acclamation, and was soon selected to preside.

For a time he was not without hope that his decree would be carried into full effect. Intelligence arrived from the seat of war of a sharp contest between some French and English troops, in which the republicans had the advantage, and in which no prisoners had been made. Such things happen occasionally in all wars. Barère, however, attributed the ferocity of this combat to his darling decree, and entertained the Convention with another Carmagnole.

hearers worthy of such a speaker, set up a laugh. Then he became serious again. "Let the enemy perish," he cried; "I have already said it from this tribune. It is only the dead man who never comes back. Kings will not conspire against us in the grave. Armies will not fight against us when they are annihilated. Let our war with them be a war of extermination. What pity is due to slages whom the emperor leads to war under the cane; whom the King of Prussia beats to the shambles with the flat of the sword; and whom the Duke of York makes drunk with rum and gin?" And at the rum and gin the Mountain and the gal. leries laughed again.

If Barère had been able to effect his purpose, it is difficult to estimate the extent of the calamity which he would have brought on the human race. No government, however averse to cruelty, could, in justice to its own subjects, have given quarter to enemies who gave none. Retaliation would have been, not merely justifiable, but a sacred duty. It would have been necessary for Howe and Nelson to make every French sailor whom they took walk the plank. England has no peculiar reason to dread the introduction of such a system. On the contrary, the operation of Barère's new law of war would have been more unfavourable to his countrymen than to ours; for we believe that, from the beginning to the end of the war, there never was a time at which the number of French

"The republicans," he said, "saw a division in red uniform at a distance. The red-coats are attacked with the bayonet. Not one of them escapes the blows of the republicans, All the red-coats have been killed. No mercy, no indulgence, has been shown towards the vil-prisoners in England was not greater than the

* M. Hippolyte Carnot does his best to excuse this

decree. His abuse of England is merely laughable. England has managed to deal with enemies of a very different sort from either himself or his hero. One disgraceful blunder, however, we think it right to

notice.

number of English prisoners in France; and So, we apprehend, it will be in all wars while England retains her maritime superiority. Had the murderous decree of the Convention been in force from 1794 to 1815, we are satisfied that, M Hippolyte Carnot asserts that a motion similar to for every Englishman slain by the French, at that of Barere was made in the English Parliament by least three Frenchmen would have been put to the late Lord Fitzwilliam. This assertion is false. We the sword by the English. It is therefore, not defy. M. Hippolyte Carnot to state the date and terms of the motion of which he speaks. We do not accuse as Englishmen, but as merabers of the great him of intentional misrepresentation; but we confi-society of mankind, that we speak with indig dently accuse him of extreme ignorance and temerity.nation and horror of the change which Barère Our readers will be amused to learn on what authority he has ventured to publish such a fable. He quotes, not attempted to introduce. The mere slaughter the Journals of the Lords, not the Parliamentary De- would have been the smallest part of the evil. bates; Lut a ranting message of the Executive Direc- The butchering of a single unarmed man in cold blood, under an act of the legislature,

tory to the Five Hundred, a message, too, the whole meaning of which he has utterly misunderstood.

The tendency of the vulgar is to embody resistance. The surviving Girondist deputies, every thing. Some individual is selected, and who had concealed themselves from the venoften selected very injudiciously, as the repre- geance of their enemies in caverns and garrets, sentative of every great movement of the pub- were re-admitted to their seats in the Convenlic mind, of every great revolution in human tion. No day passed without some signal affairs; and on this individual are concentrated reparation of injustice; no street in Paris was all the love and all the hatred, all the admira- without some trace of the recent change. In tion and all the contempt, which he ought right- the theatre, the bust of Marat was pulled down fully to share with a whole party, a whole sect, from its pedestal and broken in pieces, amidst a whole nation, a whole generation. Perhaps the applause of the audience. His carcass no human being has suffered so much from was ejected from the Pantheon. The celebrated this propensity of the multitude as Robespierre. picture of his death, which had hung in the He is regarded not merely as what he was, an hall of the Convention, was removed. The envious, malevolent zealot; but as the incar- savage inscriptions with which the walls of the nation of Terror, as Jacobinism personified. city had been covered disappeared; and in The truth is, that it was not by him that the place of death and terror, humanity, the watchsystem of terror was carried to the last extreme. word of the new rulers, was everywhere to be The most horrible days in the history of the seen. In the mean time, the gay spirit of Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, were those France, recently subdued by oppression, and which immediately preceded the ninth of Ther- now elated by the joy of a great deliverance, midor. Robespierre had then ceased to attend wantoned in a thousand forms. Art, taste, the meetings of the sovereign committee; and luxury, revived. Female beauty regained its the direction of affairs was really in the hands empire-an empire strengthened by the rememof Billaud, of Collot, and of Barère. brance of all the tender and all the sublime virtues which women, delicately bred and reputed frivolous, had displayed during the evil days. Refined manners, chivalrous sentiments, followed in the train of love. The dawn of the Arctic summer day after the Arctic winter night, the great unsealing of the waters, the. awakening of animal and vegetable life, the sudden softening of the air, the sudden blooming of the flowers, the sudden bursting of whole forests into verdure, is but a feeble type of that happiest and most genial of revolutions, the revolution of the ninth of Thermidor.

It had never occurred to those three tyrants, that in overthrowing Robespierre, they were overthrowing that system of terror to which they were more attached than he had ever been. Their object was to go on slaying even more mercilessly than before. But they had misunderstood the nature of the great crisis which had at last arrived. The yoke of the committee was broken for ever. The Convention had regained its liberty, had tried its strength, had vanquished and punished its enemies. A great reaction had commenced. Twenty-four hours after Robespierre had ceased But, in the midst of the revival of all kind to live, it was moved and carried, amidst loud and generous sentiments, there was one porbursts of applause, that the sittings of the Re- tion of the community against which mercy volutionary Tribunal should be suspended. Bil- itself seemed to cry out for vengeance. The laud was not at that moment present. He en-chiefs of the late government and their tools tered the hall soon after, learned with indignation what had passed, and moved that the vote should be rescinded. But loud cries of "No, no!" rose from those benches which had lately paid mute obedience to his commands. Barère came forward on the same day, and adjured the Convention not to relax the system of terror. "Beware, above all things," he cried, "of that fatal moderation which talks of peace and of clemency. Let aristocracy know that here she will find only enemies sternly bent on vengeance, and judges who have no pity." But the day of the Carmagnoles was over: the restraint of fear had been relaxed; and the hatred with which the nation regarded the Jacobin dominion broke forth with ungovernable violence. Not more strongly did the tide of public opinion run against the old monarchy and aristocracy, at the time of the taking of the Bastile, than it now ran against the tyranny of the Mountain. From every dungeon the prisoners came forth, as they had gone in, by hundreds. The decree which forbade the soldiers of the Republic to give quarter to the English, was repealed by an unanimous vote, amidst loud acclamations; nor, passed as it was, disobeyed as it was, and rescinded as it was, can it be with justice considered as a blemish on the fame of the French nation. The Jacobin Club was refractory. It was suppressed without

were now never named but as the men of blood, the drinkers of blood, the cannibals. In some parts of France, where the creatures of the Mountain had acted with peculiar barbarity, the populace took the law into its own hands, and meted out justice to the Jacobins with the true Jacobin measure; but at Paris the punishments were inflicted with order and decency; and were few when compared with the number, and lenient when compared with the enor. mity, of the crimes. Soon after the ninth of Thermidor, two of the vilest of mankind, Fouquier Tinville, whom Barère had placed at the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Lebon, whom Barère had defended in the Convention, were placed under arrest. A third miscreant soon shared their fate, Carrier, the tyrant of Nantes. The trials of these men brought to light horrors surpassing any thing that Suetonius and Lampridius have related of the worst Cæsars. But it was impossible to punish subordinate agents who, bad as they were, had only acted in ac cordance with the spirit of the government which they served, and, at the same time, to grant impunity to the heads of the wicked administration. A cry was raised, both within and without the Convention, for justice on Collot, Billaud, and Barère.

Collot and Billaud, with all thei" vices, appear to have been men of resolute natures.