gratitude for my kindness. In every way that it was possible far him he showed his zeal and his attachment to me; and I shall not soon forget the earnestness with which he once ventured to offer me his advice upon what appeared to him to be a matter of no small moment. I had, sometimes, employed him to copy papers which I had amused myself with writing upon abuses existing in the administration of justice, and upon the necessity of certain reforms. He had seen with great regret the little progress I had made in my profession, and particularly upon the circuit, and had observed those whom he thought much my inferiors in talents far before me in business; and, putting these matters together in his head, he entertained no doubt that he had, at last, discovered the cause of what had long puzzled him. The business of a barrister depends on the good opinion of attorneys; and attorneys never could think well of any man who was troubling his head about reforming abuses when he ought to be profiting by them. All this he, one day, took the liberty of representing to me with very great humility. I endeavoured to calm his apprehensions, and told him that what I wrote was seen only by himself and by me; but this, no doubt, did not satisfy him.

But it is time for me to mention the acquaintance which I formed with some celebrated men. It was in the latter end of the year 1784 that I first met the Count de Mirabeau, and it was to D'Ivernois that I owed his acquaintance. His extraordinary talents, the disorders of his tumultuous

youth, the excesses he had committed, the lawsuits in which he had been engaged, the harsh treatment he had experienced from his father, his imprisonment in the dungeon of Vincennes, and the eloquent work he had written with the indignant feelings which so unjust an imprisonment inspired, had already given him considerable celebrity in Europe; but it was a celebrity greatly inferior to that which he afterwards acquired. He brought with him to this country a short tract, which he had written against the Order of the Cincinnati lately established in America, which it was his object to publish here.

He was desirous that an English translation of it should appear at the same time with the original. He read his manuscript to me; and, seeing that I was very much struck with the eloquence of it, he proposed to me to become his translator, telling me that he knew that it was impossible to expect any thing tolerable from a translator who was to be paid. I thought the translation would be a useful exercise for me; I had sufficient leisure on my hands, and I undertook it. The Count was difficult enough to please; he was sufficiently impressed with the beauties of the original. He went over every part of the translation with me; observed on every passage in which justice was not done to the thought, or the force of the expression was lost; and made many very useful criticisms. During this occupation, we had occasion to see one another often, and became very intimate; and, as he had read much, had seen a great deal of the world, was acquainted with all the most distinguished persons who at that time

adorned either the royal court or the republic of letters in France, had a great knowledge of French and Italian literature, and possessed a very good taste, his conversation was extremely interesting, and not a little instructive. I had such frequent opportunities of seeing him at this time, and afterwards at a much more important period of his life, that I think his character was well known to me. I doubt whether it has been as well known to the world, and I am convinced that great injustice has been done him. This, indeed, is not surprising, when one considers that, from the first moment of his entering upon the career of an author, he had been altogether indifferent how numerous or how powerful might be the enemies he should provoke. His vanity was, certainly, excessive; but I have no doubt that, in his public conduct as well as in his writings, he was desirous of doing good, that his ambition was of the noblest kind, and that he proposed to himself the noblest ends. He was, however, like many of his countrymen, who were active in the calamitous revolution which afterwards took place, not sufficiently scrupulous about the means by which those ends were to be accomplished. He, indeed, in some degree, professed this; and more than once I have heard him say that there were occasions upon which “la petite morale était ennemie de la grande." It is not surprising that with such maxims as these in his mouth, unguarded in his expressions, and careless of his reputation, he should have afforded room for the circulation of many stories to his disadvantage. Violent, impetuous, conscious of the

superiority of his talents, and the declared enemy and denouncer of every species of tyranny and oppression, he could not fail to shock the prejudices, to oppose the interests, to excite the jealousy, and to wound the pride of many descriptions of persons. A mode of refuting his works, open to the basest and vilest of mankind, was to represent him as a monster of vice and profligacy. A scandal once set on foot is strengthened and propagated by many who have no malice against the object of it. Men delight to talk of what is extraordinary; and what more extraordinary than a person so admirable for his talents, and so contemptible for his conduct, professing in his writings principles so excellent, and in all the offices of public and private life putting in practice those which are so detestable? I, indeed, possessed demonstrative evidence of the falsehood of some of the anecdotes which, by men of high character, were related to his prejudice.

While he was in London, he lost a great part of his linen, and a manuscript copy of the correspondence between Voltaire and D'Alembert, which was at that time unpublished, but has since appeared in Beaumarchais' edition. A person of the name of Hardy, who served him in the capacity of amanuensis, having abruptly left him, although his wages remained unpaid, suspicion naturally fell on him, and the Count obtained a warrant against him ; and after some time he was apprehended and tried at the Old Bailey. The evidence was very slight, and the man was properly acquitted; but nothing at all discreditable to Mirabeau ap

peared upon the trial. On the contrary, Baron Perryn, who tried the prisoner (Mr. Justice Buller being at the same time upon the bench), declared, that though the prisoner ought certainly to be acquitted, no blame whatever was to be imputed to the prosecution. Lord Minto, then Sir Gilbert Elliot, who had been at the same school with Mirabeau, and was the greatest friend he had in England, Baynes, and myself, were present at the trial, and had been consulted by Mirabeau upon all the steps he had taken upon the occasion. When the trial was over, Lord Minto said that it would be extremely important to have an accurate account of what had passed upon the trial inserted in some of the newspapers, to prevent any misrepresentation of it, which he thought might be apprehended from Mirabeau's enemies; for it had been observed that some of them, and particularly Linguet, had taken a great interest in the affair, and had been present watching every thing that passed, as well upon the trial as previously upon the examination of the prisoner before the magistrate who committed him. At Lord Minto's suggestion, therefore, he, together with Baynes and myself, went immediately from the Court to Baynes's chambers; and there drew up a very full account of the trial, which was the next day published in one of the newspapers. I have the paper still in my possession, and it contains a most scrupulously exact account of every thing that passed. What was my astonishment, therefore, some years afterwards, when Mirabeau had, by his conduct in the National Assembly of