with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that his
laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.

If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile that
was their garland,' they did not transfer their affections without sound
reason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are many
politicians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid at
the approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who
was sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, and
the journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became
one of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
of imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth to
a popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practically
as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrine
of a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle of
free will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who accept
the scientific account of human character, know that the sudden
transformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heir
to centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government
that agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on
condition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was no
substitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of
the degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth of
July, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
entry, '_Rien_.' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep the
King to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together a
number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a more
energetic and less compliant character than his own.

Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between the
dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage and
bloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike the
imaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy,
the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, love