nce in this book or
elsewhere, for instance, that the sensitive part of his nature was
acute, or that he was easily moved by strong emotions of any kind; and
it is exceedingly difficult for us to comprehend how so singular a moral
and intellectual organization as he unquestionably possessed could have
been the result of any imaginable series of occurrences in early life,
of whatever description they might happen to be. The power of intense
concentration by which he was so remarkably distinguished was,
assuredly, a gift from Nature (whether good or bad we say not), and not
a circumstantial accident; and it is all but incredible that a man of
vivid sensibilities could have succeeded by a mere effort of the will in
suppressing every manifestation of their existence during a life
prolonged far beyond the ordinary term, and in the midst of the most
terrible convulsions that had agitated the world since the establishment
of society in Western Europe. The cause appears to us to be unequal to
the effect; and we are obliged to conclude that the cold, sarcastic, and
selfish man, who believed in nothing and nobody, and who rejected even
the common impulses of humanity, was no casual product of events, but
precisely what he had been designed to be from the cradle, and what he
would have shown himself to have been--though, perhaps, in a different
way--had he never known what paternal neglect and maternal cruelty were.

We have no account in this volume of the progressive steps of his
clerical education, beyond the intimation that it was wearisome and
distasteful. Talleyrand disliked references to his ecclesiastical
career. It had not been a respectable one; and if M. Colmache really got
from him the stories which he tells in his book, we need not be
surprised that there is nothing in them about either the Abbe or the
Bishop. We know from other sources that, notwithstanding his
constitutional timidity, he accepted the Revolution eagerly; and that he
did his best, by precept and example, to consummate the destruction of
the old order of things. He was the bosom friend of Mirabeau, so far as
his suspicious nature would allow him to be the bosom-friend of any one;
and his account (or what M. Colmache says was his) of the last days of
that able, but profligate person's troubled life is one of the most
striking things in this volume. Another extraordinary being likewise
appears here, of whom less is generally known than of the other two,