st wings of
poetry, to the immutable regions of eternal truth and of eternal
feeling. Chatham receives truth from the hand of God; and with him it
becomes, not only the light, but also the thunder of the debate.
Unfortunately, as in the case of Phidias at the Parthenon, we have only
fragments, heads, arms, and mutilated trunks left of him. But when in
thought we reassemble these remains, we produce marvels and divinities
of eloquence. I pictured to myself times, events, and passions, like
those which upraised these great men, a forum such as that they filled;
and like Demosthenes addressing the billows of the sea, I spoke
inwardly to the phantoms of my imagination.

LXVII.

About this period I read for the first time the speeches of Fox and
Pitt. I thought Fox declamatory, though prosaic; one of those cavilling
minds, born to gainsay, rather than to say,--lawyers without gowns,
with mere lip-conscience, who plead above all for their own popularity.
I saw in Pitt a statesman whose words were deeds, and who in the crash
of Europe maintained his country, almost alone, on the foundation of
his good sense, and the consistency of his character. Pitt was
Mirabeau, with less impulse and more integrity. Mirabeau and Pitt
became, and have ever continued to be, my favorite statesmen of modern
days. Compared to them, I saw in Montesquieu only erudite, ingenious,
and systematical dissertations; Fenelon seemed to me divine, but
chimerical; Rousseau, more impassioned than inspired, greater by
instinct than by truth; while Bossuet, with his golden eloquence and
fawning soul, united, in his conduct and his language before Louis
XIV., doctoral despotism with the complaisance of a courtier. From
these studies of history and oratory I naturally passed on to politics.
The remembrance of the imperial yoke which had just been shaken off,
and my abhorrence of the military rule to which we had been subjected,
impelled me towards liberty. On the other hand, family recollections;
the influence of daily associations; the touching situation of a royal
family, passing from a throne to a scaffold or to exile, and brought
back from exile to a throne; the orphan princess in the palace of her
fathers; those old men, crowned by misfortune as much as by their
ancestry; those young princes, schooled by stern adversity, from whom
so much might be expected,--all made me hope that new-born liberty
might be made to accord with the ancient monarchy of