ion; for it becomes, in after times,
_that_ of the human race.
Recital animated by the imagination, weighed and judged by wisdom,--such
is history as the ancients understood it; and of history conceived and
produced in such a spirit, I would, under the Divine guidance, leave a
fragment to my country.
II.
HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS.
Mirabeau had just died. The instinct of the people led them to press
around the house of his tribune, as if to demand inspiration even from
his coffin; but had Mirabeau been still living, he could no longer have
given it; his star had paled its fires before that of the Revolution;
hurried to the verge of an unavoidable precipice by the very chariot he
himself had set in motion, it was in vain that he clung to the tribune.
The last memorial he addressed to the king, which the Iron Chest has
surrendered to us, together with the secret of his venality, testify the
failure and dejection of his mind. His counsels are versatile,
incoherent, and almost childish:--now he will arrest the Revolution with
a grain of sand--now he places the salvation of the Monarchy in a
proclamation of the crown and a regal ceremony which shall revive the
popularity of the king,--.and now he is desirous of buying the
acclamations of the tribune, and believes the nation, like him, to be
purchasable at a price. The pettiness of his means of safety are in
contrast with the vast increase of perils; there is a vagueness in every
idea; we see that he is impelled by the very passions he has excited,
and that unable any longer to guide or control them, he betrays, whilst
he is yet unable to crush, them. The prime agitator is now but the
alarmed courtier seeking shelter beneath the throne, and though still
stuttering out terrible words in behalf of the nation and liberty, which
are in the part set down for him, has already in his soul all the
paltriness and the thoughts of vanity which are proper to a court. We
pity genius when we behold it struggling with impossibility. Mirabeau
was the most potent man of his time; but the greatest individual
contending with an enraged element appears but a madman. A fall is only
majestic when accompanied by virtue.
Poets say that clouds assume the form of the countries over which they
have passed, and moulding themselves upon the valleys, plains, or
mountains, acquire their shapes and move with them over the skies. This
resembles certain men, whose genius being as it were acquisiti
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