. We can perceive where their error lay. We can perceive that
the evil was temporary, and the good durable. But we cannot be sure
that, if our lot had been cast in their times, we should not, like them,
have been discouraged and disgusted--that we should not, like them,
have seen, in that great victory of the French people, only insanity and
crime.

It is curious to observe how some men are applauded, and others reviled,
for merely being what all their neighbours are,--for merely going
passively down the stream of events,--for merely representing the
opinions and passions of a whole generation. The friends of popular
government ordinarily speak with extreme severity of Mr Pitt, and with
respect and tenderness of Mr Canning. Yet the whole difference, we
suspect, consisted merely in this,--that Mr Pitt died in 1806, and Mr
Canning in 1827. During the years which were common to the public life
of both, Mr Canning was assuredly not a more liberal statesman than his
patron. The truth is that Mr Pitt began his political life at the end
of the American War, when the nation was suffering from the effects of
corruption. He closed it in the midst of the calamities produced by the
French Revolution, when the nation was still strongly impressed with the
horrors of anarchy. He changed, undoubtedly. In his youth he had brought
in reform bills. In his manhood he brought in gagging bills. But the
change, though lamentable, was, in our opinion, perfectly natural, and
might have been perfectly honest. He changed with the great body of his
countrymen. Mr Canning on the other hand, entered into public life when
Europe was in dread of the Jacobins. He closed his public life when
Europe was suffering under the tyranny of the Holy Alliance. He, too,
changed with the nation. As the crimes of the Jacobins had turned the
master into something very like a Tory, the events which followed the
Congress of Vienna turned the pupil into something very like a Whig.

So much are men the creatures of circumstances. We see that, if M.
Dumont had died in 1799, he would have died, to use the new cant word,
a decided "Conservative." If Mr Pitt had lived in 1832, it is our firm
belief that he would have been a decided Reformer.

The judgment passed by M. Dumont in this work on the French Revolution
must be taken with considerable allowances. It resembles a criticism on
a play of which only the first act has been performed, or on a building
from which the sca