d a parliament and 'three
estates' like the English.--So much for paper Constitutions!]

Human nature will accommodate itself to anything. The King of Pontus
taught himself to eat poison: Schubart, cut out from intemperance and
jollity, did not pine away in confinement and abstemiousness; he had
lost Voltaire and gay company, he found delight in solitude and Jacob
Boehm. Nature had been too good to him to let his misery in any case be
unalloyed. The vague unguided ebullience of spirit, which had so often
set the table in a roar, and made him the most fascinating of
debauchees, was now mellowed into a cloudy enthusiasm, the sable of
which was still copiously blended with rainbow colours. His brain had
received a slight though incurable crack; there was a certain
exasperation mixed with his unsettled fervour; but he was not
wretched, often even not uncomfortable. His religion was not real; but
it had reality enough for present purposes; he was at once a sceptic
and a mystic, a true disciple of Boehm as well as of Voltaire. For
afflicted, irresolute, imaginative men like Schubart, this is not a
rare or altogether ineffectual resource: at the bottom of their minds
they doubt or disbelieve, but their hearts exclaim against the
slightest whisper of it; they dare not look into the fathomless abyss
of Infidelity, so they cover it over with the dense and
strangely-tinted smoke of Theosophy. Schubart henceforth now and then
employed the phrases and figures of religion; but its principles had
made no change in his theory of human duties: it was not food to
strengthen the weakness of his spirit, but an opiate to stay its
craving.

Schubart had still farther resources: like other great men in
captivity, he set about composing the history of his life. It is true,
he had no pens or paper; but this could not deter him. A
fellow-prisoner, to whom, as he one day saw him pass by the grating of
his window, he had communicated his desire, entered eagerly into the
scheme: the two contrived to unfasten a stone in a wall that divided
their apartments; when the prison-doors were bolted for the night,
this volunteer amanuensis took his place, Schubart trailed his
mattress to the friendly orifice, and there lay down, and dictated in
whispers the record of his fitful story. These memoirs have been
preserved; they were published and completed by a son of Schubart's:
we have often wished to see them, but in vain.

By day, Schubart had libert