r share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory
than diligent.

Presented at court, admitted to the rare aristocratic privilege of
riding in the king's carriages at Versailles, laughed at as the Princess
Elizabeth's living specimen of inoculation, the incipient courtier and
embryo revolutionist was awakened from his delightful vision to find
himself suddenly transferred from his regal residence and gayeties, to
the sombre solitude of a country jail. He had been guilty of a
passionate attachment to a young lady of disproportionate expectations.

The young victim of parental wrong, thus severely taught that the
splendors of a court were but a veneer under which lay the terrible
springs of a wayward tyranny, killed time in brooding over the ideas and
studies which subsequently formed his "_Essai_" no less than his
character--"_sur le despotisme_." But before completing the work, the
father's monomania had been temporarily mitigated by the vengeance of a
year's imprisonment; and the son, instead of being sent to Surinam, the
Dutch Sierra Leone of that day, was graciously permitted, under the
_bourgeois_ name of "Buffiere," to enter as a gentleman volunteer the
French army that was about to crush the Corsicans in their noble
struggle against Genoese oppression.

In this liberticidal war, the liberty-loving Mirabeau performed his
first manly act, won his first public distinction, and initiated that
series of paradox, and moral revolutionism, that was hence to follow him
as lover, _litterateur_, and politician, to the grave. As his sword was
against Corsica and freedom, his pen was for them. He wrote over the
ruins of both a boyish philippic, admired by his victims, and burnt by
his father!

And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus
evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was
travailing with him who was to be Napoleon! At the instant France, by
the sword of her future liberator, was mowing down the new-born
liberties of Corsica--Corsica was breathing the breath of life into a
child, whose sword was to cleave down the fresh-won freedom of France!
As a Caesar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there
would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no
French exterminators for Corsica.[7] There are surely times when fate
plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the
revolution of an empire a nursery gam