revived
under the enthusiasm won by "Earth's loveliest vision"--a queen in
distress and a suppliant--and he pledged himself, as the Hungarians to
her royal mother, to die in the service of saving her throne. But the
highest endeavors of Mirabeau have always at their base, like the
monuments of his country, the filthy and the repulsive; and the chivalry
of this new saviour of the monarchy received sustentation in a
bribe--higgled for through months--of twenty thousand pounds, and a
pension of more than that per annum.

About the end of the year, three or four months before his death, he
opened systematically his great campaign for what professedly was the
restoration of regal authority. He was to out-Herod in patriotism the
Herods of the Jacobin club: the court was to dare every thing short of
civil war--perhaps even that; and the existing confusion, whatever it
might be, was to be cured by another of greater extent, artificially
induced by the charlatanism of art political. His scheme, in some
points, it must be allowed, successfully imitated in our own days in
Prussia, was:

First--To reorganize the party of Order in the Assembly; and while, as
far as possible, winning for it the sympathy of the country, to excite,
by all available agencies, distrust and discontent with the opposing
majority.

Secondly--To inundate the provinces with publications against the
Assembly; and by commissioners, sent nominally for other purposes, to
obtain remonstrances from the departments against its further
continuance.

Thirdly--At a proper opportunity, to dissolve the Assembly, and order
fresh elections; at the same time canceling the constitution as illegal,
and granting another by royal charter, formed on a popular basis, and on
the written instructions which (on a system unknown to England) had
originally been drawn up for each deputy by his electors.

I shall not descend to discuss the oft-mooted point, how far the
wholesale venality that based the project is justified or palliated by
the object it is supposed to have had in view, because I know that with
Mirabeau money was not _a means_ to his defense of constitutional
monarchy, but his defense of constitutional monarchy a means to money.
If we except his relentless hate to French despotism in any hands not
his own, the principles, moral or political, of this leader of a nation
had no other tenure but the interest of his personal aggrandizement.

On another debate, whether