are called "la magistrature debout."
As a rule, the latter have a great deal more talent than the
former. "What are you going to do with your son?" asked a
gentleman of his friend. "I am going to make a magistrate of
him--'debout,' if he is strong enough to keep on his legs;
'assis,' if he be not."--EDITOR.]

So far De Morny. Consulting my personal recollections of Eugene Rouher,
whom I still see now and then, I find nothing but good to say of him. I
am not prepared to judge him as a politician, that kind of judgment
being utterly at variance with the spirit of these notes, but I know of
no French statesman whose memory will be entitled to greater respect
than Rouher's, with the exception, perhaps, of Guizot's. Both men
committed grave faults, but no feeling of self-interest actuated them.
The world is apt to blame great ministers for clinging to power after
they have apparently given the greatest measure of their genius. They do
not blame Harvey and Jenner for having continued to study and to
practise after they had satisfactorily demonstrated, the one the theory
of the circulation of the blood, the other the possibility of
inoculation against small-pox; they do not blame Milton for having
continued to write after he had given "Paradise Lost," Rubens for having
continued to paint after he had given "The Descent from the Cross,"
Michael-Angelo for not having abandoned the sculptor's chisel after he
had finished the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The bold stroke of
policy that made England a principal shareholder in the Suez Canal, the
Menai Bridge, the building of the Great Western Railway, were
achievements of great men who had apparently given all there was in
them to give; why should Rouher have retired when he was barely fifty,
and not have endeavoured to retrieve the mistake he evidently made when
he allowed Bismarck to humiliate Austria at Sadowa, and to lay the
foundations of a unified Germany? Richelieu made mistakes also, but he
retrieved them before his death.

Be this as it may, Rouher was both in public and private life an
essentially honourable and honest man--as honest as Louis-Philippe in
many respects, far more honest in others, and absolutely free from the
everlasting preoccupation about money which marred that monarch's
character. He was as disinterested as Guizot, and would have scorned the
tergiversations and hypocrisy of Thiers. He never betrayed his m