and of tenacity in a great material interest, a hundred years ago or at any time, is not very easy to settle.  It is quite possible that the Slave Trade and the Test Act might have died nearly as hard, if there had been no French Revolution.  In any case, it is a curious implication that underlies all writing in this familiar vein, that France ought to have gone on with a bad government, in order to secure to England the advantages of a good one.

[Footnote 1:  Lecky, vi. 297.]

As to one disservice, however, there can be no doubt.  The French Revolution has furnished the enemies of each successive proposal of reform with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if they were the aptest arguments.  Sydney Smith might well put “the awful example of a neighbouring nation” among the standing topics of the Noodle’s Oration.  The abolition of rotten boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines.  When Sir Robert Peel took the duty off corn, Croker warned him with great solemnity that he was breaking up the old interests, dividing the great families, and beginning exactly such a castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Montmorencis in 1789.  Cobden and Bright were promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, and Anacharsis Clootz.  Baboeuf, it is true, was for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was an aggressive atheist; but these were mere nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy.  Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and treated as the counterparts and precursors of worthies so obviously and exactly like them as Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger; while an innocent caucus for the registration of voters recalls to some well-known writers lurid visions of the Cordeliers and the Jacobin Club.

A recent addition has been made to the stock of nicknames drawn from the terrible melodrama of the last century.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer at Dublin described the present very humble writer as “the Saint-Just of our Revolution.”  The description was received with lively applause.  It would be indelicate to wonder how many in a hundred, even in that audience of the elect, had ever heard of Saint-Just, how many in five hundred could have spelt his name, and how many in a thousand could have told any three facts in his career.  But let us muse for a moment upon the portrait.  I take down the first picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand, M. Taine is the artist:—­

“Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising a young monster—­with face handsome and tranquil—­Saint-Just!  A sort of precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from the ranks, and by force of atrocity wins his place! Six years before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery:  while on a visit at his mother’s, he ran away