broke forth at the moment the French carried off Pius VI. from Rome.  Then the long indignant secretary poured forth an invective more severe “against the great harlot,” than was ever traced by a Protestant pen—­MONTI now invoked the rock of Sardinia:  the poet bade it fly from its base, that the last of monsters might not find even a tomb to shelter him.  Such was the curse of a poet on his former patron, now an object of misery—­a return for “placing him below Metastasio!”

The French Revolution affords illustrations of the worst human passions.  When the wretched COLLOT D’HERBOIS was tossed up in the storm to the summit of power, a monstrous imagination seized him; he projected razing the city of Lyons and massacring its inhabitants.  He had even the heart to commence, and to continue this conspiracy against human nature; the ostensible crime was royalism, but the secret motive is said to have been literary vengeance!  As wretched a poet and actor as a man, D’Herbois had been hissed off the theatre at Lyons, and to avenge that ignominy, he had meditated over this vast and remorseless crime.  Is there but one Collot D’Herbois in the universe?  Long since this was written, a fact has been recorded of CHENIER, the French dramatic poet, which parallels the horrid tale of Collot D’Herbois, which some have been willing to doubt from its enormity.  It is said, that this monster, in the revolutionary period, when he had the power to save the life of his brother Andre, while his father, prostrate before a wretched son, was imploring for the life of an innocent brother, remained silent; it is further said that he appropriated to himself a tragedy which he found among his brother’s manuscripts.  “Fratricide from literary jealousy,” observes the relator of this anecdote, “was a crime reserved for a modern French revolutionist."[A] There are some pathethic stanzas which Andre was composing in his last moments, when awaiting his fate; the most pathetic of all stanzas is that one which he left unfinished—­

  Peut-etre, avant que l’heure en cercle promenee
     Ait pose, sur l’email brillant,
  Dans les soixante pas ou sa route est bornee,
     Son pied sonore et vigilant,
  Le sommeil du tombeau pressera ma paupiere—­

At this unfinished stanza was the pensive poet summoned to the guillotine!

[Footnote A:  Edinburgh Review, xxxv. 159]

CHAPTER XVI.

The domestic life of genius.—­Defects of great compositions attributed to domestic infelicities.—­The home of the literary character should be the abode of repose and silence.—­Of the Father.—­Of the Mother.—­Of family genius.—­Men of genius not more respected than other men in their domestic circle.—­The cultivators of science and art do not meet on equal terms with others, in domestic life.—­Their neglect of those around them.—­Often accused of imaginary crimes.