Recital animated by the imagination, weighed and judged by wisdom,—­such is history as the ancients understood it; and of history conceived and produced in such a spirit, I would, under the Divine guidance, leave a fragment to my country.

II.

History of the Girondists.

Mirabeau had just died.  The instinct of the people led them to press around the house of his tribune, as if to demand inspiration even from his coffin; but had Mirabeau been still living, he could no longer have given it; his star had paled its fires before that of the Revolution; hurried to the verge of an unavoidable precipice by the very chariot he himself had set in motion, it was in vain that he clung to the tribune.  The last memorial he addressed to the king, which the Iron Chest has surrendered to us, together with the secret of his venality, testify the failure and dejection of his mind.  His counsels are versatile, incoherent, and almost childish:—­now he will arrest the Revolution with a grain of sand—­now he places the salvation of the Monarchy in a proclamation of the crown and a regal ceremony which shall revive the popularity of the king,—.and now he is desirous of buying the acclamations of the tribune, and believes the nation, like him, to be purchasable at a price.  The pettiness of his means of safety are in contrast with the vast increase of perils; there is a vagueness in every idea; we see that he is impelled by the very passions he has excited, and that unable any longer to guide or control them, he betrays, whilst he is yet unable to crush, them.  The prime agitator is now but the alarmed courtier seeking shelter beneath the throne, and though still stuttering out terrible words in behalf of the nation and liberty, which are in the part set down for him, has already in his soul all the paltriness and the thoughts of vanity which are proper to a court.  We pity genius when we behold it struggling with impossibility.  Mirabeau was the most potent man of his time; but the greatest individual contending with an enraged element appears but a madman.  A fall is only majestic when accompanied by virtue.

Poets say that clouds assume the form of the countries over which they have passed, and moulding themselves upon the valleys, plains, or mountains, acquire their shapes and move with them over the skies.  This resembles certain men, whose genius being as it were acquisitive, models itself upon the epoch in which it lives, and assumes all the individuality of the nation to which it belongs.  Mirabeau was a man of this class:  he did not invent the Revolution, but was its manifestation.  But for him it might perhaps have remained in a state of idea and tendency.  He was born, and it took in him the form, the passion, the language which make a multitude say when they see a thing—­There it is.