donius-finding their most resolute enemy in the Thebans (three hundred of whose principal warriors fell in the field)—and now joined the Spartans at the Persian camp. The Athenians are said to have been better skilled in the art of siege than the Spartans; yet at that time their experience could scarcely have been greater. The Athenians were at all times, however, of a more impetuous temper; and the men who had run to the charge' at Marathon, were not to be baffled by the desperate remnant of their ancient foe. They scaled the walls-they effected a breach through which the Tegeans were the first to rush-the Greeks poured fast and fierce into the camp. Appalled, dismayed, stupified, by the suddenness and greatness of their loss, the Persians no longer sustained their fame-they dispersed themselves in all directions, falling, as they fled, with a prodigious slaughter, so that out of that mighty armament scarce three thousand effected an escape." Our limits will admit of only one extract more, but it is on a different subject, and exhibits Mr. Bulwer's powers of criticism in the fields of poetry and romance, with which he has long been familiar: disguise of any existent philosophy. However this be, it would certainly seem, that in this majestic picture of the dauntless enemy of Jupiter, punished only for his benefits to man, and attracting all our sympathies by his courage and his benevolence, is conveyed something of disbelief or defiance of the creed of the populace-a suspicion from which Eschylus was not free in the judgment of his contemporaries, and which is by no means inconsonant with the doctrines of Pythagoras." Mr. Bulwer justifies this warm eulogium by some beautiful translations. We select his animated version of the exquisite passage so well known to scholars, where Clytemnestra describes to the chorus the progress of the watchfires which announced to expecting Greece the fall of Troy-a passage perhaps unrivalled in the classical authors in picturesque and vivid images, and which approaches more nearly, though it has surpassed in sublimity, Sir Walter Scott's description of the bale-fires which announced to the Lothians a warden inroad of the English forces: "A gleam-a gleam-from Ida's height, It shot through the startled sky, On its holy promontory. And sent it on, the jocund sign, To Athos, Mount of Jove divine. Wildly the while, it rose from the isle, So that the might of the journeying light Till the watch that keep Macistus steep- Doth Macistus sleep On his tower-clad steep? And away-away It bounds in its freshening might. Silent and soon, Like a broadened moon, It passes in sheen, Asopus green, The warder wakes to the signal-rays, And it swoops from the hill with a broader blaze, On-on the fiery glory rode 'Summoning before us the eternal character of the Athenian drama, the vast audience, the unroofed and enormous theatre, the actors themselves enlarged by art above the ordinary proportions of men, the solemn and sacred subjects from which its form and spirit were derived, we turn to Eschylus, and behold at once the fitting creator of its grand and ideal personifications. I have said that Homer was his original; but a more intellectual age than that of the Grecian epic had arrived, and with Eschylus, philosophy passed into poetry. The dark doctrine of Fatality imparted its stern and awful interest to the narration of events-men were delineated, not as mere selfacting and self-willed mortals, but as the agents of a destiny inevitable and unseen-the gods themselves are no longer the gods of Homer, entering into the sphere of human action for petty motives, and for individual purposesdrawing their grandeur, not from the part they perform, but from the descriptions of the poet; -they appear now as the oracles or the agents of fate-they are visitors from another world, terrible and ominous from the warnings which they convey. Homer is the creator of the material poetry, Eschylus of the intellectual. The corporeal and animal sufferings of the Titan in the epic hell become exalted by tragedy into the portrait of moral fortitude defying physical anguish. The Prometheus of Eschylus is the spirit of a god disdainfully subjected to the misfortunes of a man. In reading this wonderful performance, which in pure and sustained sublimity is perhaps unrivalled in the literature of the world, we lose sight entirely of the cheerful Hellenic worship; and Stalk, in stern tumult, through the halls of Troy." yet it is in vain that the learned attempt to We have now discharged the pleasing duty trace its vague and mysterious metaphysics to of quoting some of the gems, and pointing out any old symbolical religion of the east. More some of the merits of th s remarkable work. probably, whatever theological system it It remains with equal impartiality, and in no shadows forth, was rather the gigantic con- unfriendly spirit, to glance at some of its faults ception of the poet himself, than the imperfect-faults which, we fear, will permanently prerevival of any forgotten creed, or the poetical vent it from taking the place to which it is en Thy lonely lake, Gorgopis, glowed-- And it streams amain- The headland cliffs that darkly down Are pass'd with the swift one's lurid stride, Bright harbinger of glory and of joy! titled, from its brilliancy and research, in the | than an impropriety-there is a fault. By disarchives of literature. playing such extraordinary bitterness on the subject, Mr. Bulwer clearly shows that he feels the weight of the Mitford fire; the strokes delivered have been so heavy that they have been felt. Nothing could be more impolitic than this, even for the interests of the party which he supports. It is not by perpetually attacking an author on trifling points or minor inaccuracies that you are to deaden or neutralize the impression he has made on mankind: it is by stating facts, and adducing arguments inconsistent with his opinions. The maxim, "ars est eclare artem," nowhere applies more clearly than here: Lingard is the model of a skilful controversialist, whose whole work, sedulously devoted to the upholding of the Catholic cause through the whole history of England, hardly contains a single angry or envenomed passage against a protestant historian. Mr. Bulwer would be much the better of the habits of the bar, before he ventured into the arena of political conflict. It is not by his waspish notes that the vast influence of Mitford's Greece on public thought is to be obviated: their only effect is to diminish the force of his attempted and otherwise able refutation. The future historian, who is to demolish the influence of Colonel Napier's eloquent and able, but prejudiced and, in political affairs, partial history of the Peninsular war, will hardly once mention his name. The first of these defects is the constant effort which is made to justify the proceedings, and extenuate the faults, and magnify the merits of democratic societies; and the equally uniform attempt to underrate the value of aristocratic institutions, and blacken the proceedings of aristocratic states. This, as Fouché would say, is worse than an offenceit is a fault. Its unfairness and absurdity is so obvious, that it neutralizes and obliterates the effect which otherwise might be produced by the brilliant picture which Mr. Bulwer's transcendent subject, as well as his own remarkable powers of narrative and description, afford. By the common calculation of chances, it is impossible to suppose that the aristocracies are always in the wrong, and the democracies always in the right; that the former are for ever actuated by selfish, corrupt, and discreditable motives, and the latter everlastingly influenced by generous, ennobling, and upright feelings. We may predicate with perfect certainty of any author, be he aristocratic, monarchical, or republican, who indulges in such a strain of thought and expression, extravagant eulogiums from his own party in the ontset, and possibly undeserved but certain neglect from posterity in the end. Mankind, in future times, when present objects and party excitement have ceased, will never read-or, at least, never attach faith to any works The last and by far the most serious objecwhich place all the praise on the one side and tion to Mr. Bulwer's work is the complete all the blame to the other of any of the child-oblivion which it evinces of a superintending ren of Adam. Rely upon it, virtue and vice Providence, either in dealing out impartial are very equally divided in the world: praise retribution to public actions, whether by naand blame require to be very equally bestowed. Different institutions produce a widely different effect upon society and the progress of human affairs but it is not because the one makes all men good, the other all men bad; but because the one permits the bad or selfish qualities of one class to exercise an unrestrained influence the other, because it arrays against their excesses the bad or selfish qualities of the other classes. All theories of government founded upon the virtue of mankind or the perfectability of human nature, will, to the end of the world, be disproved by the experience, and discarded by the common sense of mankind. Mother Eve has proved, and will prove, more than a match for the strongest of her descendants. Instability, selfishness, folly, ambition, rapacity, ever have and ever will characterize alike democratic and aristocratic societies and governors. The wisdom of government and political philosophy consists not in expecting or calculating on impossibilities from a corrupted being, but in so arranging society and political powers that the selfishness and rapacity of the opposite classes of which it is composed may counteract each other. The second glaring defect is the asperity and bitterness with which the author speaks of those who differ from him in political opinion. He in an especial manner is unceasing in his attacks upon Mr. Mitford: the historian whose able researches have added so much to our correct information on the state of the Grecian commonwealth. Here, too, is more tions or individuals in this world, or in deducing from the agency of human virtue or vice, and the shock of conflicting passions, the means of progressive improvement. We do not say that Mr. Bulwer is irreligious; far from it. From the brightness of his genius, as well as many exquisite passages in his novels, we should infer the reverse, and we hope yet to see his great powers exerted in the noblest of labours, that of tracing the wis dom of Providence amidst the mighty maze of human events. We say only that he ascribes no influence in human affairs to a superintending agency. This is being behind the age. It is lagging in arrear of his compeers. The vast changes consequent on the French Revolution have blown the antiquated oblivion of Providence in Raynal or Voltaire out of the water. The convulsions they had so large a share in creating have completely set at rest their irreligious dogmas. Here, too, Mr. Bulwer has fallen into an imprudence, for his own sake, as much as an error. If he will take the trouble to examine the works which are rising into durable celebrity in this country, those which are to form the ideas of la jeune Angleterre, he will find them all, without being fanatical, religious in their tendency. For obvious reasons we do not give the names of living authors; but we admire Mr. Bulwer's talents: we would fain, for the sake of the public, see them enlisted in the Holy Alliance-for the sake of himself, fall in more with the rising spi rit of the age; and we give a word to the wise As an example of the defect of which we complain, and to avoid the suspicion of injustice in the estimate we have formed of the tendency in this particular of his writings, we shall give an extract. Perhaps there is no event in the history of the world which has been so momentous in its consequences, so vital in its effects, as the repulse of the Persian invasion of Greece by Xerxes, and none in which the superintending agency of an overruling Providence was so clearly evinced. Observe the reflections which Mr. Bulwer deduces from this memorable event. "When the deluge of the Persian arms rolled back to its eastern bed, and the world was once more comparatively at rest, the continent of Greece rose visibly and majestically above the rest of the civilized earth. Afar in the Latian plains, the infant state of Rome was silently and obscurely struggling into strength against the neighbouring and petty states in which the old Etrurian civilization was rapidly passing to decay. The genius of Gaul and Germany, yet unredeemed from barbarism, lay scarce known, save where colonized by Greeks, in the gloom of its woods and wastes. The pride of Carthage had been broken by a signal defeat in Sicily; and Gelo, the able and astute tyrant of Syracuse, maintained, in a Grecian colony, the splendour of the Grecian name. "The ambition of Persia, still the great monarchy of the world, was permanently checked and crippled; the strength of generations had been wasted, and the immense extent of the empire only served yet more to sustain the general peace, from the exhaustion of its forces. The defeat of Xerxes paralyzed the East. "Thus, Greece was left secure, and at liberty to enjoy the tranquillity it had acquired, and to direct to the arts of peace the novel and amazing energies which had been prompted by the dangers, and exalted by the victories, of war. "The Athenians, now returned to their city, saw before them the arduous task of rebuilding its ruins, and restoring its wasted lands. The vicissitudes of the war had produced many silent and internal, as well as exterior, changes. Many great fortunes had been broken; and the ancient spirit of the aristocracy had received no inconsiderable shock in the power of new families; the fame of the base-born and democratic Themistocles-and the victories which a whole people had participated-broke up much of the prescriptive and venerable sanctity attached to ancestral names, and to particular families. This was salutary to the spirit of enterprise in all classes. The ambition of the great was excited to restore, by some active means, their broken fortunes and decaying influence the energies of the humbler ranks, already aroused by their new importance, were stimulated to maintain and to increase it. It was the very crisis in which a new direction might be given to the habits and the character of a whole people; and to seize all the advantages of that crisis, FATE, in Themistocles, had allotted to Athens, a man whose qualities were not only pre-eminently great in themselves, but peculiarly adapted to the circumstances of the time. And, as I have elsewhere remarked, it is indeed the nature and prerogative of free states, to concentrate the popular will into something of the unity of despotism, by producing, one after another, a series of representatives of the wants and exigencies of The Hour-each leading his generation, but only while he sympathizes with its will;—and either baffling or succeeded by his rivals, not in proportion as he excels or he is outshone in genius, but as he gives, or ceases to give, to the widest range of the legislative power, the most concentrated force of the executive; thus uniting the desires of the greatest number, under the administration of the narrowest possible control;-the constitution popular-the government absolute but responsible." Now, in this splendid passage is to be seen a luminous specimen of the view taken of the most memorable events in history by the liberal writers. In his reflections on this heartstirring event, in his observations on the glorious defeat of the arms of Eastern despotism by the infant efforts of European freedom, there is nothing said of the incalculable consequences dependent on the struggle—nothing on the evident protection afforded by a superintending Providence to the arms of an inconsiderable Republic-nothing on the marvellous adaptation of the character of Themistocles to the mighty duty with which he was charged, that of rolling back from the cradle of civilization, freedom and knowledge, the wave of barbaric conquests. It was FATE which raised him up! Against such a view of human affairs we enter our solemn protest. We allow nothing to fate, unless that is meant as another way of expressing the decrees of an overruling, all-seeing, and beneficent intelligence. We see in the defeat of the mighty armament by the arms of a small city on the Attic shore -in the character of its leaders-in the efforts which it made-in the triumphs which it achieved, and the glories which it won-the clearest evidence of the agency of a superintending power, which elicited, from the collision of Asiatic ambition with European freedom, the wonders of Grecian civilization, and the marvels of Athenian genius. And it is just because we are fully alive to the important agency of the democratic element in this memorable conflict; because we see clearly what inestimable blessings, when duly restrained, it is capable of bestowing on mankind; because we trace in its energy in every succeeding age the expansive force which has driven the blessings of civilization into the recesses of the earth, that we are the determined enemies of those democratic concessions which entirely destroy the beneficent agency of this power. ful element, which permit the vital heat of society to burst forth in ruinous explosions, or tear to atoms the necessary superincumbent masses, and instead of the smiling aspect of early and cherished vegetation, leave only in its traces the blackness of desolation and the ruin of nature. THE REIGN OF TERROR.* THE French Revolution is a subject on which neither history nor public opinion have been able as yet to pronounce an impartial verdict; nor is it perhaps possible that the opinions of mankind should ever be unanimous, upon the varied events which marked its course. The passions excited were so fierce, the dangers incurred so tremendous, the sacrifices made so great, that the judgment not only of contemporary but of future generations must be warped in forming an opinion concerning it; and as long as men are divided into liberal and conservative parties, so long will they be at variance in the views they entertain in regard to the great strife which they first maintained against each other. There are some of the great events of this terrible drama, however, concerning which there appears now to be scarcely any discrepancy of opinion. The execution of the king and the royal family-the massacre of the Girondists—the slaughter in the prisons, are generally admitted to have been, using Fouché's words, not only crimes but faults; great errors in policy, as well as outrageous violations of the principles of humanity. These cruel and unprecedented actions, by drawing the sword and throwing away the scabbard, are allowed to have dyed with unnecessary blood the career of the Revolution; to have needlessly exasperated parties against each other; and by placing the leaders of the movement in the terrible alternative of victory or death, rendered their subsequent career one incessant scene of crime and butchery. With the exception of Levasseur de la Sarthe, the most sturdy and envenomed of the republican writers, there is no author with whom we are acquainted, who now openly defends these atrocities; who pretends, in Barrère's words, that "the tree of liberty cannot flourish unless it is watered by the blood of kings and aristocrats ;" or seriously argues that the regeneration of society must be preceded by the massacre of the innocent and the tears of the orphan. But although the minds of men are nearly agreed on the true character of these sanguinary proceedings, there is a great diversity of opinion as to the necessity under which the revolutionists acted, and the effects with which they were attended on the progress of freedom. The royalists maintain that the measures of the Convention were as unnecessary as they were atrocious; that they plunged the progress of social amelioration into an ocean of blood; devastated France for years with fire and sword; brought to an untimely end above a million of men; and finally riveted about the neck of the nation an iron despotism, as the inevitable result and merited punishment of such criminal excesses. The revolutionists, Histoire de la Convention Nationale. Par M. L-, Conventionel. Paris, 1833. Foreign Quarterly Review, No. XXV., February, 1831. on the other hand, allege that these severities, however much to be deplored, were unavoidable in the peculiar circumstances in which France was then placed: they contend that the obstinate resistance of the privileged classes to all attempts at pacific amelioration, their implacable resentment for the deprivation of their privileges, and their recourse to foreign bayonets to aid in their recovery, left to their antagonists no alternative but their extirpation ; that in this "mortal strife" the royalists showed themselves as unscrupulous in their means, and would, had they triumphed, been as unsparing in their vengeance, as their adversaries; and they maintain, that notwithstanding all the disasters with which it has been attended, the triumph of the Revolution has prodigiously increased the productive powers and public happiness of France, and poured a flood of youthful blood into her veins. The historians of the Revolution, as might have been expected, incline to one or other of these two parties. Of these the latest and most distinguished are Bertrand de Molleville and Lacretelle on the royalist side, and Mignet and Thiers on that of the Revolution, the reputation of whose works is now too well established to. require us to enter here into an appreciation of their merits or defects, or to be affected by our praise or our censure. The work now before us, which is confined to the most stormy and stirring period of the Revolution, does not aspire, by its form, to a rivalry with all or any of those we have just mentioned. It consists of a series of graphic sketches of the National Convention, drawn evidently by one well acquainted with the actors in its terrific annals and interspersed with a narrative composed at a subsequent period, with the aids which the memoirs and historians of later times afford. As such, it possesses a degree of interest equal to any work on the same subject with which we are acquainted. Not only the speeches, but the attitudes, the manner, the appearance, and very dress of the actors in the drama are brought before our eyes. The author seems, in general, to speak in the delineation of character from his own recollections; the speeches which he has reported are chiefly transcribed from the columns of the Moniteur; but in some instances, especially the conversations of Danton, Robespierre, Barrère, and the other leaders of the Jacobins, we suspect that he has mingled his historical reminiscences with subsequent acquisitions, and put into the mouths of the leading characters of the day, prophecies too accurate in their fulfilment to have been the product of human sagacity. Generally speaking, however, the work bears the impress of intimate acquaintance with the events and persons who are described; and although from being published without a name, it has not the character and respectability afford, yet, in so guarantee for its authenticity which known far as internal evidence is concerned, we are inclined to rank it with the most faithful narratives of the events it records which have issued from the press. Its general accuracy, we are enabled, from a pretty extensive comparison of the latest authorities, to confirm. We shall give some extracts, which, if we are not greatly mistaken, will justify the tone of commendation in which we have spoken of it. The period at which the work commences is the opening of the Convention, immediately after the revolt on the 10th of August had overturned the throne, and when a legislature, elected by almost universal suffrage, in a state of unprecedented exasperation, was assembled to regenerate the state. Robespierre and Marat, the Agamemnon and Ajax of the democracy, are thus ably sketched: Roland and his wife, the beautiful victim of Jacobin vengeance, are thus portrayed: "Roland was a man of ordinary capacity, but he obtained the reputation of genius by means of his wife, who thought, wrote, and spoke for him. She was a woman of a most superior mind; with as much virtue as pride, as much ambition as domestic virtue. Daugh ter of an engraver, she commenced her career by wishing to contend with a queen; and no sooner had Marie Antoinette fallen, than she seemed resolute to maintain the combat, no longer against a person of her own sex, but with the men who pretended to rival the repu tation of her husband. "Madame Roland had great talent, but she wanted tact and moderation. She belonged to that class in the middling ranks that scarcely "Robespierre and Marat-enemies in secret, knows what good breeding is; her manners to external appearance friends-were early were too brusque; she trusted implicitly to distinguished in the Convention; both dear to her good intentions, and was quite indifferent the mob, but with different shades of character. in regard to external appearances, which, after The latter paid his court to the lowest of the all, are almost every thing in this world. Like low, to the men of straw or in rags, who were | Marie Antoinette, she was master in her own then of so much weight in the political sys- family; the former was king, the latter was tem. The needy, the thieves, the cut-throats-minister; her husband, whom she constantly in a word, the dregs of the people, the caput mortuum of the human race, to a man supported Marat. 66 put forward, as often disappeared in her presence, which gave rise to the bon mot of Condorcet: When I wish to see the minister of the interior, I never can see any thing but the petticoat of his wife.' This was strictly true: persons on business uniformly applied to Madame Roland instead of the minister; and whatever she may have said in her memoirs, it is certain that unconsciously she opened the portfolio with her own hand. She was to the Robespierre, albeit dependent on the same class to which his rival was assimilated by his ugliness, his filth, his vulgar manners, and disgusting habits, was nevertheless allied to a more elevated division of it: to the shopkeepers and scribes, small traders, and the inferior rank of lawyers. These admired in him the politesse bourgeoise; his well-combed and pow-last degree impatient under the attacks of the dered head, the richness of his waistcoats, the whiteness of his linen, the elegant cut of his coats, his breeches, silk stockings carefully drawn on, bright knee and shoe buckles; every thing, in short, bespoke the gentlemanly pretensions of Robespierre, in opposition to the sansculottism of Marat. "The shopkeepers and the lower ranks of the legal profession never identify themselves with the populace, even during the fervour of a revolution. There is in them an innate spirit of feudality, which leads them to despise the canaille and envy the noblesse: they desire equality, but only with such as are above themselves, not such as would confound them with their workmen. The latter class is odious to them; they envy the great, but they have a perfect horror for those to whom they give employment; never perceiving that the democratic principle can admit of no such distinction. This is the reason which made the aristocratie bourgeoise prefer Robespierre; they thought they saw in his manners, his dress, his air, a certain pledge that he would never degrade them to the multitude; never associate them, with those whose trade was carried on in the mud, like Marat's supporters. Amidst these divisions, one fixed idea alone united these opposite leaders; and that was, to give such a pledge to the Revolution, as would render it impossible to doubt their sincerity, and that pledge was to be the blood of Louis XVI."-Vol. i. p. 28. tribune, to which she had no means of reply, and took her revenge by means of pamphlets and articles in the public journals. In these she kept up an incessant warfare, which Roland sanctioned with his name, but in which it was easy to discover the warm and brilliant style of his wife."-i. 38. These observations exhibit a fair specimen of the author's manner. It is nervous, brief, and sententious, rather than eloquent or impressive. The work is calculated to dispel many illusions under which we, living at this distance, labour, in regard to the characters of the Revolution. They are here exhibited in their genuine colours, alike free from the dark shades in which they have been enveloped by one party, and the brilliant hues in which they are arrayed by the other. In the descriptions, we see the real springs of human conduct on this elevated stage; the same littlenesses, jealousies, and weaknesses which are every day couspicuous around us in private life. The Girondists in particular are stripped of their magic halo by his caustic hand. He dis plays in a clear light the weakness as well as brilliant qualities of that celebrated party: their ambition, intrigues, mob adulation, when rising with the Revolution; their weakness, irresolution, timidity, when assailed by its fury. Their character is summed up in the following words, which are put into the mouth of Lanjuinais, one of the most intrepid and nobleminded of the moderate party. |