measures

He was minister of Justice during the dreadful massacre of September, and he was very far from exerting his power to protect the wretched victims of mob fury. On that occasion was pronounced his famous speech already cited on the necessity of bold a speech by which he was long known, and will be long remembered, throughout all Europe. Other traits of his vehement nature are still recorded. When interrogated at his trial, his answer was, "Je m'appelle Danton; mon sejour sera bientot le neant; mon nom vivra dans le pantheon de l'histoire." When taking leave of his young and fair wife, and for a moment melted to the use of some such expressions as, "Oh, ma bien aimee! faut-il que je te quitte?»— suddenly recovering himself, he exclaimed, "Danton, point de faiblesse! Allons en avant!» -And the same bold front was maintained to the end. His murder was the knell of Robespierre's fate; and while choked with rage on his own accusation, and unable to make himself heard, a voice exclaimed, "C'est le sang de Danton qui t'etouffe!» It is the blood of Danton that chokes you! But it must be admitted to have been a fine, a just, and an impressive lesson which, goaded by the taunt, the tyrant, collecting his exhausted strength for a last effort, delivered to his real accomplices, the pusillanimous creatures who had not dared to raise a hand, or even a voice, against Danton's murder -"Laches! que ne le defendiez-vous donc ?» Cowards! then why did you not defend him? On the scaffold, where Danton retained his courage and proud self-possession to the last, the executioner cruelly and foolishly prevented him from embracing for the last time his friend Herault de Seychelles, a man of unsullied character, great acquirements, and high eminence at the bar, as well as of noble blood. "Fool!" exclaimed Danton indignantly, and with the bitter smile of scorn that often marked his features; "Fool! not to see that our heads must in a few seconds meet in that basket! >>>> The fall of Danton and his faithful adherent Camille has ever been regarded as one of the most surprising events of the Revolution. His habitual boldness, and the promptitude with which he always took and pursued his course, seems for the moment to have forsaken him; else surely he could have anticipated the attack of the committee, which was fully known beforehand. The Triumvirate had become generally the object of hatred and of dread. The Gironde, though broken and dispersed, and hostile to Danton, as well as to the other partisans of the Mountain, were

the last men to approve the course which had been followed since the destruction of their leaders, and were anything but reconciled to mob government, which they had always detested and scorned, by the desperate excesses to which it had led. On the scattered fragments of that once powerful party, then, he might well have relied. Even if he was ignorant of the impatience which Tallien, Bourdon de l'Oise, Legendre, and others felt under the Triumviral domination, and which the two former had not yet perhaps disclosed, he never could have omitted the consideration that some of them, especially Legendre, had before, and prematurely, given vent to their hostile feelings towards Robespierre, and were therefore sure to display them still more decidedly, now that he was so much less powerful, and had so much more richly earned their aversion. As for the charges against Danton, they were absolutely intangible; the speech of Robespierre, and report of Saint Just, presented nothing like substantial grounds of accusation, even admitting all they alleged to be proved. Their declamation was vague and puerile, asserting no offense, but confined to general vituperation; as that he abandoned the public in times of crises, partook of Brissot's calm and liberticide opinions, quenched the fury of true patriots, magnified his own worth and that of his adherents; or flimsy and broad allegations of things wholly incapable of proof,-as that all Europe was convinced of Danton and Lacroix having stipulated for royalty, and that he had always been friendly towards Dumouriez, Mirabeau, and d'Orleans. The proposition of Legendre to hear him before decreeing his prosecution was rejected by acclamation; and the report of Saint Just against him, though, by a refinement of injustice, as well as an excess of false rhetoric, addressed to him in one continual apostrophe of general abuse an hour long, was delivered and adopted in his absence, while he was buried in the dungeons of the state prison. The revolutionary tribunal, for erecting which he asked pardon of God and man, having nothing like a specific charge before them, much less any evidence to convict, were daunted by his eloquence and his courage, which were beginning to make an impression upon the public mind, when the committees sent Saint Just down to the Convention with a second report, alleging a new conspiracy, called the Conspiration des Prisons,—an alleged design of Danton and his party, then in custody, to rush out of the dungeons, and massacre the Committee, the Jacobin Club, and the patriots in the Convention;

liberate young Capet, that is, Louis XVII., and place him in Danton's hands. Upon this most clumsy fabrication, every word of which refuted itself, it was at once decreed that the tribunal should proceed summarily, and prevent any one of the accused being heard who should resist or insult the national justice that is, who should persist in asserting his innocence. Sentence and execution immediately followed.

These circumstances make it apparent that Danton's supineness in providing for his own safety by attacking the Committee. first, must have proceeded from the ascendant which the Triumvirate had gained over his mind. Originally he had a mean opinion of Robespierre, holding him void of the qualities which a revolutionary crisis demands. "Cet homme-la [was his phrase] ne saurait pas cuire des œufs durs." That man is not capable of boiling eggs hard. But this opinion was afterwards so completely. changed that he was used to say, "Tout va bien tant qu'on dira Robespierre et Danton; mais malheur a moi si on dit jamais Danton et Robespierre." All will go well as long as men say Robespierre and Danton; but woe be to me if ever they should say Danton and Robespierre. Possibly he became sensible to the power of Robespierre's character, forever persisting in extreme courses, and plunging onwards beyond any one, with a perfect absence of all scruples in his remorseless career. But his dread of such a conflict as those words contemplate was assuredly much augmented by the feeling that the match must prove most unequal between his own honesty and openness, and the practiced duplicity of the most dark, the most crafty of human beings.

The impression, thus become habitual on his mind, and which made him so distrustful of himself in a combat with an adversary like the rattlesnake, at once terrible and despicable, whose rattle gives warning of the neighboring peril, may go far to account for his avoiding the strife till all precaution was too late. to save him. But we must also take into account the other habitual feeling, so often destructive of revolutionary nerves; the awe in which the children of convulsion, like the practicers of the dark art, stand of the spirit they have themselves conjured up; their instinctive feeling of the agnostic throes which they have excited in the mass of the community, and armed with such resistless energy. The Committee, though both opposed and divided against itself, still presented to the country the front of the existing supreme power in the State; it was the sovereign de facto,

and retained as such all those preternatural attributes that "do hedge in" monarchs even when tottering to their fall; it therefore impressed the children of popular change with the awe which they instinctively feel towards the Sovereign People. Hence Danton, viewing in Robespierre the personification of the multitude, could not at once make up his mind to fly in the face of this dread power; and his hesitation enabled his adversaries to begin the mortal fray, and win their last victory. Plainly, it was a strife in which the party that began was sure to carry the day. The history of Danton, as well as that of Robespierre, both those passages wherein they were jointly successful, and those in which one fell beneath the power and the arts- the combined force and fraud-of the other, is well calculated to impress upon our minds that, in the great affairs of the world, especially in the revolutions which change its condition, the one thing needful is a sustained determination of character; a mind firm, persevering, inflexible, incapable of bending to the will of another, and ever controlling circumstances, not yielding to them. A quick percep

tion of opportunities, a prompt use of them, is of infinite advantage; an indomitable boldness in danger is all but necessary; nevertheless Robespierre's career shows that it is not quite indispensable, while Danton's is a proof that a revolutionary chief may possess it habitually, and may yet be destroyed by a momentary loss of nerve, or a disposition to take the law from others, or an inopportune hesitation and faltering in recurring to extreme measures. But the history of all these celebrated men shows that steady, unflinching, unscrupulous perseverance - the fixed and vehement will-is altogether essential to success. "Quod vult, id valde vult," said one great man formerly of another, to whom it applied less strikingly than to himself, though he was fated to experience in his own person that it was far from being inapplicable to him of whom he said it. It was the saying of Julius Cæsar respecting Junius Brutus, and conveyed in a letter to one who, celebrated, and learned, and virtuous as he was, and capable of exerting both boldness and firmness upon occasion, was yet, of all the great men that have made their names illustrious, the one who could the least claim the same habitual character for himself. Marcus Tullius could never have risen to eminence in the Revolution of France, any more than he could have mingled in the scenes which disgracefully distinguished it from the troubles of Rome.

JOHN BROWN

(1810-1882)

R. JOHN BROWN loved men and dogs so well that the entire English-speaking world loves him for it. His was a tender and manly soul, full of faith in God and man, with such courage to express itself as no weak soul can have, and such genuineness in its expression as no untrue soul can assume. His description of his walk with Thackeray on the Dean road near Edinburgh is full of his peculiar power. "It was a lovely evening," he writes,-" such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom. Between this cloud and the hills, there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowship color, lucid as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness, every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross. There it was - unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word: «Calvary!" The friends walked on in silence and then turned to other things. All that evening, he was very gentle and serious, speaking as he seldom did of divine things-of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior."

We might read many biographies of Thackeray without learning as much of the realities of his nature as are here expressed with the most delicate art,—an art which shows us Thackeray's inmost nature by describing the colors of a sunset sky and the illusion made possible by the commonplace machinery of a stone quarry. This is unquestionably literary art of a high order, and it was made possible for Doctor Brown by that strong and tender sympathy with what is best in nature and human nature which appears everywhere as the master motive of his essays.

He was born at Biggar, Scotland, in September, 1810. During most of his life he was a practicing physician in Edinburgh, and made on its streets those keen observations of dog nature which in "Rab and His Friends » go far to persuade the reader to believe,