We should also more easily detect the misrepresentations of that Tory and high-toned Whig Press of England, which has so long given laws to American literature. The adherents of both these parties, at present opposed to each other, but differing little in principle, and whom we shall before long see united in opposition to their common enemy, the Radicals, have hitherto cordially united in heaping every opprobrious epithet upon the agents in the French Revolution,* (with rare exceptions) from the Constitutionnel to the Montagnard. The select appellations which the AntiReformers of Britain divide between the Republicans of France and America, although pronounced false as regards ourselves, we have been sometimes credulous enough to apply to others; but this sort of colonial feeling, which has heretofore too much pervaded our salons and our cultivated circles, and which would make our opinions little else than an echo of error and intolerance, is fast giving way to the more healthy and national emotions, which throb in the breast of the great mass of the American people.

Let us not be misled by that press, which is at this moment the greatest obstacle to a right understanding between the liberal minds on both sides of the Atlantic, which is forever occupied in blowing into a flame the embers of hostility, that would otherwise have long since expired,—which in turn misrepresents our actual condition, and the feelings with which we are regarded in Europe, which checks, by its false statements or its arrogant sneer, those sentiments of mutual respect and affection, that should subsist between Let us not, we say, be misled by this blinded press,-but when we see how much it is wanting with regard to us, adopt with distrust its views of European politics.

us.

England, whether we regard her as a nation or as divided into the two great parties, Whig and Tory, was too vitally interested against the French Revolution to judge it fairly. Her wri

* The events of the two last years have in a great measure falsified our remarks, so far as regards the Edinburgh Review and its kindred periodicals, the brilliant success of the French revolutionists, and the feeble and dilatory progress of their own reformers, have taught them philosophy. But no one, who has traced the course of that Review for the last thirty years, so liberal and high-minded on every subject connected with its own island, can fail to have marked the misplaced arrogance with which it has treated the popular parties of the continent and of America.

ters, almost uniformly, present us with one-sided views of the time; dwelling upon horrors which are undeniable, and omitting the causes which palliate or excuse those excesses.

We are constantly reminded of the crimes committed by the people, but we are not presented with the catalogue of the vices of their monarchs, not shorter nor less bloody. We are told of the tocsin which awoke the Parisian mob to pillage and slaughter, but we are not reminded that it was the same sound which, at a king's command, ushered in the day of St. Bartholomew. They do not omit to dwell upon the horrors of the Noyades, but the bloody Dragonnades are quite forgotWe are told of enormous taxation, of the maximum and of the requisition of the French youth perishing on the frontiers; but we are not bidden to recollect treasures wasted, and a nation sent into mourning to gratify the ambition of Louis XIV.

ten.

The Parc-aux-cerfs, the scandalous vices of the whole reign of Louis XV., the outrageous luxury and oppression of the nobles, and the unheard-of misery of the Tiers Etat, are all put aside, that with a single eye we may contemplate the blood-thirstiness and cruelty of the people. It is idle to think of deducing the causes of the French Revolution, from the middle or even the beginning of the eighteenth century. We must go far, far up in their history, and trace down an almost uninterrupted series of oppression, extravagance, misgovernment on the one hand, and of misery, poverty, degradation on the other, from the first Bourbon to the fifth of May, 1789,* before we can fully appreciate the feelings of the people on that ever-to-be-remembered day.

Poets sing to us of the pride of blood; of the stirring emotions that flow from a long line of ancestry. Is it not to be supposed, that feelings of another and a deeper dye are also handed down from generation to generation? There is a chronicle kept in the heart, of the misery of fathers, of mothers, of ancestors, of their oppression and of their wrongs, as well as of chivalrous feats and knightly prowess.

It has been too much the fashion to look upon the French Revolution as a period placed apart,-a period, barred by its unintelligible horrors from all relation with previous and succeeding events; it was in truth most intimately connect

* Meeting of the States General.

ed with them, and was but the completion and last term of a long series of occurrences, that had been slowly tending to this end. It was a peculiar fulfilment of the declaration, that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, until the third and fourth generation. It presents the spectacle of a nation, sitting in severe and unpardoning judgment upon the heirs to the crimes of centuries. A king, whose incompetency as a monarch would have been cloaked in more peaceable times by his virtues as a man, perished on the scaffold for the vices of his ancestors. A nobility and clergy, not altogether unwilling to surrender the most galling of their privileges and the most oppressive of their institutions, were stripped of every immunity and every right, by a people, who saw in them only the depositaries of the pride, the arrogance, and the heartlessness of their forefathers.

The French Revolution, with its wild excesses and insatiate cruelty, is utterly incomprehensible, according to any view of human nature, if it be not regarded as a retribution,—fearful and wicked, forbidden by the laws of God and man,-but yet only a retribution, crowded into a brief space, of the wrongs of centuries.

It is to be remembered that the prominent men of the period were either of no education, moral or intellectual, or that they belonged to the class of savans and littérateurs, who, caressed and insulted by turns, felt perhaps more sensibly than any others, the difference of ranks; and that they were without the restraints of religion, which was almost to a man abandoned by the nation in its utmost need. There seems also to have been no one, sufficiently democratic in his opinions, and at the same time possessed of enough virtue and courage to command the respect and fear of the people. After Mirabeau, there appears to have been no one even capable of over-awing the multitude. France,' says Madame Roland, 'appears to have been, as it were, exhausted of men: it is really surprising, that so few have appeared in the progress of the Revolution. We have seen scarcely any thing but pigmies.'

With these prefatory remarks to bespeak the kind consideration of our readers for the subject of the following pages, we approach the auto-biography of Brissot. Brissot, as is

well known, was one of the most prominent men of that party sometimes called Girondins, sometimes after himself Brissotins, which for a moment held the reins of the State, but was shortly

afterwards swallowed up by that Revolution, which, to use the simile of Vergniaud, like Saturn, devoured its own children. Brissot possesses a peculiar claim to our favorable construction, from the interest which, at an early period, he took in our national fortunes; and he may indeed be regarded as a favorable specimen of the early republican character of France. The memoirs, now under review, purport to have been written at the Abbaye during Brissot's imprisonment there, from May to October, 1793; and, as they are guarantied by the names of his son, Anarcharsis Brissot, and of M. Montrol, the author of a History of the Emigration, we know of no reason to doubt their authenticity. The first part, coming down to the year 1787, which alone has yet reached us, was published at Paris, in 1830, and re-printed at Brussels, in a more accessible form, in the course of the same year. The work is not written with any great perspicuity or regard to chronological accuracy; but we shall be able to extract from it, so far as it comes down, a brief outline of the most marked events of the author's career; below that period, the contemporary history of the time furnishes abundant materials for completing the narrative of his life.

JEAN PIERRE BRISSOT, the son of a traiteur, the thirteenth of sixteen children, was born at Chartres, in the district of Beauce, on the 14th of January, 1754. In so large a family, it was clearly desirable that each son should bear some distinguishing title, and Brissot took, according to the custom of his province, the name of the town where he had been nursed, Quarville, which he afterwards anglicized into Warville, and by which appellation he was frequently known. He is, nevertheless, sometimes confounded with his brother, Brissot Thivars.

At the early age of eight or nine, at the College of Chartres, he appears to have been an assiduous scholar, but even then he was infected by the spirit of irreligion, which, like a pestilence, was spreading throughout every rank of France. His skepticism drew down the censure of the clergy, and the displeasure of his father. We can easily pardon the anger of one much more stern than he represents his parent, in reading the language in which he speaks of the progress of his mind on this subject.

The jests of a fellow student, Guillard (afterwards an opera

writer) ridiculed him out of the Catholic religion, and not very long after this period, he sits down at his leisure to prove the comparative advantages of belief and unbelief.

'I went to sleep a materialist, and awoke a deist; next day, I gave the palm to pyrrhonism. When my spirits were high, I was in love with atheism. Such was the state of doubt and error, in which several of my years were passed, until at length, enlightened by the writings of Rousseau, and having maturely weighed the testimony of my own consciousness, I came to the conviction of the existence of a God, and regulated my conduct accordingly. My pyrrhonism was never extended farther than revelation; I had always believed, that revealed religion was imposture. Entertaining these views, I did not hesitate to assail Christianity. Having accidentally encountered an English treatise upon the subject of St. Paul, I wrote another in reply.

This work appeared at Hamburg in 1782. In justice, however, it should be recorded that it is the only irreligious production which fell from his pen. Human happiness,' he says, flows from a reciprocal toleration of opinions, and I cannot condemn too severely this early trifling, fit only to create irritation, and to cause hatred and strife.'*

At an early age, that restlessness, that discontent, that longing after immortality, which, with those destined to take a prominent share in active life, so often render even youth little different from an unquiet dream, appear to have seized upon Brissot. He thus commemorates some of the feelings of his boyhood.

'The professor had divined the ambitious views by which I was tortured; I was wholly absorbed by the passion for renown; a theatre of action alone was wanting. The idea of revolution often entered my mind, though I dared not yet disclose it; and I naturally assigned to myself one of the most important parts in the drama. I had been very deeply impressed by the history of Charles the First and Cromwell. I will, nevertheless, avow, and the declaration will not find favor with those who convert patriotism into a species of cannibalism, that I never, in my romantic dreams, imitated the barbarous example of murdering my captive; I only sent him into exile.'

*Tom. I. p. 112.