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 justicethat 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 perception 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 "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.

success.

561

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,

with Agassiz, that nobility in dog nature is as immortal as it is in the human soul. Doctor Brown's essays appear in "Horæ Subsecivæ" (two volumes) and in "John Leech and Other Papers." He loved what was simple, true, and unpretentious, and his work is never likely to go out of favor.

WR

THE DEATH OF THACKERAY

HAVE seen no satisfactory portrait of Mr. Thackeray. We like the photographs better than the prints; and we have an old daguerreotype of him without his spectacles which is good; but no photograph can give more of a man than there is in any one ordinary—often very ordinary-look of him; it is only Sir Joshua and his brethren who can paint a man liker than himself. Lawrence's first drawing has much of his thoroughbred look, but the head is too much tossed up and vif. The photograph from the later drawing by the same hand we like better; he is alone, and reading with his book close up to his eyes. This gives the prodigious size and solidity of his head, and the sweet mouth. We have not seen that by Mr. Watts, but if it is as full of power and delicacy as his Tennyson, it will be a comfort.

Though in no sense a selfish man, he had a wonderful interest in himself as an object of study, and nothing could be more delightful and unlike anything else than to listen to him on himself. He often draws his own likeness in his books. In the "Fraserians," by Maclise, in Fraser, is a slight sketch of him in his unknown youth; and there is an excessively funny and not. unlike extravaganza of him by Doyle or Leech, in the Month, a little short-lived periodical, edited by Albert Smith. He is represented lecturing, when certainly he looked his best.

The foregoing estimate of his genius must stand instead of any special portraiture of the man. Yet we would mention two leading traits of character traceable, to a large extent, in his works, though finding no appropriate place in a literary criticism of them. One was the deep steady melancholy of his nature. He was fond of telling how on one occasion at Paris he found himself in a great crowded salon; and looking from the one end across the sea of heads, being in Swift's place of calm in a crowd, he saw at the other end a strange visage staring at him

with an expression of comical woebegoneness. After a little he found that this rueful being was himself in the mirror. He was not, indeed, morose. He was alive to and thankful for every-day blessings, great and small; for the happiness of home, for friendship, for wit and music, for beauty of all kinds, for the pleasures of the "faithful old gold pen"; now running into some felicitous expression, now playing itself into some droll initial letter; nay, even for the creature comforts. But his persistent state, especially for the latter half of his life, was profoundly morne,—there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind. His keen perception of the meanness and vulgarity of the realities around him contrasted with the ideal present to his mind could produce no other effect. This feeling, embittered by disappointment, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the sæva indignatio of Swift; acting on the kindly and too sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness. In part, too, this melancholy was the result of private calamities. He alludes to these often in his writings, and a knowledge that his sorrows were great is necessary to the perfect appreciation of much of his deepest pathos. We allude to them here, painful as the subject is, mainly because they have given rise to stories,-some quite untrue, some even cruelly injurious. The loss of his second child in infancy was always an abiding sorrow,-described in the "Hoggarty Diamond," in a passage of surpassing tenderness, too sacred to be severed from its context. A yet keener and more constantly present affliction was the illness of his wife. He married her in Paris when he was "mewing his mighty youth," preparing for the great career which awaited him. One likes to think on these early days of happiness, when he could draw and write with that loved companion by his side; he has himself sketched the picture: "The humblest painter, be he ever so poor, may have a friend watching at his easel, or a gentle wife sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles or talk or silence cheering his labors." After some years of marriage, Mrs. Thackeray caught a fever, brought on by imprudent exposure at a time when the effects of such ailments are more than usually lasting both on the system and the nerves. She never afterwards recovered so as to be able to be with her husband and children. But she has been from the first intrusted to the good offices of a kind family, ten