wife, to whom, by way of recreation in the evening, he read what he had written during the day. The Vindicia Gallicæ, accordingly, though not the most profound or learned of his productions, was never after equalled by him in vigour and fervour of thought, style, and dialectics. He sold the copyright for 301. Published in April, it reached a third edition in August; and the publisher had the liberality to give the author more than triple the stipulated sum.

Mackintosh had been already introduced by his brother-in-law to Sheridan, who was then what may be called manager of the press to the Whig party. Sheridan said that he supposed a hundred or two from the fund at Brookes's would not come amiss to the author of the Vindiciæ. The suggestion was no doubt readily assented to, but went no farther. The fund was at the time impounded, in consequence of the Whig schism on the subject of the French Revolution.

The author of the Vindicia Gallicæ started at once into celebrity. His acquaintance was sought by the chief Whigs,-by Fox, Grey, Lauderdale, Erskine, Whitbread; and he was invited to the Duchess of Gordon's rout. He was not only courted, but defamed; there could, therefore, be no doubt of the reality of his success.

"The vulgar clamour," says he, in an advertisement to the third edition, "which has been raised with such malignant art against the friends of freedom, as the apostles of turbulence and sedition, has not even spared the obscurity of my name. To strangers I can only vindicate myself by defying the authors of such clamours to discover one passage in this volume not in the highest degree favourable to peace and stable government. Those to whom I am known would, I believe, be slow to impute any sentiments of violence to a temper which the partiality of my friends must confess to be indolent, and the hostility of enemies will not deny to be mild."

Who does not know Burke's chivalrous and celebrated allusion to the Queen of France, in a passage of which the taste may be criticised, but of which the eloquence will never be unfelt by those who can appreciate imagination and sentiment? The following may be called an antagonist passage by Mackintosh in reply :

"In the eye of Mr. Burke, these crimes and excesses assume an aspect far more important than can be communicated to them by their own insulated guilt. They form, in his opinion, the crisis of a revolution, far more important than any change of government; a revolution, in which the sentiments and opinions that have formed the manners of the European nations are to perish. 'The age of chivalry is gone, and the glory of Europe extinguished for ever.' He follows this exclamation by an eloquent eulogium on chivalry, and by gloomy predictions of the future state of Europe, when the nation that has been so long accustomed to give her the tone in arts and manners is thus debased and corrupted. A caviller

might remark, that ages much more near the meridian fervour of chivalry than ours have witnessed a treatment of queens as little gallant and generous as that of the Parisian mob. He might remind Mr. Burke, that, in the age and country of Sir Philip Sidney, a Queen of France, whom no blindness to accomplishment, no malignity of detraction, could reduce to the level of Maria Antoinetta, was, by < a nation of men of honour and cavaliers,' permitted to languish in captivity and expire on a scaffold; and, he might add, that the manners of a country are more surely indicated by the systematic cruelty of a sovereign, than by the licentious frenzy of a mob."

This and another passage were made the subject of much obloquy by his opponents, and disapproved, it would appear, by some of his friends. In the advertisement before cited, he says,

"I have been accused, by valuable friends, of treating with ungenerous levity the misfortunes of the royal family of France. They will not, however, suppose me capable of deliberately violating the sacredness of misery in a palace or a cottage; and I sincerely lament that I should have been betrayed into expressions which admitted that construction."

The reign of Louis XIV., and the successive counsels which swayed France in the two feeble reigns which intervene between that celebrated age and the Revolution, are sketched by a few vigorous touches at the opening of the work :

race.

"The intrusion of any popular voice was not likely to be tolerated in the reign of Louis XIV.,- a reign which has been so often celebrated as the zenith of warlike and literary splendour, but which has always appeared to me to be the consummation of whatever is afflicting and degrading in the history of the human Talent seemed, in that reign, robbed of the conscious elevation, of the erect and manly port, which is its noblest associate and its surest indication. The mild purity of Fénélon, the lofty spirit of Bossuet, the masculine mind of Boileau, the sublime fervour of Corneille, were confounded by the contagion of ignominious and indiscriminate servility. It seemed as if the 'representative majesty' of the genius and intellect of man were prostrated before the shrine of a sanguinary and dissolute tyrant, who practised the corruption of courts without their mildness, and incurred the guilt of wars without their glory. His highest praise is to have supported the stage trick of royalty with effect; and it is surely difficult to conceive any character more odious and despicable, than that of a puny libertine, who, under the frown of a strumpet, or a monk, issues the mandate that is to murder virtuous citizens, to desolate happy and peaceful hamlets, to wring agonising tears from widows and orphans. Heroism has a splendour that almost atones for its excesses; but what shall we think of him, who, from the luxurious and dastardly security in which he wallows at Versailles, issues with calm and cruel apathy his order to butcher the Protestants of Languedoc, or to lay in ashes the villages of the Palatinate? On the recollection of such scenes, as a scholar, I blush for the prostitution of letters; as a man, I blush for the patience of humanity.

“But the despotism of this reign was pregnant with the great events which have signalised our age. It fostered that literature which was one day destined to destroy it. Its profligate conquests have eventually proved the acquisitions of humanity ; and the usurpations of Louis XIV. have served only to add a larger portion to the great

body of freemen. The spirit of its policy was inherited by the succeeding reign. The rage of conquest, repressed for a while by the torpid despotism of Fleury, burst forth with renovated violence in the latter part of the reign of Louis XV. France, exhausted alike by the misfortunes of one war and the victories of another, groaned under a weight of impost and debt, which it was equally difficult to remedy or to endure. The profligate expedients were exhausted, by which successive ministers had attempted to avert the great crisis, in which the credit and power of the government must perish.

“The wise and benevolent administration of M. Turgot, though long enough for his glory, was too short, and, perhaps, too early, for those salutary and grand reforms which his genius had conceived and his virtue would have effected. The aspect of purity and talent spread a natural alarm among the minions of a court, and they easily succeeded in the expulsion of such rare and obnoxious intruders.

"The magnificent ambition of M. de Vergennes; the brilliant, profuse, and rapacious career of M. de Calonne; the feeble and irresolute violence of M. Brienne; all contributed their share to swell this financial embarrassment. The deficit, or the inferiority of the revenue to the expenditure, at length rose to the enormous sum of 115 millions of livres, or about 4,750,000l. annually. This was a disproportion between income and expense with which no government, and no individual, could long continue to exist.

"In this exigency, there was no expedient left but to guarantee the ruined credit of bankrupt despotism by the sanction of the national voice. The States-general were a dangerous mode of collecting it. Recourse was therefore had to the assembly of the Notables, a mode well known in the history of France, in which the King summoned a number of individuals, selected at his discretion from the mass, to advise him in great emergencies. They were little better than a popular Privy Council. They were neither recognised nor protected by law. Their precarious and subordinate existence hung on the rod of despotism.

"They were called together by M. Calonne, who has now the inconsistent arrogance to boast of the schemes which he laid before them, as the model of the assembly whom he traduces. He proposed, it is true, the equalisation of impost, and the abolition of the pecuniary exemptions of the nobility and clergy; and the difference between his system, and that of the assembly, is only in what makes the sole distinction in human actions-its end. He would have destroyed the privileged orders, as obstacles to despotism. They have destroyed them, as derogations from freedom. The object of his plans was to facilitate fiscal oppression. The motive of theirs is to fortify general liberty. They have levelled all Frenchmen as men; he would have levelled them all as slaves.

"The assembly of the Notables, however, soon gave a memorable proof, how dangerous are all public meetings of men, even without legal powers of control, to the permanence of despotism. They had been assembled by M. Calonne, to admire the plausibility and splendour of his speculations, and to veil the extent and atrocity of his rapine. But the fallacy of the one, and the profligacy of the other, were detected with equal ease. Illustrious and accomplished orators, who have since found a nobler sphere for their talents in a more free and powerful assembly, exposed this plunderer to the Notables. Detested by the nobles and clergy, of whose privileges he had suggested the abolition; undermined in the favour of the Queen, by his attack on one of her favourites (Breteuil ); exposed to the fury of the people, and dreading the terrors of judicial prosecution; he speedily sought refuge in England, without the recollection of one virtue, or the applause of one party, to console his retreat."

The French soldiers, by abandoning the court, and siding with the people in the crisis of the Revolution, decided the great struggle ́between privilege and democracy. Their conduct called forth execrations from one party, eulogies from the other, eloquence from both, and remains one of the great lessons bequeathed by that awful epoch to nations and their governments. Stigmatised by Burke, they are thus defended by Mackintosh :

"These soldiers, whom posterity will celebrate for patriotic heroism, are stigmatised by Mr. Burke as 'base hireling deserters,' who sold their king for an increase of pay. This position he everywhere asserts or insinuates, but nothing seems more false. Had the defection been confined to Paris, there might have been some speciousness in the accusation. The exchequer of a faction might have been equal to the corruption of the guards. The activity of intrigue might have seduced by promise the troops cantoned in the neighbourhood of the capital. But what policy or fortune could pervade by their agents or donatives an army of 150,000 men dispersed over so great a monarchy as France. The spirit of resistance to uncivic commands broke forth at once in every part of the empire. The garrisons of the cities of Rennes, Bordeaux, Lyons, and Grenoble refused, almost at the same moment, to resist the virtuous insurrection of their fellow-citizens. No largesses could have seduced, no intrigues could have reached, so vast and divided a body. Nothing but sympathy with the national spirit could have produced their noble disobedience. The remark of Mr. Hume is here most applicable, that what depends on a few may be often attributed to chance (secret circumstances), but that the action of great bodies must be ever ascribed to general causes. It was the apprehension of Montesquieu, that the spirit of increasing armies would terminate in converting Europe into an immense camp, in changing our artisans and cultivators into military savages, and reviving the age of Attila and Genghis. Events are our preceptors, and France has taught us that this evil contains in itself its own remedy and limit. A domestic army cannot be increased without increasing the number of its ties with the people, and of the channels by which popular sentiment may enter. Every man who is added to the army is a new link that unites it to the nation. If all citizens were compelled to become soldiers, all soldiers must of necessity adopt the feelings of citizens, and the despots cannot increase their army without admitting into it a greater number of men interested to destroy them. A small army may have sentiments different from the great body of the people, and no interest in common with them; but a numerous soldiery cannot. This is the barrier which nature has opposed to the increase of armies. They cannot be numerous enough to enslave the people, without becoming the people itself. The effects of this truth have been hitherto conspicuous only in the military defection of France, because the enlightened sense of general interest has been so much more diffused in that nation than in any other despotic monarchy of Europe. But they must be felt by all. An elaborate discipline may for a while in Germany debase and brutalise soldiers too much to receive any impressions from their fellow men;-artificial and local institutions are, however, too feeble to resist the energy of natural causes. The constitution of man survives the transient fashions of despotism, and the history of the next century will probably evince on how frail and tottering a basis the military tyrannies of Europe stand."

The

army having decided that there should be a revolution, the

Constituent Assembly determined its form and extent. Burke described this memorable assembly as the greatest architect of ruin which the world had ever seen. One of the most remarkable innovations of the Constituent Assembly was the abolition of feudal titles of nobility. The measure was literally improvised, and took Europe by surprise. Burke's illustration of Corinthian capitals is familiar to most readers. The following is Mackintosh's reply :

"Thus feeble are the objections against the authority of the assembly. We now resume the consideration of its exercise, and proceed to enquire whether they ought to have reformed or destroyed their government? The general question of innovation is an exhausted common-place, to which the genius of Mr. Burke has been able to add nothing but splendour of eloquence and felicity of illustration. It has long been so notoriously of this nature, that it is placed by Lord Bacon among the sportive contests which are to exercise rhetorical skill. No man will support the extreme on either side. Perpetual change and immutable establishment are equally indefensible. To descend, therefore, from these barren generalities to a more near view of the question, let us state it more precisely. Was the civil order in France corrigible, or was it necessary to destroy it? Not to mention the extirpation of the feudal system, and the abrogation of the civil and criminal code, we have first to consider the destruction of the three great corporations-of the Nobility, the Church, and the Parliament. These three aristocracies were the pillars which, in fact, formed the government of France. The question, then, of forming or destroying these bodies is fundamental. There is one general principle applicable to them all, adopted by the French legislators, that the existence of orders is repugnant to the principles of the social union. An order is a legal rank-a body of men combined and endowed with privileges by law. There are two kinds of inequality; the one personal-that of talent and virtue, the source of whatever is excellent and admirable in society; the other that of fortune, which must exist, because property alone can stimulate to labour; and labour, if it were not necessary to the existence, would be indispensable to the happiness, of man. be necessary, yet, in its excess, it is the great malady of civil society. lation of that power, which is conferred by wealth, in the hands of perpetual source of oppression and neglect to the mass of mankind. The power of the wealthy is further concentrated by their tendency to combination, from which number, dispersion, indigence, and ignorance equally preclude the poor. The wealthy are formed into bodies by 'their professions, their different degrees of opulence (called ranks), their knowledge, and their small number. They necessarily, in all countries, administer government, for they alone have skill and labour for its functions. Thus circumstanced, nothing can be more evident than their inevitable preponderance in the political scale. The preference of partial to general interests is, however, the greatest of all public evils: it should, therefore, have been the object of all laws to repress this malady; but it has been their perpetual tendency to aggravate it. Not content with the inevitable inequality of fortune, they have superadded to it honorary and political distinctions. Not content with the inevitable tendency of the wealthy to combine, they have embodied them in classes; they have fortified those conspiracies against the general interest, which they ought to have resisted, though they could not disarm. Laws, it is said, cannot equalise men. No; but ought they for that reason to aggravate the inequality which they cannot cure? Laws cannot inspire unmixed patriotism; but ought they for

But though it The accumuthe few, is the