of impartiality and fair dealing. If he states any- "There was no longer any possibility of atthing favorable to the royalist party, he never tempting any serious conspiracy in favor of the fails to throw in some doubt of its truth, some king, since the aristocracy had been put to fight, suspicion of its motive, or some counterbalancing and the court was encompassed by the Assembly merit in their opponents. On the other hand, the people-and the national militia."-i., 216. when he is forced to describe some crime of the And yet after this confession he continues even revolutionists, it is in a mitigated and mighty more glibly than before his insinuations against charitable tone: the unhappy necessity is deplored, the counter-revolutionary conspiracies of the court. but asserted; its cause is traced back to those Here we have to observe on one of the variations whose resistance produced it; and the royalists between M. Thiers' first and subsequent editions are everywhere implicated, by some strange leger--small but significant. In his first edition (i., dermain, in all the atrocities committed against 200) M. Thiers had said that the aristocracy had themselves by their Jacobin persecutors. In short, been "chassée," driven out by force—(“ Chasser, during the whole course of the revolution the roy-mettre dehors par violence."-Dictionnaire de l' alists never did any one thing that was unexcep- Académie)—which was quite true; but M. Thiers tionally right-nor the revolutionists any one thing on reconsideration felt that this truth would have that was inexcusably wrong. exculpated the Emigration, and he altered "chassée," into "éloignéc." This is the leading principle and fundamental theory of the whole work, as it was of M. Mignet's suggestio falsi-suppressio veri. Of the mode in which he works it out, we now proceed to give a few prominent examples. We have a striking and melancholy proof of how early the king was deprived of anything that could be called "a court," even in the least invidious sense of the word : the following short but affecting statement of what he then witnessed at the Court of Versailles : "The unhappy king on his return to Versailles found himself almost alone. For three whole days there was no one near him but M. de Montmorin [one of the ministers] and me [who had no official character.] Even his menial attendants waited upon with disrespectful negligence, and I myself was a witness of this insolence."-Mém de Bezenval, ii., 568. We shall begin with his representations of the Three days after the capture of the Bastille the conduct of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, Cit-king was advised to make his celebrated and huizen Egalité, and incidentally M. de la Fayette-miliating visit to the Hôtel-de-Ville in Paris, in the main and most important topics of his earlier which the newly elected mayor, Bailly, insulted volumes. He felt himself, as we have stated, him, even in the presentation of the keys of the obliged, by the state of public opinion and the city. He returned "heart-broken" to Versailles, notorious evidence of facts, to admit-which he whither M. de Bezenvál, General of the Swiss does, however, like a reluctant and equivocating Guards, who had commanded the troops in the witness the king's benevolent disposition, good late crisis, but had now resigned his military comintentions, and, when the constitution was estab-mand, followed him, unbidden, and he has left us lished, his constitutional and conscientious execution of his duties; and he does something of the same sort of lame and imperfect justice to the queen. This looks at first sight like a gleam of candor-but not at all-it is only a faux-fuyant-a device to enable him with more venom and effect, and less risk of offence or of direct contradiction, to calumniate the victims whom he professes to absolve; for while he seems to acquit them individually, he collects and repeats all the lies and libels of those dismal times, as against an imaginary" COURT." Now every one of common sense and common information must know that this phantom of a court, as distinct from the king, is not only absurd in theory, but contradicted by every kind of evidence. The poor king was not only scrupulously cautious to do nothing but in communication with his ministers, but in truth there was at the period at which these calumnies about "the perfidious machinations of the court" were most rife—no such thing as a court-no persons of such a class as could furnish secret and irresponsible advisers, even had the king been bold enough to consult them. The first massacres in July, 1789, had driven into emigration most of the personal friends and favorites of both the king and queen-the 5th and 6th October, which led them captives to the Tuileries, completed their destitution, and there remained near their persons no one of any political weight or consequence who could have ventured to advise the king, much less-as M. Thiers sometimes asserts, and more frequently insinuates to control and overbear him. This M. Thiers, with that inconsistency from which falsehood can never entirely guard itself, incidentally admits. As early as the close of 1789 he confesses the very fact we have just stated :— Who, it must not be forgotten in measuring M. Thiers' candor, was the aunt of Marie Louise and of the Duchess of Orleans. And so early and so entirely was the "unhappy king" convinced of the perils of his own situation, and his total want of power to protect any one who was attached to him, that he forced M. de Bezenval to leave Versailles and to seek his safety in a hasty retreat to his native country. Such was the court which the pages of M. Thiers represent as being at this very time in formidable activity against the safety of Paris which was garrisoned by 60,000 new-raised National Guards, and the liberties of France which was in a state of triumphant anarchy from Dunkirk to Marseilles. The There is one great fact which, if M. Thiers had given himself the least trouble about either historical truth or logical consistency, would have warned him, as it must convince all the rest of mankind, that his device of seeming to separate the innocent king from the guilty court is, by the admission of his own idols, utterly futile. king was executed for the very circumstances imputed by M. Thiers to the court!-and Messrs. Vergniaud and Gaudet-" courageux nobles, et illustres citoyens," as M. Thiers delights to call them-and his Highness Citizen and Prince Cambacérès "homme savant et sage," and Citizen and Count Carnot "homme probe et courageux," and Citizen and Count Treilhard "honnête homme réunissant les lumières à la prolité," and Letourneur "bon homme," and Lareveillière Lepeaux " le plus honnête et le meilleur des hommes," and so many others of M. Thiers' transcendant specimens of talents, probity, and justice, who all voted for the death of the king, made no such exculpatory dis- emigrants, overawed the constitutional dispositions tinction, and sent him to the scaffold as guilty of those imaginary crimes which M. Thiers-not now daring to produce against him personally, and yet. reluctant to disavow, his "illustrious" regicides-imputes to the phantom court. of the queen. We found in Madame Campan no mention of-not the slightest allusion to, the court, nor anything like it. She speaks of the emigrants alone, and does not say that they advised the queen, or that the queen listened (as M. Thiers But may not the queen be suspected of having himself admits she did not) to their advice. What favored counter-revolutionary intrigues, and might Madame Campan does say is simply that— she not be aptly designated as the court in con- -"the emigrants showed [faisaiant entrevoir] tradistinction to the king! This M. Thiers, great apprehensions of any approaches towards the though he does not venture directly to affirm-constitutional party,which they described as existing (for the reasons we have hinted)—often insinu- only in idea, and having no longer the means of ates; but here again we have every kind of evi- repairing the mischief they had done; they would dence that the queen never separated herself from have preferred the Jacobins," &c.-Mém. de Camthe determinations of the king, though she-a pan, vol. ii., p. 194. person of a higher spirit, and, we believe, more Not a word about the court-and the opinion scope of mind than her honest but hesitating help- concerning the Feuillant party thus attributed to mate-may sometimes have differed from his the emigrants is precisely that which M. Thiers opinions, and in the confidence of their private himself had just before pronounced, "that their intercourse have thought it to be, as it assuredly means were too fecble;" and which he reiterates was, her duty to assist her king, her husband, immediately after in almost the same words, "the and the father of her children-with her affection- feebleness of their means of making head against ate but sometimes probably unpalatable, and some- the revolutionists," (ibid.) times perhaps adventurous, counsels. The testi- The sequel of this affair is such an additional mony of two constitutional ministers, Dumouriez specimen of bad faith and self-contradiction that it and Bertrand de Moleville, unquestionable on this ought not to be suppressed. The king having acpoint, as M. Thiers admits and that of Madame cepted a ministry from the Feuillant party, LafayCampan-not so authoritative, but as authentic, ette came forward to support his friends now in leave, as he professes, even in his mind no doubt of office by writing a kind of dictatorial manifesto to the queen's sincere participation in the conciliatory the Assembly, in which he denounced the proand constitutional views of her husband. We ceedings and objects of the Jacobins. Of this celourselves have received from Dumouriez's own ebrated, foolish, and, as it turned out, unfortunate mouth-Dumouriez, whom, as the friend and pro- letter, M. Thiers gives large extracts; but by a tector of Louis Philippe, and as the person who petty trick habitual to him, and, indeed, to all falgave the impulse of victory to the revolutionary sifiers, he chooses to suppress the date both of time army, it suits M. Thiers to extol, and who was and place-circumstances essential to any letter, really a most able and, in his most difficult circum- but on which, in respect to this letter, everything stances, an honest, well-intentioned man- -Dumou- turned. It was dated" 16th June, 1792, from the riez, we say, affirmed to us, in many frank and intrenched camp at Maubeuge," and the indignaconfidential conversations on the subject of the tion it produced in the Assembly arose on two Revolution, his absolute knowledge and conviction main points :-in the first place, it was most un(and no man could be a better judge) of the sin- constitutional and dangerous that a general at cerity and good faith of the king, of the entire the head of an army should presume to lecture concurrence of the queen in his constitutional the National Assembly-and, secondly-on which views, and the utter falsehood and nonsense of all ground indeed they affected to treat it as a forgery the imputations of the secret and interior court though dated at Maubeuge on the 16th, it began and the imaginary "conspiracies against the peo- by alluding to the resignation of Dumouriez, which ple" with which the agitations of Paris were at had happened in Paris only that same day-the the moment excited and fed. 16th. These two egregious blunders of his hero, Lafayette, M. Thiers thinks that he in some degree veils by suppressing the dates. But he had also another object--still more fraudulent. The letter was dated the 16th; read in the Assembly on the 18th-on the 19th it occasioned the greatest agitation in Paris, and it became the pretext for the infamous Girondin attack on the Tuileries for the following day, the celebrated 20th of June. It was necessary to M. Thiers' system of calumny to implicate in some way the king and queen in these ill-managed proceedings of Lafayette and their lamentable consequences, and he thus goes about it : The Feuillants, or Constitutional party-Lafayette, Lameth, &c-wished, says M. Theirs, to save the king without altering the constitution. Their means were feeble. In the first place, the court that they wished to save would not be saved by them. The queen, who readily gave her confidence to Barnave, [a reclaimed Jacobin, now a constitutionalist,] had always taken the greatest precautions in seeing him, and never received him but in secret. The emigrants and the court would never have forgiven her for even seeing a constitutionalist. They in fact advised her not to treat with them, and rather to prefer the Jacobins," &c. -Vol. i., p. 296. 66 The Feuillants got about Lafayette, and conHere, then, we have a court in contradistinction certed with him the draft of a letter to the assemnot only to the king, but the queen also-a court bly. His friends were divided on this subjectthat, in league with the emigrants, never would some excited, others dissuaded. But he, only forgive the queen for even seeing the constitutionalists; and for this extraordinary statement, M. Thiers refers us, in a marginal note, to the authority of Madame Campan. We turned to the passage with eagerness: we supposed that, at last, Now there is nothing in M. Thiers' relation to we were about to learn who and what this myste-explain that all this might not have happened at rious court could be, that thus, in concert with the Paris-though we know aliunde that whoever got thinking of how to serve the king to whom he had sworn fidelity, wrote the letter, and braved all the dangers which were about to threaten his life."ii., 124. about (entourat) Lafayette, must have been at | cogent reasons, the king might have a constituMaubeuge; and then M. Thiers reaches the real object of all this manœuvring : "The king and the queen (though resolved not to avail themselves of his services) allowed him to write the letter, because they were delighted to see the friends of liberty at variance."-Ib. Thus creating an impression that the king and queen were in personal communication with Lafayette, and encouraged him to write the letternot expecting or intending that it should do any good but with the perfidious design of injuring their gallant defender and rendering him suspicious and odious to the friends of liberty. And the better to carry on this fraud, M. Thiers makes another remarkable suppression. The king was so far from having had any share in this letter to the assembly, that Lafayette thought it necessary to send his majesty a copy of it in a private letter, which Bertrand de Moleville has preserved, but which M. Thiers totally suppresses-and for two reasons-first, because it disproves any treacherous intrigue on the part of the king as to the first letter; and also because it bears testimony to the honest and constitutional dispositions of his majesty. Even while forced, in all substantial cases, to admit the king's personal sincerity, he takes the opportunity of every obscure or doubtful incident to insinuate a suspicion of perfidy-and sometimes draws this ingenious conclusion from facts that should have had a quite contrary effect. For instance towards the close of 1789, he says that "The king would not recall his gardes-ducorps, who had been removed on the 5th and 6th of October, and preferred to intrust himself to the national guard, with whom he considered himself safe.' tional reluctance to acknowledge the humiliating authority that M. Lafayette and the municipality of Paris thus assumed to exercise over his household? And then, that the queen might, as usual, be implicated in this perfidy, it is said that the king employed her-à laquelle ON [we suppose the court] confiait les commissions difficiles-as the medium of his communications; when in truth it appears, even by M. Thiers' own explanatory note, that M. de la Fayette had made the proposition to the queen, and of course received the answer through the medium that he and not the king, had chosen. And, finally, after thus making this a direct and personal charge against the king and queen, he falls back upon his old device of secret and anonymous advisers, and tells us that the king and queen would have accepted the proposition, but that "ON leur fit refuser," &c. There assuredly needed no adviser to enable any person of the most ordinary understanding, to see that such a proposition could have had no other prospect than that of a new and general massacre, and an earlier and more complete overthrow of the monarchy. M. Thiers, in thus attempting to calumniate the king and queen, has in truth produced against his friend and patron Lafayette one of the heaviest charges, either of deplorable folly or detestable treachery, that ever yet had been made against him. Another case, bearing on nearly the same points, affords an instance of still more flagitious falsehood:: "On the 18th of April, (1791,)" says M. Thiers, “the king attempted to pay a visit to St. Cloud. It was immediately reported that, being unwilling to employ a priest who had taken the oath, (to the new constitution of the clergy,) he had determined What could be more prudent or more natural? to absent himself during Easter week. Others If the king had been so rash and so unfeeling as to declared that he designed to make his escape. bring forward again those poor gardes-du-corps, The people assembled in crowds and stopped his so lately the victims of popular fury, what charges horses. Lafayette hastened to his rescue, enof conspiracy and perfidy would not the revolution-treated the king to remain in his carriage, and ists of the time have raised, and M. Thiers reiter- assured him that he was about to open a passage ated?-A new massacre must have been the inev- for his departure. The king, however, according itable result. But "the king confided himself to to his old policy of not appearing free, got out of the national guard,"-the soldiers of the people. the carriage, and would not permit him to make Has M. Thiers no expression of approbation for the attempt." that conciliatory sacrifice of the royal feeling? Quite the contrary; he proceeds to throw over the king's humane reluctance to expose the gardes-ducorps to fresh danger, and his confidence in the national guard, the most odious discolor: Now, the fact is, that Lafayette did make the attempt, and totally failed. The very soldiers he had brought to protect the king's passage," says Bertrand de Moleville, "turned against him." He did, in fact, all that he could do, but "His design was to appear a prisoner. The his efforts only proved his own want of power; municipality of Paris defeated this miserable trick the feeble voice of the popular general was drowned (trop petite ruse) by begging the king to recall his in the vociferations of the mob; and although M. gardes-du-corps-which he still refused, under de Lafayette offered, if the king should persist in idle pretexts and through the medium of the queen." going, to endeavor to force a passage at the risk To appear a prisoner? Alas! who but M. of his life, the king declined a conflict of which he Thiers ever doubted that ever since the 5th of and his wife and children-whose presence M. October he was one? The fear of a new massacre Thiers fraudulently conceals-would no doubt have of the gardes-du-corps is called a "miserable been the first victims, and-after having been an trick," and an “idle pretext," on no other authority hour and a half in the carriage, exposed to the than because M. Lafayette saw one of those gen-grossest insults, ribaldry, and menaces of the poputlemen walking in the palais royal in uniform; as if (supposing that small fact to be true, which we entirely disbelieve) a single person venturing to wear an old uniform proved that the whole bodyguard would have been allowed to resume the custody of the king, and deprive the national guards of the posts which they had usurped amidst the butchery of the 6th of October! But cannot M. Thiers imagine that, besides these lace-was at length forced to alight. And instead of this being a dishonest trick of the king's-as M. Thiers insinuates-he went next day in state to the National Assembly and complained of the outrage in these words : "Gentlemen-You are informed of the opposition given yesterday to my departure from St. Cloud. I was unwilling to overcome it by force, because I feared to occasion acts of severity This appeal was as fruitless as the "forcible feeble" efforts of Lafayette had been. The municipality of Paris decreed that the king should not go to St. Cloud-the cowardly assembly declined to interfere, and the humiliated monarch was as it were remanded back to his prison. The conduct of all the authorities of the day was execrablebut what can be said of M. Thiers?-what? but that his narrative is false and calumnious. against a misguided multitude-but it is of impor- have been, about the court, as there was in every tance to the nation to prove that I am free. Noth-other class of French-as well as of Europeaning is so essential to the authority of the sanction society, a diversity of opinion about the revolution I have given to your decrees.-Governed by this that the anti-revolutionists must have predompowerful motive I persist in my plan of going to inated in the court circle-that, as the authority St. Cloud, and the National Assembly must per- and person of the king were progressively assailed, ceive the necessity of it." insulted, and endangered, the hostile opinions of the courtiers became more unanimous that they may have talked what M. Thiers calls "imprudently," and even sometimes acted imprudently. All this is true, and every such incident (surprisingly few, all things considered) was exaggerated and promulgated by every nefarious art to inflame and ulcerate the public mind. But that anything like a conspiracy or combination against the people, or even the new order of things, was ever formed-but above all, formed under any approbation or connivance of either the king or the queen -may be most confidently denied. And what ratifies our argument is, that M. Thiers, who makes these insinuations as to the secret anti-national councils on every page, never once attempts to establish them by facts; and whenever he happens to produce a fact at all approaching the subject, it is invariably found to contradict the insinuation. In the critical interval between the outrages of the 20th of June and the 10th of August, M. Thiers says "It was rumored (on répandait) in fact that the château was endeavoring to provoke the people to a second rising, in order that it might have an opportunity of slaughtering them. So that the château supposed that there was an intention of assassinating the king, and the Faubourgs one of massacring the people." octavos would have laughed and shrugged his shoulders with a "Mais, que voulez vous?-without this phantom of a court, I could not have carried my theory of the revolution through a single page." In short, it seems to us that in all this portion of Thus again endeavoring to place some imaginary his work-and a most important portion it is-M. conspiracy of the court in the same category with Thiers is as utterly regardless of truth or even of the real atrocities of the 20th of June and 10th of vraisemblance as if he were writing the Château de August, and hinting, with his usual insidious Nesle or the Mystéres de Paris-and we have little inconsistency, that the aggressions of the people doubt that, if taxed in the private society of his were prompted by an impulse of self-defence, early days with this elaborate suggestio falsi, the although he in antecedent and subsequent passa- gay and insouciant manufacturer of M. Le Cointe's ges (i., 306-372) admits that both these deplorable riots were the work not even of the people, but of a dozen leaders of the Jacobin and Gironde parties, who even found some difficulty in rousing the Parisian mob into the necessary state of frenzy, and were obliged to adjourn the decisive insurrec- His management of the case of Egalité takes tion, at first intended for the 26th of July, to the the other of the two modes of deception, on which 10th of August, that they might have the coop- his whole scheme proceeds the suppressio veri; eration of the Marseillais.-i., 372. and as he invents, even beyond the libellists of the Here is another specimen of the same masquer-day, machinations for an imaginary court, so en reade of candor. When the unhappy queen deplored the undeserved animosity of the people-M. Thiers sympathizes with her in the following strain: ranche as it were, he attenuates and envelopes in ambiguity and doubt every inclination of the real conspiracy of the Duke of Orleans. The detailed "Thus, by a kind of fatality, the supposed ill in- plan of his work did not allow him to get rid of the tention of the château excited the suspicions and Duke of Orleans in the summary style of Migfury of the people, and the vociferations of the peo-net; but we have not been able to find a single ple increased the sorrows and the imprudences of passage in which the most serious, the most notothe château. Why did not the château under-rious, the most undeniable charges against Egalité stand the fears of the people-why did not the peo- are not either passed over altogether, or treated as ple understand the sorrows of the château-Why? but because men are men."-ii., 77. To this disgusting affectation of a humane impartiality we answer No-it was because the revolutionists were not men, but monsters! Sorrows there were, and fear there was-but not divided as in M. Thiers' invidious partition; the fear, as well as the sorrow, was the bitter portion of the chûteau-the people had nothing to fear, and feared nothing. Their leaders were the only conspirators, and in every case the aggressors and assailants; while the humbled and defenceless château was doomed to suffer at first all the humiliation of insult, and ultimately the last excesses of outrage. We have no doubt that there may have been, must * Our readers know that then as now, the term château, meaning the royal residence, whether at Versailles or the Tuileries, was often used in an invidious sense for what in the same sense was and is also called the court. "La cour désignée tour-à-tour sous les noms du châ eau, du Pouroir Exécutive, et du Veto."--Thiers, ii., 177. the mere on dits of the town, or as the suggestions of enemies, or as accidents which, even if true, were of no substantial influence. Here are a few instances, not selected, but taken as they occur in the first pages. The Abbé Sièyes is introduced-his "pamphlet" which accelerated, his "motion" which constituted, the National Assembly-but not a hint is given that he had, or was supposed to have, any connexion with the Duke of Orleans-nor is any mention made of the celebrated cahiers of the Orleans bailliages, attributed to Sièyes. And why this concealment? Because it is M. Thiers', as it was M. Mignet's and no doubt M. Lafitte's object to represent the duke as a giddy, dissipated, mere man of pleasure, with no plan, no party, no influence-a fly on the wheel of the revolution :-and this hypothesis would be defeated by a confession that he was acting in close and intimate concert with "the comprehensive, philosophical, and systematic mind of one of the greatest geniuses of the age." (Thiers, vol. i., pp. 28, 60.) So when he "Vague prospect"-" inconsistent ambition”of what? M. Thiers does not say; and even doubts whether" anybody had really any projects!" By and bye M. Thiers becomes a little more particu lar: can set in movement an revolution; for it is not with a little money and with secret manœuvres that you can convulse a nation of twenty-five millions of men."—i., 55. Our readers see the art with which these changes are made and the object to which they are directed. In the first version the historian admits the fact that money was instrumental in those tumults; in the second he endeavors to discredit it. In the first version he says the historian himself can assert the fact-as if from personal investigation and conviction-in the second version he slips out of this responsibility, and turns it over to the muse of "history"-'tis Clio and not Thiers that suspects the "The garden of the Palais Royal, forming an integrity of the Duke of Orleans. In the first verappurtenance to the palace of the Duke of Orleans, sion he confesses "blows and pillage"-but "pilwhich was the rendezvous of the most vehement lage" would have reminded his reader of an affair agitators; there the boldest harangues were deliv-which M. Thiers had, as we shall more fully see ered; there might be seen an orator mounted on a by and bye, a strong desire to suppress-the piltable collecting a crowd around him, and exciting lage of the house of M. Reveillon; and so the word them by the most ferocious language-language" pillage" disappears from the second version. In always unpunished-for there the mob reigned sov- the first version it is said positively that "there ereign. Here men, supposed to be devoted to the were instigators who excited and often directed Duke of Orleans, were the most forward. The these blows and pillage." In the second version wealth of that prince-his well-known prodigality the positive assertion is lowered to a perhaps," -the enormous sums he borrowed-his residence" peut-être"-the " often" to "sometimes”—and on the spot-his ambition, though vague, all served the blows and pillage" attenuated to "some (quel to point accusation against him."-i., 88. ques uns) of its blows." And finally, the last admission, that when a nation is once in a state of excitement, money can influence and misguide it, is totally merged in an assertion of a directly opposite tendency-that "it is not by a little' money that a nation of twenty-five millions of people can be convulsed." Here, in spite of the qualifying and ambiguous phraseology, we have something that looks like a presumption against the Duke of Orleans; but M. Thiers makes a sharp turn, and being unable either to conceal or deny the fact that the mobs of the Palais Royal were bribed, he hastens to throw a veil over the name of Duke of Orleans, and to rescue the immaculate revolution from the reproach of having been in any degree influenced by these hireling agitators. We have gone into these verbal details on this point that it may serve as a specimen of the low and dishonest arts with which M. Thiers falsifies not merely the historical facts, but when he has happened in the hurry of early composition to deviate into anything like truth-his own recorded evidence and opinion. The mode in which he executes this is very remarkable and admirably characteristic. We stated at the outset that M. Thiers had, in his subsequent editions, altered certain passages of his original All this patching and plastering does little totext, and that these alterations seemed chiefly de- wards defending the Duke of Orleans; but it proves signed to remove some slight traces of truth or can- all we want to show-M. Thiers' reluctance to tell dor into which he had inadvertently fallen. We what he knows to be the truth, and the miserable have already given one example of it; but this re-shifts with which he endeavors to evade it. But vision is peculiarly observable in several passages relating to the delicate subject of the Duke of Orleans; and from many instances of this dishonest manipulation we submit to our readers a specimen of the case before us. SUBSEQUENT EDITIONS. then come the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, when the guilt of the Duke of Orleans became so audacious and flagrant, that even M. Thiers was forced -on pain of a complete literary discredit and commercial failure-to notice it distinctly; but he does so in a way that exhibits, most strikingly, his affected candor, mingling with his inveterate partiality and untruth. Our readers need not be reminded of the frightful yet romantic horrors of those dreadful days-the most extraordinary, and exciting, and touching scenes, we think, of the whole revolutionary tragedy. They ended—after "History, without mentioning any name, can at least assert that money was profusely distributed. For if the sound part of the nation was ardently desirous of They are very well narrated in Mr. MacFarlane's liberty; if the restless & Co., in four small but comprehensive volumes;-which "History of the Revolution," lately published by Knight and suffering multitude-notwithstanding some occasional flippancy in its style, resorted to agitation for and some minor inaccuracies-is much the truest and the sake of bettering its therefore the best book we have seen on the subject. Mr. condition; there were in- MacFarlane has not only consulted, but weighed and comstigators who sometimes the same conclusions as we have, as to the "equirocapared all preceding writers, and of course has arrived at excited that multitude, ting," "mystifying," "falsifying," "Jesuitism" of M. and directed perhaps Thiers-though he does not seem to have suspected the some of its blows. In peculiar influences under which he wrote. He is not other respects this influ- quite so well on his guard against the deeper deception of Mignet, whom, even while refuting him, he treats with ence is not to be reckoned more respect than his shallow philosophy and solemn inamong the causes of the sincerity deserve. |