France during the reign of King John. The temerity, the improvidence of
that monarch; the disgraceful passions of the King of Navarre; his
treacheries; the barbarous avidity of the nobility; the seditious
disposition of the people; the sanguinary depredations of the great
companies; the ever recurring insolence of England; all this is
expressed without disguise, yet with extreme moderation. No trait
reveals, no fact even foreshadows in the author, the future President of
a reforming National Assembly, still less the Mayor of Paris, during a
revolutionary effervescence. The author may make Charles V. say that he
will discard favour, and will call in renown to select his
representatives; it will appear to him that taxes ought to be laid on
riches and spared on poverty; he may even exclaim that oppression
awakens ideas of equality. His temerity will not overleap this boundary.
Bossuet, Massillon, Bourdaloue, made the Chair resound with bold words
of another description.

I am far from blaming this scrupulous reserve; when moderation is united
to firmness, it becomes power. In a word, however, Bailly's patriotism
might, I was about to say ought to, have shown itself more susceptible,
more ardent, prouder. When in the elegant prosopopoeia which closes
the éloge, the King of England has recalled with arrogance the fatal day
of Poitiers, ought he not instantly to have restrained that pride within
just limits? ought he not to have cast a hasty glance on the components
of the Black Prince's army? to examine whether a body of troops,
starting from Bordeaux, recruiting in Guienne, did not contain more
Gascons than English? whether France, now bounded by its natural limits,
in its magnificent unity, would not have a right, every thing being
examined, to consider that battle almost as an event of civil war? ought
he not, in short, to have pointed out, in order to corroborate his
remarks, that the knight to whom King John surrendered himself, Denys de