perverse, the men sublime or depraved, and their language even is as
emphatic and lofty as their aspirations. There is in their most familiar
correspondence the colour and tone of the heroic tongues of Italy.

The ancestors of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of
the quarrels of Marius and Sylla, of Cæsar and Pompey. We perceive the
great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this
domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these
details, which may seem foreign to this history, but explain it. The
source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is
sometimes the prophecy of destiny.


III.

Mirabeau's education was as rough and rude as the hand of his father,
who was styled the _friend of man_, but whose restless spirit and
selfish vanity rendered him the persecutor of his wife and the tyrant of
all his family. The only virtue he was taught was honour, for by that
name in those days they dignified that ceremonious demeanour which was
too frequently but the show of probity and the elegance of vice.
Entering the army at an early age, he acquired nothing of military
habits except a love of licentiousness and play. The hand of his father
was constantly extended not to aid him in rising, but to depress him
still lower under the consequences of his errors: his youth was passed
in the prisons of the state; his passions, becoming envenomed by
solitude, and his intellect being rendered more acute by contact with
the irons of his dungeon, where his mind lost that modesty which rarely
survives the infamy of precocious punishments.