always to be found unfailing good sense. His very vices could not
repress the clearness, the sincerity of his understanding. At the foot
of the tribune he was a man devoid of shame or virtue: in the tribune he
was an honest man. Abandoned to private debauchery, bought over by
foreign powers, sold to the court in order to satisfy his lavish
expenditure, he preserved, amidst all this infamous traffic of his
powers, the incorruptibility of his genius. Of all the qualities of a
great man of his age, he was only wanting in honesty. The people were
not his devotees, but his instruments,--his own glory was the god of his
idolatry; his faith was posterity; his conscience existed but in his
thought; the fanaticism of his idea was quite human; the chilling
materialism of his age had crushed in his heart the expansion, force,
and craving for imperishable things. His dying words were "sprinkle me
with perfumes, crown me with flowers, that I may thus enter upon eternal
sleep." He was especially of his time, and his course bears no impress
of infinity. Neither his character, his acts, nor his thoughts have the
brand of immortality. If he had believed in God, he might have died a
martyr, but he would have left behind him the religion of reason and the
reign of democracy. Mirabeau, in a word, was the reason of the people;
and that is not yet the faith of humanity!


IV.

Grand displays cast a veil of universal mourning over the secret
sentiments which his death inspired to all parties. Whilst the various
belfries tolled his knell, and minute guns were fired; whilst, in a
ceremony that had assembled two hundred thousand spectators, they
awarded to a citizen the funeral obsequies of a monarch; whilst the
Pantheon, to which they conveyed his remains, seemed scarcely a monument