of sordid and unprincipled incendiaries, by remaining the passive spectators of such guilt, they never will be without the curse of despots at one time crouching beneath the infliction of some hereditary scourge at another betrayed by some more splendid military usurper-or both betrayed, and sold, and enthralled by a succession of vulgar tyrants.* LAFAYETTE. GREATLY inferior in capacity to Carnot, but of integrity as firm, tempered by milder affections, and of as entire devotion to the principles of liberty, was the eminent and amiable person whose name heads this page; and it is a remarkable circumstance, that the predominating gentleness of his nature supplying the want of more hardy qualities, afforded him the power of resisting those with whom he was co-operating, when they left the right path and sullied the republican banner by their excesses,- -a power in which the more stern frame of Carnot's mind was found deficient. For it was the great and the rare praise of Lafayette-a praise hardly shared by him with any other revolutionary chief,-that he both bore a forward part in the scenes of two Revolutions, and refused steadily to move one step farther in either than his principles justified, or his conscientious opinion of the public good allowed. In another particular he presents a singular and a romantic example of devotion to the cause of liberty when his own country was not concerned, and his station, his interests, nay, his personal safety, were strongly opposed to the sacrifice. A young nobleman, nearly connected with the highest families in Europe, fitted by his rank and by his personal qualities to be the ornament of the greatest court in the world, was seen to quit the splendid and luxurious circle in which he had just begun to shine, and, smit with an uncontrollable enthusiasm for American freedom, to run the gauntlet of the police and the Bastille of France and the cruisers of England, that he might reach the Transatlantic shores, and share the victories of the popular chiefs, or mingle his blood with theirs. His escape to the theatre of glory was as difficult as if he had been flying from the scene of they see how little Princes respect or thank them for the meanest compliances. (Mem. vol. v. p. 311.) * The reader of this account of General Carnot will recognise the service rendered to the author by M. Arago's admirable Eloge of that great man when it shall be published. He has been favoured with the perusal of it by the kindness of his much-esteemed colleague. crimes. He withdrew in secret, travelled under a feigneď name, hid himself under various disguises, hired a foreign vessel, escaped with extreme difficulty from the custom-house scrutiny, more than once narrowly missed capture on his passage, and was a proscribed man in his own country, until the chances of politics and of war threw its councils into the same course which he had thus individually anticipated. The generous zeal which carried him into the New World was not his only recommendation to the affection and gratitude of its inhabitants. His gallantry in the field could only be exceeded by the uniform mildness and modesty of his whole demeanour. Ever ready to serve wherever he could be of most use; utterly regardless of the station in which he rendered his assistance, whether called to convey an order as an aid-de-camp, or to encourage the flagging valour of the troops by his chivalrous example, or to lead a force through multiplied difficulties, or even to signalise himself by the hardiest feat in the art of war,-commanding a retreat; never obtruding his counsels or his claims, but frankly tendering his opinion and seconding the pretensions of others rather than his own, with the weight of his merits and his name-he endeared himself to an army jealous of foreigners, by whom they had been much deceived, to a people remarkable for other qualities than delicacy of sentiment or quickness to acknowledge services rendered, and to a Chief whose great nature, if it had a defect, was somewhat saturnine, and little apt to bestow confidence, especially where disparity of years, as well as military rank, seemed almost to prescribe a more distant demeanour. The entire favour of this illustrious man, which he naturally prized above all other possessions and gloried in above all other honours, he repaid by a devotion which increased his claims to it. When, in the jealousy of party, attempts were made to undermine the General's power, and those who would have sacrificed their country to gratify their personal spleen or envy were seeking to detach the young Frenchman from his leader, by the offer of a command separate and independent of Washington, he at once refused to hold it, and declared that he would rather be the aid-de-camp of the General than accept any station which could give him umbrage for an instant. In order to perceive the extent of the affection which Lafayette had inspired into the American people, we must transport ourselves from the earliest to the latest scenes of his life, and contemplate certainly the most touching spectacle of national feelings, and the most honourable to both parties, which is anywhere to be seen in the varied page of history. Half a century after the cause of Independence had first carried him across the Atlantic, the soldier of liberty in many climes, the martyr to principles that had made. him more familiar with the dungeon than with the palace of which he was born an inmate, now grown grey in the service of mankind, once more crossed the sea to revisit the scenes of his earlier battles, the objects of his youthful ardour, the remains of his ancient friendships. In a country torn with a thousand factions, the voice of party was instantaneously hushed. From twelve millions of people the accents of joy and gratulation at once burst forth, repeated through the countless cities that stud their vast territory, echoed through their unbounded savannahs and eternal forests. It was the gratitude of the whole nation, graven on their hearts in characters that could not be effaced, transmitted with their blood from parent to child, and seeking a vent, impetuous and uncontrolled, wherever its object, the general benefactor and friend, appeared. Nothing but the miracle which should have restored Washington from the grave could have drawn forth such a rapturous and such an universal expression of respect, esteem, and affection, as the reappearance amongst them of his favourite companion in arms, whose earliest years had been generously devoted to their service. The delicacy of their whole proceedings was as remarkable as the unanimity and the ardour which the people displayed. There was neither the doubtful vulgarity of natural coarseness, nor the unquestionable vulgarity of selfish affectation, to offend the most fastidious taste. All was rational and refined. The constituted authorities answered to the people's voice -the Legislature itself received the nation's guest in the bosom of the people's representatives, to which he could not by law have access-he was hailed and thanked as the benefactor and ally of the New World-and her gratitude was testified in munificent grants of a portion of the territory which he had helped to save. If there be those who can compare this grand manifestation of national feeling, entertained upon reasonable grounds and worthy of rational men, with the exhibitions of loyalty which have occasionally been made in England, and not feel somewhat humiliated by the contrast, they must, indeed, have strange notions of what becomes a manly and reflecting people. The part which Lafayette bore in the Revolutions of his own country was of far greater importance; and as it was played in circumstances of incomparably greater difficulty, so it will unavoidably give rise to a much greater diversity of opinion among those who judge upon its merits. In America, the only qualities required for gaining him the love and confidence of the people whom he had come to serve, were the gallantry of a chivalrous young man, the ingenuous nature of his frankness and his age, and his modest obşervance of their great chief. To these he added more than a fair share of talents for military affairs, and never committed a single error, either of judgment or temper, that could ruffle the current of public opinion which set so strongly in towards him, from the ad miration of his generous enthusiasm for the independent cause. Above all, no crisis ever arose in American affairs which could make the choice of his course a matter of the least doubt. Washington was his polar star, and to steer by that steady light was to pursue the path of the purest virtue, the most consummate wisdom. In France, the scene was widely different. Far from having a single point in controversy, like the champions of separation in the New World, the revolutionists of the Old had let loose the whole questions involved in the structure of the social system. Instead of one great tie being torn asunder, that which knit the colony to the parent State, while all other parts of the system were left untouched and unquestioned, in France the whole foundations of government, nay, of society itself, were laid bare, every stone that lay on another shaken, and all the superstructure taken to pieces, that it might be built up anew, on a different plan, if not on a different basis. To do this mighty work, the nation, far from having one leader of prominent authority, split itself into numberless factions, each claiming the preponderancy, and even in every faction there seemed almost as many leaders as partizans. A whole people had broke loose from all restraint; and while the difficulty and embarrassment of these mighty intestine commotions would have been above the reach of any wisdom and the control of any firmness, had they raged alone, it was incalculably aggravated and complicated by the menacing attitude which all Europe assumed towards the new order of things, portending a war from the beginning, and very soon issuing into actual and formidable hostilities. Such was the scene into which Lafayette found himself flung, with the feeble aid of his American experience, about as likely to qualify him for successfully performing his part in it, as the experience of a village schoolmaster or a small landsteward may be fitted to accomplish the ruler of a kingdom. This diversity, however, he was far from perceiving, and it is even doubtful if to the last he had discovered it. Hence his views were often narrow and contracted to an amazing degree: he could not comprehend how things which had succeeded in the councils of America should fail with the mob of Paris. He seems never to have been aware of the dangers of violence which are as inseparably connected with all revolution as heat is with fire or motion with explosion. His calculations were made on a system which took no account of the agents which were to work it. His mechanism was formed on a theory that left out all consideration of the materials it was composed of-far more of their friction or of the air's resistance; and when it stuck fast on the first movement, or broke to pieces on the least stroke, he stood aghast, as if the laws of nature had been suspended, when it was only that the artist had never taken the trouble of consulting them. These remarks are peculiarly applicable to his conduct at the two first crises, one of which loosened his connexion with the Revolution, and the other broke it off,-the violent measures of the 20th of June, 1792, when he seems, for the first time, to have conceived it possible that a constitution, six months old, should be violated by the multitudes who had made it in a few weeks-and the events of the famous 10th of August, which astonished him, but no one else, with the spectacle of a monarchy stripped of all substantive strength, overthrown by the tempest in a soil where it had no root, and giving place to a republic, the natural produce of the season and the ground. Enamoured with that liberty for which he had fought and bled in America, no sooner did the troubles break out in France than Lafayette at once plunged into the revolutionary party, and declared himself for the change. The violences that attended the 14th of July he seemed to have laid upon the resistance made by the court; and was nothing scared even by the subsequent proceedings, which, though accompanied by no violence, yet inevitably led to the scenes of tumult that ensued. His error-nor is he the only deluded politician, nor his the only times rank with such delusions-his error, his grievous error, was to take no alarm at any measures that could be propounded, so they were adopted in present peace, and to regard all proceedings as harmless which were clothed with the forms of law. The cloud in the horizon he saw not, because it was of the size of a man's hand; but, indeed, he looked not out for it, because it was afar off: so when the tempest roared he was unprepared, and said, "I bargained not for this." To no one more fitly than to him could be administered the rebuke, "Les révolutions ne se font pas à l'eau de rose;" for their necessary connexion with blood seems never to have struck him. Of Mr. Burke's wiser views he entertained a supreme contempt; and it is a truly marvellous thing that the Commander-in-chief of the National Guard, forty thousand strong-held together by no martial law-restrained by no pay-deliberating habitually with arms in their hands-acting one part at clubs or in the streets in the evening when dismissed from parade, and another when called out-should never have dreamt of the contagious nature of tumultuary feelings and anarchical principles; and even after he had been compelled to resign the command on account of disorders committed by them, and could only be prevailed upon to resume it by their swearing to abstain for the future from such excesses, should have expected such an anomalous force to continue tractable as peace officers, and to maintain the rigorous discipline of practised troops, untainted by the surrounding licence of all classes. There certainly must be admitted to have been more than the share of simplicity (bonhommie) with which men who had gone through a revolution on both sides of the Atlantic might be supposed endowed, in |
