Guizot quietly at work in the preparation of a history of France for the instruction of children—Thiers taking his place in a balloon to fly from one seat of government in France to another! Such were the occupations, at a given time in last November, of the two distinguished men whose rivalries and contentions disturbed the politics of France for so many years.

An ill-natured person might feel inclined to say that the adventures in the balloon were a proper crowning of the edifice of M. Thiers's fitful career. Was not his whole political life (non meus hic sermo, please to understand—it is the ill-natured person who says this) an enterprise in a balloon, high out of all the regions where common sense, consistency, and statesmanship are ruling elements? Did he not overleap with aËronautic flight when it so suited him, from liberalism to conservatism, from advocating freedom of thought to enforcing the harshest repression? Was not his literary reputation floated into high air by that most inflated and gaseous of all balloons, the "History of the Consulate and the Empire"? Thiers in a balloon is just where he ought to be, and where he ever has been. Condense into one meagre little person all the egotism, all the self-conceit, all the vainglory, all the incapacity for looking at anything whatever from the right point of view, which belong to the typical Frenchman of fiction and satire, and you have a pretty portrait of M. Thiers.

Doubtless, the ill-natured person who should say all this would be able to urge a good many plausible reasons in justification of his assertions. Still, one may be allowed to admire—one cannot help admiring—the astonishing energy and buoyancy which made M. Thiers, despite his seventy-three years, the most active emissary of the French Republic during the past autumn, the aËronautic rival of the vigorous young Corsican Gambetta, who was probably hardly grown enough for a merry-go-round in the Champs ElysÉes when Thiers was beginning to be regarded as an old fogy by the ardent revolutionists of 1848. About the middle of last September, a few days after the sudden creation of the French Republic, M. Thiers precipitated himself on London. An account in the newspapers described him as "accompanied by five ladies." Thus gracefully escorted, he marched on the English capital. He had interviews with Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, the French Ambassador, and divers other great personages. He was always rushing from diplomatic office to office. He "interviewed" everybody in London who could by any possibility be supposed capable of influencing in the slightest degree the fortunes of France. He never for a moment stopped talking. Great men excel each other in various qualities; but there never was a great man who could talk against M. Thiers. He could have shut up the late Lord Macaulay in no time; and I doubt whether Mr. Seward could have contrived to edge in a word while Thiers was in the same room. M. Thiers stayed in London little more than two days. He arrived, I think, on a Wednesday night, and left on the following Saturday. During that time he managed to do all the interviewing, and was likewise able to take his family to see the paintings in the National Gallery, where he was to be observed keenly eyeing the pictures, and eloquently laying down critical law and gospel on their merits, as if he had come over on a little autumnal holiday from a settled and peaceful country, which no longer needed looking after. Then he started from London in a steam-yacht, cruised about the North Sea and the Baltic, dropped in upon the King of Denmark, sounded the views of Sweden, collected the general opinion of Finland, visited the Emperor of Russia and talked him into semi-bewilderment, and then travelled down by land to Vienna, where he used all his powers of persuasion on the Emperor Francis Joseph, and to Florence, where by the sheer force of argument and fluency he drove Victor Emanuel nearly out of his senses. Since that time, he all but concluded an armistice with Bismarck, and when last I heard of him (previous to this writing) he was, as I have said, going on a mission somewhere in a balloon.

During his recent diplomatic flights, M. Thiers constantly offered to encounter much greater fatigues and responsibilities if needful. He was ready to go anywhere and talk to anybody. He would have hunted up the Emperor of China or the Mikado of Japan, if either sovereign seemed in the remotest degree likely to intervene on the side of France. I believe I can say with confidence, that at the outset of his expedition he had no official authority or mission whatever from the Provisional Government. He told Jules Favre and the rest that he was about to start on a tour of inspection round the European cabinets, and that they had better let him try what he could do; and they did not refuse to let him try, and it would not have mattered in the least whether they refused or not. He came, in the first instance, altogether "on his own hook." Perhaps, at first, the Republican Government was not very anxious to accept the services of M. Thiers as a messenger of peace. No living Frenchman had done half so much to bring about the state of national feeling which enabled Louis Napoleon to precipitate the nation into a war against Prussia. Perhaps they thought the man whose bitterest complaint against the Emperor was that he failed to take advantage of the chance of crushing Prussia in 1866, was not the most likely emissary to conciliate victorious Prussia in 1870. But Thiers was determined to make himself useful, and the Republican Government had to give in at last, and concede some sort of official authority to him. Like the young lady who said she married the importunate suitor to get rid of him, Jules Favre and his colleagues probably accepted M. Thiers for their spokesman as the only way of escaping from his eloquence. His mission was heroic and patriotic, or egotistical and fussy, just as you are pleased to regard it. In certain lights Cardinal Richelieu looks wonderfully like Bottom the weaver. But it is impossible not to admire the energy and courage of the irrepressible, inexhaustible, fragile-looking, shabby old Orleanist. Thiers does not seem a personage capable of enduring fatigue. He appears a sapless, withered, wasted old creature. But the restless, fiery, exuberant, egotistical energy which carried him along so far and so fast in life, has apparently gained rather than lost in strength and resource during the forty years which have elapsed since the subject of this sketch, then editor of the "National," drew up in Paris the famous protest against the five infamous ordonnances of Charles the Tenth, and thus sounded the prelude to the Revolution of July.

It must have been no common stock of self-possession and self-complacency which enabled M. Thiers to present himself before the great Prussian Chancellor as a messenger of peace. Bismarck, who has a happy knack of apt Shakespearian quotation, might have accosted him in the words of Beatrice and said, "This is a man's office, but not yours." For M. Thiers, throughout his whole career, devoted his brilliant gifts to the promotion of that spirit of narrow national vainglory which of late years has made France dreaded and detested in Germany. M. Thiers is like Æsop's trumpeter—guilty not of making war himself, but of blowing the blasts which set other men fighting. The very speech in which he protested last summer against the war initiated by the Imperial Government, was inspired by a principle more immoral, and more calculated to inflame Germany with resentment, than the very declaration of war itself. For Thiers only condemned the war on the ground that France was not properly prepared to crush Germany; that she had lost her opportunity by not falling on Prussia while the latter was in the death-grapple with Austria in 1866; and that as France had not done the thing at the right time, she had better not run the risk of doing it incompletely, by making the effort at an inopportune moment.

These considerations, however, did not trouble M. Thiers. He advanced to meet Count von Bismarck with the easy confidence of one who feels that he has a right to be treated as the best of friends and most appropriate of envoys. If, immediately after the conclusion of the American war, John Bright had been sent to Washington by England to endeavor to settle the Alabama dispute, he probably would not have approached the President with anything like the confident assurance of a genial welcome which inspired M. Thiers when he offered himself as a messenger to the Prussian statesman. This very sublimity of egotism is, and always was, one of the sources of the success of M. Thiers. No man could with more perfect composure and self-satisfaction dare to be inconsistent. His was the very audacity and Quixotism of inconsistency. In office to-day, he could advocate and enforce the very measures of repression which yesterday, out of office, he was the foremost to denounce—nay, which he obtained office by opposing and denouncing. He whose energetic action in protesting against the celebrated five ordonnances of Charles the Tenth did so much to bring about the Revolution of July, was himself the chief official author of the equally celebrated "laws of September," introduced in Louis Philippe's reign, which might have suited the administration of a Peter the Great, or any other uncompromising despot. In practical politics, of course, almost every minister is occasionally compelled by the force of circumstances to do things which bear a considerable resemblance to acts warmly condemned by him while he sat in opposition. But M. Thiers invariably, when in power, exhibited himself as the author and champion of principles and policy which he had denounced with all the force of his eloquent tongue when he was the opponent of the Government. He seemed in fact to be two men rather than one, so entirely did Thiers in office contrast with Thiers in opposition. But Thiers himself never appeared conscious of inconsistency. Indeed, he was always consistent with his one grand essential principle and creed—faith in the inspiration and the destiny of M. Thiers.

To one other principle too let it be said in justice that this brilliant politician has always been faithful—the principle which maintains the right of France to throw her sword into the scale where every or any foreign question is to be weighed. When, after a long absence from the parliamentary arena, he entered the Imperial Corps LÉgislatif as one of the deputies for Paris, he soon proved himself to be "old Cassius still." Age, study, experience, retirement, reflection, had in no wise dimmed the fire of his ardent nationalism. Eagerly as ever he contended for the sacred right of France to dragoon all Europe into obedience, to chop up the Continent into such symmetrical sections as might seem suitable to the taste and the convenience of French statesmen. Undoubtedly he was a sharp, tormenting thorn in the side of the Imperial Government when he returned to active political life. Louis Napoleon had no minister who could pretend to compare with Thiers in debate. He was an aggravating and exasperating enemy, against whom fluent and shallow men like Billault and Baroche, or even speakers of heavier calibre like Rouher, had no chance whatever. But there were times when to any impartial mind the invectives of Thiers made the Imperial policy look noble and enlightened in comparison with the canons of detestable egotism which he propounded as the true principles of government. I remember thinking more than once that if Louis Napoleon's Ministers could only have risen to the real height of the situation and appealed to whatever there was of lofty unselfish feeling in France, they might have overwhelmed their remorseless and envenomed critic. In 1866 and 1867, for example, Thiers made it a cardinal point of complaint and invective against the French Government that it had not prevented by force of arms the progress of Germany's unity. Nothing could be more pungent, brilliant, bitter, than the eloquence with which he proclaimed and advocated his doctrines of ignoble and unscrupulous selfishness. Why did not the Imperial spokesmen assume a virtue if they had it not, and boldly declare that the Government of France scorned the shallow and envious policy which sees calamity and danger in the union and growing strength of a neighboring people? Such a chord bravely struck would have awakened an echo in every true and generous heart. But the Imperial Ministers feebly tried to fight M. Thiers upon his own ground, to accept his principles as the conditions of contest. They endeavored in a paltering and limping way to show that the French Government had been selfish and only selfish, and had taken every care to keep Germany properly weak and divided. It was during one of these debates, thus provoked by M. Thiers, that occasion was given to Count von Bismarck for one of his most striking coups de thÉÂtre. The French Minister (if I remember rightly, it was M. Rouher), tortured and baited by M. Thiers, stood at bay at last, and boldly declared that the Government of France had taken measures to render impossible any political cohesion of North and South Germany. A day or two after, Count von Bismarck effectively and contemptuously replied to this declaration by unfolding in the Prussian Chamber the treaties of alliance already concluded between his Government and the South German States.

It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thiers did not prove a success at the bar, to which at first he applied his abilities. He seems to have the very gifts which would naturally have made a great pleader. All through his political career he displayed a wonderful capacity for making the worse appear the better cause. The adroitness which contends skilfully that black is white to-day, having argued with equal force and fluency that white was green yesterday, would have been highly appropriate and respectable in a legal advocate. But M. Thiers did not somehow get on at the bar, and having no influential friends (he was, I think, the son of a locksmith), but plenty of ambition, courage, and confidence, he strove to enter political life by the avenue of journalism. Much of Thiers's subsequent success as a debater was probably due to that skill which a practised journalist naturally acquires—the dexterity of arraying facts and arguments so as not to bear too long on any one part of the subject, and not to offer to the mind of the reader more than his patience and interest are willing to accept. Most of the events of his political career, up to his reappearance in public life in 1863, belong wholly to history and the past. His long rivalry with Guizot, his intrigues out of office, and his conduct as a Minister of Louis Philippe, have hardly a more direct and vital connection with the affairs of to-day than the statecraft of Mazarin or the political vicissitudes of Bolingbroke. One indeed of the projects of M. Thiers has now come rather unexpectedly into active operation. The fortifications of Paris were the offspring of the apprehension M. Thiers entertained, thirty years ago, that the Eastern question of that day might provoke another great European war. Since that time many critics sneered and laughed a good deal at M. Thiers's system of fortifications; but the whirligig of time has brought the statesman his revenge. No one could mistake the meaning of the smile of self-satisfaction which used last autumn to light up the unattractive features of the veteran Orleanist, as he made tour after tour of inspection around the defences of Paris. This chain of fortifications alone, one might almost say, connects the Thiers of the present generation with the Thiers of the past. There were malignant persons who did not scruple to say that the author of the scheme of defences was not altogether sorry for the national calamity which had brought them into use, and apparently justified their construction. It is very hard to be altogether sorry for even a domestic misfortune which gives one who is especially proud of his foresight and sagacity an opportunity of pointing out that the precautions which he recommended, and other members of the family scorned, are now eagerly adopted by unanimous concurrence. There certainly was something of the pardonable pride of the author of a long misprized invention visible in the face of M. Thiers as he used to gaze upon his beloved system of fortifications any time in last September. Little did even he himself think when, after Sadowa, he accused the Emperor's Government of having left itself no blunder more to commit, that it had yet to perpetrate one crowning and gigantic mistake, and that one effect at least of this stupendous error would be to compel Paris to treat au sÉrieux, and as a supreme necessity, that system of defences so long regarded as good for little else than to remind the present generation that Louis Adolphe Thiers was once Prime Minister of France.

Thiers was not far short of seventy years old when, in 1863, he entered upon a new chapter of his public life as one of the deputies for Paris in the Imperial Corps LÉgislatif. A new generation had meantime arisen. Men were growing into fame as orators and politicians who were boys when Thiers was last heard as a parliamentary debater. He returned to political life at an eventful time and accompanied by some notable compeers. The elections which sent Thiers to represent the department of the Seine made the venerable and illustrious Berryer one of the delegates from Marseilles. I doubt whether the political life of any country has ever produced a purer, grander figure than that of Berryer; I am sure that an obsolete and hopeless cause never had a nobler advocate. The genius and the virtues of Berryer are indeed the loftiest claims modern French legitimacy can offer to the respect of posterity. I look back with a feeling of something like veneration to that grand and kingly form, to the sweet, serene, unaffected dignity of that august nature. Berryer belonged to a totally different political order from that of Thiers. As John Bright is to Disraeli, as John Henry Newman is to Monsignore Capel, as Montalembert was to Louis Veuillot, as Charles Sumner is to Seward, so was Berryer to Thiers. Of the oratorical merits of the two men I shall speak hereafter; now I refer to the relative value of their political characters. With Thiers and Berryer there came back to political life some men of mark and worth. Garnier-PagÈs was one, the impulsive, true-hearted, not very strong-headed Republican; a man who might be a great leader if fine phrases and good intentions could rule the world. Carnot was another, not much perhaps in himself, but great as the son of the illustrious organizer of victory (oh, if France had lately had one hour of Carnot!), and personally very popular just then because of his scornful rejection of Louis Napoleon's offer to bring back the ashes of his father from Magdeburg in Prussia to France. EugÈne Pelletan, who had been suffering savage persecution because of his fierce attack on the Empire in his book, "The New Babylon"; Jules Simon, a superior sort of French Tom Hughes—Tom Hughes with republican convictions and strong backbone—and several other men of name and fibre, were now companions in the Corps LÉgislatif. All these, differing widely in personal opinions, and indeed representing every kind of political view, from the chivalrous and romantic legitimacy of Berryer to the republican religion or fetichism of Garnier-PagÈs, combined to make up an opposition to the Imperial Government. Up to that time the opposition had consisted simply of five men. For years those five had fought a persevering and apparently hopeless fight against the strength of Imperial arms, Imperial gold, and the lungs of Imperial hirelings. Of the five the leader was Jules Favre. The second in command was Emile Ollivier, whose treason to liberty, truth, and peace has since been so sternly avenged by destiny. The other three were Picard, a member of the Republican Government of September, and MM. Darimon and Henon. Numerically the opposition, now strengthened by the new accessions, became quite respectable; morally and politically it wholly changed the situation. It was no longer a Leonidas or Horatius Cocles desperately holding a pass; it was an army encountering an army. The Imperialists of course still far outnumbered their opponents; but there were no men among the devotees of Imperialism who could even pretend to compare as orators with Berryer, Thiers, or Favre. Of these three men, it seems to me that Berryer was by far the greatest orator, but Thiers left him nowhere as a partisan leader. Thiers undoubtedly pushed Jules Favre aside and made him quite a secondary figure. Thiers delighted in worrying a ministry. He never needed, as Berryer did, the impulse of a great principle and a great purpose. He felt all the joy of the strife which distinguishes the born gladiator. He soon proved that his years had in no degree impaired his oratorical capacity. It became one of the grand events of Paris when Thiers was to speak. Owing to the peculiar regulations of the French Chamber, which required that those who meant to take part in a debate should inscribe their names beforehand in the book, and speak according to their turn—an odious usage, fatal to all genuine debate—it was always known in advance through Paris that to-morrow or the day after Thiers was to speak. Then came a struggle for places in what an Englishman would call the strangers' gallery. The Palais Bourbon, where the Corps LÉgislatif held its sittings, opposite the Place de la Concorde, has the noble distinction of providing the least and worst accommodation for the public of any House of Assembly in the civilized world. The English House of Commons is miserably defective and niggardly in this respect, but it is liberal and lavish when compared with the French Corps LÉgislatif. Therefore, when M. Thiers was about to speak, there was as much intriguing, clamoring, beseeching, wrangling, storming for seats in the public tribunes as would have sufficed to carry an English county election. The trouble had its reward. Nobody could be disappointed in M. Thiers who merely desired an intellectual exercise and treat. Thiers never was heavy or dull. He is, I think, the most interesting of all the great European debaters. I do not know whether I convey exactly the meaning I wish to express when I used the word "interesting." What I mean is that there is in M. Thiers an inexhaustible vivacity, freshness, and variety which never allows the attention to wander or flag. He never dwells too long on any one part of his subject; or if he has to dwell long anywhere, he enlivens the theme by a lavish copiousness of novel argument, application, and illustration, which is irresistibly piquant and fascinating. ReËntering public life in his old age, M. Thiers had physically something like the advantage which I have known to be possessed by certain mature actresses, who, never having had any claim to personal beauty in their youth, were visited with hardly any penalty of time when they began to descend into age. Thiers always had an insignificant presence, a dreadfully bad voice, and an unpleasant delivery. Time added nothing, and probably could add nothing, to these disadvantages. Already John Bright has lost, already Gladstone is losing, those magnificent qualities of voice and intonation which till lately distinguished both from all other living English orators. One of the only fine passages in Disraeli's "Life of Lord George Bentinck" is that in which he describes the melancholy sensation created in the House of Commons when Daniel O'Connell, feeble and broken down, tried vainly to raise above a mumbling murmur those accents which once could thrill and vibrate to the furthest corner of the most capacious hall. But the voice and delivery of Thiers at seventy were no whit worse than those of Thiers at forty; and in energy, vivacity, and variety, I think the opposition leader of 1866 had rather gained upon the Minister of 1836. In everything that makes a great orator he was far beneath Berryer. The latter had as commanding a presence as he had a superb voice, and a manner at once graceful and dignified. Berryer, too, had the sustaining strength of a profound conviction, pure and lofty as a faith. If Berryer was a political Don Quixote, Thiers was a political Gil Blas. Thiers was all sparkle, antithesis, audacity, sophistry. His tours de force were perfect masterpieces of fearless adroitness. He darted from point to point, from paradox to paradox, with the bewildering agility of a squirrel. He flashed through the heavy atmosphere of a dull debate with the scintillating radiancy of a firefly. He propounded sentiments of freedom which would positively have captivated you if you had not known a little of the antecedents of the orator. He threw off concise and luminous maxims of government which would have been precious guides if human politics could only be ruled by epigram. His long experience as a partisan leader, in and out of office, had made him master of a vast array of facts and dates, which he was expert to marshal in such a manner as often to bewilder his opponents. His knowledge of the mechanism and regulations of diplomatic and parliamentary practice was consummate. He was singularly clear and attractive in statement; his mode of putting a case had something in it that was positively fascinating. He was sharp and severe in retort, and there was a cold, self-complacent hauteur in his way of putting down an adversary, which occasionally reminded one of a peculiarity of Earl Russell's style when the latter was still a good parliamentary debater. M. Thiers had the great merit of never talking over the heads, above the understandings of his audience. His style of language was of the same character perhaps as that of Mr. Wendell Phillips. Of course no two men could possibly be more unlike in the manner of speaking, but the rhetorical vernacular of both has a considerable resemblance. The diction in each case is clear, incisive, penetrating—never, or hardly ever, rising to anything of exalted oratorical grandeur, never involved in mist or haze of any kind, and with the same habitual acidity and sharpness in it. I presume M. Thiers wrote the greater part of his speeches beforehand, but he evidently had the happy faculty, rare even among accomplished orators, which enables a speaker to blend the elaborately prepared portions of his discourse with the extemporaneous passages originated by the impulses and the incidents of the debate. Some of the cleverest arguments, and especially some of the cleverest sarcastic hits in M. Thiers's recent speeches, were provoked by questions and interruptions which must have been quite unexpected. But a strange peculiarity about the whole body of the speeches, the written parts as well as the extemporaneous, was that they bore no resemblance whatever to the glittering and gorgeous style which is so common and so objectionable in the pages of the author's history of the French Revolution, and of the Consulate and the Empire. I must say that I think M. Thiers's historical works are decidedly heavy reading. I think his speeches are more interesting and attractive to read than those of any political speaker of our day. As an orator I set him below Berryer, below Gladstone and Bright, below Wendell Phillips, and not above Disraeli. But as an interesting speaker—I can think of no better qualification for him—I place M. Thiers above any of those masters of the art of eloquence.

I have not compared M. Thiers with Jules Favre. Any juxtaposition of the two ought rather perhaps to be in the way of contrast than of comparison. Jules Favre is probably the most exquisite and perfect rhetorician practising in the public debates of our time. No one else can lend so brilliant an effect, so delightful an emphasis to words and phrases by the mere modulations of his tone. I once heard a French workingman say that Jules Favre parlait comme un ange—talked like an angel; and there was a simple appropriateness in the expression. An angel, if he had to address so unsympathetic and uncongenial an audience as the Imperial Corps LÉgislatif, could hardly lend more musical effect to the meaning of his words than was given by Jules Favre's consummate rhetorical skill. But I must acknowledge that to me at least there never seemed to be much in what Jules Favre said. It seemed to me too often to want marrow and backbone. It was an eloquence of fine phrases and splendid vague generalities. "Flow on, thou shining river," one felt sometimes inclined to say as the bright, broad, shallow stream glided away. If Thiers spoke for half a day, and the discourse covered a dozen columns of the closely-printed "Moniteur," yet the listener or reader came away with the impression that the orator had crammed quite a surprising quantity of matter into his speech, and could have found ever so much more to say on the same subject. The impression produced on me at least by the speeches of Jules Favre was always of the very opposite character. They seemed to be all rhetoric and modulation; they were without depth and without fibre. The essentially declamatory character of Jules Favre's eloquence received its most complete illustration in that remarkable document—so painful and pathetic because of its obvious earnestness, so ludicrous and almost contemptible because of its turgid and extravagant outbursts—the report of his recent interviews with Count von Bismarck at the Prussian headquarters near Versailles. One must keep constantly in mind the awful seriousness of the situation, and the genuine suffering which it must have imposed upon Jules Favre, not to laugh outright or feel disgusted at the inflated, hyperbolical, and melodramatic style in which the Republican Minister describes his interview with the Prussian Chancellor. Now, whatever faults of style M. Thiers might commit, he never could thus make himself ridiculous. He never allows himself to be out of tune with the occasion and the audience. You may differ utterly from him, you may distrust and dislike him; but Thiers, the parliamentary orator, will not permit you to laugh at him.

Thiers was always very happy in his replies and retorts, and he never allowed if he could an interruption to one of his speeches in the Corps LÉgislatif to pass without seizing its meaning and at once dissecting and demolishing it. He rejoiced in the light sword-play of such exercises. He would never have been contented with the superb quietness of contempt by which Berryer in one of his latest speeches crushed Granier de Cassagnac, the abject serf and hireling of Imperialism. While Berryer was speaking, Granier de Cassagnac suddenly expressed his coarse dissent from one of the orator's statements by crying out, "That is not true." Berryer was not certain as to the source of this insolent interruption. He gazed all round the assembly, and demanded in accents of subdued and noble indignation who had dared thus to challenge the truth of his statement. There was a dead pause. Even enemies looked up with reverence to the grand old orator, and were ashamed of the rude insult flung at him. De Cassagnac quailed, but every eye was on him, and he was compelled to declare himself. "It was I who spoke," said the Imperial servant. Berryer looked at him for a moment, and then said, "Oh, it was you!—then it is of no consequence," and calmly resumed the thread of his discourse. Nothing could have been finer, nothing more demolishing than the cold, grand contempt which branded De Cassagnac as a creature incapable of meriting, even by insult, the notice of a man of honor. But Thiers would never have been satisfied with such a mode of crushing an adversary; and indeed it needed all the majesty of Berryer's presence and the moral grandeur of his character to give it full force and emphasis. Thiers would have showered upon the head of the Imperial lacquey a whole fiery cornucopia of sarcasm and sharp invective, and De Cassagnac would have gone home rather proud of having drawn down upon his head the angry eloquence of the great Orleanist orator.

Thiers threw his whole soul into his speeches—not merely as to their preparation, but as to their revision and publication. According to the Imperial system, no independent reports of speeches in the Chambers were allowed to appear in print. The official stenographers noted down in full each day's debate, and the whole was published next day in the "Moniteur Universel." These reports professed to give every word and syllable of the speeches—every whisper of interruption. Sometimes, therefore, the "Moniteur" came out with twenty of its columns filled up with the dull maunderings of some provincial blockhead, for whom servility and money had secured an official candidature. Besides these stupendous reports, the Government furnished a somewhat condensed version, in which the twenty-column speech was reduced say to a dozen columns. Either of these reports the public journals might take, but none other; and no journal must alter or condense by the omission of a line or the substitution of a word the text thus officially furnished. When Thiers had spent the whole day in delivering a speech, he was accustomed to spend the whole night in reading over and correcting the proof-sheets of the official report. The venerable orator would hurry home when the sitting was over, change his clothes, get into his arm-chair before his desk, and set to work at the proof-sheets according as they came. Over these he would toil with the minute and patient inspection of a watchmaker or a lapidary, reading this or that passage many times, until he had satisfied himself that no error remained and that no turn of expression could well be improved. Before this task was done, the night had probably long faded and the early sun was already lighting Paris; but when the Corps LÉgislatif came to assemble at noon, the inexhaustible septuagenarian was at his post again. That evening he would be found, the central figure of a group, in some salon, scattering his brilliant sayings and acrid sarcasms around him, and in all probability exercising his humor at the expense of the Imperial Ministers, the Empire, and even the Emperor himself. After 1866 he was exuberant in his bons mots about the humiliation of the Imperial Cabinet by Prussia. "Bismarck," he once declared, "is the best supporter of the French Government. He keeps it always in its place by first boxing it on one ear and then maintaining the equilibrium by boxing it on the other."

If one could have been present at the recent interviews between Count Bismarck and M. Thiers, he would doubtless have enjoyed a curious and edifying intellectual treat. Bismarck is a man of imperturbable good humor; Thiers a man of imperturbable self-conceit. Thiers has a tongue which never lacks a word, and that the most expressive word. Bismarck has a rare gift of shrewd satirical humor, and of phrases that stick to public memory. Each man would have regarded the other as a worthy antagonist in a duel of words. Neither would care to waste much time in lofty sentiment and grandiose appeals. Each would thoroughly understand that his best motto would be, "A corsaire, corsaire et demi." Bismarck would find in Thiers no feather-headed Benedetti; assuredly, Thiers would favor Bismarck with none of Jules Favre's sighs and tears, and bravado and choking emotions. Thiers would have the greater part of the talk, that is certain; but Bismarck would probably contrive to compress a good deal of meaning and significance into his curt interjected sentences. Thiers assuredly must have long since worn out any freshness of surprise or thrilling emotion of any kind at the political convulsions of France. To him even the spectacle of the standard of Prussia hoisted on the pinnacles of Versailles could hardly have been an overpowering wonder. He had seen the soldiers of Prussia picketed in Paris; he could remember when a fickle Parisian populace, weary of war, had thronged into the streets to applaud the entrance of the conquering Czar of Russia. He had seen the Bourbon restored, and had helped to overthrow him. He had been twice the chief Minister of that Louis Philippe of Orleans, who in his youth had had to save the Princess his sister by carrying her off in her night-gown, without time to throw a shawl around her, and whose long years of exile had led him, in fulfilment of the prophecy of Danton, to the throne of France at last. He had helped towards the downfall of that same King his master, and had striven vainly at the end to stand between him and his fate. He had seen a second Republic rise and sink; he had now become the envoy of a third Republic. He had refused to serve an Imperial Napoleon, although his own teaching and preaching had been among the most effective agencies in debauching the mind and heart of the nation, and thus rendering a second Empire possible. People say M. Thiers has no feelings, and I shall not venture to contradict them—I have often heard the statement from those who know better than I can pretend to do. It would have been personally unfortunate for him in his interview with Count von Bismarck if he had been burthened with feelings. For he must surely in such a case have felt bitterly the consciousness that the misfortunes which had fallen on his country were in great measure the fruit of his own doctrines and his own labors. If the public conscience of France had not been seared and hardened against all sentiment of obligation to international principle, where French glory and French aggrandizement were concerned; if France had not learned to believe that no foreign nation had any rights which she was bound to respect; if she had not been saturated with the conviction that every benefit to a neighbor was an injury to herself; if she had not accepted these views as articles of national faith, and followed them out wherever she could to their uttermost consequences, then M. Thiers might be said to have written and spoken and lived in vain.

It is probable that a new career presents itself as a possibility to the indomitable energy, and, as many would say, the insatiable ambition of M. Thiers. Certainly, there seems not the faintest indication that the veteran believes himself to lag superfluous on the stage. It is likely that he rushed into the recent peace negotiations with the hope of playing over again the part so skilfully played by Talleyrand at the time of the Congress of Vienna, by virtue of which France obtained so much advantage which might hardly have been expected, and Germany got so little of what she might naturally have looked for. I certainly shall not venture to say whether M. Thiers may not even yet have an important official career before him. His recent enterprises and expeditions give evidence enough that he has nerve and physique for any undertaking likely to attract him, and I see no reason to doubt that his intellect is as fresh and active as it was thirty years ago. Thiers deserves nothing but honor for the unconquerable energy and courage which refuse to yield to years, and will not acknowledge the triumph of time. He would deserve far greater honor still if we could regard him as a disinterested patriot; highest honor of all if his principles were as wise and just as his ambition was unselfish. But charity itself could hardly hope to reconcile the facts of M. Thiers's long and varied career with any theory ascribing to the man himself a pure and disinterested purpose. That a statesman has changed his opinions is often his highest glory, if, as in the case of Mr. Gladstone, he has thereby grown into the light and the right. Nor is a change of views necessarily a reproach to a politician, even though he may have retrograded or gone wrong. But the man who is invariably a passionate liberal when out of office, and a severe conservative when in power; who makes it a regular practice to have one set of opinions while he leads the opposition, and another when he has succeeded in mounting to the lead of a ministry; such a man cannot possibly hope to obtain for such systematic alternations the credit of even a capricious and fantastic sincerity. No one who knows anything of M. Thiers would consent thus to exalt his heart at the expense of his head. When the late Lord Cardigan was, rightly or wrongly, accused of having returned rather too quickly from the famous charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, his lordship, among other things, alleged that his horse had run away with him. A bitter critic thereupon declared that Lord Cardigan could not be allowed thus unfairly to depreciate his consummate horsemanship, I am afraid we cannot allow M. Thiers's intelligence and shrewdness to be unjustly depreciated by the assumption that his political tergiversations were the result of meaningless caprice.

M. Thiers is one of the most gifted men of his day. But he is not, in my judgment, a great man. He wants altogether the grand and stable qualities of principle and judgment which are needed to constitute political greatness. His statesmanship is a sort of policy belonging apparently to the school of the Lower Empire; a Byzantine blending of intrigue and impudence. He has never had the faculty of reading the signs of the times, or of understanding that to-day is not necessarily like yesterday. But for the wonderful gifts of the man, there would seem to be something positively childish in the egotism which could believe that it lay in the power of France to maintain, despite of destiny, the petty princes of Germany and Italy, to arrange the political conditions of England, and prescribe to the United States how far their principle of internal cohesion should reach. Victor Hugo is undoubtedly an egotistic Frenchman. Some of his recent utterances have been foolish and ridiculous. But the folly has been that of a great soul; the folly has consisted in appealing, out of all time and place, to sublime and impracticable sentiments of human brotherhood and love which ought to influence all human souls, but do not and probably never will. Far different is the egotism of Thiers. It is the egotism of selfishness, arrogance, and craft. In a sublime world, Victor Hugo's appeals would cease to be ridiculous; but the nobler the world, the more ignoble would seem the doctrines and the policy of Thiers. My own admiration of Thiers extends only to his skill as a debater and his marvellous intellectual vitality. The man who, despite the most disheartening disadvantages of presence, voice, and manner, is yet the most fascinating political debater of his time, the man who at seventy-three years of age can go up in a balloon in quest of a new career, must surely command some interest and admiration, let critical wisdom preach to us never so wisely. But the best days will have arisen for France when such a political character and such a literary career as those of M. Thiers shall have become an anachronism and an impossibility.