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Arquentil, where he planned a little Eden for his pleasure, and then he abandoned himself to every gross passion of his nature. If he had not, which I am not sure of, sold himself to the court, he had pandered away the last relic of self-respect, and when he spoke to the Assembly that the monarchy should be saved, it was no longer with the authority of a patriot calling up a people to liberty. His moral strength began to fail, so his bodily functions also began to be weary. Long afflicted by many diseases, he decayed rapidly as the spring of 1791 went on, and by an imprudent excess accelerated his end.

On Monday the 28th of March he proceeded towards the Assembly to deliver an elaborate oration on mines. On the way he was forced to rest at the house of a friend; he uttered the speech and staggered from the tribune. On the 1st of April he lay on his death-bed; suffered the most rending pangs; fell into an asphyxia, and only woke to hear some cannon firing in the distance. Quietly he said--"Are those already the Achilles' funeral?" And opening his eyes, and looking upwards, he breathed away his life, leaving a face as with a dream upon it.

All Paris wore mourning for his death, even the king-and-court party. But a strong rumour went out that he was poisoned. An examination of the body could not be refused. Fortyfour medical men attended the autopsy; they officially reported that his death was natural, but many of them afterwards expressed their conviction that he was poisoned. Two of them said so while the stomach was before them; but they were warned by their master, Professor Sue, who whispered to them" He was not poisoned. He cannot be poisoned. Understand that, imprudens! Would you have them devour the King, the Queen, the Assembly, and all of us?" It is enough to add, that to our own knowledge the living representatives of Mirabeau, believe he was murdered, which is a circumstance very significant. But, murdered or not, the capital gave him splendid obsequies, and the remains of Mirabeau were laid in the church of St. Geneviève, by the side of those of Descartes, amid the sobs of an assembled population.

Mirabeau was a politician of com

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manding capacity; he counted and combined the forces of the nation to draw them up against the old fabric of corrupted tyranny which he desired to overthrow. But he did not estimate well the power he evoked, and was terrified by the success of his achievements. He was the greatest orator of his age and country; he wrote with eloquence, but on few subjects above the topics of the pamphleteer; and, leaving out of view the dubious episode of his connection with the court, may be honoured as one who laboured well for the liberties of France. a man, he was partly to be loved, but much to be despised. Patient with his father, who was inhuman to him, he was generous to his friends, and not implacable to his enemies. worst phase of his character is that which related him to the female sex. He found little virtue in his own wife, and little respected it in the wives of others. Poisoned morally by an education the most pernicious, he never experienced the delighting serenities of home, or the graceful charms of social life. It is little surprising, therefore, that he fed his most ignoble passions, and resorted, when the common sources of happiness were closed against him, to pleasures of a baser kind. Whether it is our disposition to mollify on this account our judgment of Mirabeau as a man, certainly we cannot admire him for the moral virtue of his nature, though we may allot to him a station of superior glory among the masterspirits of the French revolution.

The common reproach of what we may term scholastic history derogates nothing from the lustre of this man's name. They who justify the excesses of despotism may be expected to denounce the leaders of a liberal revolt. Mirabeau assailed the king, and he may be called a rebel; he assailed the church, and he may be called an accomplice in spoliation; but it is not from those who applaud the crime of power that posterity will accept judgment on the struggles of liberty. If the Revolution which he encouraged was the dissolution of a corrupt society, the tyranny it overthrew was a disrupture of every relation between man and man. History, therefore, will preserve a memorial of Mirabeau's infringements of the first social law;

but it will not impute to him as infamy that from his eloquence arose the defence, the consolation, and the revenge of France against a confederated fraud, against a standing conspiracy of oppressors, against a profane and impious usurpation of authority, by men whose names are remembered only as words of malediction in the language of the country they abused, insulted and betrayed.

JOHN STERLING.

A MAN who, so shortly after his death, was privileged with two biographers, and these biographers Archdeacon Hare and Thomas Carlyle, certainly demands a few pages of a work devoted chiefly to cotemporary biographical literature. Such a man is John Sterling, who was born in the year 1806, on the 20th day of July, at Kaimes Castle, in Scotland. His father, Edward Sterling, was a man of celebrity like himself, being for many years the chief editor of the Times newspaper. Edward Sterling was a soldier in his youth, but at the time we speak of had retired from the army on half pay, and now occupied himself principally in the cultivation of a small farm, which was attached to "the dilapidated baronial residence which he rented,” in the isle of Bute. Of a remarkably active and energetic nature, he possessed all the attributes which are essential to the formation of a good journalist; and wearied, with agriculture as he had been with arms, he resolved, in 1811, to make his entrance into the world of literature, and did so by the publication of a pamphlet on "Military Reform." Previous to this event, however,--his farm in Scotland by no means having prospered—he had removed to another residence, this time in Wales-" an eligible cottage," says Carlyle," without farm attached, in the pleasant little village of Llanbethian, close by Cowbridge, in Glamorganshire.” While here, he became adjutant to the Glamorganshire Militia, and it was while here, too,-the success of his pamphlet having urged him to new efforts with the pen-that he wrote, under the signature of Vetus, his celebrated letters to the Times. In these letters he treated in a masterly and able manner of the principal events

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and questions of the day, of the war then raging, and of Wellington and Peel. This correspondence-which, as far as Sterling was concerned, was entirely gratuitous and voluntaryexcited a great deal of attention, and led ultimately to his closer connection with the Times, upon which journal, from that time till 1840, in which year he finally retired into private life, he continued to be importantly and actively engaged. He was an impetuous man, full of real energy, and immensely conscious of the same; who transacted everything, not with the minimum of fuss and noise, but with the maximum; a very Captain Whirlwind," says Carlyle. But he was also one of the most remarkable of literary improvisateurs, able to seize instantly, and to treat with an astonishing degree of ability and power, the salient points of any question whatsoever. He often changed his opinions respecting men, but only respecting such as were of doubtful or of secondary worth,-whom it is very difficult to judge effectively, and who are always changing, mutable, and unstable. To men of incontestible worth he remained constantly attached, however much their opinions might oppose his own; and he always supported Wellington and Peel. Carlyle has given a letter, which was written by Sir Robert, at the close of his first administration, to Edward Sterling, thanking him for the disinterested support which he had given to his government, with the reply of the latter. This correspondence was alike honourable to both parties, to the journalist, who had never seen the man to whose defence he was devoted, and to the minister who had never seen the journalist who had defended his administration with so much vigour. To his constant and immutable admiration of the two personages we have named, Edward Sterling added a hatred, equally immutable and constant, of the Irish Liberator; and Wellington, Peel, and O'Connell were among the men whom he ever honoured by regarding invariably either with dislike or attachment. Such was Edward Sterling, the famous "Thunderer" of the Times, and the father of the subject of our memoir.

John Sterling, the celebrated son of the foregoing, passed the first three years and a half of his life in Scotland,

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on that wild-wooded, rocky coast, with its gnarled mountains, and green silent valleys, with its seething rainstorms, and many sounding seas," but he did not preserve many recollections of its scenery, nor yet, indeed, of that of the Celtic land in which were passed the succeeding four and half years of his being; and the few impressions which he did retain thereof, began only to take root when dwelling amid the red brick houses of the gay city of Paris, whither his father removed with his family in 1814. He had not been there long, however, before an unexpected and unforetold event, namely, the return of Napoleon from Elba-threw Europe again into confusion, and forced him, with full many a thousand others, to quit the soil of France, and take up his abode in a region of less change and of more peace.

He fixed himself this time, with his family, in London, and for his own part never again removed therefrom. His family had been numerous, but death before long left him but two children, -John and another boy, whose name was Anthony, and who ultimately embraced the military profession. Five times within six years had John to follow the coffins of his brothers, three of whom even died within one twelve months, making upon his mind impressions which were never afterwards effaced, and teaching him sorrow at an early age. As for his school education, it was carried on just how it happened, in the midst of these repeated changes and bereavements. No child ever changed schoolmasters so often as John Sterling. He went from Cowbridge to Paris, from Paris to Blackheath, from Blackheath to Greenwich, from Greenwich to Glasgow, and from thence to Cambridge, passing incessantly from under the direction of one professor to that of another. It was said of him at that time that nothing would be stable in his life, and we find him afterwards going from London to Bordeaux, from Bordeaux to Madeira, from Madeira to Naples, and then wandering through and searching all the corners of old England for a spot in which he could manage to taste of peace, and to win health. Even in infancy, the adventurous and excitable spirit which he inherited from his father, compelled him to be constantly changing his resi

dence and his preceptors. His spirit was as mobile as his life: it was a spirit rapid, prompt, and facile, having many of Edward Sterling's "impetuous, explosive," and improvising qualities, but unable to allow the slow and heavy labours of thought to concentrate its forces of imagination. His sentiments and feelings were equally rapid, generous, and energetic, but without great depth. He was a man of much talent and amiability, but lacking much in strength and force of character. A certain nomadism seemed to envelop his whole life, to direct it and fashion it as it pleased. Even his studies, brilliant as they undoubtedly were, were wanting infinitely in method, unity, and discipline. "He never,' says Archdeacon Hare, who was one of his tutors at Cambridge, " was a scholar in the true sense of the word; he was neither an archæologist, nor a philologist, nor by any means what is called learned,"" but he made up for at any rate some of these defects by a lively and intelligent comprehension of the ancients. He possessed in a great degree the sentiment of the antique life, and he reproduced it in some of his writings with grace and elegance. Certain of his essays, Cydon, the Lycian Painted, for example, have a remarkably fresh and agreeable classical turn, but they want the robust health of antique life-a want in which we perceive the effect of the noise and bustle of contemporary existence which invaded so much more than necessary the life of Sterling.

He was eighteen years of age when he was sent to Cambridge, and Carlyle says of him at this period, "In his ever-changing course, from Reece at Cowbridge, to Trollope in Christ's, which was passed so nomadically under ferules of various colour, the boy had, on the whole, snatched successfully a fair share of what was going. Competent skill in construing Latin; I think also, an elementary knowledge of Greek; add cyphering to a small extent; Euclid, perhaps, in a rather imaginary condition; a swift, but not very legible or handsome penmanship, and the copious, prompt habit of employing it in all manner of unconscious English prose composition, or even, occasionally, in verse itself. This, or something like this, he had gained from his grammar-schools,- this, or some

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thing like this, is the most of what they offer to the poor young souls in general in these indigent times. The express schoolmaster is not equal to much at present, while the unexpress, for good or for evil, is so busy with a poor little fellow! Other descriptions of schooling had been infinitely more productive for our young friend than the gerundgrinding one! A voracious reader, I believe, he all along was; had read the whole Edinburgh Review,' in those boyish years; and out of the circulating libraries one knows not what cartloads; wading, like Ulysses to his palace, through infinite dung. A voracious observer and participator in all things, he likewise all along was; and had his sights, and reflections, and sorrows, and adventures, from Kaimes Castle onward. Puer bona spei, as the school albums say, a boy of whom much may be hoped? Surely, in many senses, yes. A frank veracity is in him; truth and courage, as the basis of all; and of wild gifts and graces, there is abundance. I figure him a brilliant, swift, voluble, affectionate, and pleasant creature; out of whom, if it were not that symptoms of delicate health already show themselves, much might be made. Promotions, at least, especially in this country and epoch of Parliaments, are surely very possible for such a one!"

He continued at Cambridge for about two years, and while there he became the chief of the "Union," a famous debating club, in which Sterling and his companions handled pretty freely the political and ecclesiastical questions of the day, so that he had already breathed largely, when he quitted the University in 1827, of the atmosphere of that liberalism, which was at that time the reigning spirit, not only at Cambridge, but all over Europe and the world.

Handsome in his person; impulsive, generous, energetic, in his nature; possessing, if not genius, at least much talent, and an ardent, enthusiastic, liberal in his political sentiments, such was Sterling when he bade farewell to Cambridge. He was just twenty-one years of age, and free to enter upon any career whatever. What sort of choice will he decide on making?

There is no problem in these days more difficult to solve, than that of chosing a fit and proper life-profession,

especially for individuals of such a cast of character as Sterling's. How shall we choose a profession and a calling, when we are convinced that we have duties to fulfil in life, but know not exactly what they are, or, when we are doubtful whether there are such things as duties and obligations,-questions, which are put to himself when about to enter life, by every serious young man Sterling felt this keenly at the time we speak of, when he found himself face to face with the necessity for choosing a profession. Neither the law nor medicine suited his disposition, and trade and commerce required regular and sedentary habits, while Sterling possessed neither, and had, moreover, a fault which is that of many others he could not by any possibility, be kept calm and quiet. Besides, a feeble and delicate constitution, already touched by consumption, prevented him accepting occupations of too regular a nature. In such a situation there were three ways open to him: either he must plunge into a sea of pleasure, and run the feverish and agitated course of a modern Epicurian; or he must throw himself headlong into public life-political affairs, parliaments, and diplomacy, or else enter upon the career which is more arduous, more stormy, and more agitated, than any other, namely, that of litera ture. Sterling, after having made some vain attempts to obtain a diplomatic appointment, and after having become, for a time, the secretary, at a salary of £300 per annum, of a joint-stock company, set on foot by Mr. John Crawford, the well-known orientalist, and having thereby wearied himself with commerce, chose the latter, and began his novel of " Arthur Coningsby," which was not, however, published till 1832, when its author had made himself a

tolerably good name in the world of letters.

His first appearance in print was made in the columns of the "Athenæum ;" which journal at that time had only just been started by Mr. J. S. Buckingham. To its conductors he was introduced by some mutual friends; and he contributed to it a variety of historical articles, together with some little allegorical compositions, which, if the age of their author, who was but two-and-twenty when he wrote them, be considered, will be allowed to be remarkable. "First fruits," Carlyle

calls them," by a young man of twentytwo; crude, imperfect, yet singularly beautiful and attractive; which will testify still what high literary promise there lay in him." Shortly after, we find him purchasing the proprietorship of the "Athenæum," and working there upon laboriously, in conjunction with his friend and college companion, Mr. (now Professor) Frederic Maurice, as its editor. In the course of a few years, however, it passed out of his hands, and all connection between it and Sterling ceased. Carlyle says of his connection with this journal,-"For the present, it brought him into the thick of London literature, especially of young London literature and speculation; in which turbid exciting element he swam and revelled, nothing loth, for certain months longer a period short of two years in all. He had lodgings in Regent Street: his father's house, now a flourishing and stirring establishment, in South Place, Knightsbridge, where, under the warmth of increasing revenue and success, miscellaneous cheerful socialities, and abundant speculations, chiefly political, (not John's kind, but that of the "Times" newspaper, and the clubs), were rife, he could visit daily, and yet be master of his own studies and pursuits:-Maurice, Trench, John Mill, Charles Buller: these, and some few others, among a wide circle of a transitory phantasmal character, whom he speedily forgot, and cared not to remember, were much about him: with these, he in all ways employed and disported himself a first favourite with them all!-no pleasanter companion, I suppose, had any of them :-so frank, open, guileless, fearless, a brother to all worthy souls whatsoever. Come when you might, here is he, openhearted, rich in cheerful fancies, in grave logic, in all kinds of bright activity. If, perceptibly or imperceptibly, there is a touch of ostentation about him, blame it not; it is so innocent, so good, and child-like. He is still fonder of jingling publicly, and spreading on the table, your big purse of opulence than his own." Open, cordial, generous, and much inclined to be enchanted with the present:-such was Sterling at this epoch. To these qualities, he added a singular activity, an immense ardour for work, and yet, also, an insatiable desire for change.

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about, here and there, with the velocity of a railway engine; now rushing to the lakes of Cumberland, to pay a visit to Wordsworth; now to Highgate, to see Coleridge; then to Paris, to mix with the disciples of Saint Simon, whose school was just then forming; and then returning to London to write an article, for example, on Fanny Kemble, whom he knew, and for whom he cherished an admiration which bordered upon something tenderer, or to chat with his friends respecting electoral reform, general liberalism, the hopes of humanity, and the approaching extinction and annihilation of superstition. Carlyle continues, respecting his acquaintance at this period, shortly after the passage we just quoted, "An extensive very variegated circle of connections was forming round him. Besides his 'Athenæum work, and evenings in Regent Street and elsewhere, he makes visits to country houses-the Bullers, and others; converses with established gentlemen, with honourable women not a few; is gay, and welcome with the young of his own age; knows also religious, witty, and other distinguished ladies, and is admiringly known by themmore especially by one Susannah Barton, a stately, blooming, black-eyed young woman, attractive enough in form and character, full of gay softness, of indolent sense and enthusiasm, about Sterling's own age, if not a little older." Of this daughter of Bernard Barton we shall hear again directly.

If ever Sterling was happy, it was at this time; but two circumstances soon happened, and concluded in a tragic and impressive manner, this delightful period of youth and radicalism. We allude to his intimacy with Coleridge, and the expedition of General Torrijos. With the former, Sterling began about this time to be in the habit of visiting often. Coleridge was then living, like a philosopher retired from the world, at Highate-hill, with the Gilmans, and pouring forth his oracles into the ears of a band of young and eager listeners. His conversations were celebrated through all England; and, if we may judge from certain specimens, they well deserved their reputation. They were remarkable in many points, but more especially for exhibiting, in a high degree, the phenomenon to which psychologists have given the

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