forcing-pump can do nothing after a vacuum is attained. During the last two or three reigns the misery of the people had increased in direct proportion with the splendor of the court. Occasional insurrections and riots had been promptly punished by the gallows or a volley of musketry, and the wild people had gone back whipped to their wretchedness. But now all this was changed. A growth of philosophers and lovers of men had arisen, peculiar to the country and the age. An odd sort of cultus-the Religion of Humanity had taken the place of other forms of worship, and was working sin gular results. It began among solitary dreamers in squalid garrets, and had at last spread to palaces, and infected thrones. The unhealthy dreams of Rousseau had turned the heads of dukes and princes. The visit of Dr. Franklin to Paris was one long homage of privilege to democracy. These amiable aristocrats, these innocent tyrants, were playing with the lightning, of whose properties they were

this delirium. He had democratic tendencies himself, but knew where to draw the line. When his sister, the Queen, wanted him to meet Franklin, he replied: "Madame, the trade I live by is to be a royalist."

Among the high and the low the age of fable had returned. The aristocracy of birth and of learning had caught from the philosophers the habit of considering the people good and gentle, to whom all things must be yielded. The people had taken philosophy their own way, with a difference, and considered the aristocracy bloody-minded robbers, deserving of pillage and death. Even the Queen and the court loved the people-and the people believed the filthiest calumnies on the Queen and court. But over all, rich and poor alike, there floated this strange dream of a better time which was soon to come. The way in which it was to be realized differed according to the imaginations of individuals and classes. Some believed in an idyllic return of Saturnian reigns,

scheme of this great revolution will always remain the warning and the amazement of the world. It pursued its remorseless course without human let or hinderance, and apparently also without human aid. The loftiest virtue, the most extraordinary talents, produced scarcely any effect upon it. The innocent enthusiasts went softly bleating of Liberty and Fraternity to their doom. The most ferocious scoundrels followed their own victims to the Place de la Révolution. Anarchy raged, all-devouring, until, aliment lacking elsewhere, it turned and devoured itself, and the exhausted and agonized land was ready again for a master. Great things were certainly accomplished for France in the midst of that terror and destruction. No event in the world's history so dwarfs and belittles all criticism and comment; and the most marvellous thing about it all is that many of the objects seen in the rosy mist of fancy by the dreamers of 1789 have actually come to

which we propose just now to consider, but rather its effect upon the fortunes of a single family of poor estate in Corsica. When the mob burst into the Tuileries on the memorable 10th of August, and the monarchy of France looked its last out of the palace windows before betaking itself to the cruel protection of the Legislature, the eyes of poor Louis XVI. might have beheld in the street, among the crowd of curious spectators, the man for whose advantage the throne of St. Louis was crumbling into dust. He was a captain of artillery, off duty at the moment, who had come to see the riot with those intelligent eyes of his, and whose name was Napoleon Bonaparte. He was rather a fierce patriot too, in those days, and sympathized strongly with the mob, so far as death to tyrants and liberty to the people were concerned. But his love of orderly and efficient fighting was more natural to him than his passion for the people, and when he saw the gallant Swiss of the palace