tion, and was thus able to declare that he had not incurred the pains of emigration, and yet to assure Grenville that he was not in the service of the Republic. But with all his dexterity and coolness he could not hold a position between the upper and the nether millstone. He was outlawed in France, he was expelled from England; and having sold his books in London, he sailed for Philadelphia. He would have been glad to get a passage to India, to be shrouded in sufficient obscurity until his time came.

It came at the end of two years. In 1796 he found himself restored to France, in the embarrassing company of a lady who had got Francis into trouble before him, and having no position but that of a member of the Institute. In the scheme for a national system of education which he presented to the Assembly, the whole was to have been directed by a central board composed of the ablest men in France; so that the idea of the Institute may be said to belong to him. The Duke de Broglie, following his father's Souvenirs, believes that Talleyrand's Report was not his own work; while Jules Simon affirms the contrary, and the Memoirs claim that he drew it up after consulting Lavoisier, Laplace, and the scientific men of the day. In his new character he read two papers exposing the wisdom he had gathered in exile. During his two years' stay in England he had made a friend of Lord Lansdowne, and in the Bowood circle had met men who were working the problems of the hour on different lines from those he had learned at home In the United States he came under the influence of Alexander Hamilton. He had gone away a disciple in economics of Dupont de Nemours, without his dogmatism and without his fervour. He came back a believer in the doctrine of Utility, in the colonial system of Adam Smith; and he informs his countrymen that nations act by self-interest, not by gratitude or resentment, and that nothing can divert the trade of America from England to France. He said afterwards that a sound political economy was the talisman which made England, for thirty years, the first of European Powers.

Academic exercises were not the road to greatness; and Madame de Staël rescued him from penury by telling Barras what manner of man he was. Talleyrand's fortune was made that day. He grasped his opportunity; fascinated the director by that pleasant talk which aged men still remember with admiration; and was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs by a bare majority over the most obscure of competitors. With an interval of four months in 1799, he held the office during the ten extraordinary years from Campo Formio to Tilsit. His despatches written for the Directory have been published by M. Pallain, who, but for names and dates, would be an excellent editor, and they are not worthy of his later fame. As the executive agent of a deliberative and fluctuating body he is not seen to advantage. His employers distrusted him, and he despised his

employers. The Swiss and Italian questions were decided without him; the question of the negotiations at Lille was settled against him. He made way slowly, and carried to extremes the compliance which is expected in a subordinate and in a colleague. He tried in vain to be elected one of the directors, and the Prussian envoy writes that his elevation would put an end to the convulsions of Europe. He craved for a master more intelligent than the directors, or at least firmer and more constant. Together with Sieyes he thought of Moreau, of Joubert, of the Duke of Brunswick, the grand illusion of the time. Together they contrived the Eighteenth of Brumaire. He had seen from the beginning that Buonaparte had more than a military genius. He felt for Monarchy like the Vendean chief who, when he was asked in whose name he fought, replied, ‘In the name of the king, that is, of any man who may occupy the throne.' He had found what he wanted-a master worthy of such a minister.

By the account which he gives of his own system, his endurance in office during all the ascending years is a prodigy of suppleness. Talleyrand at all times wished to restrict the limits of France to the Rhine. He would have made terms with England by the sacrifice of Malta, and thought us justified in the breach of the peace of Amiens. He regarded Austria as the natural and necessary ally, and would have granted overwhelming compensation by the partition of Turkey for her losses in the sphere of French influence. He advised the restoration of Venice, and exposed the folly of surrounding the empire with a girdle of helpless Buonapartes. On the topics of agreement with Napoleon he does not enlarge, and asserts some merit for sympathy and generosity shown to the vanquished Hohenzollerns. But in his political construction Prussia was the inevitable adversary. He constantly described it as a neighbour on whom there was no reliance, with a barren territory and an open frontier, compelled by nature to be ambitious and aggressive, and to scheme for the subjugation of Germany. Tout prétexte lui est bon. Nul scrupule ne l'arrête. La convenance est son droit. His encounter at Vienna with the Prussian statesmen, when he got the better of William Humboldt, must have been a prouder moment than when he set up his chancery at Berlin.

From his entrance into office he pursued the policy of secularisation. From Salzburg all round to Liège Europe was covered with ecclesiastical proprietors and potentates, and it was an opportune and congenial resource to suppress them in order to satisfy the princes who had to be consoled for the conquests of Buonaparte. This process of ecclesiastical liquidation was Talleyrand's element. He had destroyed the Church of France as a privileged and proprietary corporation; and by the like impulse he helped to deprive the clergy of the Empire of their political prerogative. And he was still on the same ground at the Congress, when he reduced political right to the

hereditary rights of families, and the Prince of Reuss was a weightier personage than a doge of Venice or an archbishop of Cologne. There was little to boast of in following with a despatch-box where the sword of Napoleon cleared the way; but Talleyrand claims to have done his best for the victims, and he angered his master by drawing clauses from which he could not escape. He had to submit to the instrument of violence; to see his State papers transformed; and, as in the Lauderdale correspondence, to publish as authentic letters he had been too wise to send.

Not much in the description of Napoleon is new. There is a good deal between the lines of the grotesque account of the Spanish princes at Valençay; and in the complacent details of the interview at Erfurt, the point of the dialogue with Wieland has been lost. But the portrait of the Emperor by the most intelligent man in the Empire will always retain its value. The idea it suggests is that Napoleon failed by excess of talent. The flaw in the reckoning was that he calculated too much, and carried his thinking too far. He set himself to provide against contingencies which he could detect, but which were so remote that they practically did not exist, and weakened himself by defences against dangers not likely to take shape amongst obvious-minded men. He brought on perpetual war because the increase of France having been the work of other generals, he was afraid of their renown. Therefore he annexed Piedmont as a trophy of his own campaigns. In the same way he thought that Spain could never be reduced to a trusty satellite, as the king would some day remember who the Bourbons were, and how they came to reign beyond the Pyrenees.

In 1807, when the Empire was at its best, Talleyrand resigned his office; but as a great dignitary of State he continued to be consulted and employed. His proper place at that time was in opposition. He implored Alexander not to ruin his master by too much yielding. His advice to Metternich was an encouragement to Austria to prepare for the war of 1809. Napoleon proposed to send him to Warsaw in 1812, and made the mistake of changing his mind. In the following year he again offered him the Foreign Office. Talleyrand refused; he was not good on a sinking ship. It does not suit everybody, as he said to Savary, to be buried in the impending crash. Before Napoleon started for the campaign in France, that scene of violence occurred which Molé described to Dalling. Talleyrand offered to resign his dignities. Insult had released him from personal obligation; and when the fortune of war turned, after the victories of February, he allowed his friends to open communication with the invaders. Their emissary made his way through the French lines to headquarters, carrying two names as a password, names which had a meaning for Stadion; and, for Nesselrode, these dangerous and significant words traced in invisible ink: You march on VOL. XXIX.-No. 170. ЗА

crutches.' The bearer of these credentials was the most acute, the most alert, and the boldest of royalists. He found, in the middle of March, less than a fortnight before the capitulation of Paris, that the allies were agreed in rejecting the Bourbons. This mission of the Baron de Vitrolles, of which there are three narratives in the second volume, is an epoch in the life of Talleyrand. When he knew that Louis the Eighteenth, who was forgotten in France, was repudiated by Europe, he resolved that he should be king. It was the one solution entirely his own. And he made him king, imposing his choice with invincible ease on an Assembly of Republicans and Buonapartists, and on the wavering and bewildered master of twenty legions. It is the stroke of genius in his career. The conquerors of Napoleon found themselves at Paris in the hands of a gracious cripple in powder, who, without emphasis or exertion, crumpled up their schemes, and quietly informed them that the Bourbons alone were a principle.

With those words he legislated for Europe. By that law, so convincing to his generation, he was providing an organic force that enabled him at Vienna to subdue the Congress, to scatter the victorious allies, and to achieve his own chosen scheme of an alliance between England, Austria, and France. The implacable analysis of history has since made known that the doctrine which makes hereditary right paramount in politics is unscientific, and cannot combine with the rights of nations. Talleyrand was no advocate of arbitrary power, either at Paris or at Vienna. He was disgusted with those who sent Ferdinand the Seventh to reign without conditions. Although it was not his hand that drew up the Charte, it was his mind chiefly that inspired it. In 1815 he denounced the reactionary counsels of the Count of Artois before the king and the count himself, and insisted on the principle of a homogeneous and responsible ministry; and he retired before the Holy Alliance. The Bourbons, if they had reigned by his advice, would not have fallen. When he wrote his narrative of the events in which he performed the part of kingmaker, he did not see that he had made a blunder. The dynasty he had set upon the throne persisted for fifteen years in excluding him from power. After 1830 he regrets that he had forgotten Fox's saying that the worst sort of Revolution is a Restoration. When Madame de Lieven affected surprise that the man who had enthroned Louis the Eighteenth should appear in London as the plenipotentiary of Louis Philippe, he replied that the king he served would have been the choice of Alexander in 1814. They do not seem to have remembered who it was that prevented it.

ACTON.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY AND THE DUKE OF

ARGYLL.

A FEW sentences, written in a characteristic tone, at the close of his last reply to Mr. Gladstone in the current number of this Review are devoted by Professor Huxley to an intimation that for cogent reasons' he declines to answer my criticism on his previous assertions about geology and the deluge. This result is entirely satisfactory to me. I quite understand what these cogent reasons really are. It has been proved that in his attack upon 'Christian theology' he has been betrayed into assertions which cannot be defended. Very wisely, therefore, he declines the task. He says that my paper can be judged by every instructed and clear-headed reader.' This also is true, and has proved to be true, as a matter of fact. Before publication it was submitted to, and judged by, several men quite as instructed and clear-headed' as Professor Huxley; and since its publication letters have reached me from some of the most distant parts of the world which have been written by men of like qualifications, and these do not indicate either the judgment of the Professor, or the feelings by which that judgment is obviously inspired. Meanwhile, I only desire to point out the fact, first, that a teacher of great eminence in science has made a broad and confident assertion that Quaternary geology has established a certain negative conclusion as to any possible submergence which can have caused a deluge, or can account for the universal human tradition of such an event; and, secondly, that when challenged to defend this assertion, and when confronted with an array of admitted facts which are subversive of it, he refuses to reply. Even this, however, is not so bad as the alternative he adopts. Like certain combatants of the Celestial Empire he throws a malodorous missile at his opponent-and retires. If Professor Huxley is satisfied with this method of conducting a scientific controversy, I have no cause to remonstrate.

His Chinese missile, however, remains to be dealt with. Therefore, notwithstanding its unpleasant fumes, I proceed to handle it as representing the ostensible excuse for his turning aside in the day of battle. But, since I have no reason to expect the readers of this Review to know anything of the personal dispute with