The first picture given in these pages relating to the French Revolution, "The Assembly of the Notables," is one of the most celebrated caricatures ever produced, and one of the best. Setting aside one or two of Thackeray's, two or three of Gillray's, and half a dozen of Mr. Nast's, it would be difficult to find its equal. It may be said, however, that the force of the satire is wholly in the words, which, indeed, have since become one of the stock jokes of French Joe Millers. The picture appeared in 1787, when the deficit in the revenue, after having widened for many years, had become most alarming, and it was at length proposed to tax the nobility, clergy, and magistrates, hitherto exempt from vulgar taxation. But the Assembly of the Notables, which was chiefly composed of the exempt, preferred to prolong inquiry into the causes of the deficit, and showed an unconquerable reluctance to impose a tax upon themselves. It was during this delay, so fatal to the monarchy, that the caricature appeared. There must have been more than one version of the work, for the one described by Mr. Carlyle in his "History of the French Revolution" differs in several particulars from that which we take from M. Champfleury. Mr. Carlyle says: "A _rustic_ is represented convoking the poultry of his barn-yard with this opening address, 'Dear _animals_, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with,' to which a _cock_ responding, 'We don't want to be eaten,' is checked by, 'You wander from the point!'" The outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 menaced Europe with one of the greatest of all evils--the premature adoption of liberal institutions. Forever vain and always fruitful of prodigious evil will be attempts to found a government by the whole people where the mass of the working population are grossly ignorant and superstitious. The reason is known to all who have had an opportunity of closely observing the workings of such minds. They can only be swayed by arts which honest intelligence can not use, and therefore they will be usually governed by men who have an interest in misleading them. Great Britain was nearer a republic than any other nation in Europe; but England, too, needed another century to get the tap-room reduced, the people's school developed in every parish, and the educated class intensely alive to the "folly of heaping importance upon idiots." [Illustration: The Dagger Scene in the House of Commons. (Gillray, 1793.)]