The giants who stalked through his inflamed imagination like spectres on the Brocken, may be seen to-day in the Musee de la Revolution at Paris, shrunken to their true proportions--a dreary procession, indeed, of dreamers, madmen, quacks and felons! How can that be called a 'Great Revolution,' of which it is recorded that before it had filled the brief orbit of a decade, it had made an end of the life or of the reputation of every single man conspicuous in initiating or promoting it? The men who began the English Revolution of 1688 organised the new order to which it led. The men who began the American Revolution of 1776 organised the new nation which it called into being. This must have been as true of the French Revolution had it been really an outcome of the 'principles of 1789,' or of any principles at all. But it was nothing of the kind. It was simply a carnival of incapacities, ending naturally in an orgie of crime. It was in the order of Nature that it should deify Mirabeau in the Pantheon, only to dig up his dishonoured remains and trundle them under an unmarked stone at the meeting of four streets, that it should set Bailly on a civic throne, only to drag him forth, under a freezing sky, to his long and dismal martyrdom amid a howling mob, that it should acclaim Lafayette as the Saviour of France, only to hunt him across the frontier into an Austrian prison. It was because France detested the Republic, and, detesting the Republic, might at any moment recall the Bourbons, that Napoleon executed the Duc d'Enghien. It was to make an end of claims older than his own upon the allegiance of a people essentially and naturally monarchical. It was a crime, but it was not a squalid and foolish crime like the murder of Louis XVI. It belonged to the same category with the execution of Conradin of Hohenstaufen by Charles of Anjou--not, indeed, as to its mere atrocity, but as to its motives and its intent. It announced to the French people the advent of a new dynasty, and left them no choice but between the Republic and the Empire. An autograph letter of Carnot, the grandfather of the actual President of the Third Republic, sold the other day in Paris may be cited to illustrate this point. Carnot, like many other regicides, would gladly have made his peace with Louis XVIII. His peace with some sovereign he knew that he must make. The letter I now refer to was written after the return of the Emperor from Elba, and it could hardly have been written had Carnot not believed that France might be rallied to the Empire and to its chief, because France could not exist without a monarchy and a monarch.