the effect; and we are obliged to conclude that the cold, sarcastic, and selfish man, who believed in nothing and nobody, and who rejected even the common impulses of humanity, was no casual product of events, but precisely what he had been designed to be from the cradle, and what he would have shown himself to have been--though, perhaps, in a different way--had he never known what paternal neglect and maternal cruelty were. We have no account in this volume of the progressive steps of his clerical education, beyond the intimation that it was wearisome and distasteful. Talleyrand disliked references to his ecclesiastical career. It had not been a respectable one; and if M. Colmache really got from him the stories which he tells in his book, we need not be surprised that there is nothing in them about either the Abbe or the Bishop. We know from other sources that, notwithstanding his constitutional timidity, he accepted the Revolution eagerly; and that he did his best, by precept and example, to consummate the destruction of the old order of things. He was the bosom friend of Mirabeau, so far as his suspicious nature would allow him to be the bosom-friend of any one; and his account (or what M. Colmache says was his) of the last days of that able, but profligate person's troubled life is one of the most striking things in this volume. Another extraordinary being likewise appears here, of whom less is generally known than of the other two, viz., the Abbe Cerutti, an Italian Jesuit, who had been in the service of the Dauphin, the father of Louis XVI., and who, like so many others, threw his religion and his allegiance behind his back when they could no longer subserve his personal ends, and who was, moreover, with Mirabeau and Talleyrand, one of the most active promoters of the popular cause. This trio, in conjunction with Condorcet, started, in 1789, the first democratical journal known in Paris. It was called the _Feuille Villageoise_, and was designed for circulation among the rural populations of the provinces. It has been accused of having provoked many of the atrocities of the Revolution; but this, it would seem, was a mistake. It only fanned the flames after they had broken out, but did not excite them: and it was remarkable for "burning columns" from Mirabeau, the ex-noble; for "cold, bitter irony," from Cerutti, the ex-Jesuit; and for recommendations of the "divisions of church property, &c." from Talleyrand, the ex-bishop. Such pastimes could have done no harm, according to M. Colmache; and were obviously inadequate to the production of a revolution--and such a revolution! Let us acquit these patriots, then, of treason against society, and let us believe that they were actuated by the purest motives, when they used every effort within their reach to rouse to madness an ignorant and excitable multitude, and stimulated by every possible means, the cupidity of the poor by suggestions to plunder the rich and to despoil the Church. It may be