But if the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so short a period never accomplished so much before, against such disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any one rest so wholly for his amazing achievements on the sole power of intrinsic genius. It was intellect that did all with Mirabeau; and made his head, according to his own boast, a power among European states. It united almost every possible capacity and attainment. His rare and penetrating powers of observation were sustained by the equal depth and justness of his discrimination, and the rapidity and accuracy of his judgment. Uniting, to his admirable natural capacity, an activity and habitual power of application, more marvelous almost in their extent than even in their rare combination, he possessed an understanding full, beyond precedent, both of the recorded knowledge of books, and of that priceless experience of men and things, without which all else is naught; and as the complement of these amazing and unparalleled advantages, he had the still rarer advantage of a felicity and power of diction every way worthy of so incomparable a genius. Looking with contempt at the stiff, ornamental, and childishly antithetical style of his day and nation, he welded the flimsy elements of the French language into instruments of strength akin to his own conceptions, and wrought out of them a style for himself in which a Demosthenic simplicity and severity of language is sustained by an earnest and straightforward power which vivifies and amplifies all that it touches. Startled by an innovation far beyond the conceptions of the French academy, the writer was smiled at and neglected by the critics; and it was not till they heard him launching from the tribune the thunders of justice, disposing at pleasure of the inclinations of the multitude, and subjugating even the captious by the imperious power of his eloquence, that they began to discover that there was a "power of life"[10] in his rude and singular language; that "things, commonplace, in his hand became of electric power;"[11] and that, standing "like a giant among pigmies,"[12] his style, albeit "savage,"[13] dominated the assembly, stupefying, and thundering down all opposition.