convocation of notables, which occurred during this year, was a sort of commentary on his views. He expected to be named secretary to the assembly, but that place was given to Dupont de Nemours; and, when he returned to Paris in September, the notables were already dismissed. Mirabeau, in his letters at this period, displays that deep interest in politics which afterwards was to engross his life, and led to his success and triumph. "It is impossible," he writes, "to witness the excess of shame and folly which combine to engulf my country without consternation. It is not given to human wisdom to guess where all this will find a term." Meanwhile his pen was never idle; and in the midst of various journeys, and multiplied occupations, he published a variety of political works, which drew public observation on him; though now for the most part they are forgotten, as belonging to a state of things sunk in perpetual oblivion. In these he never ceased to attack the abuses of government; to urge the necessity of framing a constitution for his country; and to announce with enthusiasm his love of political liberty and independence. In the history of Mirabeau, so far, we find his life divided into two parts. The first, up to the age of two and thirty, was stormy and disastrous; but the accidents that marked it did not take him from private life. Proud of his station and name, and ambitious of distinction, yet the vices of youth wrecked him at the very outset, and the conduct of his father, who acted the part of Cornish wrecker, rather than taking his natural post of pilot, threatened his perpetual submersion. As lord Brougham observes, in his observations on his character, "There is, perhaps, no second instance of an individual whose faults have been committed under such a pressure of ill-treatment, to besiege and force his virtue, rather than of temptation, to seduce and betray it." The extraordinary energy of his character alone saved him; and he merited the praise, not only of delivering himself, through his resolute and unwearied exertions, from the dungeon in which, had he been a weaker man, he had been left to perish, but also of making good use of the leisure which the sad and solitary hours of imprisonment afforded, to store his mind with knowledge.