complexion of mildness and grace to the despotic policy of the day. One heard only a puff, not a report; it was the noiseless slaughter of the air-gun." To outward seeming, Legitimist principles were being vindicated; in point of fact, their vindicators were not Legitimists when their interests bade them be the reverse. In them Goethe's words were fulfilled: "None are so Legitimist as those who can legitimise themselves." The cause Gentz championed was a bad cause, but even the champion of a bad cause is interesting if possessed of remarkable talent. And Gentz was talented in an extraordinary degree. Varnhagen rightly said of him: "Never has the dust of German scholarship been stirred up with greater _éclat_; never has learning been displayed to such advantage." Friedrich von Gentz was born in Breslau in 1764. Both his parents belonged to the middle classes; his future exalted position in society he owed entirely to his own ability. At the University of Königsberg he applied himself seriously to the study of Kant's philosophy, at the same time cultivating an enthusiastic Platonic friendship for an unhappy young married woman, Elisabeth Graun. In 1786 he went to Berlin, obtained a Government appointment, and made a _mariage de convenance_ with the daughter of a high official in the finance department. He plunged into a course of unbridled dissipation, and took part in all the foolish pleasures of a court "in which a repulsive assemblage of roués and bigoted women surrounded the old king, Frederick William II." In the midst of such a life as this he was surprised by the French Revolution. Its first effect was to fire him with youthful enthusiasm. "If this revolution were to fail," he wrote, "I should deem it one of the greatest misfortunes which has befallen mankind. It is the first practical triumph of philosophy, the first example of a form of government founded upon principles and a coherent system. It is hope and comfort for our race, which is groaning under so many ancient evils. Should this revolution fail, these evils will be more irremediable than before. I can picture so clearly to myself how the silence of despair would acknowledge, in defiance of reason, that men can only be happy as slaves, and how all tyrants, great and small, would take advantage of this dreadful acknowledgment to avenge themselves for the terror caused them by the awakening of the French nation." But the horrors which the French Revolution brought in its train soon caused him to change his mind. He suddenly became the ardent champion of the good old days. To combat the supremacy of public opinion and the follies of the masses became the object of his life. He was incapable of seeing in the French Revolution the necessary outcome of centuries of wrong and ferment; he declared the cause of its lawlessness to be "enlightenment," the inordinate cultivation of cold reason--a characteristically Romantic theory.