Recording the appointment of Bonaparte to succeed Scherer in command of the French forces on Genoese territory, Southey observes that although the former had given indications of his military talents at Toulon, and of his remorseless nature at Paris, “the extent either of his ability or his wickedness was at this time known to none, and perhaps not even suspected by himself.” Of all the lessons derived from the history of human passion, says Lavalette, the most important is the utter impossibility which even the best men will always experience of stopping, if they are once led into the path of error. If, a few years before they were perpetrated, the crimes of the first French Revolution, he goes on to surmise, could have been portrayed to those who committed them, “even Robespierre himself would have recoiled with horror.” Men, in the case suggested, are seduced at first by plausible theories, which their heated imaginations represent as beneficial and easy of execution: “they advance unconsciously from errors to faults, and from faults to crimes, till sensibility is destroyed by the habitual spectacle of guilt, and the most savage atrocities come to be dignified by the name of state policy.” The world, and the spirit of the world, observes Sir Fowell Buxton in one of his letters, are very insidious; “and more than once I have seen a person who, as a youth, was single-eyed and single-hearted, and who, to any one who supposed he might glide into laxity of zeal, would have said, ‘Am I a dog?’ in maturer age become, if not a lover of the vices of the world, at least a tolerator of its vanities.” But as M. de Sainte-Beuve sententiously puts it, in one of his maxims after the manner of La Rochefoucauld, “La plupart des défauts qui éclatent dans la seconde moitié de la vie existaient en nous tout formés bien auparavant; mais ils étaient masqués, en quelque sorte, par la pudeur de la jeunesse.” The faults of after-life were there, and only the modest reserve and self-restraint of youth kept them under cover. With riper years comes less regard for others, and the cover is taken off. A clerical essayist on “Future Years,” “can well believe,” he tells us, “that many a man, could he have a glimpse in innocent youth of what he will be twenty or thirty years after, would pray in anguish to be taken before coming to _that_!” “Mansie Wauch’s glimpse of destitution was bad enough; but a million times worse is a glimpse of hardened and unabashed sin and shame.” And it would be no comfort, we are reminded—it would be an aggravation in that view—to think that by the time you have reached that miserable point, you will have grown pretty well reconciled to it—_that_ being the worst of all.