for equality, or with its suspicious dread of Kings and Ministers and nobles. Studying their views to-day, in the calm light of our own system, it is difficult to refuse to this group of men the praise which is due to great enlightenment and moderation; but it is not difficult to understand, how, in those stormy times, when precedent and experience went for nothing, their grave, and measured counsels fell unheeded, and how, outstripped by the pace of Revolution, they fell back into the ranks of the party of reaction. Opposite to the politicians of the Right sat the great bulk of the Commons deputies, with a few nobles and a good many clergy among them. This, with its many groups and interests, was, in general terms, the party of Reform, the party which had made the Revolution, which embodied its virtues, its doctrines, its follies, its faults, and with which the responsibility for the policy of the Constituent Assembly rests. In the ranks of this great, heterogeneous party were to be found most of the well-known names of the early period of the Revolution. Among them was Bailly, the cultivated and distinguished man of science, with his high character, his gentle demeanour, his convinced optimism, his tender heart, his pardonable vanity, and his obvious limitations, perhaps the best type of the enthusiastic philanthropists who adopted with ardour the popular cause. Bailly played for a few months a conspicuous and honourable part. He received the high compliment of being appointed successively first President of the National Assembly and first Mayor of Paris; and then, losing heart and reputation among the embarrassments of the great office which he had not sought, he learned the fickleness of popular favour, and was sacrificed to the resentment of the people. Among them too was Sieyès, the democratic priest, the calm logician, the happiest maker of phrases in a nation of happy phrase-makers, the readiest of any to frame reports, to cast resolutions, to draw up plans, the imperturbable builder of constitutions which never endured, sublime in the assurance of his theories, and important owing to the influence which his cool head and ready tongue obtained. Among them was Talleyrand, the Bishop of Autun, the only distinguished Churchman of the time who took a leading part in the attack upon the Church, witty, supple, dissolute, extraordinarily able, and already beginning to display the rare dexterity in understanding men and in ranging his abilities upon the winning side, which afterwards made him the most powerful subject in Europe. Among them were Lafayette, who soon discovered in the great office conferred on him by the Parisians a larger scope for his restless ambition than he could have obtained in Parliamentary tactics, and Mirabeau, leader of no groups, but cynosure of all, the greatest statesman and orator of modern France. Among them were a number of eminent lawyers, Target and