exercise of authority, and not by the brute force of oppres sion and arbitrariness. I care no more for despotism than for anarchy, no more for anarchy than for despotism.

I have taken up my pencil without favor or hatred. I have received from those who have sat to me neither benefits nor injuries. They have offered me nothing, I have asked them for nothing.

My duty and my principles have led me to decline the honors of the Bench, of the Council of State and of the Ministry, ten years ago, when I was at the age of ambition. I have passed that age. All I now desire is to remain in the obscure and solitary position into which I have voluntarily retired. I would easily content myself to be still less prominent. Is there in our days a post, however high, which is worth a wise man's wish? And then, in office, there is so little time left to live! and in the present day such a wear and tear of conscience, the sole one of all the goods of earth which has for me any great value.

Unquestionably, I do not despair of the future of my country, because after all, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and God, it must needs be, at last will speak. But it is not my fault that I have lost all illusion, respecting the men of the present time. I have no confidence in one of them even of my own party, and in that dust of all parties I look in vain for any man who represents anything.

There is in every member of parliament two characters, the orator and the politician; the orator I have portrayed according to my taste as artist, which may well not accord, I admit, with the taste of others, and especially the orators, a race, vainglorious above all races. The politician I have judged by his opinions, when he had any, by mine, as a term of comparison.

It is now ten years since I began to spread my canvass on the easel and charge my pallet, and I continue still to paint without intermission.

The politics internal and external of a free people are now

no more to be looked for in the intrigues of courts, but in the causes and the effects of parlaimentary debates: to portray the orators, then, is to write history.

It was my design to make this a serious work, and which should endure and be connected with the study of our revo lutions, and conducive to a more exact and true knowledge of the affairs of my time. Shall I have succeeded? I should think so, if I were not liable to deceive myself; and, at all events, it would not be for me to say it.

All I can say, is, that I have been placed, to observe my models, in the best conditions wherein a painter has ever been. I have seen, I have heard General Foy, Benjamin Constant, Manuel, Royer-Collard, Casimir Perrier, Villele, de Serre, and in addition, I have undertaken what no one in France had ever done before me, and what probably will never be done again; I have read and re-read, one by one, the whole cart-loads of their speeches.

I have witnessed the gathering parliamentary storms, not in the clouds of Olympus, but at the foot of the tribune, and have heard the thunder burst, and the lightning, conducted by an electric thread, disappear sometimes afar from the public, in the chamber of conference, a few paces from where I sat.

I have seen, alone among so many foreign spectators, the actors of our political dramas, dress and undress themselves behind the scenes. I have been present, and not another painter except me, at the dumb play of their pantomime, at their half-confidences--those exchanges of gestures, of looks, of smiles-those emotions scarce perceptible of spite, of embarrassment, of shame, of anger-those comings and goings of ministerial aid-de-camps-those dispatchings of notes under hand and under the table--those buzzings, orders and passwords those changes of countenance, those sudden tackings, those mutual stabs, those devices of warfare and of comedy, which explain better a situation of an orator than all the studied discourses in the world, and which always.

escape the ears and the eyes of the Chamber and the re porters, however sagacious.

Yes, I know these orators well, for I have lived in close intimacy with their public life. But, on the other hand, I have fastened against myself the door of their private life, and have had no desire even to look through the key-hole.

It is not the praise of friends that flatters us most, but that of enemies; and we are by so much the more sensible to it, that it comes to us mixed with censure and criticism, and that its sincerity is thus the better attested. But, sincerity is the quality which charms us the most in others, even when we do not possess it ourselves.

The modern orators know well, and, besides, they feel it instinctively, that their effusions pass away like the sound of their words, that if they shine with the splendor of the meridian sun, they must go down, at the end of the day, behind the horizon, into a night without morning or mor row; and they hold, they cling, as they can, to that life of remembrance and of renown which escapes them on all sides.

Of what avail is it, by a posthumous respect, to print rich editions of the speeches of General Foy, Casimir Perrier, Benjamin Constant, and so many others, if nobody touches them? People no more read orators in their works. They are now read but in their portraits.

Doubtless, to live by shreds, by fragments, to live in little more than the name, to live without his works, without his words, is scarcely to live to an orator. But it is, at least, not to die entirely, and he ought to be thankful to the helpful hand which makes an opening in his tomb and lets in upon his brow even a single ray of light.

Let each of those who live still and whom I have drawn, interrogate himself; let him examine himself in his own mirror, and then in my portraiture, and let him say, his hand upon his heart, if he does not think it a good likeness.

I am firmly persuaded he would; and it seems to me, if I had been myself an orator, at the risk of the conse quences to me, I should wish to be painted by Timon.

GARNIER-PAGES.

ALAS! how much I have already lived. I have seen Manuel perish amid the ungrateful desertion of his constit uents and his friends. I have witnessed the death of Lafayette, who was not yet at the end of his green old-age, and who, by his majestic and simple rebuke, would have prevented the laws of September. I have seen Carrel fall in the spring-tide of life; Carrel, the brilliant knight of democracy, the flower of our hopes, the pen and the sword of the national party. I have seen extinguished Garnier-Pagès, who, had he sooner quitted the vitiated air of the Chamber, and the deadly agitation of our fruitless struggles, would have recovered his strength and health beneath the milder climate of the south and in the repose of study.

And I, the obscure companion of these illustrious men, I can only depict and admire them. I will begin with you. Garnier-Pagès, and I owe you this homage; for you are now no more, and the dead are so soon forgotten! for, besides, you loved me and were as unwilling to separate from me, as I would be to ever separate from you! for there was not one of your thoughts which was not mine: like you, I disdained to accept honors or power; like you, I loved the people; like you, I expected reform, and we had no need of communicating to one another these sentiments, or of expressing these opinions. We formed together wishes so sincere and so ardent for the union of all the patriots, for the aggrandizement of our beloved France, for the amelioration of the condition of the poor, and for the definitive triumph of democracy! Yes, yours was a great intellect, GarnierPagès! yes, yours was a noble heart! you understood liberty, you knew how it should be loved! more than this, you knew how it should be served! I shall see you no more, you whom I had left so full of life and when I return to the

Chamber, I shall find you no more at the extremity of our solitary bench!

Attacked myself, far away from you, by a malady not so destructive as yours, I have been unable to receive your latest breathings and pay you the duty of a faithful friendship; but may these lines which I consecrate to you, and which flattery does not dictate, preserve your name from that flight of time which passes on and sweeps us along, and render you still dearer to our hearts and more regretted in our memory!

Garnier-Pagès had the good fortune of not undergoing, as a member of parliament, that trial almost always fatal of the passage through several governments. Had he been deputy when the Revolution of July broke out, would he have, as so many others have done, exceeded the limits of his com. mission? Would he have quitted the battle-field to go pillage the dead? Would he have lost, under the touch of power, that political virginity which he kept to the last with a continence so exemplary? I do not think so. GarnierPagès had the rarest of courages in a country where all have personal bravery, he had the bravery of conscience. He would, in case of need, have sacrificed more than his life, he would have sacrificed his popularity; and this is what I particularly esteem him for, for I should make little account of the orator or the writer, who could not, upon occasion, resist the prejudices and the precipitation of his own party. Truth should be spoken to friends still more than to enemies, and he who courts popularity at any rate, is but a coward, a demagogue or a blockhead.

Simple in manners, of upright life, and a democrat austere without being extravagant; faithful to his principles, sincere, disinterested, generous, inoffensive; such was the mar in the moral and political aspect. As orator, he excelled, by the sage economy of his plan, the simpleness of his dialectics and the ingenious quickness of his repartees. He was deficient perhaps in that elevated, copious and ample vigor, which sustains the discourse, and leaves the adversary