les Anglais contre la vie du Premier Consul, et devant, en cas de succes de cette conspiration, entrer en France." On this point he was examined and unanimously condemned, and it is certain that his participation in the flagrant conspiracy was believed at the time. Nor is it distributively fair to represent this act as one that seemed almost normal in the light of revolutionary experience. European opinion did not stand so high above French, or royalist above revolutionary. We do not forget what the Austrians did at Rastatt, and the English at Naples, the undisguised design of La Rochejaquelein, Gentz's indignation when Fox denounced Guillet, and the ferocious despatch in which the Russian protest was met by asking whether Alexander would have hesitated to seize his father's murderers if they had ventured within striking distance of his frontier. Whilst Austria gave assurance that she was ready to accept without discussion the motives of the arrest, the applause of the revolutionists was less decided than Mr. Seeley implies. The Jacobins, says Garat, were as indignant as the royalists.
Although Mr. Ropes rises on the other side avowedly to plead a cause, it is the interest of science that the reason of things should be reasonable, and that interpreters of history should not resort prematurely to mere folly and passion, and the psychology made common by Tacitus. The produce of late years, even of the brief interval since these artists mixed their colours on both sides of the Atlantic, will not allow the mighty figure ever again to shine with excessive light. It is well to have his enemies watched through the same lens, and weighed in the same scales as himself ; to see how much failure and evil in his life is explained without his fault, by the wiles of foes, by the legacy of time, by the necessity of defence, and the extremity of peril which the new order suffered from the girdle of ancient forces ; to mark the regenerating hand, the gratitude of nations, like the Swiss, that did not thwart him, the gift of fascinating good men. The use which Thiers made of the finest
