shield the arrested royalists from the fury of the populace, but in no sense from the action of justice. The Assembly confirmed this view, and from that moment Necker's influence was practically gone. It was proved to be a bubble; and his triumph, respectable as were some of the motives which had urged him to invoke it, became ludicrous when contrasted with the stern and tragic realities of the moment. This Madame de Staël did not, could not see. She was fain to console herself with the compassionate reflection that, after all, De Besenval—an old man—was saved.
She narrates with dolorous pride the efforts honestly, courageously, and to a certain degree successfully, made by her father, during fifteen months, to avert the disaster of famine; and innocently appeals to them against the failure as a statesman to which she resolutely shuts her eyes.
One measure after another opposed by Necker was voted: the confiscation of the property of the clergy, the suppression of titles of nobility, and the emission of assignats. No popularity could have resisted such successive blows; and Necker was popular no longer. Still, Madame de Staël touchingly begs the world, in her writings, not to allow itself to be turned from the paths of virtue by the spectacle of a good man so persecuted by fate. She claims our admiration for a series of quixotic acts, and is perpetually insisting on the amazing magnanimity which would not allow her father to become base because he had ceased to be useful.
Thoroughly discouraged at last—perhaps partly convinced that to preach kindness to savages, and selfabnegation to the vile, was a task to be resumed in better times—Necker tendered his resignation, and
