34 
The outlines of the French Revolution are familiar to all: 
How the Nobility and Clergy had abused their unjust privileges 
until the common people—‘‘ the twenty-five millions of haggard 
figures "’—‘‘ the poor dumb sheep whom these others had 
previously agreed upon the manner of shearing *”’—could bear 
it no longer, and, united in a common bond of hunger and 
misery, began to raise ominous sounds. Their first “ Petition of 
Grievances ” was greeted with a ‘ gallows forty feet high,” and 
they were told to ‘‘eat grass.” This treatment, followed by bad 
trade, an empty exchequer, a useless King, and a terrific hail- 
storm in July, 1788, which ruined the harvest, hurried on the 
crisis, and, with a false nobility and a false Church, a feeling of 
scepticism and suspicion, fostered by revolutionary pamphleteers 
in Paris, soon spread itself—poison-like—over the already dis- 
turbed country, so that in the State which once had been 
described as ‘‘ Despotism tempered by Epigram,”’ the EKpigrams 
soon obtained the upper hand. 
It is interesting to note that that far-sighted English states- 
man, Lord Chesterfield, thirty years before the Revolution, foretold 
the event in the following words :— 
“In short, all the symptoms which I have ever met with in History, 
previous to great changes and revolutions in government, now exist and daily 
increase in France.” 
Those who wish to follow further ‘ how anarchy breaks 
prisons, bursts up from the infinite deep, and rages uncontrollable, 
immeasureable, enveloping a world,” the essayist refers to Carlyle’s 
pregnant pages, where the story is told with a vividness, a 
thoroughness, an eloquence, a picturesqueness, with a fire, some- 
times of the most grotesque humour, often with sublime poetic 
genius, and ever with a sympathy, an earnestness and an insight 
which would be impossible to surpass. 
Perhaps the most striking feature of the whole book is its 
totally unconventional style, every sentence being stamped with 
the author’s rugged and emphatic personality. Such an idea as 
writing for literary effect never seems to have entered into his 
mind. His object being rather to express the earnest outpourings 
of his inmost soul in the language of a man who feels deeply, 
and would make others feel every word he utters. Not a word is 
wasted, not a word left out which is needed to complete his 
striking pictures—pictures which are brushed on the canvas 
with such vigour and clearness that every figure, each with its 
own peculiarities, stands out definite and breathing before us, 
and we watch the different acts of Kurope’s greatest drama with 
all the emotions of spectators; and at times, so ghastly and 
hideously real are the pictures drawn, that the eyes spontaneously 
