108 BAILLY. 
graceful passions of the King of Navarre; his treach- 
eries ; the barbarous avidity of the nobility ; the seditious 
disposition of the people; the sanguinary depredations of 
the great companies; the ever recurring insolence of 
England; all this is expressed without disguise, yet with 
extreme moderation. No trait reveals, no fact even fore- 
shadows in the author, the future President of a reform- 
ing National Assembly, still less the Mayor of Paris, 
during a revolutionary effervescence. The author may 
make Charles V. say that he will discard favour, and 
will call in renown to select his representatives; it will 
appear to him that taxes ought to be laid on riches and 
spared on poverty ; he may even exclaim that oppression 
awakens ideas of equality. His temerity will not over- 
leap this boundary. Bossuet, Massillon, Bourdaloue, 
made the Chair resound with bold words of another 
description. 
I am far from blaming this scrupulous reserve; when 
moderation is united to firmness, it becomes power. In 
a word, however, Bailly’s patriotism might, I was about 
to say ought to, have shown itself more susceptible, more 
ardent, prouder. When in the elegant prosopopceia 
which closes the éloge, the King of England has _ re- 
called with arrogance the fatal day of Poitiers, ought 
he not instantly to have restrained that pride within just 
limits? ought he not to have cast a hasty glance on the 
components of the Black Prince’s army? to examine 
whether a body of troops, starting from Bordeaux, re- 
cruiting in Guienne, did not contain more Gascons than 
English? whether France, now bounded by its natural 
limits, in its magnificent unity, would not have a right, 
every thing being examined, to consider that battle almost 
as an event of civil war? ought he not, in short, to have 
