conviction; to abstain scrupulously from all kinds of action and observance, public or private, which tend ever so remotely to foster the ignoble and degrading elements that exist in a court, and spread from it outwards; and to use all the influence we have, however slight it may be, in leading public opinion to a right attitude of contempt and dislike for these ignoble and degrading elements, and the conduct engendered by them." This is not the language of saponaceous bishops or of turtle-fed aldermen; but it is "the voice of sense and truth," albeit it was never heard at the Guildhall.
With nearly all that Mr. Morley has written on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, and the French Revolution, I cordially concur. To Robespierre alone I think he has done scant justice, while to Burke he has been more than kind. With the impartiality of a judge, and the insight of a statesman rather than of a man of letters, he has succeeded in dispelling much of the obscurity in which Mr. Carlyle is chiefly responsible for having involved the greatest movement of the mind of modern Europe. Carlyle's "French Revolution" is undoubtedly a work of genius; but so has a lurid "nocturne" by Mr. Whistler been pronounced to be a work of genius. The trouble is that neither has the smallest resemblance to the original. The time is coming when, it is to be hoped, the English people will have forgotten all about the "sea-greenness" of Robespierre, and remember only his unquestioned and unquestionable "incorruptibility." Mr. Morley's objection to Carlyle's bogey does not lie in a nickname; but I think he would, perhaps, have regarded Robespierre with a kindlier eye if he had not been the author of the dictum, "Atheism
