* MIQUEL, Friederich Anton Wilhelm, a celebrated Dutch botanist, professor of botany and director of the botanic garden at Amsterdam. He was for some time director of the Leyden garden. He has devoted his attention specially to systematic botany, and has published some valuable monographs. He has contributed papers to German, Dutch, French, and English periodicals, and he wrote the Urticeæ and Piperaceæ for Martius' Flora Brasiliensis. Among his publications are the following—"Observations on Piperaceæ and Melastomaceæ;" "Description of Cacteæ;" "Monograph of Cycadeæ;" and "Systema Piperacearum," which is a standard work on the subject.—J. H. B.
MIRABAUD, Jean Baptiste, was born at Paris in 1675. His literary reputation was first acquired by a prose translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, 1724—a work to which his reception into the Academy in 1726 was mainly due. He subsequently translated the Orlando Furioso, but with less success. The atheistical Système de la Nature, which was so long attributed to him, was in reality the work of the Baron d'Holbach and his clique. In 1742 he was elected perpetual secretary of the French Academy, and died in 1760. He was succeeded in the Academy by Button.—W. J. P.
MIRABEAU, Boniface Riquetti, Vicomte de, younger brother of the great orator, was born at Bignon, 30th November, 1754. He displayed an almost excessive valour in the war of the American revolution, and on entering public life at home held fast to the privileges of the noblesse, and in no way co-operated with his brother. He had wit enough, for it was he who said:—"In any other family I should be considered a clever fellow, though a profligate; in my own I am looked on as a moral man, but an ass." He exaggerated his own vices, and was but a fat jovial fellow, fond of his bottle, and appropriately enough christened Barrel-Mirabeau. He went over the border to serve with Condè. The circumstances of his death, which took place in 1792, are variously reported: he died of a flux, say some; was run through the body, say others.—W. J. P.
MIRABEAU, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Count de, was born at Bignon, near Nemours, on the 9th of March, 1749, and died at Paris on the 2d April, 1791. He was descended from an Italian family attached to the Ghibeline party. This family—the Arrighetti—fled from Florence in the thirteenth century, and took refuge in Provence, where the members thereof engaged with success in commercial pursuits. One of the descendants bought the estate of Mirabeau, which Louis XIV. raised to a marquisate. The father, the grandfather, and the uncle of the Count de Mirabeau had all served in the army or navy, and the Mirabeaus generally were distinguished by a character bold, impetuous, and original. In none was this character more marked than in the Marquis de Mirabeau, the father of France's most famous orator. The marquis was a man of talent and an independent thinker. He wrote numerous and voluminous works, in which eccentric doctrines were clothed in a still more eccentric style. His writings were devoted to philanthropic and economic subjects. His chief production was the "Friend of Men," which while bringing him celebrity, involved him in controversy. But this shrewd economist grossly mismanaged his own affairs, and this ardent and disinterested philanthropist treated his wife and children with brutal despotism and insane caprice. Honorè Mirabeau had, when three years old, the smallpox, which left his face horribly disfigured. He gave early signs of a robust constitution, of brilliant qualities, of a generous heart, and of a wild and passionate temper, which his father maddened when trying to subdue. It cannot be said that Mirabeau's education was wholly neglected, but, through his father's tyranny and whim, it was so fitfully conducted that there was no harmony of mental and moral development, while the intellect was stimulated and enriched in a few directions without being thoroughly disciplined. Having studied for a year or two at a military institution, Mirabeau entered in July, 1767, the regiment of the Marquis de Lambert, a disciplinarian as ferocious as Mirabeau's father. Mirabeau was not slack in the discharge of his military duties, and read diligently every book that he could obtain on the art of war. After serving a short time Mirabeau was involved in a disreputable quarrel with the Marquis de Lambert, the blame of which the marquis must chiefly bear. The angry subaltern abruptly quitted the regiment. For this act of disobedience he was, with his father's entire approval, imprisoned in the island of Ré. He devoted a part of his half-year's confinement to the composition of an essay on despotism. On leaving Ré, Mirabeau was permitted to join the French legion in Corsica. He gained by his zeal, intelligence, and courage the approval of his superiors, and he seemed destined t o an illustrious military career; but just when he was raising his hand to obtain the promotion he had so well deserved, his father with cruel perversity commanded him to abandon a profession to which he had grown attached, and to retire to the estate of Mirabeau, where he was to perfect himself in the sciences so much loved by his father, and to make agricultural and economical experiments—a fine occupation, truly, for the fiery and ambitious youth. In June, 1772, Mirabeau married the only daughter of the Marquis de Marignane This was one of those marriages, altogether worldly, with which France is so familiar, and which bear such bitter fruits. The Marquis de Marignane, though rich, would not intrust Mirabeau with any portion of his daughter's fortune. He agreed, however, to an annual allowance of the most moderate kind. Mirabeau's income from other sources was scanty enough; nevertheless he plunged recklessly into the most extravagant expenses, and was soon deeply in debt. The father was provoked, the father-in-law annoyed, and the young wife was not sorry to find an excuse for bidding farewell to a husband who had been forced upon her from conventional considerations. By the direct intercession of his father, and by the help of one of those instruments of oppression then so rife in France, Mirabeau was again condemned to imprisonment, first from September, 1774, till May, 1775, in the castle of If, in the Gulf of Marseilles, and then in the fortress of Joux, near the dreary little town of Pontarlier in the Jura. His wife he was never to see more, to the regret neither of her nor himself. Prison and exile did not prove so very formidable. Soon at Pontarlier Mirabeau was a prisoner in little more than the name. He obtained from the commandant of the fortress permission to visit the town, and was admitted into whatever of good society Pontarlier had, including the Marquis de Monnier, an old gentleman of eighty, and his wife, a beautiful young lady of nineteen. As few Frenchmen deem it wrong to reward hospitality by the blackest injury which one man can inflict on another, Mirabeau had no scruple about seducing the marquis' wife. The affair was discovered; the marchioness was sent to her parents; Mirabeau fled. Ere long he was joined by the marchioness in Switzerland; thence, to elude immediate pursuit, the guilty fugitives went to Holland. They fixed their abode in October, 1776, at Amsterdam. By a decree of the parliament at Besançon Mirabeau was condemned to death and executed in effigy. In May, 1777, Mirabeau and the marchioness were arrested; she was sent to a cloister, and he to the fortress of Vincennes, where, strictly watched, he had for three long years and a half ample leisure for repentance and reflection. We have abundant traces of the reflection, but few of the repentance. Mirabeau's productions at Vincennes were on all subjects; and sometimes the topic and the treatment were alike obscene, though now and then there was nobleness in both. Alone of all his Vincennes utterances did his passionate "Correspondence with Sophie," published shortly after his death, gain him more than a passing renown. Freed from his bonds in December, 1780, broken in health, but not bowed in soul, Mirabeau stept from his dungeon only to battle in the courts of justice. He had first to procure the revocation of the decree condemning him to capital punishment. He then entered into an ignominious contest with his wife and her relations, to which perhaps he was chiefly urged by his pecuniary embarrassments. Pleading his own cause, Mirabeau showed that though he might be thwarted, defeated, maligned, France had in him an orator of a rare and peculiar kind. From this time to the outbreak of the Revolution Mirabeau could scarcely be regarded as aught but a literary adventurer, clutching at a precarious livelihood by means not always the purest. His love for Sophie de Ruffey had spent itself in the ardent letters; a Dutchwoman named Nehra took her place, to whom he remained as faithful as such a man could be to any woman. Dashing pamphleteer, indefatigable agitator, as dissatisfied with public affairs in France and throughout the world as he had reason to be with his own private affairs, Mirabeau went to England at the close of 1784. Here he agitated and pamphleteered after his wont; and when in 1785 he returned to Paris, it was simply to pamphleteer and to agitate. In his own rough way Mirabeau was an honest man, though falling far below the loftiest standard of integrity. There seems little doubt that in his trashy flying sheets and hasty compilations, his pen was often that of the hireling. Beginning to be felt and dreaded as
