a power, colossal if chaotic, Mirabeau was sent in 1786 by the French ministry, whom he had virulently attacked, on a secret mission to the court of Berlin. A few days after his arrival Frederick the Great died. Recalled in a few months from Berlin, where he seems slenderly to have satisfied his ministerial employers, he—anew a restless condottiere in Paris—scourged them with all the weight of his vengeance, and all the bitterness of his wounded vanity. He likewise—in a big pamphlet of half a dozen volumes or so on the Prussian monarchy—dissected and denounced that stringent and pedantic bureaucratism which Frederick the Great had established, and which has been so fatal to Germany. Several of Mirabeau's works, worthless enough in themselves, were burned by the public executioner. The government was also silly enough to order his arrest; he, however, contrived to escape. Greatly sinning, but far more wronged than sinning; squandering his faculties recklessly, yet preparing them for magnificent results; Mirabeau—born a few months after Alfieri and Charles Fox, a few months before Göthe—had reached his fortieth year when the grandest and most terrible of political dramas opened. His lurid popularity, bought alike by generous self-sacrifice and by venality, by patriotic zeal and by vileness, his leonine courage, his tumultuous and titanic vigour, his contagious sympathies, his electric speech, his quick glance, his genuine insight, his practical sagacity, his martial promptitude, at once made Mirabeau both the Agamemmon and the Achilles of the Revolution. He led his eager troops only too well to the onslaught on the citadel of corruption. Yet Mirabeau was really as little of a revolutionist as of a republican. He was too much a pure politician to delight in extremes; the reformation of abuses, the transformation of the monarchy, the regeneration of France, he aimed at, and not wholesale annihilation and anarchy; no one could be less a dreamer, a doctrinaire, a destructionist. But he had torn wide the floodgates; and it was vain for him or for others to believe that he could control the deluge. The two eventful years from the opening of the states general on the 5th May, 1789, till Mirabeau's death, identify Mirabeau's biography with the history of France. Rejected as a candidate by the nobility of Provence, Mirabeau threatened to crush the French aristocracy, as Marius had crushed the Roman. Turning with wrath from his own class, Mirabeau appealed to that third estate which, after simply claiming equality with the clergy and the patricians, rose to an exclusive omnipotence only to be trampled into insignificance and servitude by a remorseless autocracy. To qualify himself as a deputy for the third estate, Mirabeau opened a shop as a cloth merchant. There was something of paltry, petulant defiance, and of French theatricality in this. The states general merged in a few weeks into the national or constituent assembly. As a member of the assembly Mirabeau speedily dominated it by his genius, his audacity, his statesmanship, by the pith, plenitude, pressure of his imposing individuality. The assembly in the main acted with moderation, with wisdom, and with dignity, and passed many valuable measures of lasting benefit to the French people; and the multitude, though guilty of violent acts, such as the taking of the Bastile and the massacres at Versailles, had not yet been heated and stung to a sanguinary mood. Nothing could have saved the French monarchy; but its downfall was immensely hastened by the cowardice and desertion of the French nobles, who, instead of heroically combating for the French throne, and for whatever in the existing institutions was worth saving, began almost ere the assembly had entered on its deliberations to leave France in masses, and then had the double disgrace of being plotters against their country and pensioners in foreign lands. The splendour of Mirabeau's eloquence has made men forget how much more the assembly was a doing than a talking body, containing, though it did, orators the most gifted and brilliant. A few of Mirabeau's memorable sayings are continually repeated; but it would be degrading Mirabeau to a mere rhetorician to judge him by these. Mirabeau was continually urging the assembly to hard work; to change, and then to consolidate. The assembly was divided into four principal parties; the extreme monarchists, the rational monarchists, the Orleanists, the opponents of aristocratic distinctions and of all privileges. This fourth party was, however, not compact, but fell into numerous fractions, whereof that anarchic and bloody fraction which afterwards gained such an evil name in the convention, had scarcely any influence. Sieyès fertile in ideas, and Mirabeau as the irresistible champion of order and of progress, could not be classed with any of these four parties. At first Mirabeau opposed the court intrigues and machinations; then he seemed willing to be the saviour of the Bourbon dynasty. There was no inconsistency herein; there was nothing dishonourable. What alone was blamable was that Mirabeau, while obeying his chivalrous instincts no less than his political prescience, should have accepted large sums from the court. Shattered by his various imprisonments, exhausted by vice—for his harangues in the assembly, and his labours in his cabinet, in committees, and in political clubs could have told little on a man of so much muscle and tenacity—Mirabeau died after a short and severe illness. His death was universally and fervently deplored, and he was buried with prodigious pomp. He had expressed his regret that he had not brought into the Revolution a character as spotless as that of Malesherbes; he said that he had paid dearly the sins of his youth; and he cried in his last hour that his heart mourned for the monarchy as about to become the prey of the factions. But he could not, as in his celebrated interview with her he assured the queen, have shielded the throne from popular fury. When he was snatched away, France was trembling with the first throbs of that national delirium which tore to pieces everything that was not willing to be still more reckless than itself, and in the presence of which even the mighty and massive Mirabeau would have been powerless. Mirabeau, with that absence of self-respect which made him borrow money from every one, was equally unscrupulous in borrowing ideas. Many of his speeches, and probably most of his books and pamphlets, were either wholly or in part composed by others. Ample memoirs of Mirabeau have been published by his illegitimate son, Lucas de Montigny, The most copious account of him in English is that by Mr. Storer Smith. The recorded discourses of Mirabeau scarcely come up to his reputation; we must therefore conclude that, as in notable orators generally, more than half of the magic, of the invincible impressiveness, was in the voice, the gesture, and the glance.—W. M—l.
MIRANDA, Francisco de, a Peruvian general, born 1750; died 1816. He entered the military service of Spain, and afterwards served in the French army in the American war (1779-81). He afterwards visited nearly every country in Europe, seeking aid for his project of achieving for the South American colonies the same independence which had already been gained by the North American states. In 1792 and 1793 he again served in the French army of Flanders, under Dumouriez; but in consequence of a dispute with his superior, Miranda was compelled to escape to England in 1797. In 1804 Pitt meditated the liberation of the South American colonies, and an expedition was to have been despatched under Sir Arthur Wellesley; but the project was abandoned, and Miranda betook himself to the United States. Aided by two citizens of New York, he fitted out the Leander with thirty guns and two hundred volunteers, and sailed for Trinidad, where Admiral Cochrane assisted him with a small flotilla of gun-boats. He landed, 2nd August, 1806, at Vela de Coro in Venezuela; but overpowered by superior force, he re-embarked for Trinidad. In 1811 he re-appeared in Venezuela, induced the inhabitants to declare their independence of Spain, and received the command of the republican troops. The revolution triumphed in New Granada; and on the 23rd December, 1811, a constitution was voted in the form which had been suggested chiefly by Miranda. A terrible earthquake, 26th March, 1812, by which seven cities were destroyed, and twenty-six thousand lives sacrificed, led to the ruin of the new republic, and the Spanish forces retook Barequisemento, San Carlos, and Arauna. Treachery and desertion completed the discomfiture of the independent party; and Miranda, who maintained his position to the last at La Victoria, concluded a capitulation, by which the constitution of the Spanish cortes was established, but the persons and property of all the insurgents were to be respected. In violation of this capitulation, Miranda was seized and conveyed to Cadiz, where he died in the dungeons of the Inquisition.—F. M. W.
MIRANDA, Saa de, a Portuguese poet, born at Coimbra of a noble family in 1495. He abandoned the profession of the law, and travelled through Spain and Italy. On his return to Portugal he enjoyed the favour of King John III.; but some quarrel, arising out of an allusion in one of his poems, compelled him to retire to his estate at Tapada, where he died in 1558. His eclogues, of which the greater number are written in Spanish, are his most characteristic works, and may be said to have founded a new school, based on the study of the classical writers.
