The London quarterly review - 1891 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A Model of all the Virtues. 5 and which assuredly helped to determine the attitude assumed by the younger Mirabeau in the impending struggle. His stormy youth... more » did more than acquaint him with the horrors of oppression ; it taught him his own power over men and things ; it made him desperate of good from the old order ; it made him ready and willing to fight with his giant's strength for change and reform. So, amid his wild loves and wild pleasures, his studies and his soldierings, his lonely prisoned years at Chateau d'If and Joux and Vincennes, his Paris pamphleteerings for mere bread when his tyrant father had set him free to starve or to thrive as he might, unaided, we see him gathering iron strength for the strife ; and when once he has got himself elected to the States-General as deputy for Aix, we find him easily leading, easily dominating the Third Estate, with which he has ranked himself, seizing the right moment, saying the right word with infallible instinct, his lion's voice rolling out its thunders ever more masterfully, more fatefully, until the family scapegrace, the renegade noble, the penniless pamphleteer, stands before us revealed in his formidable majesty, the first and most fortunate of the national leaders of the Revolution—most fortunate, because he died timely, ere the hurricane he could no longer have controlled had risen to its height. To that point of time Mr. McCarthy has not yet carried his history. But he has given us a very impressive, if rather too sympathetic, picture of Mirabeau in his glory, not unworthy of standing beside the sombre magnificence of Carlyle's portrait of the same great agitator. We must praise him also for the keen sense of the moral picturesque which has made him set beside the stormy, splendid Mirabeau the strongly contr...« less