Solon. Either you lie now, Pisistratus, or you lied when you abolished my institutions. Pisistratus. They exist, and shall exist, I swear to you. Solon. Yes, they exist like the letters in a burnt paper, which are looked down on from curiosity, and just legible, while the last of the consuming fire is remaining, but they crumble at a touch, and indeed fly before it, weightless and incoherent. the beginning; the former the most pernicious. men hath enjoyed so high a character as you, in Tyrants, like ravens and vultures, are solitary: wisdom and integrity. they either are swept off, or languish and pine away, and leave no brood in their places. Kings, as the origin of them is amid the swamps and wildernesses, take deeper root, and germinate more broadly in the loose and putrescent soil, and propagate their likenesses for several generations; a brood which (such is the power of habitude) does not seem monstrous, even to those whose corn, wine, and oil, it swallows up every day, and whose children it consumes in its freaks and festivals. I am ignorant under what number of them, at the present day, mankind in various countries lies prostrate; just as ignorant as I am how many are the desarts and caverns of the earth, or the eddies and whirlpools of the sea; but I should not be surprised to find it stated that, in Asia and Africa, there may be a dozen, greater or less. Europe has never been amazed at such a portent, either in the most corrupted or the most uncivilised of her nations, as a hereditary chief in possession of absolute power. Pisistratus. The first despots were tyrannical and cruel. Do you desire, Pisistratus, that your family shall inherit your anxieties? If you really feel none yourself, which you never will persuade me, nor (I think) attempt it, still you may be much happier, much more secure and tranquil, by ceasing to possess what you have acquired of late, provided you cease early; for long possession of any property makes us anxious to retain it, and insensible, if not to the cares it brings with it, at least to the real cause of them. Tyrants will never be persuaded that their alarms and sorrows, their perplexity and melancholy, are the product of tyranny: they will not attribute a tittle of them to their own obstinacy and perverseness, but look for it all in another's. They would move everything and be moved by nothing; and yet lighter things move them than any other particle of mankind. Solon. And so the last will be. This is wanting, on some occasions, to arouse a people from the lethargy of servitude; and therefore I would rather see the cruellest usurper than the mildest king. Under him men lose the dignity of their nature: under the other they recover it. Pisistratus. Hereditary kings too have been fools. dethroned. Solon. Certainly: for, besotted as those must be who have endured them, some subject at last hath had the hardihood and spirit to kick that fellow in the face and trample on him, who insists that the shoe must fit him because it fitted his father and grandfather, and that, if his foot will not enter, he will pare and rasp it. Pisistratus. The worst of wickedness is that of bearing hard on the unfortunate; and near it is that of running down the fortunate: yet these are the two commonest occupations of mankind. We are despised if we are helpless; we are teased by petulance and tormented by reprehension if we are strong. One tribe of barbarians would drag us into their own dry desarts, and strip us to the skin: another would pierce us with arrows for being naked. What is to be done? Solon. Simpler men run into no such perplexi- its very greatness. Solon. Better there may be, but you will render worse necessary; and would you have it said hereafter by those who read them, "Pisistratus was less wise than Solon?" Pisistratus. It must be said; for none among Pisistratus. You are talking, Solon, of mere Solon. The worst of fools, Pisistratus, are those who once had wisdom. Not to possess what is good is a misfortune; to throw it away is a folly : but to change what we know hath served us, and would serve us still, for what never has and never can, for what on the contrary hath always been pernicious to the holder, is the action of an incorrigible idiot. Observations on arbitrary power can never be made usefully to its possessors. There is not a foot-page about them at the bath whose converse on this subject is not more reasonable than mine would be. I could adduce no argument which he would not controvert, by the magical words "practical things" and "present times:" a shrug of the shoulder would overset all that my meditations have taught me in half a century of laborious inquiry and intense thought. "These are theories," he would tell his master, "fit for Attica before the olive was sown among us. Old men must always have their way. Will their own grey beards never teach them that time changes things?" One fortune hath ever befallen those whom the indignant gods have cursed with despotical power; to feed upon falsehood, to loath and sicken at truth, to avoid the friendly, to discard the wise, to suspect the honest, and to abominate the brave. Like grubs in rotten kernels, they coil up for safety in dark hollowness, and see nothing but death in bursting from it. Although they place violence in the highest rank of dignities and virtues, and draw closely round their bodies those whose valour, Pisistratus. They need nothing from us mortals; but I was happy in the performance of what I have been taught is my duty. from the centre to the extremities, should animate the state, yet they associate the most intimately with singers, with buffoons, with tellers of tales, with prodigies of eating and drinking, with Solon. Piously, virtuously, and reasonably said, mountebanks, with diviners. These captivate my friend. The gods did not indeed want your and enthrall their enfeebled and abject spirits; sacrifice: they, who give everything, can want and the first cry that rouses them from their tor-nothing. The Athenians do want a sacrifice from por is the cry that demands their blood. Then you: they have an urgent necessity of something; would it appear by their countenances, that all the necessity of that very thing which you have they had scattered among thousands, had come taken from them, and which it can cost you nosecretly back again to its vast repository, and thing to replace. You have always been happier. was issuing forth from every limb and feature, you confess, in giving to the gods what you could from every pore, from every hair upon their have yourself used in your own house believe heads. me, you will not be less so in giving back to your What is man at last, O Pisistratus, when he is fellow-citizens what you have taken out of theirs, all he hath ever wished to be! the fortunate, the and what you very well know they will seize when powerful, the supreme! Life in its fairest form they can, together with your property and life. (such he considers it) comes only to flatter and You have been taught, you tell me, that sacrifice deceive him. Disappointments take their turn, to the gods is a duty: be it so: but who taught and harass him; weakness and maladies cast him you it? Was it a wiser man than you or I? Or down pleasures catch him again when he rises was it at a time of life when your reason was more from them, to misguide and blind and carry him mature than at present, or your interests better away: ambition struggles with those pleasures, understood? No good man ever gave anything and only in struggling with them seems to be his without being the more happy for it, unless to friend they mar one another, and distract him: the undeserving, nor ever took anything away enemies encompass him; associates desert him; without being the less so. But here is anxiety rivalries thwart, persecutions haunt him: another's and suspicion, a fear of the strong, a subjection thoughts molest and injure him; his own do worse to the weak; here is fawning, in order to be than join with them and yet he shudders and fawned on again, as among sucking whelps half shrinks back at nothing so much as the creak-awake. He alone is the master of his fellow-men, ing of that door by which alone there is any escape. who can instruct and improve them; while he who makes the people another thing from what it was, is master of that other thing, but not of the people. And supposing we could direct the city exactly as we would, is our greatness to be founded on this? A ditcher may do greater things: he may turn a torrent (a thing even more turbid and more precipitate) by his ditch! A sudden increase of power, like a sudden increase of blood, gives pleasure; but the new excitement being once gratified, the pleasure ceases. I do not imagine the children of the powerful to be at any time more contented than the children of others, although I concede that the pow Pisistratus! O Pisistratus! do we tire out the patience of mankind, do we prey upon our hearts, for this? Does Nature crave it? Does Wisdom dictate it? Can Power avert it? Descend then from a precipice, it is difficult to stand, it is impossible to repose on. Take the arm that would lead you and support you back, and restore you to your friends and country. He who places himself far above them, is (any child might tell you) far from them. What on earth can be imagined so horrible and disheartening, as to live without ever seeing one creature of the same species! Being a tyrant or despot, you are in this calamity. Imprison-erful themselves may be so for some moments, ment in a dungeon could not reduce you to it: false friends have done that for you which enemies could but attempt. If such is the harvest of their zeal, when they are unsated and alert, what is that which remains to be gathered in by you, when they are full and weary? Bitterness; the bitterness of infamy! And how will you quench it? By swallowing the gall of selfreproach! Let me put to you a few questions, near to the point: you will answer them, I am confident, easily and affably. Pisistratus, have you not felt yourself the happier, when in the fulness of your heart, you have made a large offering to the gods? Pisistratus. Solon, I am not impious: I have made many such offerings to them, and have always been the happier. Solon. Did they need your sacrifice? paying however very dearly for those moments, by Pisistratus. It must depend on his temper and character: but I think in nearly all instances you would diminish it. Solon. Certainly. When we can not have what we expect, we are dissatisfied; and what we have ceases to afford us pleasure. We are like infants; deprive them of one toy, and they push the rest away, or break them, and turn their faces from you, crying inconsolably. If you desire an increase of happiness, do not look for it, O Pisistratus, in an increase of power. Still silent? Who is at the door? trolled, but excited, fed, and flattered, by all around, and mostly by their teachers. Do not expose them to worse monsters than the young Athenians were exposed to in the time of Theseus. Never hath our city, before or since, endured such calamity, such ignominy. A king, a conqueror, an injured and exasperated enemy, imposed them shall a citizen, shall a beneficent man, shall a father, devise more cruel and more shameful terms, and admit none but his own offspring to fulfill them? That monster perhaps was fabulous. O that these were so and that pride, injustice, lust, were tractable to any clue or conquerable by any courage, of despotism! : Weak man! will sighing suffocate them? will holding down the head confound them? Hippias and Hipparchus! you are now the children of Solon, the orphans of Pisistratus. If I have any wisdom, it is the wisdom of experience: it shall cost you nothing from me, from others much. I present to you a fruit which the gods themselves have fenced round, not only from the animals, but from most men; one which I have nurtured and watched day and night for seventy years, reckoning from the time when my letters and duties were first taught me; a lovely, sweet, and wholesome fruit, my children, and which, like the ambrosia of the blessed in Olympus, grows by participation and enjoyment. Solon. Come, my little fugitives! turn back again hither! come to me, Hippias and Hipparchus! I wish you had entered earlier; that you might have witnessed my expostulation with your father, and that your tender age might have produced upon him the effect my declining one has failed in. Children, you have lost your patrimony. Start not, Pisistratus! I do not tell them that you have squandered it away: no, I will never teach them irreverence to their parent: aid me, I entreat you, to teach them reverence. Do not, while the thing is recoverable, deprive them of filial love, of a free city, of popular esteem, of congenial sports, of kind confidence, of that which all ages run in pursuit of, equals. Children seek those of the same age, men those I of the same condition. Misfortunes come upon all who can best ward them off? not those above us nor those below, but those on a level with ourselves. Tell me, Pisistratus, what arm hath ever raised up the pillow of a dying despot? He hath loosened the bonds of nature in no hour, and least of all in the last, can they be strengthened and drawn together. It is a custom, as you know, for you have not yet forgotten all our customs, to conduct youths with us when we mark the boundaries of our lands, that they may give their testimony on any suit about them in time to come. Unfortunate boys! their testimony can not be received: the landmarks are removed from their own inheritance by their own father. Armed men are placed in front of them for ever, and their pleasantest walks throughout life must be guarded by armed men. Who would endure it? one of the hardest things to which the captive, or even the criminal, is condemned. The restraints which everyone would wish away, are eternally about them; those which the best of us require through life, are removed from them on entering it. Their passions not only are uncon-ple than we have done. You receive it attentively and gratefully your father, who ought to know its value, listens and rejects it. I am not angry with him for this; and, if I censure him before you, I blame myself also in his presence. Too frequently have I repeated my admonition: I am throwing my time away I who have so little left me: I am consuming my heart with sorrow . . when sorrow and solicitudes should have ceased. . and from whom? from him principally who will derive no good from it, and will suffer none to flow on others, not even on those the dearest to him. Think, my children, how unwise a man is Solon, how hard a man Pisistratus, how mistaken in both are the Athenians. Study to avoid our errors, to correct our faults, and by simplicity of life, by moderation in your hopes and wishes, to set a purer and (grant it, Heaven!) a more stabile exam LOUIS XVIII. AND TALLEYRAND. Louis. M. Talleyrand! in common with all my gance and presumption would incur, the usurper family, all France, all Europe, I entertain the attempted to silence and stifle it with other highest opinion of your abilities and integrity. and far different emotions. Half his cruelties You have convinced me that your heart, throughout the storms of the revolution, leaned constantly toward royalty; and that you permitted and even encouraged the caresses of the usurper, merely that you might strangle the more certainly and the more easily his new-born empire. After this, it is impossible to withhold my confidence from were perpetrated that his vanity might not be wounded: for scorn is superseded by horror. Whenever he committed an action or uttered a sentiment which would render him an object of derision, he instantly gave vent to another which paralysed by its enormous wickedness. He would extirpate a nation to extinguish a smile. No man alive could deceive your Majesty: the exTalleyrand. Conscious of the ridicule his arro-tremely few who would wish to do it, lie under you. Louis. But the sovran of his country.. would the sovran suffer it? that vigilant and piercing eye, which discerned in perspective from the gardens of Hartwell those of the Tuileries and Versailles. As joy arises Talleyrand. Alas! sire! Confronted with such from calamity, so spring arises from the bosom of men, what are sovrans, when the people are the winter, purely to receive your Majesty, inviting judges? Wellington can drill armies: Peterthe august descendant of their glorious founder borough could marshal nations. to adorn and animate them again with his beneficent and gracious presence. The waters murmur, in voices half-supprest, the reverential hymn of peace restored: the woods bow their heads. . . Louis. Talking of woods, I am apprehensive all the game has been wofully killed up in my forests. Talleyrand. A single year will replenish them. Louis. Meanwhile! M. Talleyrand! meanwhile! Talleyrand. Honest and active and watchful gamekeepers, in sufficient number, must be sought; and immediately. Louis. Alas! if the children of my nobility had been educated like the children of the English, I might have promoted some hundreds of them in this department. But their talents lie totally within the binding of their breviaries. Those of them who shoot, can shoot only with pistols; which accomplishment they acquired in England, that they might challenge any of the islanders who should happen to look with surprise or displeasure in their faces, expecting to be noticed by them in Paris, for the little hospitalities the proud young gentlemen, and their prouder fathers, were permitted to offer them in London and at their country seats. What we call reconnaisance, they call gratitude, treating a recollector like a debtor. This is a want of courtesy, a defect in civilisation, which it behoves us to supply. Our memories are as tenacious as theirs, and rather more eclectic. Louis. Thank God! we have no longer any such pests on earth. The most consummate general of our days (such is Wellington) sees nothing one single inch beyond the field of battle; and he is so observant of discipline, that if I ordered him to be flogged in the presence of the allied armies, he would not utter a complaint nor shrug a shoulder; he would only write a despatch. Talleyrand. But his soldiers would execute the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto, and Paris would sink into her catacombs. No man so little beloved was ever so well obeyed: and there is not a man in England, of either party, citizen or soldier, who would not rather die than see him disgraced. His firmness, his moderation, his probity, place him more opposite to Napoleon than he stood in the field of Waterloo. These are his lofty lines of Torres Vedras, which no enemy dares assail throughout their whole extent. Louis. M. Talleyrand! is it quite right to extol an enemy and an Englishman in this manner? Talleyrand. Pardon! Sire! I stand corrected. Forgive me a momentary fit of enthusiasm, in favour of those qualities by which, although an Englishman's, I am placed again in your Majesty's service. Louis. We will now then go seriously to business. Wellington and the allied armies have interrupted and occupied us. I will instantly write, with my own hand, to the Marquis of Buckingham, desiring him to send me five hun M. Talleyrand! but in what a condition! Not a Here; read it. Give me your opinion: is not the note a model? Since my return to my kingdom I have under-dred pheasant-eggs. I am restored to my throne, gone great indignities from this unreflecting people. One Canova, a sculptor at Rome, visited Paris in the name of the Pope, and in quality of his envoy, and insisted on the cession of those statues and pictures which were brought into France by the French armies. He began to remove them out of the Gallery: I told him I would never give my consent: he replied, he thought it sufficient that he had Wellington's. Therefore, the next time Wellington presented himself at the Tuileries, I turned my back upon him before the whole court. Let the English and their allies be aware, that I owe my restoration not to them, but partly to God and partly to Saint Louis. They and their armies are only brute instruments in the hands of my progenitor and intercessor. Talleyrand. Fortunate, that the conqueror of France bears no resemblance to the conqueror of Spain. Peterborough (I shudder at the idea) would have ordered a file of soldiers to seat your Majesty in your travelling carriage, and would have reinstalled you at Hartwell. The English people are so barbarous, that he would have done it not only with impunity, but with applause. Talleyrand. If the charms of language could be copied, it would be. But what is intended for delight may terminate in despair: and there are words which, unapproachable by distance and sublimity, may wither the laurels on the most exalted of literary brows. Louis. There is grace in that expression of yours, M. Talleyrand! there is really no inconsiderable grace in it. Seal my letter: direct it to the Marquis of Buckingham at Stowe. Wait: open it again: no, no: write another in your own name: instruct him how sure you are it will be agreeable to me, if he sends at the same time fifty or a hundred brace of the birds as well as the eggs. At present I am desolate. My heart is torn, M. Talleyrand! it is almost plucked out of my bosom. I have no other care, no other thought, day or night, but the happiness of my people. | test with our hands within our frills) he alone is The allies, who have most shamefully overlooked capable of doing. We must enlarge on his genethe destitution of my kitchen, seem resolved to rosity (and generous he indeed is), and there is turn a deaf ear to its cries evermore; nay, even nothing he will not concede. to render them shriller and shriller. The allies, I suspect, are resolved to execute the design of the mischievous Pitt. Talleyrand. May it please your Majesty to inform me which of them; for he formed a thousand, all mischievous, but greatly more mischievous to England than to France. Resolved to seize the sword, in his drunkenness, he seized it by the edge, and struck at us with the hilt, until he broke it off, and until he himself was exhausted by loss of breath and of blood. We owe alike to him the energy of our armies, the bloody scaffolds of Public Safety, the Reign of Terror, the empire of usurpation, and finally, as the calm is successor to the tempest, and sweet fruit to bitter kernel, the blessing of your Majesty's restoration. Excepting in this one event, he was mischievous to our country; but in all events, and in all undertakings, he was pernicious to his own. No man ever brought into the world such enduring evil; few men such extensive. Louis. His king ordered it. George the Third loved battles and blood. Louis. But if they do not come over in a week, we shall lose the season. I ought to be eating a pheasant-poult by the middle of July. O! but you were talking to me about the other matter, and perhaps the weightier of the two; ay, certainly. If this indemnity is paid to England, what becomes of our civil list, the dignity of my family and household? Talleyrand. I do assure your Majesty, England shall never receive.. did I say a tithe?.. I say she shall never receive a fiftieth of what she expended in the war against us. It would be out of all reason, and out of all custom in her to expect it. Indeed it would place her in almost as good a condition as ourselves. Even if she were beaten she could hardly hope that: she never in the last three centuries has demanded it when she was victorious. Of all the sufferers by the war, we shall be the least. Louis. The English are calculators and traders. Talleyrand. Wild speculators, gamblers in trade, who hazard more ventures than their books can register. It will take England some years to cast Talleyrand. But he was prudent in his appetite up the amount of her losses. for them. Louis. He talked of peppering his people as I would talk of peppering a capon. Talleyrand. Having split it. His subjects cut up by his subjects were only capers to his leg of mutton. From none of his palaces and parks was there any view so rural, so composing to his spirits, as the shambles. When these were not fresh, the gibbet would do. I wish better luck to the pheasant-eggs than befell Mr. Pitt's designs. Not one brought forth anything. Louis. No: but he declared in the face of his parliament, and of Europe, that he would insist on indemnity for the past and security for the future. These were his words. Now, all the money and other wealth the French armies levied in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and everywhere else, would scarcely be sufficient for this indemnity. Talleyrand. England shall never receive from us a tithe of that amount. Louis. A tithe of it! She may demand a quarter or a third, and leave us wondering at her moderation and forbearance. Talleyrand. The matter must be arranged immediately, before she has time for calculation or reflection. A new peace maddens England to the same paroxysm as a new war maddens France. She hath sent over hither for minister. . or rather her prime minister himself is come to transact all the business.. the most ignorant and most shortsighted man to be found in any station of any public office throughout the whole of Europe. He must be treated as her arbiter: we must talk to him of restoring her, of regenerating her, of preserving her, of guiding her, which (we must pro Louis. But she, in common with her allies, will insist on our ceding those provinces which my predecessor Louis the Fourteenth annexed to his kingdom. Be quite certain that nothing short of Alsace, Lorraine, and Franc Comté, will satisfy the German princes. They must restore the German language in those provinces: for languages are the only true boundaries of nations, and there will always be dissension where there is difference of tongue. We must likewise be prepared to surrender the remainder of the Netherlands; not indeed to England, who refused them in the reign of Elizabeth: she wants only Dunkirk, and Dunkirk she will have. Talleyrand. This seems reasonable: for which reason it must never be. Diplomacy, when she yields to such simple arguments as plain reason urges against her, loses her office, her efficacy, and her name. Louis. I would not surrender our conquests in Germany, if I could help it. Talleyrand. Nothing more easy. The Emperor Alexander may be persuaded that Germany united and entire, as she would then become, must be a dangerous rival to Russia. Louis. It appears to me that Poland will be more so, with her free institutions. Talleyrand. There is only one statesman in the whole number of those assembled at Paris, who believes that her institutions will continue free; and he would rather they did not; but he stipulates for it, to gratify and mystify the people of England. Louis. I see this clearly. I have a great mind to send Blacas over to Stowe. I can trust to him to look to the crates and coops, and to see that |