the émigrés, when triumphantly restored, would humbly obey those laws against which they were constantly declaiming with so much violence, and would forget their privileges, or would be promptly constrained to obedience by the king should they exhibit any disposition to oppose constitutional liberalism. These things it was evidently impossible for them to believe. The revolutionists, on the contrary, expected fresh dragonnades and a new St. Bartholomew from their triumphant adversaries, and, expecting this, were not unwilling to be beforehand in the matter. This natural alarm might be taken as a sufficient reason for the 'terror,' and as affording some palliation even for its excesses. But this M. Sorel does not by any means allow. The alarm had, no doubt, its effect in hastening on and intensifying the terror; but that portentous phenomenon was really due to other and anterior causes. Our author tells us that army of anarchy 'was already collected together and well exercised, even before the elections of 1789. It had its recognised chiefs, 'who soon got a name in insurrections.' From the beginning their aid was sought, first by one and then by another party, as each successively ousted its predecessor. But their leaders were ever at the mercy of the lower grades of anarchists, who composed their army, and who continually cried out for pay, and soon began to try and make practical and real that reign of the people' which had been continually held out to them as a bait, but which, as they advanced, continually receded from their grasp. The only way to hold such men in hand was to be ever ready to make new denunciations and fresh revelations of treason-to put before them new obstacles to overcome and destroy, and thus continually to augment their frenzy. This impulse, which we may detect from the very commencement of the Revolution, necessarily led to the reign of the most fanatical, the most violent, and the most unscrupulous. It was the inevitable lot of the leaders to be successively overwhelmed by the torrent which bore them along.

"The apologists of the terror-and what tyranny has not found its apologists?-have presented it to us,' says M. Sorel, as the necessary consequence of the war, and as a sort of superhuman effort, made by certain colossal minds for the salvation of the country. . . . But the terror was no real novelty. To dominate men by fear has been at all times a favourite expedient of gross and barbarous despotisms.'

The leaders of the Revolution had recourse to it because they desired to remain in power, and they could not sustain themselves in power without it. They really made use of it

for their own interests, and then pretended that it was for the salvation of the State. Moreover, the attempt to make use of 'terror' was not an expedient peculiar to the revolutionists, for their adversaries, as we have seen, did the very same thing for analogous reasons.

M. Sorel's two volumes bring us down to the opening of the war between Europe and the French revolutionary government. At that moment took place the last solemn manifestation of old Europe and of such Teutonic mediævalism as survived towards the close of the eighteenth century. During the agony of the French monarchy the German courts were en jete. The Holy Roman Empire, at the very moment when it was beginning a war in which it was destined to perish, shone out with an expiring flame. On July 5, 1792, Francis was elected emperor; on the 14th he made his solemn entry into Frankfort. The ceremony recalled to men's minds recollections of the most prosperous imperial coronations. The ecclesiastical electors fulfilled, for the last time, their venerable functions according to the rite prescribed by the golden bull. The last of the long series of Holy Roman Emperors appeared with his mediæval surroundings amidst the representatives of Europe, and before the people, who acclaimed him with enthusiasm. On the very same day the last king of the old French monarchy took, on the Champ de Mars, as a sort of public penance, the oath which in his mouth was equivalent to an abdication. That evening, when all was agony and humiliation at the Tuileries, there was at Frankfort nothing but illuminations and endless trains of carriages filled with the guests invited to the splendid fête which Count Esterhazy, electoral ambassador to the crown of Bohemia, offered to his sovereign. The Count Clement Metternich opened the ball with a young princess of Mecklenburg, whose grace, beauty, and vivacity excited general admiration. She was the future Queen Louisa of Prussia, one of the most noble and touching victims of the war which then commenced. At supper were assembled around the imperial family and the princes all the greatest of the German nobility. Who could then have suspected that the magnificent banquet was in fact a funeral repast, and that the Holy Roman Empire itself had but a few miserable years to live? Little did anyone then present imagine that the Queen of France, whom they boasted of being about to rescue, should in a few months perish on the scaffold; that the army of sans-culottes, which they talked of driving before them with their whips, would rout all their

forces, and that from out of its ranks would arise a Cæsar of whom they would all in turn become allies, clients, or tributaries, and to whom the just crowned emperor would gladly accord the hand of his daughter in marriage!

The King of Prussia had promised to meet the emperor at Mainz, and his journey was a sort of triumphal march. The Prince Archbishop Elector of Mainz made it a point of honour to display all his luxury and magnificence, and all Germany hastened to avail itself of his hospitality. From the 19th to the 21st of July the sovereigns of Austria and Prussia, the young Francis, and the stately, urbane, and gigantic Frederick William, lodged in his palace. Fifty princes, a hundred counts and barons, made for them a military and feudal court. The French princes, august courtiers of these warriors armed in their quarrel, appeared, followed by a train of émigrés. The city was full of officers and gentlemen in gala costume, and resounded with military preparations and social festivities. The German nobility presented a magnificent spectacle, not again to appear till fifteen years later, and then in a strangely different fashion. But the tale of that future is reserved by M. Sorel for his subsequent volumes. His work at present ends with that moment of tragic suspense at Paris, and of mistaken elation. in Germany, which marked the fatally eventful outbreak of the great revolutionary war. From the interest of what M. Sorel has already published, we look forward with a very confident anticipation of pleasure and profit to other volumes of his, the appearance of which we trust will not be long delayed.

ART. VIII.-The Family of Brocas of Beaurepaire and Roche Court, Hereditary Masters of the Royal Buckhounds. With some Account of the English Rule in Aquitaine. By MONTAGU BURROWS, Captain R.N., M.A., F.S.A., Chichele Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. London: 1886.

THE ingenuity of Her Majesty's loyal subjects has been put to a severe test during the last few months-their ingenuity and their memories. Like very good children counting the number of the presents they have had on their birthdays, we have all been trying to add one more to the long list of glories of the Victorian era. The yearbooks and annals of science and literature and art, of war and battles, of legislation and discovery, have been ransacked, and we are all inclined to be proud of the result. But how is it that so little has been said and so little been made of the rise and progress during the present reign of the Oxford School of History? For history we had almost written historians; but this would have been to subordinate the great results arrived at to the personal achievements of the men who have been working with a purpose and for an end, and who, more or less consciously, have always had that end in view. The recognition of history as a science, and the winning for her a throne on which she may take her seat without fear of supercilious slight or contemptuous comparison, is a triumph won for a cause, say rather for a great idea; and the greater the toilers, and the more magnanimous they are, the greater will be their joy at the result which their labours have brought about. The historians have worked so loyally for history that through them we have learnt to understand and believe in a science of history. But it has been a long fight, and it is not yet quite ended.

As there always seems a certain kind of reluctance on the part of the Powers' to admit a new kingdom or a new republic into the comity of nations, so it is with the realms of science. The old kingdoms are a trifle jealous of a new claimant for recognition to equality—or shall we say parity?-among themselves. Even scientists are men of flesh and blood, and of like thoughts and passions with the painters and the poets; and, being so, even they are capable of littleness, at any rate capable of amiable weaknesses, as others are. As to the great pioneers and discoverers of physical science, none have met with more generous and grateful

VOL. CLXVI. NO. CCCXXXIX.

Q

treatment than they. We are all proud of them, and of the wonderful advances they have made, and we are all glad to honour them; but there are, among the littérateurs of our time, still to be found men of some pretension to learning and culture whose tents are pitched in the neutral territory between the domains of science and art, who are rather waspish in their iteration of the words that history is, and must ever remain, but a branch of the belles lettres, or can only be regarded at best as an art whose function it is to amuse with a panorama of the course of events in the past, much as an itinerant lecturer on astronomy sets up his orrery and explains the movements of the heavenly bodies in the concrete, leaving the abstract and the abstruse-the science, in fact-to his betters. The man with the orrery appeals to the eye, and turns his handle; the historian uses his pen, and all the tricks of rhetoric are resorted to to turn his handle and make the panorama go smoothly.

Happily the world moves on, and light and knowledge advance, and our conceptions acquire more and more clearness, and truth gets absorbed somehow, and somehow finds its way through the pores of our common humanity, in despite of all the Philistines and all the obstructives. Already the gentlemen who made themselves merry at the notion that there ever could be a science of history are beginning to feel a trifle less merry than they were, under the disagreeable suspicion that they belong to a decreasing minority, and the further suspicion that they began to laugh a little too soon-in fact before they quite understood what they were laughing at. If physical science be everything, and historical or economic science be nothing-and these two peradventure may turn out to have an awkwardly close connexion with each other-how is it that already there are complaints that the rising men are more and more inclined every year to crowd into the school of history, and are already showing an increasing reluctance to seek for honours in natural science? Men of promise and of ambition do not enter an arena where the contest is least arduous and distinction easiest to win: they seek rather a career where there may be hope of making their mark by conquests over new difficulties and discoveries in new fields of research, and by winning for themselves a crown in the kingdoms of knowledge which shall not easily be taken from them. They who come after us will not forget that the study of history according to scientific methods was first begun in the Victorian age-begun, at any rate; and that it was