About this period I read for the first time the speeches of Fox and
Pitt. I thought Fox declamatory, though prosaic; one of those cavilling
minds, born to gainsay, rather than to say,--lawyers without gowns,
with mere lip-conscience, who plead above all for their own popularity.
I saw in Pitt a statesman whose words were deeds, and who in the crash
of Europe maintained his country, almost alone, on the foundation of
his good sense, and the consistency of his character. Pitt was
Mirabeau, with less impulse and more integrity. Mirabeau and Pitt
became, and have ever continued to be, my favorite statesmen of modern
days. Compared to them, I saw in Montesquieu only erudite, ingenious,
and systematical dissertations; Fénelon seemed to me divine, but
chimerical; Rousseau, more impassioned than inspired, greater by
instinct than by truth; while Bossuet, with his golden eloquence and
fawning soul, united, in his conduct and his language before Louis
XIV., doctoral despotism with the complaisance of a courtier. From
these studies of history and oratory I naturally passed on to politics.
The remembrance of the imperial yoke which had just been shaken off,
and my abhorrence of the military rule to which we had been subjected,
impelled me towards liberty. On the other hand, family recollections;
the influence of daily associations; the touching situation of a royal
family, passing from a throne to a scaffold or to exile, and brought
back from exile to a throne; the orphan princess in the palace of her
fathers; those old men, crowned by misfortune as much as by their
ancestry; those young princes, schooled by stern adversity, from whom
so much might be expected,--all made me hope that new-born liberty
might be made to accord with the ancient monarchy of our forefathers.
The government would thus have possessed the two most potent spells in
all human affairs,--antiquity and novelty; memory and hope. It was a
fair dream, and most natural at my age. Each succeeding day, however,
dispelled a portion of that dream. I perceived with grief that old
forms but ill contain new ideas; that monarchy and liberty would never
hold together in one bond without a perpetual struggle; that in that
struggle the strength of the state would be exhausted, that monarchy
would be constantly suspected, liberty constantly betrayed.