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: CHAPTER IV THE APOSTLES OP EEVOLT : BYRON AND SHELLEY When the natural history of revolutions comes to be written it will probably appear that Mirabeau, Danton, and Napoleon represent something more than individuals who played a great part in the most notable of political and social upheavals. They stand for types. Mirabeau represents the better element of the Past, suddenly come to itself, conscious of its danger, in some degree perhaps conscious of its shortcomings and guilt, and resolute to atone for them by a recognition of the new order of things; but anxious to guide the forces of change along immediately constructive channels — to save the fabric of the state from wreck. There is a story, very possibly apocryphal, that Mirabeau once mounted the Assembly's tribune, and, impelled by a sense of his own inadequacy to the demands of the moment, owing to the general lack of confidence in his character, cried out, "Oh that I had a different past!" He was thinking of his own misspent youth; but he spoke for France and that element in her life which he represented. Danton, on the other hand, stands for the revolutionary impulse, pure and simple, upon its destructive side. His are the fire, the sword, the ploughshare, all those implements whose office is to consume, to destroy, to overturn, to leave nothing as it has been. The antithesis of Lord Strafford in manner and purpose, 'thorough' is no less his motto. To the work of these there succeeds the career of the soldier and builder, himself in some respects a mightier clearer-away of rubbish than either of his predecessors, but primarily a man of ambitions and plans whose fulfilment is made possible no less by the new day of which they have been heralds, than by his own genius. He is sure to be a great and striking figur...