Nothing great was ever done by Fox, | relieve the most commonplace things of and when at last he came into power he Rogers, of course, was a Whig, and he Before we part with Grattan it is inter- My much injured country will have her revenge for all her wrongs: she will send into England, and into the bosom of her Parliament, and the very heart of her constitution, a hundred of the greatest rascals that can be found anywhere. Rogers did not write very good letters. Indeed, if those given in Mr. Clayden's two volumes are average specimens, his letters have nothing to distinguish them from those of any ordinary person. That he did not write good letters is, to our thinking, a corroborative proof that he wanted original genius. The freshness and the originality which accompany gen ius make themselves everywhere felt, and Fox's father, Gibbon tells us, paid in 1773 his son's debts to the amount of £140,000; reducing himself thereby to £90,000. one. It does not even appear certain that Rogers much enjoyed the society of men of deep thought. He could follow the wit of Sydney Smith, Luttrell, and Moore, the literary playfulness of Fox, the genial manof-the-world talk of Scott, the half literary and social and half-political chit-chat of Lord Holland. He could enjoy himself and make others enjoy the clash of brilliant conversation, which revealed all but the depths of the minds of the various men and women who came to his table; but Coleridge was never to Rogers what his other guests were, and Uvedale Price, whose letters are the best, because the most full of idea and thought, in Mr. Clayden's volumes, was thought a bore by Rogers, who sought to avoid him. There is no evidence of the deep and sustained thought of Wordsworth and Coleridge in anything left by Rogers. He perceived the true relations of things with amazing quickness, and gave expression to his opinion with ready and sardonic wit. But it was as the critic of others' thoughts rather than as himself the discoverer in the thought world that he shone. He found a rough agate of some other mind, and lent it polish. Behind the man of letters was the man of the world, and other according to the society in which he each was perpetually cropping up over the found himself. He took jokes at himself with good temper, as when Byron satirized him, in a fit of fun, in satire which Medwin says was stinging enough. But he is something rather unpleasing in hearing could repay as well as receive, and there that men manoeuvred to be the last to quit the dining-room that they might be the hearers, rather than the victims, of Rog. ers's cutting satire upon others. He was wont to give as his excuse for his ill-natured sayings, that he had a weak voice, and if he did not say cutting and bitter things, society would pass him by. This was his reason, but no excuse. It amounts to a confession that he preferred to be ill-natured rather than not be talked about and thought witty, and it brings us cready, the poet quoted with pardonable pleasure the fine line : Their very shadows consecrate the ground. Thus it is with the famous men and women who for half a century graced the meetings in St. James's Place. We do not know whether any tablet records the fact that in this house Samuel Rogers lived. But such a tablet would not be out of place. Such a record would be read a hundred years hence with the same reverence as we should now read a tablet over the doorway of any literary celebrity of the last century, and the record might appropriately close with the line just quoted, with which Rogers bid a lasting adieu to the great actor: Their very shadows consecrate the ground. From The National Review. THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY CALENDAR. We have not space to particularize each of the guests that have given fame to the meetings in St. James's Place. Besides such giants as Scott and Wordsworth; Coleridge, Byron, and Moore; Thackeray and Dickens; came Lamb with that "head worthy of Aristotle; "Thomas Campbell, Washington Irving, Macaulay, Hallam, Montalembert, Lamartine, and Gladstone. Think what this wonderful old man had seen and heard. He had sat down at dinner with Tom Paine; he had seen Marie Antoinette go to mass with her little pale-faced boy, happily ignorant of the cruel tragedy about to happen to him. He had looked on Louis XVI. with his amiable but unmeaning face; and never-to-be-forgotten incident! - he had witnessed the great Napoleon mount his white horse at the Palace of St. Cloud, his face "one dead tint of yellow." What a period Rogers covers when we think of ONE of the principal things which made him as setting eyes upon Louis XVI. and the French Revolution memorable, was alive at the death of the Duke of Wel- that it represented the "triumph of ideas," lington! He saw France before the great which, in the mind of the philosophic RadRevolution, saw that struggle of the na-ical of to-day, is in itself an eminently tions which ended in the victory of 1815; he witnessed the rise of the demand for Reform and the carriage of the bill, the final fall of the Bourbons and of him who still more deserved to fall, the intriguing Louis Philippe. He saw the Irish rebellion of 1798, and the Cabbage-garden Rebellion of 1848. The history of the best part of a century had passed under his observing eye; and he had witnessed the rise and fall of nations, institutions, and men. His cold wit and what Carlyle terms his "sardonic sense " had been employed at one time or other on epigrammatic sayings on all these great men and great events. He had summarized in witty lines the chief features of men, and given Ward a heart by which he got his speeches. He had listened to Wordsworth at his favorite employment of reading his own poems, been rallied by Byron, sung to by Tom Moore, and had listened to the wit of Sheridan. To his table came Grey and Lansdowne and Lyndhurst; here Wellington listened to the beautiful singing of Miss Jervis, and here, by no means to be omitted from the celebrated list, came our greatest modern poet, Ten nyson. In Rogers's last interview with Ma desirable thing. The rest of the world may, however, be pardoned for looking at that great series of events from a somewhat different point of view, and for estimating mere abstract ideas somewhat less highly than do the apostles of culture. This reverence for ideas does not, of course, want for champions. The ideas of the Revolution were not new; they were certainly not original, and they_sprang from purely English sources. England was a free country for many generations during which Frenchmen were, as they themselves complained, the victims of an aristocratic tyranny which practically crushed out the life of the nation. Church in England was reformed and brought into harmony with modern ideas two centuries and a half before France awoke to the iniquities of a Cardinal de Rohan and his satellites. Even unbelief, which counted for so much in the general overturn of France in the eighteenth century, was no new thing. The fool had said in his heart there is no God, and had become corrupt and abominable some thousands of years before the Père Duchesne voided his execrable filth on "the politest nation of Europe." Nay, even the Encyclopædists were anticipated. The "En cyclopédie " itself is a huge plagiarism | ers on agriculture... even by societies from the English Encylopædia " of in their public memoirs." The complaint Chambers, while every idea for which they goes on through three large and closely claim credit may be found in the writings printed quarto pages, and it is obvious of Hobbes, Toland, Tindal, Shaftesbury, that the grievance was no trifling one. and Woolston, and, it may be added, is Such as it was, however, it lasted until put with the greatest force and point by the Revolution had made considerable its originators. The simple solution of headway, and then, in accordance with the the whole matter is, that while ideas had new ideas, an attempt was made to introbeen steadily growing and maturing in duce an enormous and instantaneous English minds, the French mind lay com- change to substitute the decimal system paratively fallow. Then, having suddenly for the ancient weights and measures. awakened to certain truths, the French Nearly a century has gone by since that philosophers of the eighteenth century time, and it can hardly be contended that fondly imagined that they had a monopoly the triumph of the decimal system is asof wisdom, and boldly undertook to insured even in France. On general princistruct the world in those "principles of '89" which they had borrowed from the English of a century before. Like Candide in El Dorado, they fancied that the pebbles of the highway were nuggets of gold. The English mind had rightly appraised them long before, and had discarded them accordingly. It says but little for the knowledge or the wisdom of a large section of our fellow-countrymen that they should accept these exploded fallacies as unimpeachable truths. Amongst the "ideas" of the Revolutionary period none took a firmer root or exercised a wider influence than the reform of the existing standards of weights, measures, and time. That changes of some sort were necessary, and, indeed, inevitable, had long been notorious. The English, in their dull, Philistine way, began to modify their system about the middle of the last century. Local rules faded into desuetude, and by the time that Arthur Young set out on his famous tour through France and Italy, he was able to congratulate himself on the fact, that, although there was no uniform measure of land in England, the statute acre was gradually coming into general use, and the statute bushel of eight gallons was commonly accepted. Things in France were by no means so satisfactory. "The infinite perplexity of the measures," says Young (Travels, i., 315), "exceeds all comprehension. They differ not only in every province, every district, but almost in every town, and these tormenting variations are found equally in the denominations and contents of the measures of land and corn. There are two na tional measures of land-the arpent de Paris and the arpent de France - both legal and common measures, notwithstand ing which they are of very different contents, and, what is strange to say, they are sometimes confounded by French writVOL. LXVII. 3480 LIVING AGE. ples, to which the devotees of ideas so constantly appeal, it ought to have been taken up with enthusiasm, and to be by this time adopted by every civilized nation. Ten is a normal number, and "to count by tens is the simplest way of counting." Man has five fingers on each hand, and five toes on each foot- the Philistine has six; the bearing of which observation, as Captain Bunsby would say, lies in the application thereof. It is likewise an incontrovertible fact, that the equator is of certain length, and that it is within the power of human ingenuity to devise a measure which shall be an hundred thousandth or a millionth part of that length. But it does not follow that the man is of necessity a fool who chooses to measure the kerseymere for his small clothes by the cubit, which is according to the measure of a man. As far as ideas are concerned, one standard seems to be as good as another. To count by tens may be the "simplest way of counting," but in the arithmetic of every-day life, a division into halves and quarters and half-quarters is found in practice natural and convenient. For arithmetic of another kind, the ancient Babylonian sexagesimal system, which divides the hour into sixty minutes, and the minute into sixty sec onds, has, as Professor Max Müller pointed out not long ago, been found practically useful for several thousand years. The French people, at all events, have not taken very kindly to the proposals of their philosophical guides in this matter. Accounts, it is true, are kept in francs and centimes mainly because the franc is the equivalent of the livre - but in the every-day affairs of the people, the weights and measures and currency of the old time are retained. The conducteur of a Paris omnibus, the market-woman of the Halles, the shop-keeper of the side streets where Mr. Cook's tourists do not go, all charge their customers in sous, and sell their goods by the half-kilo, the aune, and the demi-litre; while the class above them still talk of louis and écus, as their grandsires did. as was, in short, out of harmony with the science and philosophy of 1792-93. Had the savants of that period been consulted at the creation, they would undoubtedly have suggested sundry notable improvements. The year in that case would not have consisted of three hundred and sixtyfive days, six hours, some odd minutes and seconds. A year of one hundred days, divided into ten months of ten days, each of ten hours, each hour of ten minutes, and each minute of ten seconds, was obvi ously the simplest arrangement, and infi. nitely preferable to the awkward malarrangement with which philosophy had to deal. All that could be done, in view of the perversity of nature, was, therefore, to make the best of the situation, and subdue the recalcitrant months and weeks as completely as possible. If, whilst "correcting the errors of the Gregorian system," the glories of the young republic could be commemorated, so much the better. The National Convention accepted the charge with joy, and referred the work to the Committee of Public Instruction, of which Romme was the chairman, Lagrange, Monge, Dupuis, and Guyton de Morveau the principal members. With them were associated as consultants the principal astronomers and geometricians of the Academy of Sciences. All these things were to be swept away in the Revolution of '89. They were marks of "feudality," traces of the pied de Charlemagne, as Victor Hugo calls it, and as such intolerable to the partisans of the movement which had for its shibboleth Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death. As an outward and visible sign of that republican faith, the Church was first destroyed. The Constitution of 1789 had guaranteed liberté des cultes: the republic denounced worship of any kind superstition," preached the cheerful doctrine that death is an eternal sleep, and, under the Terror, mercilessly guillotined those who were such bad citizens as to seek for moral support in religion, rather than in the windy plastudes of the new philosophy. Having thus got rid of Christianity having, in its own phrase, "abolished God" and having enthroned a harlot on the high altar of Notre Dame, it seemed only natural to get rid of the calendar, which, alike by its nomenclature and its divisions of time, recalled its ecclesiastical origin. Helen Maria Williams, in her "Residence in France "(p. 12), admits the anti-religious object of the change. "It Romme, it should be noted, was a sin was desired," she says, "by a different gular specimen of the philosopher turned nomenclature of the months, to banish all politician a race of which we have had the commemorations of Christianity, and some examples in England of late years prepare the way for abolishing religion and was a curious mixture of excellent itself." Thiers, in his history, gives a intentions and obstinate wrong-headedsomewhat different version of the same ness. He was a professor of mathematreason. "The Catholic religion had mul- ics; a man of great abilities, if not of tiplied fêtes most enormously; the Revo- genius; sincere doubtless, but extravalution considered it necessary to reduce gantly bigoted; a dangerous man polit them as much as possible.' In the Con-ically, and the more dangerous because of vention the change was explained, and his honesty. Michelet-who is perhaps supported by the familiar phrases. The a little given to gushing over the heroes Gregorian calendar was condemned as of the Revolution says of him, that being "anomalous; because there was "with the figure of Socrates he had the no reason for beginning the year on the profound wisdom, the austere benevolence 1st of January, "except the pleasure of of a sage, of a hero, of a martyr." He Numa Pompilius, who wished to propitiate early dabbled in politics, and, as seems the god Janus;" because the division of inevitable with men of his temper, atthe year into periods of seven days was tached himself to the extreme section of "unscientific because "the year con- the Radical party. When the Revolution sists of more than three hundred and broke out he was acting as tutor to the sixty-five days, and fifty-two weeks of young Count Strogonoff, whom he had seven days give only three hundred and brought to Paris for the purpose of comsixty-four days; because a week of pleting his education. Romme's notions seven days does not represent one of the of his duty in this matter may be guessed phases of the moon; because it is absurd by the fact that he took the lad to the sitthat the sun should rule the day of twenty-tings of the National Assembly, and to four hours while the moon regulates the the meetings of Jacobin clubs and revoluyears, and so forth. The order of nature tionary committees. The empress Cath erine heard what was going on, and not | Heine declares them to be-they are unnaturally ordered the return of the young likely to appear the reverse of sublime, Count Strogonoff to Russia. Romme re- like so many of the theatrical performtired to Auvergne; turned his attention to ances of the Revolution. It is said that agriculture; talked Jacobinism to his twenty thousand people walked in procesneighbors, and was sent by them, as dele- sion, but the figure is probably greatly exgate, to the National Convention, where aggerated. They were divided into groups he took his place on the Mountain and according to their ages, and represented devoted himself to the task of remodel- the months. Following them came a little ling society on democratically philosophic" sacred group," representing the suppleprinciples. Under the Terror he prospered, but in the reaction which followed the death of Robespierre he was arrested and brought to trial, “not for what he had done, but for what he was," and dramatically ended his life by stabbing himself at the bar of the military tribunal which had condemned him (17th June, 1795). mentary days which made up the republican year, and, last of all, the representative of leap year a venerable centenarian - who, when the march past was over, solemnly planted a tree of liberty. There were bevies of virgins in white, and parties of artisans "who consecrated their tools by touching the tree of liberty with them." The elders grouped themselves around it, and ate and drank while the youths and maidens waited upon them. The republican calendar was the one achievement by which his name has been preserved from oblivion. He had apparently prepared everything, and the work" Thus, before idolatrous Belgium," says of the committee was reduced to a minimum. They reported on September 20th, 1793, and a fortnight later (October 5th) their report was adopted with some modifications. Romme was the presiding spirit throughout : His stoical genius [says Michelet], his austere faith in pure reason, appeared in his calendar. No name of saint or hero; nothing which could afford an excuse for idolatry. For the names of the months, eternal ideas; justice, equality, etc. Two months only were named from their sublime associations. June was called "the Oath of the Tennis Court month" (in memory, of course, of the scene of June 20th, 1789), and July was "the Bastille month." For the rest nothing but numerals; days and decades were distinguished only by figures. Days followed days, equal in duty, equal in labor. Time put on the unvarying face of eternity. This extraordinary austerity did not prevent the new calendar from being well received. The people were hungry and thirsty after truth. (Histoire de la Révolution Française, tome viii., 176.) It was, perhaps, the hunger and thirst after truth which caused Romme to admit to the constitutional Bishop Grégoire, himself an ardent member of the Mountain, that one of the principal objects of the new calendar was "the suppression of Sunday." Five days later the event was celebrated by a fête at Arras -the little town best known to fame as the birth-place of Robes pierre. The performances of that day excited great enthusiasm in Republican bosoms at the time, and there are still some persons who profess to consider them sublime and affecting." To Englishmen "inaccessible to ideas as Michelet, "before the barbarian army which was bringing back to us its false gods, republican France showed herself pure, strong, and pacific, playing the sacred drama of time, celebrating the new era, the greatest that this planet had seen since the beginning of the age. The The modifications in "the sacred drama of time" upon which the Convention insisted were somewhat extensive. In the first place, the names of the months with their (more or less) "sublime associations " preferring the chaste simplicity of the were swept away, the Convention ordinal numbers. For the rest, they succeeded in producing the most admired disorder under the pretext of simplicity and regularity. To begin with, the year was divided into twelve months, each of thirty days, and completed by five days superadded (jours complémentaires), with an additional day in leap year. week, "as measuring exactly neither the changes of the moon, nor the months, nor the seasons, nor the year," was suppressed, and each month divided into three decades or periods of ten days each. The day was to be divided into ten parts, each of which was to be divided into ten others so as to complete the metrical system. It is hardly necessary to say that, with all their enthusiasm for the scientific symmetry of their measurement of time, the Convention hesitated to take a step which would, at one stroke, have rendered useless every watch and clock in France. The latter portion of the scheme was consequently adjourned for a year, and, happily, never heard of again. Thiers says that the dials were actually |