To use M. Sorel's eloquent expression, with every week that passed the coup d'état of Brumaire appeared more useful, more beneficent, more legitimate.' The line of policy adopted by Bonaparte was truly statesmanlike, and gave Frenchmen a new conception of the possibilities of revolutionary government. That policy is summed up in the instructions issued to General St.-Hilaire on January 4, 1800: Faites réciter à tous les citoyens que le temps des 'partis et des déchirements est passé. Dites que la Révolu'tion est finie et que les rênes de l'Etat sont dans les mains 'fermes.'

When the Constitution of the year VIII took the place of that of the year III, and Bonaparte found himself installed as First Consul in the Luxembourg, France and her armies alike believed that a new era had dawned, as indeed it had, though not destined to have the consequences men believed at the moment. Only a contemptible fraction in France, and some clear heads abroad, saw in the accession of Bonaparte to power the commencement of despotism. He seemed by the circumstances of the day to have been carried to the helm rather than to have grasped at it, and in the official accounts of what had passed his part was described as a subordinate one. In the new Constitution, with its checks and balances, its Grand Elector, its methods of indirect election, and its three Consuls, Bonaparte might well have appeared as nothing more than primus inter pares. But the common sense of the populace at once distinguished the essential fact among the elaborate and accidental elements in which it was enveloped. While a municipal official was reading the new Constitution in the street, one woman said to another, For my part I have heard nothing,' to which her neighbour replied, I have not lost a word.' Well, what is there in it?' said the first. 'Bonaparte,' was the reply.*

But although the name of Bonaparte was the vital circumstance for the mass, it was not Bonaparte the dictator who was welcomed, but Bonaparte the restorer of the Republic. Phrases still reigned supreme, the deceptive legacy of ten years' insincere declamation. When the army in Holland heard that Bonaparte was named Dictator, they contemplated revolt; so soon as they learned that he was merely First Consul,' they were overwhelmed with joy. †

* Cited by Vandal from the Gazette de France' of 26 Brumaire. Mémoires du Duc de Raguse, vol. ii. p. 108.

And indeed at the time he was only tentatively supreme. He could, it is true, at once begin to evolve for France that peace within her own borders which she so ardently desired. He himself set the example of tolerance by calling to his counsels the most capable men of all shades of political thought, and set them to work at the reorganisation of the country; he offered an amnesty to the émigrés and the revolted provinces and abolished religious persecution. But he had yet to secure peace beyond the frontiers, to avert the invasion still threatening on the South, and force Europe to recognise the natural limits' of France. Marengo was in the future, and, before Marengo, his position was only half won. As yet he was still regarded as one of Plutarch's 'men,' and his supporters would have shuddered at the trappings and circumstance of avowed Cæsarism.

If

Brumaire was not the last episode of the Revolution; on the contrary, to use M. Vandal's words,* though it dealt the 'Republic its death-blow, it saved the Revolution.' For the time it gave personal security and comparative freedom instead of oppression and anarchy. When a new, if more orderly, tyranny took the place of the old, we find the very men who had helped to lift Bonaparte into the saddle on the 18th Brumaire combining to hurl him to the earth in 1814, and again in 1815 rallying round the ideas of the Revolution threatened by the restored Legitimists. Bonaparte had not been the instrument of revolt in 1799, there would have been another, and no living man was more worthy to fill the place. His ruling passion was a desire for orderly administration. He was the greatest practical apostle of 'efficiency' that had appeared on the world's stage since Cæsar. But the desire to see things properly done is hardly to be separated from the conviction that one can do things best oneself, which conviction again easily shades off into overweening ambition. Another soldier might conceivably have treated all classes of Frenchmen as if they were equal before the law, and might have repeated on a larger stage the pacification of La Vendée. It is more than doubtful if he could have shown the prodigious organising capacity which created modern France.

The Constitution of the year III perished by its own faults and was never destined to a long life, for it was in fundamental contradiction to the whole theory of the Revolution, which proclaimed liberty and equality for all.

* Op. cit. p. 402.

The middle class desired the former boon and the lower class the latter; but, by the Constitution which brought the Directory into existence, equality vanished, for many citizens were thereby disfranchised. No Frenchman was eligible for election to the Legislature who had not a certain amount of property, or could claim a vote who had not both a property and a residential qualification. This was the negation of Democracy, as understood by the Revolutionary theories. The middle class, which had acquired liberty for itself, had thus deprived the lower of 'equality.' In any case, the Revolutionary principle was not overthrown by Bonaparte and the Constitution of the year VIII in theory restored universal suffrage. Though this arrangement was perhaps delusive, it was not so anti-democratic as the instrument which it replaced. The French people in 1799 welcomed the rule of one man for the same reason that the Roman people supported Cæsar. They saw embodied in him their own absolutism taking the inefficient oligarchy.

place of a corrupt and

ART. V.-BISHOP CREIGHTON.

Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, D.D., sometime Bishop of London. By HIS WIFE. In two volumes. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1904.

THE popular conception of the episcopal office has greatly varied during the course of Christian history. We have travelled far from the days when the bishop was the protomartyr of his flock, and almost as far from those when he disputed political pre-eminence with great nobles and challenged the authority of kings. In England, though bishops have long ceased to hold secular offices, it is onlyby comparison of late that they have exchanged the position of sinecurists for that of men who are continually trying, and failing, to keep abreast of their diocesan work. In some ways we seem further removed from the eighteenthcentury bishop than from the thirteenth. We can more easily imagine the feudal lord than the ecclesiastical official whose main business was to enjoy a princely income and to provide for his own family by a judicious use of episcopal patronage. But in the eighteenth century sinecures were universal and involved no discredit to the holder of them. As they died out in the civil order they became impossible in the spiritual, and with the creation of the Ecclesiastical Commission, and the reduction of episcopal incomes to a nearly uniform scale, they finally disappeared. The precise steps by which the office of a bishop, from being one of dignified or learned leisure, came to be what it is, are not very well known, but the varied activities and commanding personality of Bishop Wilberforce made the change visible. To-day it may safely be said of the episcopate that, whether its members work wisely or unwisely, to much purpose or to little, they all work.

Mandell Creighton, whose life has been described by his wife with equal fulness and self-restraint, was eminently a bishop of the modern type, and he was at the same time an illustration of the drawbacks under which the type suffers. It has come to be recognised that a bishopric is the fitting reward of eminence in some one of the many directions taken by ecclesiastical activity. Here a great teacher, a great historian, a great preacher alike find the end of their career. Nor can objection be reasonably taken to this principle of selection. The bishops are the appointed leaders of the Church, and distinction in the parts they

have already played is the recommendation for which a Minister naturally and properly looks out. But the system has one drawback. The same act which rewards a man for the good work he has done ensures for the most part that he shall do no more work of the same kind. A great preacher, indeed, will preach as often after his promotion as before, though not perhaps as well. But the teacher will have few opportunities as a bishop for the continuous exercise of his faculty, and the historian will have none at all. On Creighton's appointment to Peterborough, he wrote indeed to Count Balzani, 'I do not mean to abandon "my "Popes;" they will still be a recreation for my leisure, ' and even a bishop must have some leisure, I suppose.' And for a time he worked whenever he could find a moment at a new volume which he had brought with him from Cambridge, within measurable distance of completion.' But each year the chance of carrying it any further grew less, and on his translation to London he gave up the attempt, and altered the title to fit the lessened scope of the history. Ideally we might wish that learning had some other reward in the Church of England than to be transferred to new and untried duties. But on the whole the Church benefits by a system which recruits her bishops from her more distinguished clergy instead of making them a class apart, chosen purely for promptitude in answering letters and the endurance without disabling fatigue of a great number of cross-journeys. Creighton himself had no doubt as to his duty in the matter. A bishopric,' he wrote, is to me personally a terrible nuisance. But how ' is a man to refuse the responsibilities of his branch of the 'service ? ' He was not in the least carried away by the prospect. My peace of mind is gone; my books will be shut up; my mind will go to seed; I shall utter nothing 'but platitudes for the rest of my life, and everybody will 'write letters in the newspapers about my iniquities.' But he submitted, as he told the present Bishop of Rochester, 'because I felt that a tranquil conscience could no longer 'be mine if I ventured to take my life in my own hands, and presumptuously say that I preferred the inward ' responsibility of the student to the graver responsibility of taking my part in the rough work of the world.'

Creighton's working life falls naturally into four periods. He was fellow and tutor of his college for nine years, a country vicar for nine more, then professor and canon for six years, and finally bishop for eleven years-for four of