HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN EUROPE, FROM THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE TO THE BY M. GUIZOT, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY IN THE FACULTY OF LITERATURE AT PARIS, THIRD AMERICAN, FROM THE SECOND ENGLISH EDITION, WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES, BY C. S. HENRY, D. D., PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILADELPHIA: GEORGE S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT-ST. MDCCCXLYL BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF M. GUIZOT.' On the 8th of April, 1794, three days after the bloody victory of Robespierre over Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and the men of the Committee of Clemency, the scaffold was prepared at Nîmes for a distinguished advocate, who was also suspected of resistance to the will of the terrible triumvirate, and desolation had seated itself at the fireside of one of the worthiest families of the country. A woman, all tears, was beseeching God for strength to support a fearful blow; for the executioner at that moment was rendering her a widow, and her two children orphans. The eldest of these, scarcely seven years old, already wore upon his contemplative countenance the stamp of precocious intellect. Misfortune is a species of hothouse; one grows rapidly within its influence. This child, who had no childhood, was François Pierre Guillaume Guizot. Born a Protestant, on the 4th of October, 1787, under the sway of a legislation which refused to recognise the legal union of his parents and denied him a name and social rank, young Guizot saw the Revolution, with the same blow, restore him definitively to his rightful place in God's world, and make pay for the benefit by the blood of his father. him If we designed to write any thing more than a biography, perhaps we might find in this concurrence of circumstances the first germ of that antipathy which the statesman afterwards manifested, almost equally for absolute monarchies and for democratic governments. Chiefly from the Galerie des Contemporains Illustres, 3d edition, Paris, 1840. 1 |