other object of this triumph! has borne that day, (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well,) and that she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the exulting adulation of addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and becoming the offspring of a Sovereign distinguished for her piety and courage.

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in -glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy! Oh! what a revolution! And what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall. Little did I dream, that when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace, concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream, that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men,-in a nation of men of honour and cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and

VOL. II.

D

calculators, has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage, while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which, vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness!

"This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin in the ancient chivalry. And the principle, though varied in its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, subsisted and influenced, through a long succession of generations, even to the time we live in. It is this, which has given its character to modern Europe. It is this, which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and distinguished it to its advantage, from the States of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the Antique World. It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, and handed it down through all the gradations of social life. It was this opinion, which mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without force or opposition it subdued the fierceness of pride and power, it obliged

sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.

"But now, all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new, conquiring empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off; all the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, is only common homi

cide !"

The consequences of finally extinguishing the principle of honour in France were predicted with equal clearsightedness. "When the old feudal and chival

י

rous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men; plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and by that long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all power not standing on its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle."

The illustration of those profound views was to be rapidly given by the Republic. Its jailers were its governors; the reign of terror succeeded the abandonment of allegiance. The axe became the substitute for the sceptre; until France, wearied by civil murder, threw herself at the feet of despotism; and the regicide took refuge in the chain of the most lawless and malignant tyranny that ever insulted the hopes, or trampled on the privileges, of man.

CHAPTER III.

The Democracy-Fate of the Philosophic Infidels-Death of Bailly -Death of Condorcet.

ALL history is but a romance, unless it is studied as an example. The miseries of the fathers are for the warning of the children; and the ruin of the man or the nation which will take no lesson from experience will only be more sudden, fatal, and returnless, than that which has already given the disregarded moral of the grave. There is a solemn appeal to the wisdom of England, in the evidence that the French monarchy perished solely by party. In a time of profound peace, in the general flourishing of every resource and every class of the kingdom, with a remarkable absence of public burdens, with no financial difficulties but those which the opulence of the nation could have thrown off, as dewdrops from the lion's mane; with an unbroken military and naval force, with a population exceeding in activity, dexterity, and general acquirement, all others in Europe, not then excepting