and their barren pity into generous and active indignation; if he had reproached the conquerors of Europe with the disgrace of being the slaves of an upstart stranger; if he had brought before their minds the contrast between their country under her ancient monarch-the source and model of refinement in manners and tasteand since their expulsion the scourge and the opprobrium of humanity; if he had exhorted them to drive out their ignoble tyrants and to restore their native sovereign; I should then have recognized the voice of a Royalist. I should have recognized language that must have flowed from the heart of Mr. Peltier, and I should have been compelled to acknowledge that it was pointed against Bonaparte.

The senti

ode would be

nonsense in the mouth of

a Royalist.

and to punish those who delivered you from them. I exhort you to reverence the den of these banditti as 'the sanctuary of the laws,' and to lament the day in which this intolerable nuisance was abated as 'an unfortunate day.' Last of all, I exhort you once more to follow that deplorable chimera-the first lure that led you to destruction-the sovereignty of the peoplethough I know, and you have bitterly felt, that you never were so much slaves in fact as since you have been sovereigns in theory!"

Let me ask, Mr. Attorney General, whether, upon his supposition, I have not given you a faithful translation of this ode; and I think I may safely repeat that if this be the language of a Royalist addressed to Royalists, it must be the production of a lunatic. But on my supposition, every thing is natural and consistent. You have the sentiments and language of a Jacobin. It is therefore probable, if you take it as a historical republication of a Jacobin piece. It is just, if you take it as a satirical representation of Jacobin opinions and projects.

seusical if they

to take a Jaco

designs of a

These, or such as these, must have been the topics of a Royalist, if he had published ments of that an invective against the First Consul. But instead of these or similar topics, Mr. Peltier as what have we in this ode? On the supposition that it is the invective of a Royalist, how is it to be reconciled to common sense? What purpose is it to serve? Το Perhaps it will be said that this is the producwhom is it addressed? To what interests does tion of a Royalist writer, who as- Equally nonit appeal? What passions is it to rouse? If it sumes a Republican disguise to serve are supposed be addressed to Royalists, then I request, gen- Royalist purposes; but if my learn- bin dress to tlemen, that you will carefully read it, and tell ed friend chooses that supposition, I promote the me whether, on that supposition, it can be any think an equal absurdity returns upon Royalist. thing but the ravings of insanity, and whether a him in another shape. We must, then, suppose commission of lunacy be not a proceeding more it to be intended to excite Republican discontent fitted to the author's case than a conviction for and insurrection against Bonaparte. It must, a libel. On that supposition, I ask you whether then, be taken as addressed to Republicans. it does not amount in substance to such an ad- Would Mr. Peltier in that case have disclosed dress as the following? "Frenchmen, Royal- his name as the publisher? Would he not much ists, I do not call upon you to avenge the murrather have circulated the ode in the name of der of your innocent Sovereign, the butchery of Chenier, without prefixing his own, which was your relations and friends, the disgrace and more than sufficient to warn his Jacobinical oppression of your country! I call upon you readers against all his counsels and exhortations. by the hereditary right of Barras, transmitted If he had circulated it under the name of Chenier through a long series of ages, by the beneficent only, he would, indeed, have hung out Republicgovernment of Merlin and Reubell, those worthy an colors; but by prefixing his own, he appears successors of Charlemagne, whose authority was without disguise. You must suppose him then as mild as it was lawful-I call upon you to reRepublicans! I, your mortal enemy for venge on Bonaparte the despotism of that Direc-fourteen years, whom you have robbed of his all, tory who condemned the far greater part of your- whom you have forbidden to revisit his country selves to beggary and exile, who covered France under pain of death, who, from the beginning of with Bastiles and scaffolds; who doomed the the Revolution, unceasingly poured ridicule upon most respectable remaining members of their your follies, and exposed your crimes to detescommunity-the Pichegrues, the Barbé Marbois, tation, who in the cause of my unhappy Soverthe Barthélemis-to a lingering death in the pes-eign braved your daggers for three years, and tilential wilds of Guiana. I call upon you to avenge on Bonaparte the cause of those councils of five hundred or of two hundred, of elders or of youngsters, those disgusting and nauseous mockeries of representative assemblies-those miserable councils which sycophant sophists had converted into machines for fabricating decrees of proscription and confiscation, which not only proscribed unborn thousands, but, by a refinement and innovation in rapine, visited the sins of the children upon the fathers, and beggared parents, not for the offenses, but for the misfortunes of their sons. I call upon you to restore this Directory and these councils, and all this horrible profanation of the name of a republic,

to say:

who escaped almost by miracle from your assassins in September, who has since been constantly employed in warning other nations by your example, and in collecting the evidence upon which history will pronounce your condemnation; I, who at this moment deliberately choose exile and honorable poverty, rather than give the slightest mark of external compliance with your abominable institutions; I, your most irreconcilable and indefatigable enemy, offer you counsel which you know can only be a snare into which I expect you to fall, though by the mere publication of my name I have sufficiently forewarned you that I can have no aim but that of your destruction."

15 We learn from Mr. Mackintosh's son that Mr. Canning was the author of this beautiful translation. | a dagger to avenge thee among the last Romans.

cribed to a

triot.

as easy and ordinary expedients; and to what a Having said so much on the first of these suphorrible extent it has familiarized their minds to posed libels, I shall be very short on Comment on crimes which before were only known among the two that remain-the verses as the lines a civilized nations by the history of barbarous cribed to a Dutch patriot, and the Dutch pa times, or as the subject of poetical fiction. But, parody of the speech of Lepidus. In thank God, gentlemen, we in England have not the first of these, the piercing eye of Mr. Attornlearned to charge any man with inciting assas-ey General has again discovered an incitement sination, not even a member of that atrocious sect who have revived political assassination in Christendom, except when we are compelled to do so by irresistible evidence. Where is that evidence here? In general, it is immoral, because indecent to speak with levity, still more to anticipate with pleasure, the destruction of any human being. But between this immorality and the horrible crime of inciting to assassination, there is a wide interval indeed. The real or supposed author of this ode gives you to understand that he would hear with no great sorrow of the destruction of the First Consul. But surely the publication of that sentiment is very different from an exhortation to assassinate.

But, says my learned friend, why is the example of Brutus celebrated? Why are the French reproached with their baseness in not copying that example? Gentlemen, I have no judgment to give on the act of Marcus Brutus. I rejoice that I have not. I should not dare to condemn the acts of brave and virtuous men in extraordinary and terrible circumstances, and which have been, as it were, consecrated by the veneration of so many ages. Still less should I dare to weaken the authority of the most sacred rules of duty by praises which would be immoral, even if the acts themselves were in some measure justified by the awful circumstances under which they were done. I am not, in the words of Mr. Burke, the panegyrist of "those instances of doubtful public spirit at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature recoils."

But whatever we may think of the act of Brutus, surely my learned friend will not contend that every allusion to it, every panegyric on it which has appeared for eighteen centuries, in prose and verse, is an incitement to assassination. From the Conspicua Divina Phillipica Fama, down to the last school-boy declamation, he will find scarce a work of literature without such allusions, and not very many without such panegyrics. I must say that he has construed this ode more like an Attorney General than a critic in poetry. According to his construction, almost every fine writer in our language is a preacher of murder.18

to assassinate-the most learned incitement to assassinate that ever was addressed to such ignorant ruffians as are most likely to be employed for such nefarious purposes !19 An obscure allusion to an obscure and perhaps fabulous part of Roman history, to the supposed murder of Romulus, about which none of us know any thing, and of which the Jacobins of Paris and Amsterdam probably never heard. But the apotheosis! Here my learned friend has a little forgotten himself. He seems to argue as if apotheosis always presupposed death. But he must know that Augustus, and even Tiberius and Nero, were deified during their lives, and he can not have forgotten the terms in which one of the court poets of Augustus speaks of his master's divinity:

for Bona

not for his as

The utmost that can seriously be made of this
passage is, that it is a wish for a man's They express
death. I repeat that I do not contend only a wish
for the decency of publicly declaring parte's death,
such wishes, or even for the propriety sassination.
of entertaining them; but the distance between
Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres
Wheeling unshaken through the void immense;
And speak, O man! does this capacious scene
With half that kindling majesty dilate
Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose
Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove

When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud
On TULLY'S name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the Father of his Country hail!
For lo! the tyrant prostrate on the dust,
And Rome again is free!

Pleasures of the Imagination, Book i. 19 The passage referred to is at the close of a The quotation above is from the tenth satire of short poem, entitled "Vau d'un bon Patriot," Wish Juvenal, line 125. of a good patriot:

such a wish and a persuasive to murder is immense. Such a wish for a man's death is very often little more than a strong, though, I admit, not a very decent way of expressing detestation for his character.

all the horrible crimes and horrible retaliations of the last calamity that can befall society-a servile revolt. They sought the worst of ends by the most abominable of means. They labored for the subjugation of the world at the expense of crimes and miseries which men of humanity and conscience would have thought too great a price for the deliverance of mankind.

The last of these supposed libels is the parody on the speech of Lepidus, in the frag- Parody on ments of Sallust. It is certainly a very the speech of Lepidus. ingenious and happy parody of an orig

But without pursuing this argument any further, I think myself entitled to apply to these verses the same reasoning which I have already applied to the first supposed libel on Bonaparte. If they be the real composition of a pretended Dutch patriot, Mr. Peltier may republish them innocently. If they be a satire on such pretended Dutch patriots, they are not a libel on Bona-inal, attended with some historical obscurity and parte. Granting, for the sake of argument, that difficulty, which it is no part of our present busithey did entertain a serious exhortation to assas- ness to examine." This parody is said to have sinate, is there any thing in such an exhortation been clandestinely placed among the papers of inconsistent with the character of these pretend- one of the most amiable and respectable men in ed patriots? France, M. Camille Jordan, in order to furnish a pretext for involving that excellent person in a charge of conspiracy. This is said to have been done by a spy of Fouché. Now, gentlemen, I take this to be a satire on Fouché, on Applied to his manufacture of plots-on his contrivances for the destruction of innocent and virtuous men-and I should admit it to be a libel on Fouché, if it were possible to libel him. I own that I should like to see Fouché appear as a plaintiff, seeking reparation for his injured character, before any tribunal safe from his fangs, where he had not the power of sending the judges

Character of
Jacobins.

Fouché

They who were disaffected to the mild and tolerant government of their flourishthe Dutch ing country, because it did not exactly square with all their theoretical whimsies; they who revolted from that administration as tyrannical, which made Holland one of the wonders of the world for protected industry, for liberty of action and opinion, and for a prosperity which I may venture to call the greatest victory of man over hostile elements; they who called in the aid of the fiercest tyrants that Europe ever saw, who served in the armies of Robespierre, under the impudent pretext of giving lib-to Guiana or Madagascar. It happens that we erty to their country, and who have finally buried in the same grave its liberty, its independence, and perhaps its national existence, they are not men entitled to much tenderness from a political satirist, and he will scarcely violate dramatic propriety if he impute to them any language, however criminal and detestable. They who could not brook the authority of their old, lazy, good-natured government, are not likely to endure with patience the yoke of that stern domination which they have brought upon themselves, and which, as far as relates to them, is only the just punishment of their crimes. They who call in tyrants to establish liberty, who sacrifice the independence of their country under pretense of reforming its internal constitution, are capable of every thing.

cept those of

I know nothing more odious than their charMore odious acter, unless it be that of those who invoked the aid of the oppressors of Ireland. Switzerland to be the deliverers of Ireland! Their guilt has, indeed, peculiar aggravations. In the name of liberty, they were willing to surrender their country into the hands of tyrants, the most lawless, faithless, and merciless that ever scourged Europe; who, at the very moment of their negotiation, were covered with the blood of the unhappy Swiss, the martyrs of real independence and of real liberty. Their success would have been the destruction of the

only free community remaining in Europe of England, the only bulwark of the remains of European independence. Their means were the passions of an ignorant and barbarous peasantry, and a civil war, which could not fail to produce

know something of the history of M. Fouché from a very credible witness against him—from himself. You will perhaps excuse me for reading to you some passages of his letters in the year 1793, from which you will judge whether any satire can be so severe as the portrait he draws of himself.

24

"Convinced that there are no innocent men in this infamous city,23 but those who Quotations from are opposed and loaded with irons by his letters. the assassins of the people, we are on our guard against the tears of repentance! nothing can disarm our severity. They have not yet dared to solicit the repeal of our first decree for the annihilation of the city of Lyons! but scarcely any thing has yet been done to carry it into execution." (Pathetic!) "The demolitions are too slow. More rapid means are necessary to republican impatience. The explosion of the mine and the devouring activity of the flames can alone adequately represent the omnipotence of the people." (Unhappy populace, always the pretext, the instrument, and the victim of political crimes!) "Their will can not be checked like that of tyrants. It ought to have the effects of thunder!" The next specimen of this worthy gentleman which I shall give, is in a speech to the Jacobin Club of Paris, on the 21st of De

i

cember, 1793, by his worthy colleague in the massacre, by way of sparing themselves the pain
mission to Lyons, Collot d'Herbois :
of punishing individual criminals.]