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 homicide!"

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

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

even our own; France, possessing every material of foreign and domestic power, the chief monarchy of the Continent, fell into instantaneous ruin. As if the ground had been hollowed under her, the throne went down from the eyes of Europe.—As if some sudden decree of Heaven had commissioned the sword against all that retained the impress of birth, honour, and learning in the land, all was cut away even with the surface. It is remarkable that in this decisive vengeance, all the great habitual agencies of public destruction were kept aloof. Pestilence, famine, and war, were chained up; the ruin was left to be wrought by party; and from whatever source the commission came, whether from the wrath of Providence, or the malignity of the enemy alike of Heaven and man, it was found terribly equal to do the work of them all. The leading principle was selfishness, and the leading pretext a zeal for the populace. The system consisted of nothing but a reversal of all the maxims of human experience, for the purpose of a reversal of the whole order of human society. Its chiefs, contemptuous of morals, avowed themselves the champions of rights. Abasing all the privileges belonging to centuries of public service, of opulence, and high hereditary recollections, they exalted meanness, poverty, and ignorance; exclaiming against the luxury, feebleness, and prodigality of the first ranks of the state, they pampered the vices, the indolence, and the rapine of the crowd; offering an ostentatious homage to the law, they stimulated the people to its open violation; pro