ALL history is but a romance unless it act as an example. The mise. ries 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. Is there no appeal to the wisdom of England, in the evidence that the French monarchy perished solely by party? In a time of profound peace, in a 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, scarcely excepting even our own; France, possessing every material of foreign and domestic power, the chief monarchy of the Continent, fell into sudden ruin. As if the ground had been hollowed under her throne, the throne went down at the instant, and disappeared from the eyes of Europe. As it 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 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 fully equal to do the work of them all. The leading principle of this party 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, personally 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 multitude; offering an ostentatious homage to the law, they stimulated the people to its open violation; proclaiming themselves the heralds of a new triumph of peace, they covered the way to its temple with corpses. It is cheering to the sacred sense of justice to know that this labour had its reward; that the hypocrites felt the heaviest vengeance of their own delusions; that, after years employed in laying the mine under the monarchy of France, the moment in which they applied the match was the moment of their own extinction; that the blast which tore up the foundations of society, shattered themselves into dust and ashes, and left of their ambition but an ignominious and abhorred name.

Hypocrisy is of all vices the most hateful to man; because it combines the malice of guilt with the meanness of deception. Of all vices it is the most dangerous; because its whole machinery is constructed on treachery through the means of confidence, on compounding virtue with vice, on making the noblest qualities of our nature minister to the most profligate purposes of our ruin. It erects a false light where it declares a beacon, and destroys by the very instrument blazoned as a security. The French Revolution was the supreme work of hypocrisy. All its leaders were low and licentious slaves, of the basest propensities nurtured by the most criminal habits. We can detect in them nothing, to this hour, that belongs even to the higher failings of our nature,—not even a generous self-delusion, not even a wandering enthusiasm for the good of man, not even the erroneous ardour which might have rashly tasted of the tree of knowledge, and thought

lessly incurred death; they had nothing of the common mixture of honest intention and frail performance. They were the tempter, not the tempted; they were stern, subtle, and vindictive destroyers, for the sake of selfish possession, and selfish revenge.

The Revolutionary faction were not glowing zealots, whose political wisdom was obscured by the blaze of their own imaginations. Zealots undoubtedly they were, but it was by a frenzy of power and possession which incapacitated them from seeing the ruin into which they were plunging themselves. They saw clearly the ruin into which they were plunging their fellow-men. There they were cool calculators. Two hundred thousand heads must fall, said Marat, before France will be fit to acknowledge the Jacobin club as its sovereigns; and the calculation was carried into effect, with the most unswerving adherence to the great Jacobin law of massacre. As the Revolution advanced, its doctrines grew more undisguised; the rapidity of its speed swept back its robe, and shewed the naked dagger hung to its bosom. Every additional step in the furious chase in which it hunted down the hope and the honour of France, cast away some remnant of that specious covering in which it had performed its early mockeries of public virtue; until, at last, it held on its career, the open despiser of all attempts at the palliation of its gigantic iniquity-the assertor of the right to tyrannize, of finance by universal plunder, and of public regeneration by the sword and the scaffold.

Burke saw this aspect of the faction even before it had altogether flung away its disguise. While among us, all the enthusiasts of political change at any price, were ready to throw themselves at its feet, and all the strugglers for place were proclaiming it a present deity, he saw the native ferocity and malice of the Jacobin, and denounced the common conspirator against all laws human and divine. "In your legislature," said he to France, "a majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, compels a captive King to issue, as royal edicts, the polluted nonsense of their licentious and giddy coffeehouses. It is notorious, that all their

measures are decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt, that under the terrors of the lamppost and the bayonet, and of the torch to their houses, your legislature are obliged to adopt all the crude and despotic measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations. Among those are to be found persons, in comparison with whom Catiline would be thought scrupulous, and Cethegus a man of moderation. Nor is it in those clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters. They undergo a previous distortion in academies, intended as so many seminaries for those clubs, which are set up in all places of public resort. In those meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the constitution. Liberty is to be always estimated perfect in proportion as property is rendered insecure. Amid assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of future society. Embracing in their arms the carcasses of the basest criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime."

The farce of deliberation was still carried on by the National Assembly, but it had become the notorious tool of the mob. Like all representative bodies which assume a power beyond right, the National Assembly, in attempting to make the throne its vassal, had called in a third estate, which made itself a slave. The ferocious auxiliary instantly domineered over its perfidious summoner; and from that hour the representative body of France was the representative of nothing but the brute will of the populace. The consequence has followed the crime in every land; and the ambition that begins by conspiracy, has always been scourged by its own instruments. "The Assembly," says Burke,

the parliaments were the great depositaries of discontent. The genius of the Gascon, hot, ostentatious, and self-sufficient, gave the precedence in clamour to the South; and the Girondists amply asserted their right to take the lead where the prize was to be public confusion, and the contest was to be a competitorship of every weakness and every crime of human nature. That faction, composed almost wholly of the lawyers of the South, rapidly perished. It realized power only to the point of national undoing, and having given the world the lesson of utter incompetency, died, to shew that the passions may from time to time perform the work of the virtues-that the popular axe may be the instrument of a moral, of which the populace never dreamed

"acts before the multitude the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience. They act amid the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious men and of women lost to shame; who, according to their insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them, and sometimes mix and take their seats among them-domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile petulance and presumptuous authority. As they have inverted all things, the gallery is in place of the house. This Assembly, which overthrows Kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy of a legislative body-nec color imperii, nec frons ulla senatus.' They have a power given to them, like that of the evil principle, to subvert and destroy, but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction."

The philosophers of France, the Baillys, Lavoisiers, and Buffons, have been charged with the crimes of the Revolution. That they were guilty to the full extent of their power, was unquestionable-that they sedulously unhinged the national respect for religion-that they gave the sanction of their names to attacks on morals-and that some of the leading individuals of French science exhibited in their habits the profligacy of their principles, are facts which sink their memory in a grave of eternal shame. But the true work of overthrow claims other hands. We must not be unjust to the superior claims of homicide. The feeble speculators of the closet must be content with having pointed out the road to ruin. It was the race of bitter and ambitious barristersthe obscure pleaders in the obscure courts-the reptile family of litigiousness, that poured into the path, and corrupted the hopes of liberty. In France, the higher employments of the law alone conferred public distinction. All ranks beneath were alike crowded and contemptible. Fifty thousand village attorneys, meagre sinecurists, small dependents upon petty offices, and pertinacious holders of petty distinctions, were an unequalled machinery for the uses of faction. The lawyers of

and that the blood of the man of blood may be exacted as scrupulously by the blind ferocity of vice, as by the clearsighted wrath of divine retribution. The fate of those traitors is the triumph of human feeling. We may turn away with mere scorn from the sufferings of the savage rabble who trampled down each other in the general rush to the royal spoil, but we cannot withdraw our eyes from the delight of seeing perfidy forced to feel that there is justice on the earth. We almost rejoice to see the deepening terrors of that specious villany which betrayed with a kisswe leave the common murderers to be crushed undistinguished by the high hand of retribution; but we instinctively love to follow every pang of Judas-to see the whole course of penalty, the bitter disappointment, the helpless remorse, the cureless despair, until the hour when he anticipates the law of human abhorrence, and falls headlong. We have no such speculation in the graves of the Dantons and Heberts, and their associate revellers in slaughter. We see their ravages as we should those of a troop of tigers; and when they are destroyed, think neither more nor less of their destruction than of that of a troop of tigers. But the smiling and bowing betrayers, the orators of humanity, the solemn devotees of principle, the pompous Vergniauds, and immaculate Rolands, the pure priests of the Constitutional Altar, where they led their unhappy King only to stab him, in the act of clinging to

the hem of his robe-these are due to posterity as examples of the lowest baseness of the human heart; and the record of their punishment deserves to be one of the most indelible pages of the history of Revolution. It becomes especially important that those men should not be consigned to the obscure infamy earned by their mediocrity of mind. It is of this class that all true political hazard springs. No revolution was ever effected by the mere brute force of the multitude. No Revolutionist, who began by the display of violence, ever succeeded. All men's fears are awakened by the roar of rapine suddenly let loose through the community. The most sluggish are roused into courage and activity, when they find the conflagration rolling round their own roofs. If they are once startled, they are secure. They spring from their beds, and extinguish the incendiarism and the incendiaries together. The men made for public ruin proceed in other ways. They are the abhorrers of all violence. They are the mere solicitors for a small portion of that general justice which is due to all beings bearing the shape of mankind. They limit their pleadings, too, rather by what they can hope to obtain from the compassion of the higher ranks, than by any reference to the natural claims of members of the same common family of freemen. Having thus made the first step, the advocate grows bolder; he now discovers grievances, harangues on claims, and insists upon rights. Still there is nothing more than importunity-no menace-no display of the ruffian visage-no railing against authority-no ebullition of that hot malignity which is swelling round the villain heart. Pamphlets, speeches, and sarcasms, are the light weapons, the feeble missile shower, that cover the march of the main body. The bearers of the pike and the hatchet are not far behind, but they are kept out of sight-the signal at last is made-the advocate has become the threatener-the entreaty for justice has been raised into a demand for submission-the equality of privileges is now spurned for the robbery and exile of the higher ranks -the old constitution is no longer to crown all the hopes of patriotism by its revival-it is to be swept away as

an encumbrance, for the building of a new-society is to be subverted, that purification may be complete. The early morals of the State are to be expunged from this proud tablet which records the regeneration of the land. The new banner which floats in front of the new army of freedom, is to disdain all the hereditary armorial bearings; its blazonry is to be wrought in the popular loom, tinctured by the blood of the noble. Its image and superscription is to be of neither King nor law, but of the new sovereignty of the streets. Confiscation is to be thenceforth the revenue, massacre the law, and the holy right of insurrection the prerogative of the sacred empire of liberty.

In England this process was fully begun. The clubs of 1793 were as active within the British Islands as on the mainland of France. Their muster-rolls were already swelling with all the profligate, the idle, and the envenomed of the community. Ireland, which seems sealed for eternal discontent, had her 108,000 sons of freedom! marshalled, and waiting only for the sound of the pastoral horn from the Alecto of France. The pamphleteer and the haranguer had done their work, and the civil war was armed in procinct. In another year, perhaps in another month, it would have broken out in one vast burst of havoc and dismay. The time was pregnant with the fates of mankind. But England was not yet to perish; her destinies were not to be accomplished by the hands of hypocrites, with virtue on their lips, and the venom of blasted ambition in their hearts. If she was to fall, it was not by the weapon of slaves and culprits, too mean for her hostility. She was not to fall in the hour of popular festival, by an arrow in the heel. The generous resolution to rescue Europe saved her from domestic ruin. As she rushed forward to throw her shield over the fainting sovereignties of the Continent, she left the whole tribe of her assassins behind. At every step she enlarged her distance from revolt, until it found itself exposed in the centre of the nation; and, until, without an object and without an ally, its clamours drowned in the triumphant voice of the country, and its strength

extinguished in the countless levy of the empire, it was glad to shrink from the public eye, and expire in the obscurity in which it was born.

One strong and unfailing test of Jacobinism in all lands, is its vulgarity of soul. "Nothing," says Burke, "is more certain, than that our manners, our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours, for ages depended upon two principles; and were, indeed, the result of both combined, the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by patronage, the other by profession, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms and confusions, and while Governments were rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received, to nobility and the priesthood; and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy, if learning, not debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude."

In this passage the powerful sagacity of the writer had actually predicted the fates of the literary victims, headed by Bailly and Condorcet, both vehement worshippers of the Parisian rabble, and both destroyed by popular cruelty, within three years;-Bailly guillotined in the midst of every accumulation of public insult, and Condorcet driven from the haunts of man, proscribed, and dying of actual famine. Still the period of the true democracy had not arrived; and Burke was yet to see the rise of a generation to whose fierce activity, despotic designs, and unsated love of blood, the crimes of the mere philosophers were as venial, as their characters were feeble, cold, and solitary. Yet the career of those two men is worth remembering; if it can hold out a warning to the grave coxcombry among ourselves, that, under the affectation of universal science, is palpable intriguing for political power. Let those meagre imitators of the French philosophers in science, learn

to dread their fate in legislation, shrink from the attempt to ride into Parliament on the shoulders of our manufacturers by paltry flatteries of their handicraft; and, taught by the scorn which clings on the memories of those miserable dupes of corrupted principle and turgid vanity, forswear an ambition, yet only ridiculous, though sure to become at once hazardous to themselves and contemptible to the world.

Bailly was born in Paris about the middle of the last century; an era when France, relieved from the wars of Louis XIV., had begun to devote herself to the arts. His first pursuit was painting, his next poetry, his third science. Without possessing the powers that confer originality, he was remarkable for a plasticity of mind, which qualified him for various and vigorous attainment. The abstract sciences had become the way to fame; and when La Caille had acquired a reputation, Bailly might be secure of eminence. He now published a succession of papers on astronomy, fought his way up the national road to distinction, and consummated his career by being chosen, in 1770, a member of the Academy, the very summit of French literary ambition. The Brahminical astronomy, ridiculously overrated by infidelity in France, as an antagonist to the Mosaic history of the origin and age of the world, had grown into a popular topic. It was adopted by Bailly; from this point his researches led him to enquire into the nature of astronomical knowledge among the ancients; and in the ten years from 1775, he produced his three histories, of Ancient Astronomy, Modern Astronomy from the time of the school of Egypt, and Oriental Astronomy. Those works made him popular with the large class who love amusing knowledge. Anecdote, romantic speculation, and shewy theory, made Bailly the theme of the Parisian salons. He was now chosen a member of the Academy of Belles Lettres. And from that hour he began the career of his ruin!

Lively, unprincipled, and vain, he saw in the new politics of France an opening to new distinction. With the habitual ingratitude of French philosophy, he deserted the Govern