gitive, issues from Paris and the Convention; from the Jacobins, and the perpetrators of the massacres of September; from the bleeding ruins of his party, and the frightful anarchy of his country; and while the sword is suspended over himself, in the total failure of all his political hopes, and before he dispatches himself by poison, actually delivers a work to posterity on the future melioration and happiness of his fellow-creatures, and the indefinite perfectibility of the human race! The eloquent Vergniaud, and other leaders of the Gironde party, go calmly to their execution; the wife of Roland predicts that her husband will not survive her; and he is found on the road-side, having fallen on his sword like the patriots of Roman story. Barbaroux destroys himself; so do others. Pétion and Buzot wander away from their pursuers, till they lie down and die. The sentence is pronounced on the two-and-twenty deputies together; and Valazé falls down in a swoon. "What then, are you afraid?" said Gensonné, who stood also condemned beside him he was not afraid; for he had, unperceived, thrust a poniard into his own heart. "It is difficult," says the deputy Sulles, writing his last letter to his wife, "it is difficult to serve one's country. Brutus, when he destroyed a tyrant; Cato, when he destroyed himself; each equally failed of saving Rome from oppression. I have believed that I devoted myself for the people: if my recompense is to be death, I shall still have the consciousness of good intentions; it is pleasing to me, to think that I carry to the tomb my own esteem; and that one day, perhaps, I shall receive the esteem of the public also. But bear up, my love, as I do; hope on! and hope in Him who is the master of all. Mankind have long acknowledged his existence; and I have too much interest in believing that order must somewhere or other exist, not to believe in the immortality of my soul. He is great, and just, and good; the God at whose tribunal I am to appear. I bear to Him a heart, though not exempt from weaknesses, free, at least, from crimes, and pure in its intentions."

The slight notices that I have thus taken of those distinguished men, will induce you, I hope, to turn and consider their characters and their history. What shall we say to them? The crimes of some of them, the faults of many of them, disappear in the midst of the greater crimes and faults of their opponents, and are forgotten while we read of their misfortunes, and the calmness with which they met their fate, or the courage with which they defied their oppressors.

It is impossible to save ourselves from an influence of this

kind, while we contemplate their high qualities, and read their story. But after this has been felt, and every testimony due to them thus properly discharged, we must not turn away from what is necessary to the purposes of our own instruction, and what is due to the moral purity of our own minds; we must not forget their behaviour to the king, during the earlier sittings of the Legislative Assembly; their hostility to the Constitutionalists, and La Fayette; their resolution, at all events, to have their experiment of a republic, or of some new dynasty, which must have ended in a republic, tried; and lastly, their contrivance of the insurrection of the 10th of August; from the first, their referring all political right and wrong to the mere will of the people. These mistakes, and faults, and crimes must not be forgotten.

I consider the example of these men, in all its bearings, as very edifying, and of the highest importance, to a very interesting, very elated, but very impracticable and dangerous description of the friends of freedom, if they would but condescend to consider it; edifying and important to them in the way I have endeavoured to explain. But my doctrines are so humble in their nature, and so little captivating in their sound, that I may well fear to fatigue an audience (a youthful audience) by recurring to them too often, and insisting upon them too long. In brief, the faults of the Girondists were not a little the faults of young men, as described by Lord Bacon. "Young men," says he, "in the conduct and management of actions, embrace more than they can hold, stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles, which they have chanced upon, absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first, and that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them, like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Of the old, on the contrary," says Lord Bacon, "they object too much; they consult too long; they adventure too little: they repent too soon; and they seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.' In these last words the great philosopher did not, perhaps, mean to compliment the old, but in these few words appears to me, I confess, the sum and substance of all human wisdom in practical politics-"to content ourselves with a mediocrity of success." This does not

exclude, but it on the contrary supposes, enterprise and benevolence, active virtue; but it supposes also, a deep sense of the

uncertainty of everything human, the respect that is due to the opinions and feelings of others, the tremendous nature, if once roused, of the collective passions of mankind.

LECTURE XXXVIII.

REIGN OF TERROR

THE Girondists are put down. They were the last party that could pretend to any virtuous principle. Guilty, as they had themselves been, of the 10th of August, and the conduct that led to it, still they would have saved the king, and would have punished, if they could, the authors of the massacres of September; and for these last sentiments of humanity and justice, for these last compunctious visitings of nature, and the crime of being in the way of the ambition of their political opponents, they perished.

We are now to see the sway of men still more violent and bloody; men, whom no crimes could make to hesitate, or turn from their course; of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

From the first opening of these lectures I have warned you against all counsels of violence and fury; I have wearied you with entreaties ever to remember the wisdom of moderation; to cherish and to reverence that despised and insulted virtue; the safeguard of the state; the correcting guardian of the virtues of mankind; the timely protectress of the human heart against its vices, above all, against those excesses and enormities of guilt, from the very mention of which, in its calm and original state, it would have recoiled with horror. Look now at these scenes of the French Revolution: see, what is the result of this eternal fault to be imputed to all parties in their turn; this neglect of all moderation; this disregard of the means for the sake of the end; this insensibility to the objectionable nature, to the criminality of the expedients, by which an object is to be accomplished; even in policy this total forgetfulness of this practical truth, that no violent measure can ever be adopted by one set of men, that is not sure to be followed by some antagonist measure, still more violent, of their opponents.

I do not despair of the cause of liberty, or human improvement; it is not necessary, it is not wise to do so; but everything is devoted to ruin, and there is no hope, if men will listen to

no counsellors but their own wild wishes, and their own resentful passions; and pay no attention to those great sentiments of human conduct and those great principles of justice, humanity, and right, that are implanted within them by their Creator.

Such are the sentiments with which we should turn to survey this crisis of human affairs, at which we are now arrived; the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

This reign is best represented in the history of the Two Friends of Liberty. The other historians, to whom you would naturally refer, in one sense of the word desert us, desert the cause of human nature; for they are too much occupied in the miserable office of making out a case for France; of insensibly reconciling us to the atrocities, which they cannot openly vindicate; and they would often lead us, if they could, even to the ridiculous supposition, that these atrocities were owing to the machinations of England. "The intrigues of the stranger-Pitt and his gold;" these are never-failing resources, when they want an explanation or an excuse, for what they cannot deny. But let not cruelty and wickedness, and political faults of every kind, be thus suffered to escape your censure and abhorrence. I would save you, if I could, from the plausible representations, from the specious but unsound reasonings, from the natural, from the insensible, the inevitable influence of these French writers; for they are very able writers, and such as are especially fitted to attract your confidence. And if there be one lesson, more than another, resulting from these dreadful scenes, it is, the manner in which ingenious and bad men can gloss over their crimes; the manifesto that each party, and that any party, can produce in its turn, by taking for granted whatever is necessary to constitute its justification.

"I hate, when Vice can bolt her arguments,

And Virtue has no tongue to check her pride. And among other afflicting circumstances to which the human race is exposed, it is not the least (it may be indeed to answer some great probationary purpose of our Creator), that there is no cause so bad, in defence of which something plausible may not be urged; and that, during the present state of our existence, we are left to an unremitting exercise of our faculties and virtues, if we are to endeavour, as it is our duty to do, to distinguish the right from the wrong, and escape from the sophistries and pretences, with which bad men and their abettors give a colour to their guilty proceedings.

I speak of the modern French historians. But it is not always

thus, that historians are unworthy of their office. Look at Tacitus, and observe how the Romans appear in his indignant pages; and this, whether they are the scourges and oppressors of mankind, or the disgrace. Look at the French historian, De Thou, when he has to speak of the massacres of St. Bartholomew-look at Hume, or Robertson, or any of the great and regular writers on history, whatever be the occasion or the people, they never forget the great interests of mankind; their own first duties as historians; the defence they are always bound to afford to those great obligations of mercy, justice, and humanity, which alone can bind up men together into any state, that can deserve the name of a civilized community.

Remember, therefore, before I advert to this Reign of Terror, that I accuse the French historians, such as you will naturally read, of deserting the cause of humanity; and this (as I conceive) for no other or better reason, but the miserable reason of making out a case for their country. And again, that I accuse the actors in the scene, of the most astonishing defiance of all nature and common sense, in representing themselves as the defenders of their country, and as models of every virtue that can be named.

I will read you extracts from the best historians, that you may receive the facts of the case not on any authority of mine, but on their own. And you will observe at the same time their reasonings; not forgetting the protest that I have now made against such reasonings. This protest, however, it may be as well (perhaps before I begin to allude to the history) shortly to substantiate by such remarks as occur to me.

I must observe, then, in the first place, that reasonings of this kind would not have been tolerated, even in France itself, for a long period posterior to the Reign of Terror; and that the ingenuity of modern historians must not be suffered to avail itself of the obscurity in which distant scenes are placed, and of the fugitive nature of the impressions of reasonable men, who lived at the time, thus to defy all the common sense and common feelings that belong to us as rational creatures.

Again. It is very obvious to remark, that the real defence of the Revolution, and of France, was accomplished not by Robespierre and the Jacobins, but by Dumourier in the autumn of 1792. Both might be in some danger then, from the allied powers, but were never afterwards. The defence of the great kingdom of France always consisted not in the outrages of bloody demagogues, in their insurrections and their massacres,