nature; the forms of justice stripped of every appearance of humanity and honour; France covered with lock-up houses and prisons; all the excesses of anarchy and despotism struggling with each other in noisy commotion amid a confused multitude of committees of every possible name and nature; terror and consternation in every heart; the scaffold devouring every day a hundred victims, and threatening every day to devour a still greater number; in every house, an universal melancholy and mourning, in every public street and place the silence of the tomb. Such was this incredible system, that annihilated everything, all persons, all property, everything. War was waged against nature in her tenderest emotions. Was a tear shed over the tomb of a father, a wife, a friend, it was, according to these Jacobins, a robbery of the republic. Grief, they held, was not to be confined within domestic limits. Not to rejoice, when the Jacobins rejoiced-not to rejoice, though in the loss of relations one saw torn away all the ties that bound one to existence,was to conspire against the republic. All the mob of tipstaffs and low officers of justice, some of whom could scarcely read, sported with the lives of men, without the slightest shame or remorse. Often, a person taken up received an act of accusation intended for another; the officer only changed the name on perceiving his error, and sometimes did not change it. Mistakes of the most inconceivable nature were made with impunity: the Dowager Duchess of Biron was judged upon an act of accusation drawn up against her agent. A young man of only twenty, was taken to execution for having a son then bearing arms (as it was alleged) against France. Another young man of sixteen, of the name of Mallet, was brought up; but it was a man of the name of Bellay, of the age of forty, that was intended. "What is your age?" said the president, looking at him with some surprise. Sixteen." "Well, you are quite forty in crime," replied the bloody magistrate; "take him away to the guillotine." From every corner of France victims were brought in carts to the Conciergerie. This prison was filled and emptied, every day, by daily massacres, and by transfers from other prisons. These removals were made when it was dark; in the fear, no doubt, that the sensibility of the spectators might be excited by the deplorable state of the prisoners. Fifty or sixty poor creatures, strait-bound, conducted by men of ferocious aspect, a drawn sabre in one hand, and a lighted torch in the other, passed in this manner through the silence of the night. The passenger who happened to meet them, had to

keep his pity well concealed in the bottom of his heart, if he wished to preserve his own liberty: a sigh that had escaped him, would instantly have united him to the unhappy beings who composed the funeral train before him. The prisons, multiplied in every quarter of Paris, were the abode of every possible species of suffering. The Committee of Public Safety had calculated the quantity of air and light that was necessary for the mere existence of their victims. The despair that reigned under the vaults of these sepulchres presented itself under forms the most terrific: one finished his unhappy existence by poison; another dispatched himself by a nail, that he buried in his heart: one opened his veins by the first sharp instrument he could get hold of; another dashed his head against the bars of the casements: some lost their reason: those who had sufficient fortitude waited patiently for the executioner, or gave in to the snares which they knew were laid for them by the spies that surrounded them. Every house of arrest was required to furnish a certain number of victims. The turnkeys went with these mandates of accusation from chamber to chamber in the dead of the night: the prisoners, starting from their sleep, at the voice of their Cerberuses, supposed their end had arrived; and it was thus, that warrants of death for thirty threw into a state of consternation many hundreds. At first the officers of justice ranged fifteen at a time in their carts, which Barrere called "live coffins;" soon after, thirty; and about the time of the fall of Robespierre, preparations had been made for the execution of a hundred and fifty at a time. An aqueduct had been contrived to carry off the blood. It was always about three o'clock in the afternoon that these long processions of victims descended from the tribunals, and marched slowly through lines of spectators, who came to see them pass on, with inconceivable eagerness. Forty-five magistrates of the parliament of Paris, thirty-three of the parliament of Toulouse, moved along to death in as composed a manner as they had been accustomed to do formerly on occasions of public ceremony. They were accused of a conspiracy; their real crime was a protest, idle enough to be sure, made secretly against the innovations that had taken place in France after the destruction by the Constituent Assembly of their ancient courts of magistracy. Forty farmers-general, executed together, showed in their last moments a fortitude not expected from their luxurious habits of life. The Duc du Chatelet, Custines, the father and the son, Brunet, Houchard, Biron, Lamerliere, Luckner, and other warriors, that had been crowned

with victory, were conducted to the scaffold, and seemed as if some torpor had been thrown over them by enchantment; not a word, not a symptom of indignation; they had only to die.

"In these batches, as they were called, were often united people of the most opposite systems and habits; Duport du Terte and Barnave, Thouret and D'Espremenil, Chapelier and the old Duchess of Grammont, Gobel and Herbert. Sometimes whole generations were destroyed in a day. Malesherbes, at the age of eighty, perished with his sister, his daughter, his son-in-law, his grandson, and his granddaughter; Montmorin with his son; four of the Briennes, with the sister of Louis XVI. accused of having transmitted some jewels to her brothers: she was the only one that was examined; of this the rest complained. 'It is quite sufficient,' replied Dumas; 'to death!' Forty young women were brought to the guillotine for having danced at a ball given by the king of Prussia at Verdun; twenty-two peasant women, whose husbands had been executed at La Vendée.

'Again: a law had ordered all the nobles to leave Paris in three days on pain of death. A woman, found in disobedience to the decree, was conducted to the Conciergerie; for three days she had taken no food: her reason had become disordered. Born in affluence, she had with difficulty during the last year, by daily labour, found means to keep herself alive after the law that ordered her to emigrate had passed, having no one she could confide in, death was her only resource-and she came to demand it. The paleness occasioned by her sufferings, prevented not the traces still appearing of elegance and a sense of propriety, and youth, and even beauty; but her affliction had not yet reached its height: she had to learn that her husband had just been executed; she was called widow in her indictment: she was then executed herself.

"Again: a messenger was dispatched by the Convention to stop a particular execution. As the messenger ran up the garden, he heard the guillotine descend: he redoubled his speed; but again, he heard a second; a third victim had now mounted the scaffold, and the messenger was unable to make himself heard: a fourth, in like manner, before he could make himself understood by the executioner. The prisoner was already tied to the fatal plank. 'Pardon! pardon!' cried the multitude. Your name? said the officer, addressing the poor man, as he lay bound before him. It was told him. 'Alas! no, it is not you! and he was immediately guillotined. The messenger in an agony made for the prison; and he there found the object of

his inquiry: the condemned man was waiting the return of the tumbrel, his hair cut off, his hands tied behind him, his wife and his nine children lamenting his fate and their own: an instant dried their tears. Affecting picture," says the historian, "which I wish I could more often present to my readers, to relieve them from the pain they must suffer, while I have to recall events, which I would willingly efface from the pages of our history."

Such are a few of the paragraphs that I have selected from the historian Desodoards. He is a very regular writer, and, as I have mentioned, was an eye-witness, and acquainted, as he tells us in his preface, and afterwards in his work, with all the principal men that figured in the Revolution.

I have hitherto said nothing of the military executions, perpetrated at Lyons, Toulon, in La Vendée, and elsewhere, because they were military; and, though unspeakably atrocious, stand not exactly on the same footing. I shall have to allude to them hereafter, but in the meantime I must beg you to observe, that I have only called your attention to the most acknowledged facts, such as happened at Paris, such as neither are, nor can be justified or explained by any insurrection or rebellion, or opposition to the existing government whatever; and that I could not have stated them to you in a more simple and less impressive manner, than by selecting and translating paragraphs in the way I have done from the pages first of a regular, and composed, and cold historian, like Toulongeon, afterwards from Desodoards. Such facts, however, even thus delivered to you, will speak to your mind, if you come to reflect upon them, things unutterable, and picture to your imagination an abuse of power, and a mass of guilt and horror, totally unparalleled in the annals of the world. It was the proscriptions of Rome, it was the massacre of St. Bartholomew, it was the orgies and abominations of the massacres of September, all mingled and mixed, and lengthened out on one dark and fearful canvas for days, and weeks, and months together; till even the mob of Paris turned away, from the mere weariness of having eternally to look at the same repeated picture.

LECTURE XXXIX.

REIGN OF TERROR.

In my last lecture I endeavoured to give you some general notion of the system of terror that existed in France under the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and I entered my protest against the species of defence that has been set up for such enormities by two very able historians, Mignet and Thiers, more particularly, and more or less by all the later historians. Not willing to leave you to depend upon any authority of mine, I made extracts from their works to apprise you of the facts, and enable you thus the better to judge of their reasonings. I cannot well go into the detail of these scenes, but I must continue a little longer to dwell on this subject, and in the way I did in the lecture of yesterday.

I have often referred you to the History of this Revolution by the Two Friends of Liberty, and to this history I must again refer you. You will nowhere find the detail of this Reign of Terror better given, and their testimony is quite decisive. These "Two Friends of Liberty," as they style themselves, are authors that, through the whole of their work, have shown themselves long and warmly attached to the popular cause, and they make the same improper concessions to the Jacobins that I have noted in all the other writers, and say, that this system of terror defended the country; yet are they at the same time totally overpowered and shocked when they have, in the course of their narrative, to describe these extraordinary atrocities. You will see how they are affected, and justly affected, when you read the opening of the third part of their work,

"What funeral pall," they cry, "is this, that envelops desolated France? What mean those stifled sighs, which victims crowded into dungeons seem to fear should be heard by the hangmen that surround them? What then, when the ancient tree of royalty, struck to the very root, strews with its withered branches the sacred soil of the republic, when the liberty of a whole people has been proclaimed in the face of heaven, is this same people, far from lifting itself in majesty above the nations that are enslaved, to bend its dishonoured front beneath the hatchets of executioners? Good heavens! have we then broken our fetters, torn off the mask from fanaticism, and cast away the disgrace and the chains of a long servitude; and have we