"In these batches, as they were called, were often united people of the most opposite systems and habits: Duport du Tertre and Barnave, Thouret and D' Espremenil, Chapelier and the old Duchess of Grammont, Gobel and Hebert. 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 in 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 eyewitness, 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 mean time 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 canvass 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 apprize 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 hangsmen 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 only conquered to see our laurels darkened in our blood, and to see elevated on the ruins of the throne a maddening faction, that maintains its monstrous power only by murder, proscriptions, and rapine? Yes, yes, it is so; the tocsin of war has sounded, and France is no more; a ferocious monster of hypocrisy has issued from her Areopagus. Yes! it is for him, and for the support of his dictatorial tyranny, that, torn from the bosom of their family, the youth of France shall expire on the frontiers; it is for him that flourishing cities shall fall, reduced to ashes and to dust; it is for him that our rivers shall cast upon the countries of the south the dead bodies by which they are infected. O honour, probity, decency, talents, and patriotism! virtues so cherished and beloved, you are but the titles to proscription under the reign of this cannibal and his followers. Robbery unpunished, plunder decreed, divorce encouraged, irreligion applauded, prostitution salaried, informations, treachery, falsehood rewarded. Let pity shed a tear, and it shall be a passport to the scaffold. Infancy and age, grace and beauty, all, all, are now alike the prey of these famished vultures. A torpor universal paralyzes France; a fear of death shoots cold to every heart; the name of death is inscribed on every door. And is it at this moment, monster of hypocrisy ! that thou canst proclaim the worship of a Being above? Yes, barbarian! there is a Being above; and if to this day thou hast doubted it, acknowledge it now, and acknowledge his justice, for it is he who, at the moment thou proclaimest his existence, it is he that sendeth thee to the scaffold-die."

Such is the opening of the third part of the History by the Two Friends. The dreadful detail, which justifies every senti

ment that is thus delivered in the imagery of a feeling and animated mind, may be found in the third part of the work that follows, and it is to this third part of the work I must refer you: it contains every thing that relates to this tremendous subject, and the view of it that is taken by the historians in the quotation I have made, is the view I have already offered you.

But I stop now for a moment to direct your attention to a particular episode that may be found in this history, and that, I think, illustrates in a very interesting manner the nature of this system of terror. It is a curious narrative given by some friend to these writers, some individual who but too inconsiderately ventured to come to Paris during the Reign of Terror, to recover some money that was due to him. You have here a more distinct picture of the state of Paris at the time, from the minuteness of the detail, than can elsewhere be obtained. The manner in which this poor man was rejected from the house of his old friend, who durst not receive him; the terror he occasioned by knocking at the door; the night he passed in the streets, as he could not be admitted; the police offices to which he was conducted; the wretches he saw there; the appearance of the streets and houses; the frightful inscriptions of every kind that he observed; the aristrocratic mistakes that, coming from the country, he naturally made; the torments of every description that he endured; the delays and vexations about his passport, till he could contrive some mode of escaping out of Paris unobserved; the chances that befriended him; the tumult of joy with which he found himself in the midst of his family once more; all these particulars, and many more that will be met with in this account, give a reader of reflection a more distinct impression of what was then suffered in Paris and in France than volumes of any history can possibly do, and I only regret that the story is too minute, and therefore too long, to be here quoted.

After giving this narrative of their friend, the authors travel on, as you should do, through all the transactions, all the various abuses of power, all the inconceivable excesses of cruelty and iniquity, which they think it their duty to relate; what passed at Lyons, Nantes, and in La Vendée: descrip