prisons, where she sunk into a swoon, when she saw herself surrounded by men whose faces, hands, clothes, and weapons were covered with blood, and when she heard the shrieks of those whom the executioners were murdering near her in the streets. When at length she was able to speak, her judges asked her if she knew anything of the plots of the court on the 10th of August.

"I am ignorant," she replied, "whether there were any; I am sure I know of none." She was then told to swear liberty and equality, and hatred to the king and queen and royalty. "I will readily swear the two first," said she, "but I cannot swear the last; it is not in my heart." "Swear," whispered a bystander; "you are dead if you do not." She made no reply, but covering her face with her hands, made a step towards the gate; she passed the threshold, was struck by a sabre, dragged over the dead bodies, swooned away, and was then massacred.

Barbarities followed, exercised upon her lifeless remains, that are not to be told. As a last specimen of infuriated malignity and brutal vengeance, her head was brought on a pike to the windows of the Temple, that the royal sufferers there (the unhappy prisoners) might see, in the instance of this unoffending lady, how fatal was the distinction of having been the ornament of their court and the associate of their domestic pleasures; how sad were the consequences of being cherished by their love and faithful to their fortunes.

It seems not possible for human brutality to go further. Civilized man and savage man, if uniting to produce a deed of horror, could not go beyond this.

And are these, then, the means by which the sacred cause of liberty is to be asserted, by which a country is to be defended, by which invaders are to be repelled, by which a Revolution is to be endeared to a people, or recommended to the respect and imitation of mankind?

The historians and the writers of memoirs connected with this period of the Revolution, generally preface their accounts by saying that a veil must be thrown over the frightful scenes that took place during these massacres of September.

No doubt, the laws of public decency must be observed; there are excesses of guilt and brutality that must not be thought possible amongst mankind, and must, therefore, not be mentioned lest the human heart should lose, by any familiarity, that first instinctive recoil of horro and disgust, which, as we now unhappily see, is its best protection.

Still, however, the crimes, the outrages that were committed, must not be concealed. It is for history to admonish mankind, to warn them of their nature, and to show them what they may become.

I am concluding my lecture, but I will first mention an incident that I observed in one of the histories of the times.

When the Convention met after the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly, it was accustomed to hold two sittings every day and in one of the evening sittings, some time after these dreadful massacres, when the hall was but feebly lighted, Danton was in the Tribune and speaking, while scarcely seen, and in the shade. He was vaunting the services he had rendered the country, and in his turn spoke aloud of reason, of justice, and of humanity. The sounds were scarcely uttered, when from a distant part, and athwart the obscure gloom of the hall, a loud and thrilling voice pronounced the word "September."

The fable of antiquity seemed now to be realized. As if the head of a Medusa had been seen, the deputies sat petrified, and the orator was struck dumb. At the word September, reason, justice, and humanity, profaned by the breath of Danton, obtained a short but memorable triumph; the hearers could no longer listen, and the speaker faltered as he endeavoured to proceed. The assembly (and that assembly the Convention) had felt the common workings of our nature, and in the bosom of the ruffian demagogue the strangled scorpions of his conscience had suddenly revived and stung him.

Something of the nature now described seems to have taken place in the sentiments even of others, who may be thought in many respects but too much to resemble him. No declaimer for the authority of the people, however wild, no demagogue, no revolutionist, that would not be checked and reduced to his limitations and apologies when reminded of the scenes that took place on these days of September; and no Frenchman, however democratic, that would refuse to acknowledge, that, during this fatal period, his Revolution and his country incurred a stain that can never be obliterated.

But the great practical lesson of these massacres of September is the precipitous nature of human guilt.

Are the authors and perpetrators of these appalling crimes, are they our fellow-mortals or not? They are men of like passions with ourselves.

See then, to what a state of degradation a community may

be reduced, to what extravagances of horror men may be excited, when each and all of them have been accustomed to tamper with their moral feelings.

In public as in private life, this is not to be done. Crime leads on to crime, probably in ourselves, certainly in those who follow us.

It is not too much to say, that they who tolerated the people in their excesses on the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, prepared the way for those of the 20th of June, and so of the 10th of August and of the rest; and that all the popular leaders who from the first shut their eyes on the licentiousness of the people, are thus gradually brought within the character of guilt, and must all, in whatever varied proportion, take their share even in the guilt of the massacres of September.*

LECTURE XXXII.

LA FAYETTE.-FAULTS OF ALLIED POWERS, ETC.

Ir is impossible to speak of the scenes and characters to which I have alluded in the two last lectures, but in the terms I have made use of; it is impossible to feel any other sensations but those of reprobation and horror. We should be as inhuman as themselves, were we to think with any other sentiments of these furious and unfeeling men, of their counsels of blood, of insurrections and massacres: insurrections against a helpless king and his family, his insulated friends and guards; and massacres of priests and aged men. And I may go still further, and protest against the employment of mobs, and all base and unprincipled pandering to the licentious passions of the people. Resist

* In the memoir on the massacres of September, there is a detailed and most affecting account of the perils and sufferings of the Abbé Sicard. The Abbé was one of the refractory priests, but was the celebrated teacher of the deaf and dumb. His narrative is very descriptive of what passed at this period.

Tallien makes a dreadful appearance in these scenes. He stands before the Legislative Assembly of his country, talking of assignats and barriers, and of the justice of the people; of the honour of the people, and of the just vengeance of the people; while all these foul butcheries were perpetrating, and while he was one of those who had regularly planned, prepared, and organized them.

Me. Roland describes her sufferings, and the efforts of her husband, then minister, to avoid the guilt and shame, she says, of being in any measure an accomplice in such transactions.

ance may be made, it may even grow up into a civil war, and sad may be the scenes of private and public wrong that may thence ensue; but what is even a civil war, compared with insurrections and massacres? Many a good and brave man may lie slaughtered in the field, and many a widow may have to mourn, and many an orphan to be desolate; but what are even these calamities (the afflicting scenes and results of honourable warfare), when put in comparison with the atrocities of the 10th of August and the 2nd of September? Who ever compared the civil wars of England with scenes of guilt and cruelty like these? We, too, have had our civil dissensions, our struggles for liberty, our Hampdens, and even our Cromwell: but not our processions of murder and assassination, our massacres in palaces and prisons, our Marats, our Dantons, and our Robespierres. The assertors of freedom are not to be the ministers of Meloch. Resistance is to be honourable and manly; it is not to be made at all but in the last resource, and after every moral and constitutional resistance has been tried in vain; but even then, it must not be made in the murder of a few faithful guards, and the butchery of men confined in public prisonsin the commission of crimes and atrocities, which can only render the very name of freedom hateful to mankind; which can only serve to reconcile them to any species of rule, however arbitrary, which leaves them any tolerable enjoyment of their lives and property.

Through these two last lectures, and through the whole of these lectures, wherever I presume to breathe the accents of censure on popular leaders at all, I speak not to censure the cause of freedom, for it is the cause of human nature, but to censure the conduct of those on whose caution and moderation its success depended, a caution and moderation on which its success must ever depend.

And having now made these general observations, I must announce to you that a painful duty immediately presents itself. I must turn from the faults, and excesses, and crimes, of the assertors of the new opinions, to the faults of those who were their opponents, the followers of the court and the supporters of the old.

It is the melancholy situation of an historian or commentator on human affairs, when they at all assume a revolutionary aspect, to be placed between the contending offences and mistakes of the patriots and rulers of mankind. He has to censure each in their turn, and to be himself very often exposed to great misapprehension; for while he is speaking with just in

dignation of the criminality of the one, he may appear to have quite forgotten, to be even insensible, to the faults of the other. This is especially the case of all who have to speak of the French Revolution. I must entreat my hearers not to do me this injustice. I would fain teach them-it would be the pride and honour of my life, it may hereafter be my comfort, to have taught them that as they belong to the educated classes of the community, they are the proper guardians, not only of the institutions of their country, but of the liberties of their country; that they must never abandon that sacred cause; but that it is a trust, delicate as it is important; and that they are not to let it descend, either by their own inertness or their own violence, to the licentious management of those below them. This I would fain teach them: but I would warn my hearers also of the little feeling which the high but too often show for the low; and as they are to be intermingled with the higher orders, many of them, and some to constitute a part of them, I would rouse them, if I could, to a sense of the temptations of their particular situation; of the carelessness with which they are apt to turn from the ignorance and sufferings of those with whom (happy and improved themselves) they suppose they have no immediate concern; of the unblushing profligacy with which they too often indulge their own vices, expecting, however, the virtues of their proper station in those below them; and, on the whole, of the little sympathy and respect which too many of them appear to have for the rights and fair claims of the lower orders. This is their remaining duty and lesson; a duty and lesson that is more and more observed and practised as the government is free, and again, as men are more and more actuated by the influence of Christianity. Of later years this duty has been very eminently felt by the people of condition in this country; but I am speaking not only of this country and of these times, but of all times and of all civilized Europe together. In prior lectures on the Constituent Assembly, and more particularly on the Legislative, I have had to hold up every warning of the first kind, the faults of the friends of freedom, and I must now direct your attention to the other; not exactly to the vices and profligacy of the higher orders, such as I had to notice when alluding to the times of the regent and Louis XV., but to the callousness, the indisposition to the cause of freedom, the total want of sympathy with the rights and interests of the community, which was so constantly shown by the royal party in France (with the exception of the king himself), and afterwards by the continental powers, through the whole of the history of the Revolution.