steps with huzzas. When, after a long detour, he at length reached the place where he was to die, either some official delay, or some contrivance of official malignity, kept him standing on the scaffold for three hours, in the midst of a bitter November tempest of sleet and rain. "Aha! vous tremblez, Bailly," was the taunt of the circle of ruffians round him, who saw the shuddering of the half-naked old man. "C'est le froid, mon ami," was his only answer. But his pain was at last brought to a conclusion. He was flung under the hatchet of the guillotine, and with the roar of twenty thousand of his fellow-traitors in his ears, yelling A bas les traîtres! he closed a life of spurious ambition.

ment which had raised him to wealth by the munificence of its institutions, and threw himself into the full chase of popular applause. His intelligence and activity soon attracted notice, and entering the States-General as a simple representative of the tiers état, he sat as President of the first National Assembly. The fate of the monarchy was already decided, and Bailly made himself conspicuous, by the first blow to the prerogative, in his refusal to submit to the royal order for the dissolution of the Assembly, in the well-known words of the oath, "never to separate, until they had obtained a free constitution." He had now achieved the height of democratic renown, and received a fatal proof of popular confidence in his appointment to the Mayoralty of Paris, on the eventful 14th of July, 1789, the day of the capture of the Bastile. But he had now entered on a pursuit in which every step is downward. The champion of Democracy must always either keep in front, or be trampled down. The first attempt of Bailly to check the riot of the populace was his overthrow. He had ordered the soldiery to fire on the Revolutionary mob in the Champ de Mars. The wrath of the multitude was boundless, at this disappointment of robbery and massacre. Bailly, terrified at the aspect of public vengeance, shrank from office, retired into his study, and professed himself sick of ambition. But he was not thus to evade the ruin which he and his tribe of traitors had brought upon the throne. The blood of his King was on the head of every Girondist. Bailly was dragged from his seclusion by Robespierre, and in November, 1793, the regicide philosopher was put to death, amid the shouts of the rabble that he had inflamed, that he had panegyrized, and that he had plunged into a sea of blood, profanation, and treason. His last hours were wretchedness itself. The weather was dreadfully cold, yet Bailly, accustomed to luxurious life, and nearly sixty, was conveyed in an open cart through the streets of the metropolis where he had once usurped the authority of his King, and surrounded by the execrations of the multitude who had once followed his

Condorcet was a victim of a higher order in all senses of the word,man of noble birth, of large attainments, and of distinguished science. About ten years younger than Bailly, his rank introduced him more rapidly into the leading circles of Parisian literature. He became the intimate of Voltaire and the shewy crowd of infidelity. But his own powers substantiated all his claims to scientific distinction. And France was astonished to see a Marquis, at the age of twenty-two, producing treatises on some of the sublimest subjects of analysis. The public honours of science naturally_followed, and the Marquis of Condorcet was made a member of the Academy of Sciences at twenty-six. His unusual combination of eloquence with abstract knowledge, added to his distinctions the Secretaryship of the French Academy, on the death of D'Alembert. The profligate principles of all French society had prepared every man for the Revolution. All virtue begins at the fireside, and the altar. Condorcet followed the Revolution in its fiery speed over the ruins of the State, and was consumed by the sparks flung from its wheels. He published a journal filled with trea

son.

He realized the treasons of his journal by entering into the Jacobin Club. Too malignant to suffer royalty to perish without a wound from his hand, yet too feeble to strike the mortal blow himself, he took shelter alternately behind_the ranks of the Jacobins and the Bris

sotins, and did the work of both with out securing the protection of either. But even this contemptible dexterity could not save him. He had sat in judgment on his King, and he was to share in the retribution of that murder. Of all the crimes of individuals or public bodies within history, the death of the unhappy Louis was perhaps the most rapidly, the most condignly, and the most naturally avenged on his destroyers. Of the majority of 361 who voted for regicide, scarcely one escaped the direct punishment of this atrocious crime. Many were exiled, many died in utter beggary in France, many died by the same axe which had drunk the royal blood. Scarcely one survived within a few years. The Legislature stained with that blood was suddenly extinguished. France, the guilty participator, was scourged by the perpetual infliction of every calamity that can smite a perjured people; a civil war that cost a million of lives, a foreign war that cost three millions, twenty years of conscription, finished by the ruin of her veteran army of 500,000 men, the inroads of all the armies of Europe over her provinces, the double capture of her capital, the ruin of her martial glory, and the utter dismantling of her empire. She had bound herself to the demon by a compact of slaughter, and while she could supply the tribute from the veins of Europe, the compact was good; she revelled in victory and possession, that seemed to be achieved by means above the power of man; but when she could betray no more, the compact recoiled upon the necromancer. The evil principle by which she had been borne along in the glare of unaccountable triumphs must be paid by her own sacrifice, and the Jacobin Empire was the last price of the Jacobin spell.

Condorcet had outlived the Brissotins, but he was not forgotten by the bolder traitors. In 1793 he was pursued by the general vengeance that swept the ranks of French faction, in the shape of Robespierre; himself to fill an abhorred grave the moment this task was done. The wretched Ex-noble hid himself in Paris for nine months, a period of protracted terror much worse than VOL. XXXV. NO. CCXVII.

the brief pang of the scaffold. At length he fled to the country, in the hope of finding refuge in the house of a friend at Montronge. This friend happened to be absent, and the fugitive dreading to discover himself to the neighbourhood, wandered into the adjoining thickets, where he lay for two nights, perishing of cold and hunger. At length, compelled by intolerable suffering, he ventured to apply for food at the door of a little inn; there he was recognised as the delinquent named in the decree of arrest, seized, and thrown into the village dungeon, to be conveyed next day to Paris. Next morning he was found lying on the floor, dead. As he continually carried poison with him, he was supposed to have died by his own hand! Thus miserably perished, in the vigour of life and understanding, (for he was but fifty-one,) a man of the most accomplished intellect, and possessing every advantage of rank, fortune, and fame. But he wanted a higher advantage still, honesty of heart. "He had sacrificed loyalty to popular applause, personal honour to ambition, and the force, grandeur, and truth of religious principle, to the vanity of being the most dexterous scoffer in the halls of philosophic infidelity. Grafting irreligion on personal profligacy, and rebellion on on both, his death was the natural produce. Living an Atheist and a traitor, he finished his course in despair and suicide.

Burke's prediction of the fall of the philosophes by the hands which they had armed, was fully realized. Still there is a distinction to be taken. His phrase was Learning. It would have been more exactly Science. Of all the cultivated nations, France in all periods has been the most destitute of that knowledge which is to be drawn from the treasuries of ancient wisdom. She has been among the most expert in science. The distinction arises largely from the peculiar temperament of the national mind. From ancient learning man gains wisdom, from modern science he gains knowledge. The labour, the grave reliance on the maxims wrought by ages of trial, the acknowledgment that they may be indebted for truth to the dead, the homage to the

C

tered into their hearts, and hurried them down to perish in the troubled waters of conspiracy and murder!

mighty minds of Greece and Rome, are feelings alien to the character of the nation. They have no resting place in its quick elasticity, its vivid self-sufficiency, and its thirst of all that is novel, brilliant, and productive of instant applause. But all those qualities are the wings of science. In its wide and captivating pursuits, the man of France found the natural region for his volatile and eager ambition. All cultivators of the higher sciences know that there is a charm in their investigation all but irresistible; perpetual variety, perpetual novelty, an unlimited capability of attainment; and all those followed by the most animated and immediate popular celebrity. Astronomy, mechanics, and physiology, were adopted by French genius with the most unrelaxing ardour. Men of the highest rank rushed into this arena. War no longer offered a vent for the national effervescence; the subtleties of scientific speculation supplied its place, and in that boundless element the national faculties might expand and expatiate for ever.

Burke's phrase of the "Swinish" multitude gave memorable offence; popular wrath was denounced in every form against the insult to the decorums of the mob. To have characterised the Revolutionists as atheists and regicides; was but a species of involuntary applause, but to depict their rudeness as savage, and their ignorance as brutish, was high treason to the majesty of Sansculottism in all lands. Their in dignation scorned to make allowance for metaphor to the great master of metaphor, or for the ardour of argument to an orator pleading the greatest cause that ever came before the judgment of man. The culprit phrase was branded by every mark of rabble and resentment; and pamphlets, ballads, and toasts, were hurled on the head of the sage, who had only proclaimed a truth acknowledged by every rational understanding, and fatally confirmed by the popular conduct of France, before the ink that wrote it down was dry. Happy for the Revolutionists, if they had been responsible for no more than the faculties of swine! Still happier for them, if the rebellious "Legion" had not en

The commencement of the attack on the throne had been a general assault on the Church Establishment of France. But the assailants of that Church were not inflamed by zeal for the suppression of its errors; their object was the seizure of its property. The deepest covering that the most antiquated superstition had ever thrown over truth might have lain on it for ever, if nothing but a truth was to be vindicated. The French assertors of the right of overthrow had other purposes than clearing the great religious fabric of its decay and dust, the bats and moles, that flitted or burrowed within its precincts. They were indignant→ not at its impurities, but at its possessions; not at the rites of its altars, but at the gold and silver that still glittered there, beyond the reach of their infidel rapacity. The first act of the National Assembly-that guilty fount of all the crimes and misfor tunes of France, ten thousand times more culpable in its hypocrisy than the Decemvirate, with Robespierre in the fury of open carnage was the ruin of the Church. We of this country cannot feel the zeal of advocates for the great champion of the Papacy; but it moves the scorn and abhorrence of all men with hearts in their bosoms, to see the ostentatious havoc, the rivalry of destruction, with which that smiling and bowing Assembly made its first claim on the reprobation of posterity, in its treason to the Church of France. We have those in this country who are longing only to adopt their model. But whether feeble guardianship shall betray, or pretended exigency shall plunder, or popular ferocity shall subvert, the miseries of revolutionized France will be sport to the miseries of undone England. The bed on which the great criminal of the eighteenth century was flung will be a bed of dalliance, to the bed of flame, in which the great criminal of the nineteenth will leave her ashes as a warning to the world. To this fierce faction in England, Burke addressed his most powerful wisdom.

"Our whole constitution," said he," has been formed under the auspices, and has been confirmed by

the sanctions, of Religion. The whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national character, and from a sort of native plainness and directness of understanding, which has for a long time characterised those men who have successively obtained authority among us. This disposition still remains, at least in the great body of the people.

"We know, and what is better, we feel, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort. In Eng land, we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We shall never be such fools, as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system, to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on Atheism to explain them. We shall not light our Temple from that unhallowed fire. It will be illumined with other lights; it will be perfumed with other incense, than the infectious stuff which is import ed by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics. If our Ecclesiastical Establishment should want a revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public or private, that we shall employ for the audit or application of its consecrated revenue.”

From those general statements, he passes to the condition of French Ecclesiastical polity. "We know, and it is our pride to know, that man, by his constitution, is a religious animal; that Atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts, and that it cannot continue long; but if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delirium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of Hell, which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion, which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilisation among us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, perni

cious, and degrading superstition might take place of it."

It is no more than a just tribute to the sagacity of the great writer, or rather a homage to the protective wisdom of Heaven, speaking by the lips of political inspiration, that both those consequences strictly followed the public subversion of Christianity in France. All Europe saw with astonishment the nation, who had refused the religion of the Scriptures, instantly shaping a religion of their own; inventing a burlesque compound of romance, fable, and metaphysics, for their creed; and esta blishing a worship half borrowed from Paganism, and half from the opera. But the extravagance of public folly was incomplete, and the pollution unworthy of Atheism, until Paris saw a public harlot placed upon the altar and the whole legislature actually bowing down with the most solemn formalities of worship to this living emblem of impu rity. Burke's declaration of the incompatibility of Atheism with the publie understanding was realized with almost equal speed. Even so early as 1793, and even from the lips of Robespierre, the confession was wrung, that the belief in a God was essential. While this consummate criminal, this demoniac of the Revolution, was decreeing, in the spirit of Paganism, a succession of days of worship, or fêtes, to Justice, Modesty, Truth, Friendship, and other poetic idolisms of his new Pantheon, he pronounced a discourse in the Convention on the necessity of acknowledging a God." The idea of a Supreme Being," he exclaimed, "and of the immortality of the soul, is a continual call to justice. It is therefore a social and republican principle. Who has authorized you to declare that a Deity does not exist? Oh, you who support so arid a doctrine, what advantage do you expect to derive from the principle, that a blind fatality regulates the affairs of men, and that the soul is nothing but a breath of air impelled towards the tomb? Will the idea of nonentity inspire man with more elevated sentiments than that of immortality? Will it awaken more respect for others or himself; more courage to resist tyranny, greater contempt for pleasure or death?

You, who regret a virtuous friend, can you endure the thought that his noblest part has not escaped disso lution? You who weep over the remains of a child or a wife, are you consoled by the thought that a handful of dust is all that remains of the beloved object? You, the unfortunate, who expire under the stroke of the assassin, is not your last voice raised to appeal to the justice of the Most High? Innocence on the scaffold, supported by such thoughts, makes the tyrant turn pale on his triumphal car. Could such an ascendant be felt, if the tomb levelled alike the oppressor and his victim?" How much does this acknowledgement, which came only from the lip, remind us of the self-condemning confessions of the enemies of God and man in earlier times! We might almost think that we saw the false prophet who was summoned to curse the righteous cause, constrained to bless; or one of those sons of irreparable ruin, whose knowledge only increases their crime and their misery, who "believe and tremble."

Burke pursues the argument for an authorized, legal form of worship, as indispensable to the uses and dignity of religion. "Instead of quarrelling with establishments, as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them. We are resolved to keep an established Church, an established Monarchy, an established Aristocracy, and an established Democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater. I speak of the Church establishment first. It is first, and last, and midst in our minds. For, taking ground on that religious sys tem, of which we are now in possession, we continue to act on the early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense, not only like a wise architect, has built up the august fabric of states, but, like a provident proprietor, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple, purged from all the impurities of fraud, and violence, and injustice, and tyranny, hath solemnly and for ever consecrated the commonwealth, and all that officiate in it. This consecration is made, that all who ad

minister in the government of men, in which they stand representatives of the Deity himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and distinction; that their hope should be full of immortality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid and permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature, and to a perma nent fame and glory in the example they leave, as a rich inheritance to the world.

"Such sublime principles ought to be infused into persons of exalted situations; and religious establish ments ought to be provided, that they may continually revive and enforce them. Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than necessary, in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man, whose prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own making; and who, when made as he ought to be, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation. But, wherever man is put over man, as the better nature ought ever to preside; in that case more particularly, he should as nearly as possible be approximated to his perfection. **** To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the State, that no man should approach, to look into its defects or corruptions, but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country, who are prompt rashly to hack their aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life.