others who had been taken, when La Fayette, roused from his repose, arrived at the head of a body of grenadiers of the old French guards, who had been lately incorporated with the civic guard, and were probably the most efficient part of his force. He did not think of avenging the unfortunate gentlemen, who lay murdered before his eyes for the discharge of their military duty; but he entreated his soldiers to save him the dishonour of breaking his word, which he had pledged to the King, that he would protect the Gardes du Corps. It is probable he attempted no more than was in his power, and so far acted wisely, if not generously.

To redeem Monsieur de la Fayette's pledge, the grenadiers did, what they ought to have done in the name of the King, the law, the nation, and insulted humanity, they cleared, and with perfect ease, the court of the palace from these bands of murderous bacchantes, and their male associates. The instinct of ancient feelings was in some degree awakened in the grenadiers. They experienced a sudden sensation of compassion and kindness for the Gardes du Corps, whose duty on the royal person they had in former times shared. There arose a cry among them,-"Let us save the Gardes du Corps, who saved us at Fontenoy." They took them under their protection, exchanged their caps with them in sign of friendship and fraternity, and a tumult which had something of the character of joy, succeeded to that which had announced nothing but blood and death.

The outside of the palace was still besieged by the infuriated mob, who demanded, with hideous cries, and exclamations the most barbarous and obscene, to see the Austrian, as they called the Queen. The unfortunate Princess appeared on the balcony, with one of her children in each hand. A voice from the crowd called out, "No children!" as if on purpose to deprive the mother of that appeal to humanity, which might move the hardest heart. Marie Antoinette, with a force of mind worthy of Maria Theresa, her mother, pushed her children back into the room, and, turning her face to the tumultuous multitude, which tossed and roared beneath, brandishing their pikes and guns with the wildest attitudes of rage, the reviled, persecuted, and denounced Queen stood before them, her arms folded on her bosom, with a noble air of courageous resignation. The secret reason of this summons the real cause of repelling the children-could only be to afford a chance of some desperate hand among the crowd executing the threats which resounded on all sides. Accordingly, a gun was actually levelled, but one of the bystanders struck it down; for the passions of the mob had taken an opposite turn, and, astonished at Marie Antoinette's noble presence, and graceful firmness of demeanour, there arose, almost in spite of themselves, a general shout of Vive la Reine!

But if the insurgents, or rather those who prompted them,

missed their first point, they did not also lose their second. A cry arose, To Paris!' at first uttered by a solitary voice, but gathering strength, until the whole multitude shouted, To Paris-to Paris! The cry of these blood-thirsty bacchanals, such as they had that night shown themselves, was, it seems, considered as the voice of the people, and as such, La Fayette neither remonstrated himself, nor permitted the King to interpose a moment's delay in yielding obedience to it; nor was any measure taken to put some appearance even of decency on the journey, or to disguise its real character, of a triumphant procession of the sovereign people, after a complete victory over their nominal monarch.

The carriages of the royal family were placed in the middle of an immeasurable column, consisting partly of, La Fayette's soldiers, partly of the revolutionary rabble whose march had preceded his, amounting to several thousand men and women of the lowest and most desperate description, intermingling in groups amongst the bands of French guards, and civic soldiers, whose discipline could not enable them to preserve even a semblance of order. Thus they rushed along, howling their songs of triumph. The harbingers of the march bore the two bloody heads of the murdered Gardes du Corps paraded on pikes, at the head of the column, as the emblems of their prowess and success. The rest of this body, worn down by fatigue, most of them despoiled of their arms, and many without hats, anxious for the fate of the royal family, and harassed with apprehensions for themselves, were dragged like captives in the midst of the mob, while the drunken females around them bore aloft in triumph their arms, their belts, and their hats. These wretches, stained with the blood in which they had bathed themselves, were now singing songs, of which the burthen bore, We bring you the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice;' as if the presence of the unhappy royal family, with the little power they now possessed, had been in itself a charm against scarcity. Some of these Amazons rode upon the cannon, which made a formidable part of the procession. Many of them were mounted on the horses of the Gardes du Corps, some in masculine fashion, others en croupe. All the muskets and pikes which attended this immense cavalcade, were garnished, as if in triumph, with oak boughs, and the women carried long poplar branches in their hands, which gave the coJumn, so grotesquely composed in every respect, the appearance of a moving grove. Scarce a circumstance was omitted which could render this entrance into the capital more insulting to the King's feelings-more degrading to the royal dignity.

After six hours of dishonour and agony, the unfortunate Louis was brought to the Hotel de Ville, where Bailli, then mayor, complimented him upon the beau jour,' the splendid day,' which restored the monarch of France to his capital; assured him

that order, peace, and all the gentler virtues, were about to revive in the country under his royal eye, and that the King would henceforth become powerful through the people, the people happy through the King; and what was truest of all,' that as Henry IV. had entered Paris by means of reconquering his people, Louis XVI. had done so, because his people had reconquered their king. His wounds salved with this lip-comfort, the unhappy and degraded Prince was at length permitted to retire to the PaJace of the Tuilleries, which, long uninhabited, and almost unfurnished, yawned upon him like the tomb where alone he at length found repose.'

Our author proceeds to mention and discuss the ulterior measures, and the characters, of the several factions of the Assembly. He has soon to deal chiefly with the new lords of the ascendant, the oracles of the Jacobin club, and idols of the Sans culottes; and with their anomalous schemes of equality, finance, manners, dress, and discourse. He dilates upon the confiscation of the property of the church; the alterations in the system of religious worship; the inadmissible oaths prescribed to the clergy, and the emission of assignats. Among the acts of the National Assembly, he notices in the following terms, what was done with regard to the press:

"The National Assembly recognised the freedom of the press; and, in doing so, conferred on the nation a gift fraught with much good and some evil, capable of stimulating the worst passions, and circulating the most atrocious calumnies, and occasioning frequently the most enormous deeds of cruelty and injustice; but ever bearing along with it the means of curing the very evils caused by its abuscs, and of transmitting to futurity the sentiments of the good and the wise, so invaluable when the passions are silenced, and the calm slow voice of reason and reflection comes to obtain a hearing. The press stimulated massacres and proscriptions during the frightful period which we are approaching; but the press has also held up to horror the memory of the perpetrators, and exposed the artifices by which the actors were instigated. It is a rock on which a vessel may be, indeed, and is often wrecked; but that same rock affords the foundation of the brightest and noblest beacon."

The king's flight from Paris, his capture, and compulsory return, and the immediate consequences of this luckless attempt to escape from contumely and murder, are rapidly and impressively detailed in the first volume. On reaching the dissolution of the National Assembly, our author, though he condemns the Constitution which they framed, celebrates the talents and good intentions of a large part of the members, and proclaims that, to these men, France was indebted for the first

principles of civil liberty. "They kindled the flame," he adds, "if they could not regulate it; and such as now enjoy its temperate warmth should have sympathy for the errors of those to whom they owe a boon so inestimable."

We come, next, to the Legislative Assembly, "in which there was no party, that could be termed strictly or properly royalist." Its three divisions, the Constitutionalists, the Girondists, or Brissotins, and the Jacobins, are exhibited in their diversity of traits and objects; their relentless mutual strife, and their common warfare against the wretched king. The Girondists and the Jacobins stood ready "to storm together the last bulwarks of the monarchy"--but the latter were resolved and destined to monopolize the spoil, and establish the ineffable, incomparable Reign of Terror. Robespierre, says Scott, might be considered as the head of the Jacobins, "if they had, indeed, a leader, more than wolves have, which tune their united voices to the cry of him that bays the loudest."-Marat loved to talk of murder as soldiers do of battles, and made, con amore, an exact calculation to show in what manner two hundred and sixty thousand aristocrats might be butchered in a day. The two peerless ruffians, and their condign associate, Danton, are thus portrayed in the second volume:

"Three men of terror, whose names will long remain, we trust, unmatched in history by those of any similar miscreants, had now the unrivalled leading of the jacobins, and were called the triumvirate.

Danton deserves to be named first, as unrivalled by his colleagues in talent and audacity. He was a man of gigantic size, and possessed a voice of thunder. His countenance was that of an Ogre on the shoulders of a Hercules. He was as fond of the pleasures of vice as of the practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamations excited, and might be approached with safety, like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds always ready credit with them, when brought against public men.

Robespierre possessed this advantage over Danton, that he did not seem to seek for wealth, either for hoarding or expending, but lived in strict and economical retirement, to justify the name of the Incorruptible, with which he was honoured by his partisans. He appears to have possessed little talent, saving a deep fund of hypocrisy, considerable powers of sophistry, and a cold exaggerated strain of oratory, as foreign to good taste, as the measures

he recommended were to ordinary humanity. It seemed wonderful, that even the seething and boiling of the revolutionary cauldron should have sent up from the bottom, and long supported on the surface, a thing so miserably void of claims to public distinction; but Robespierre had to impose on the minds of the vulgar, and he knew how to beguile them, by accommodating his flattery to their passions and scale of understanding, and by acts of cunning and hypocrisy, which weigh more with the multitude than the words of eloquence, or the arguments of wisdom. The people listened as to their Cicero, when he twanged out his apostrophes of Pauvre Peuple, Peuple vertueux! and hastened to execute whatever came recommended by such honied phrases, though devised by the worst of men for the worst and most inhuman of purposes.

Vanity was Robespierre's ruling passion, and though his countenance was the image of his mind, he was vain even of his personal appearance, and never adopted the external habits of a sans culotte. Amongst his fellow jacobins, he was distinguished by the nicety with which his hair was arranged and powdered; and the neatness of his dress was carefully attended to, so as to counterbalance, if possible, the vulgarity of his person. His apartments, though small, were elegant, and vanity had filled them with representations of the occupant. Robespierre's picture at length hung in one place, his miniature in another, his bust occupied a niche, and on the table were disposed a few medallions exhibiting his head in profile. The vanity which all this indicated was of the coldest and most selfish character, being such as considers neglect as insult, and receives homage merely as a tribute; so that, while praise is received without gratitude, it is withheld at the risk of mortal hate. Self-love of this dangerous character is closely allied with envy, and Robespierre was one of the most envious and vindictive men that ever lived. He never was known to pardon any opposition, affront, or even rivalry; and to be marked in his tablets on such an account, was a sure, though perhaps not an immediate sentence of death. Danton was a hero, compared with this cold, calculating, creeping miscreant; for his passions, though exaggerated, had at least some touch of humanity, and his brutal ferocity was supported by brutal courage. Robespierre was a coward, who signed death-warrants with a hand that shook, though his heart was relentless. He possessed no passions on which to charge his crimes; they were perpetrated in cold blood, and upon mature deliberation.

Marat, the third of this infernal triumvirate, had attracted the attention of the lower orders, by the violence of his sentiments in the journal, which he conducted from the commencement of the Revolution upon such principles that it took the lead in forwarding its successive changes. His political exhortations began and ended like the howl of a blood-hound for murder; or, if a wolf