could have written a journal, the gaunt and famished wretch could not have ravened more eagerly for slaughter. It was blood which was Marat's constant demand, not in drops from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter of families, but blood in the profusion of an ocean. His usual calculation of the heads which he demanded amounted to two hundred and sixty thousand; and though he sometimes raised it as high as three hundred thousand, it never fell beneath the smaller number. It may be hoped, and, for the honour of human nature we are inclined to believe, there was a touch of insanity in this unnatural strain of ferocity; and the wild and squalid features of the wretch appear to have intimated a degree of alienation of mind. Marat was, like Robespierre, a coward. Repeatedly denounced in the Assembly, he skulked instead of defending himself, and lay concealed in some obscure garret or cellar among his cut-throats, until a storm appeared, when, like a bird of ill omen, his deathscreech was again heard. Such was the strange and fatal triumvirate, in which the same degree of cannibal cruelty existed under different aspects. Danton murdered to glut his rage; Robespierre, to avenge his injured vanity, or to remove a rival whom he envied; Marat, from the same instinctive love of blood, which induces a wolf to continue his ravage of the flocks long after his hunger is appeased."

"Danton despised Robespierre for his cowardice, Robespierre feared the ferocious audacity of Danton; and with him to fear was to hate-and to hate was when the hour arrived-to destroy. They differed in their ideas also of the mode of exercising their terrible system of government. Danton had often in his mouth the sentence of Machiavel, that when it becomes necessary to shed blood, a single great massacre has a more dreadful effect than a series of successive executions. Robespierre, on the contrary, preferred the latter process as the best way of sustaining the reign of terror. The appetite of Marat could not be satiated but by combining both modes of murder. Both Danton and Robespierre kept aloof from the sanguinary Marat.

Among the three monsters mentioned, Danton had that energy which the Girondists wanted, and was well acquainted with the secret movements of those insurrections to which they possessed no key. His vices of wrath, luxury, love of spoil, dreadful as they were, are attributes of mortal men;-the envy of Robespierre, and the instinctive blood-thirstiness of Marat, were the properties of fiends. Danton, like the huge serpent called the Boa, might be approached with a degree of safety when gorged with prey-but the appetite of Marat for blood was like the horse-leech, which says, Not enough-and the slaughterous envy of Robespierre was like the gnawing worm that dieth not, and yields no interval of repose. In glutting Danton with spoil, and furnishing the means of indulging his luxury, the Girondists might have purchased his VOL. I.-No. 1.

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support; but nothing under the supreme rule in France would have gratified Robespierre; and an unlimited torrent of the blood of that unhappy country could alone have satiated Marat. If a colleague was to be chosen out of that detestable triumvirate, unquestionably Danton was to be considered as the most eligible.”

Before entering upon a particular exposition of the progress and character of the Sansculotte régime, Sir Walter passes in cursory review the situation and dispositions of the foreign powers, with regard to Revolutionary France, and the origin and first events of the general war which commenced at the epoch of the Legislative Assembly. Of the supposed treaties of Pavia and Pilnitz he remarks, that, although they were, at one time, assumed as real documents, in the British House of Commons, they are now generally allowed to have had no existence. Among the domestic occurrences of this period, those of the 10th August, the attack made upon the palace of the Tuileries, and the destruction of the Swiss guards, are told in the most animated and touching strain. So, likewise, the demoniac massacres of the four thousand, chiefly innocent, tenants of the prisons of Paris, between the 2d and 7th of September; which consigned to the perpetrators the name of Septembrisers; a name devoted to horror and infamy. "The massacres of the 2d September," says Burke, "were begotten by the massacres of the 10th August. They were universally foreseen, and hourly expected. During the short intervals between the two murderous scenes, the furies, male and female, cried out havocthe jails were filled with prepared victims; and when they overflowed, churches were turned into jails," &c.

Few of the features, occurrences, or prime movers of the reign of terror, are left unheeded by Sir Walter, and some are handled with a masterly discrimination. We cannot say that Burke's explanations of the springs and phenomena of the Jacobin rule are superseded by these pages; but our author, too, is ably speculative and descriptive. He has almost overlooked, however, the external politics of the republic,-"the system of circulating mutinous manifestoes, and of keeping emissaries of sedition in every country, under the name of ambassadors," a system which was extended to the United States, and here severely felt in its restlessness and audacity. Sir Walter contrasts, at some length and pains, the situation of France in reference to republican government, with that of each of the countries, ancient and modern, which have enjoyed popular institutions. He seems to have been aware of the truth, that a republic, justly so called, never existed in France; that "the principles, the plans, the manners, the morals, of her

constitution-mongers and rulers were, in every change, adverse to the formation and duration of any rational scheme of a republic." That polity, rightly understood, and as it flourishes here, has not to answer for any of the enormities or miscarriages prominent in the French revolutionary records. Even Rousseau defines it to be a government of laws--not one of demagogues or monsters. Our author grants all credit, in the kindest strain, to "the successful attempt in America to establish it on a large scale," but ascribes, as many distinguished European politicians have done, more power of good or evil to Washington, in that question, than he, or any other individual, possessed. The model of heroes was no more able than he was inclined, to turn the march of our Revolution, or give a monarchical character to our system.

Notwithstanding the confidence with which Sir Walter and various foreign historians, indicate opportunities, by the improvement of which, in the modes they specify, Louis XVI. might have stayed the revolutionary torrent in France, and rescued the monarchy, we unaffectedly doubt whether this was ever possible, whatever degree of sagacious vigilance, or despotic energy, or circumspect, timely compliance, he might have personally essayed. The earthquake of popular commotion was prepared: the minds of men were incurably seasoned and determined for a grand catastrophe, by accumulated abuses, wide-spread discontent, profligate ambition, ignorance, vice, irreligion-by all reveries of wild enthusiasm, all exorbitances of rash theory. "Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas, who might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs." Heaven and earth combined in the tempest. No sovereign, however strenuous, no ministers, however skilful, could have averted its approach or repelled its shock. It was "Fire, and hail; snow, and vapour; stormy wind fulfilling His word."

The imprisonment, trial, and execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette, are materials out of which our author might have wrought more elaborate and moving pictures and lessons than he has furnished, if he had possessed space for the indulgence. of his talent and sensibility: But, though abstemiously, they are still efficiently used; and also, the siege and treatment of Lyons, the subsequent fierce and ravenous struggles, and successive overthrow and butchery, of the Girondists, and of the more nefarious leaders and instigators of the sovereign canaille, and indefatigable directors of the holy guillotine, in their turn. The decree of proscription against the Girondists, passed on

the motion of Couthon,-"a decrepid being, whose lower extremities were paralysed-whose benevolence of feeling seemed to pour itself out in the most gentle expressions uttered in the most melodious tones-whose sensibility led him constantly to foster a favourite spaniel in his bosom, that he might have something on which to bestow kindness and caresses-but who was at heart as fierce as Danton, and as pitiless as Robespierre." This old, genial colleague of Robespierre, -fit agent in the work of decimating a whole people at one time, and immuring in dungeons not less than three hundred thousand souls, a third of whom were women,-was among the few who adhered to that sublime monster when his death-knell was at length rung in the Convention, after he had been for two years absolute master of the life of every man in France. No tyrant ever had so hideous an end, as none ever maintained a more ghastly sway. The closing scenes of his career, in the Convention, in the guard-room at the Hotel de Ville, and on the gory, clotted platform of his darling guillotine, are etched by Sir Walter with the highest dramatic effect. The epitaph written for him conveys the universal sense of his nature and rule

"Here lies Robespierre-let no tear be shed;

Reader, if he had lived, thou had'st been dead." Those who deposed and immediately succeeded this dread representative of the King of Terrors, were, however, not much his superiors in patriotism or humanity; and Burke was not far wrong, when he referred to the occasion in these characteristic terms:

"I hear of another inducement to fraternity, with the present rulers. They have murdered one Robespierre. This Robespierre, they tell us was a cruel tyrant, and now that he is put out of the way, all will go well in France. Astræa will again return to that earth from which she has been an emigrant, and all nations will resort to her golden scales. This is their jargon. It is the old bon ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates. I care little about the memory of this same Robespierre. I am sure he was an execrable villain. I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less, than I should at the execution of the present directory, or any of its members, But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny? The present virtuous constitution-mongers. He was a tyrant, they were his satellites and his hangmen. Their sole merit is in the murder of their colleague. They have expiated their other murders by a new murder. It has always been the case among this banditti. They have always had the knife at each other's throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man. These people thought,

that, in the commerce of murder, he was like to have the better of the bargain, if any time was lost; they therefore took one of their short revolutionary methods, and massacred him in a manner so perfidious and cruel, as would shock all humanity, if the stroke was not struck by the present rulers on one of their own associates."*

We would willingly quote the whole of Sir Walter's most interesting and spirited outline of the struggle in La Vendée, where "the blood-hounds of war" were indeed uncoupled and unmuzzled, by the Jacobin dynasty, to imbrue themselves in carnage worthy of fiends; but we must be content with part of it, and that, perhaps, beyond our proper contingent.

"The Vendean insurgents, though engaged in the same cause, and frequently co-operating, were divided into bodies, under leaders independent of each other. Those of the right bank of the Loire were chiefly under the orders of the celebrated La Charette, who, descended from a family distinguished as commanders of privateers, and himself a naval officer, had taken on him this dangerous command. An early wandering disposition, not unusual among youth of eager and ambitious character, had made him acquainted with the inmost recesses of the woods, and his native genius had induced him to anticipate the military advantages which they afforded. In his case, as in many others, either the sagacity of these uninstructed peasants led them to choose for command men whose talents best fitted them to enjoy it, or perhaps the perils which environed such authority prevented its being aspired to, save by those whom a mixture of resolution and prudence led to feel themselves capable of maintaining their character when invested with it. It was remarkable also, that in choosing their leaders, the insurgents made no distinction between the noblesse and the inferior ranks. Names renowned in ancient history-Talmont, D'Autichamp, L'Escure, and La Roche-Jacquelein, were joined in equal command with the gamekeeper Stoffet; Cathelineau, an itinerant wool-merchant; Charette, a roturier of slight pretensions; and others of the lowest order, whom the time and the public voice called into command, but who, nevertheless, do not seem, in general, to have considered their official command, as altering the natural distinction of their rank in society. In their success, they formed a general council of officers, priests, and others, who held their meetings at Chatillon, and directed the military movements of the different bodies; assembled them at pleasure on particular points, and for particular objects of service; and dispersed them to their homes when these were accomplished.

With an organization so simple, the Vendean insurgents, in

* Fourth Letter on a Regicide Peace.