Academy of Sciences at Paris, who called him their “most illustrious associate,” a letter brim-full of compliments and generous sympathy. This letter was written by no less a man than Condorcet, who was at this time secretary to the Academy, and who was soon after one of the leading republicans in the National Convention. In a very short time Priestley published the letter to the world, together with addresses from the committee of dissenters at Birmingham, from the members of the New Meeting-house, from the young people belonging to his congregation at Birmingham, from the congregation of Mill Hill, Leeds, where he had once officiated, and from the Protestant dissenters in Great Yarmouth, from the Philosophical Society at Derby, &c. &c. Condorcet, as might have been expected, laid it on pretty strongly. “You are not the first friend of liberty," wrote this scientific secretary, “against whom tyrants have armed the very people whom they have deprived of their rights.... At this present moment a league is formed throughout Europe against the general liberty of mankind; but for some time past another league has existed, occupied with propagating and with defending this liberty, without any other arms than those furnished by reason; and these will finally triumph! It is in the necessary order of things that error should be momentary, and truth eternal. Men of genius, supported by their virtuous disciples, when placed in the balance against the vulgar mob of corrupt intriguers-the instruments or the accomplices of tyrants-must at length prevail against them. The glorious day of universal liberty will shine upon our descendants, but we shall at least enjoy the aurora. [We shall presently see the sort of aurora it was that Condorcet enjoyed.] This letter from a zealot of the revolution, with the other matter which Priestley printed so rapidly, was not likely to allay the storm which had been raised. He seized every opportunity of contrasting the bigotry and misery of England, and the enlightened toleration and happiness of France. In the preface to the first of his appeals he said:" How different are the spectacles that are now exhibited in France and in England! Here

bigotry has been fostered, and has acquired new strength. There it is almost extinct. Here the friends of the establishment are burning the meeting-houses of the dissenters, with all the rage of crusaders; while in Paris one of the churches has been procured by the Protestants." To keep up and increase the irritation of these blisters, fresh addresses and condolences poured in from France upon Priestley, who published a proud list of them all, while he or his friends published many of the peppery documents at full length. A few days after Condorcet's letter, the Jacobins of Lyons wrote him an address, and this was followed, in rapid succession, by other addresses from the Jacobins of Nantes, from the Jacobins of Marmande on the Garonne, from the Jacobins of Clermont, in Auvergne, from the Jacobins of Toulouse, and from the Société-Mère-the great genetrix and nursing-mother of them [all-in the Rue St. Honoré, at Paris. As a climax, the National Convention, almost as soon as it met, nominated Priestley a citizen of the French republic!

The public mind was in a most excited state when the trials of some of the Birmingham rioters who had been apprehended came on. As the circuit was at hand, the prisoners had not long to wait. Of five of them who were tried at the assizes for Worcestershire, on the 22nd of August, for offences committed near Birmingham, only one was convicted. But of those tried at the Warwick assises on the 25th, four received sentence of death. Those who had suffered in their property, and all those who sympathised so deeply with Priestley, maintained that there ought to have been a good many more convictions; that the trial was unfair, or, at least, that the jury was all chosen from among the high-church party. But if they had taken some of the sturdy partisans of the other side, we really believe-so inflamed were both parties-that they would have fought in the jurybox, and would never have agreed in any one verdict ; and if they had taken them all from that opposite party, who, great philanthropists as they were, had no notion of secondary punishments, but, in their vengeance, a most

decided taste for gibbets and halters, there would have been such a black list of convictions as had not been seen

in Warwick for many a day. But, besides the advantage of the one-sidedness of the jury, the rioters had in their favour nearly the whole strength of public opinion in those parts, and many witnesses who, believing that the original motive of their conduct was a good and loyal one, were probably not over-scrupulous as to what they swore, in order to screen them and get them off. It could also be proved, upon better evidence, that several of these rioters had previously been inoffensive, well-conducted men, and that they had only been excited by their own inward belief that Priestley and his friends were sworn enemies to the king and church. Besides all this, there was the favourable confusion of great numbers, the contradictory evidence of the illiterate witnesses for the prosecution, and the common flaws in indictments, when drawn up, as these had been, in a hurry, and upon loose testimony. And, after all, it is a difficult and odious and agonizing task to select out of so great a number a few men for examples. Previously to, and during, the trial, the sufferers from the riots and their witnesses were publicly abused and threatened in the streets of Birmingham and Warwick, where-as in many other places-the favourite toast of the church and king party was"May every revolutionary dinner be followed by a hot supper!"

Although, including the man convicted at Worcester, five rioters were sentenced to death, only three were hanged, the other two receiving his majesty's free pardon.

We may now turn once more to the startling events in France-or to the aurora of French liberty.

It was soon seen that the courage of the majority of the clergy had not been overrated by Maury, and that the forcible exacting of the serment civique would lead to a civil war, at least in a part of France. Before matters had come to this extremity with the clergy, Louis XVI., as a really scrupulous Catholic, had written to Rome for the opinion and advice of Pius VI. The pope's opinion

was opposed to the plans and determinations of the Assembly, and therefore the liberal Archbishop of Vienne, minister for ecclesiastical affairs, and the equally liberal Archbishop of Bordeaux, keeper of the seals, into whose hands it fell, had kept it for a long time from the knowledge of the king. But neither the strong opinion of the pontiff of the Catholic world, nor the sentiments of the French hierarchy, among whom were many individuals that he revered, could be kept for good from the knowledge of Louis; and his own strong conviction gave him courage to withhold for some time the royal assent to the civil constitution of the clergy, and to the forced serment civique, which was a part of it. At one time he is even said to have declared that he would rather die than be a party to the destruction of the established church; and, as he studied very attentively the history of our Charles I., he may have thought of acting with the church of France, as that prince had done in his last days by the Anglican church. But Louis had none of the boldness of Charles I.; and even on this point, where his feelings and principles were perhaps stronger than upon any other, he was incapable of any steadiness of purpose. He was not born to be a voluntary martyr; and no people but the French could have made him a martyr. Day after day the majority of the Assembly were thrown into transports of rage by the reception of protests against the civil constitution of the clergy, and by the positive refusal of some prelates, curés, and other priests to take the serment civique. This hardihood of the shavelings was attributed to the obstinacy of the king. To extort compliance, through terror, the Paris patriots made an émeute, and a terrible charivari under the windows of the apartment of the poor weak prisoner of the Tuileries, who then gave his assent.

On the 24th of January, the Jacobins of Paris had bound themselves by an oath to defend with their fortunes and their blood every citizen who should have the courage to devote himself to the denunciation of traitors to the country, by which they understood all men that entertained different opinions from their own. The

decree to this effect-for the Jacobins made decrees like the Assembly-was unanimously adopted, as was also the resolution that copies of it should be sent to the affiliated societies in all parts of France, in order that they might bind themselves by the same oath-an oath which would have suited the original Assassins of the Old Man of the Mountain. The president, on the night when all this was decreed in the Rue St. Honoré, was Victor Broglie, ex-count, and father of the present Duke de Broglie; and one of the secretaries was Alexandre Beauharnais, ex-viscount, the first husband of Napoleon Buonaparte's first wife, by fate of revolutions and wars, Josephine Empress of the French.* The immediate effect produced by the infernal vow and covenant was a red-hot persecution against all unsworn priests. Mirabeau had proclaimed in the Assembly that those priests who would not take the oath, and that gave up their livings, places, and appointments, were not to be treated or considered as culpable; but the Jacobins and the unbelieving mobs, and the dastardly majority of the Assembly itself, determined to consider them as suspect. [This terrible word was already in use, and equivalent to a sentence of proscription; but the champions of the Rights of Man and the zealots of liberty and equality went on improving until soupçonné d'être suspect-suspected of being suspected-had the same force, and was a common term.] At this time also another democratic club started into existence, in aid of the Jacobins, to which it was to serve as a sort of seminary or preparatory school. This club of the people, called "Société Fraternelle," held its meetings in the section of Enfans Rouges, or Red Boys, and had for its first president M. Tallien, a leading member of the Jacobins, lately a compositor in a printing-office, but now the editor of a journal, and destined to be, for a time, a sort of dictator in France, and one of the first patrons of young Napoleon Buonaparte. This Société Fraternelle especially undertook to explain, in an easy and familiar manner, to the populace of Paris,

*Hist. Parlement.