confessions of their lay companions in
misfortune, and encouraging them to undergo the evil hour, with as much
calmness as if they had not been to share its bitterness. As
protestants, we cannot abstractedly approve of the doctrines which
render the established clergy of one country dependant upon the
sovereign pontiff, the prince of an alien state. But these priests did
not make the laws for which they suffered; they only obeyed them; and as
men and christians we must regard them as martyrs, who preferred death
to what they considered as apostacy.

In the brief intervals of this dreadful butchery, which lasted four
days, the judges and executioners ate, drank, and slept: and awoke from
slumber, or arose from their meal, with fresh appetite for murder. There
were places arranged for the male, and for the female murderers, for the
work had been incomplete without the intervention of the latter. Prison
after prison was invested, entered, and under the same form of
proceeding made the scene of the same inhuman butchery. The Jacobins had
reckoned on making the massacre universal over France. But the example
was not generally followed. It required, as in the case of St.
Bartholomew, the only massacre which can be compared to this in
atrocity, the excitation of a large capital, in a violent crisis, to
render such horrors possible.

The community of Paris were not in fault for this. They did all they
could to extend the sphere of murder. Their warrant brought from Orleans
near sixty persons, including the Duke de Cosse-Brissac, De Lesart the
late minister, and other royalists of distinction, who were to have been
tried before the high court of that department. A band of assassins met
them, by appointment of the community, at Versailles, who, uniting with
their escort, murdered almost the whole of the unhappy men.

From the 2d to the 6th of September, these infernal crimes proceeded
uninterrupted, protracted by the actors for the sake of the daily pay of
a louis to each, openly distributed amongst them, by order of the
Commune. It was either from a desire to continue as long as possible a
labour so well requited, or because these beings had acquired an
insatiable lust of murder, that, when the jails were emptied of state
criminals, the assassins attacked the Bicetre, a prison where ordinary
delinquents were confined. These unhappy wretches offered a degree of
resistance which cost the assailants more dear than any they had
e