* This was a mistake, for the French seem to have adopted the
maxim, "that man is never too old to learn;" and, accordingly, at
the opening of the Normal schools, the celebrated Bougainville, now
eighty years of age, became a pupil. This Normal project was,
however, soon relinquished--for by that fatality which has hitherto
attended all the republican institutions, it was found to have
become a mere nursery for aristocrats.

But this revolutionary barbarism, not content with stopping the progress
of the rising generation, has ravaged without mercy the monuments of
departed genius, and persecuted with senseless despotism those who were
capable of replacing them. Pictures have been defaced, statues
mutilated, and libraries burnt, because they reminded the people of their
Kings or their religion; while artists, and men of science or literature,
were wasting their valuable hours in prison, or expiring on the
scaffold.--The moral and gentle Florian died of vexation. A life of
abstraction and utility could not save the celebrated chymist, Lavoisier,
from the Guillotine. La Harpe languished in confinement, probably, that
he might not eclipse Chenier, who writes tragedies himself; and every
author that refused to degrade his talents by the adulation of tyranny
has been proscribed and persecuted. Palissot,* at sixty years old, was
destined to expiate in a prison a satire upon Rousseau, written when he
was only twenty, and escaped, not by the interposition of justice, but by
the efficacity of a bon mot.

* Palissot was author of "The Philosophers," a comedy, written
thirty years ago, to ridicule Rousseau. He wrote to the
municipality, acknowledged his own error, and the merits of
Rousseau; yet, says he, if Rousseau were a god, you ought not to
sacrifice human victims to him.--The expression, which in French is
well tuned, pleased the municipality, and Palissot, I believe, was
not afterwards molested.

--A similar fate would have been awarded Dorat, [Author of "Les Malheurs
de l'Inconstance," and other novels.] for styling himself Chevalier in
the title-pages of his novels, had he not commuted his punishment for
base eulogiums on the Convention, and with the same pen, which has been
the delight of the French boudoir, celebrated Carrier's murders on the
Loire under the appellation of "baptemes civiques." Every province in
France, we are informed by the eloque