e ruffians, Danton and Robespierre, fell in succession,
and expiated their crimes (if indeed such crimes be expiable at all)
on that guillotine which they had so often deluged with the blood
of innocence, even of female innocence and beauty. But the reign of
terror still held on its course. The government was continually
shifting its form. In truth, there was virtually no government at all.
It was one continued scene of anarchy and confusion. Those terrible
factions, the Jacobin, the Gironde, the Mountain, in their struggles
for power, and their alternate ascendancy, continued to exhibit France
as one great slaughter-house of human victims, without regard to
guilt or innocence, sex or age. The whole nation seemed to have been
metamorphosed into a nation of demons, wild and frightful, and drunk
with human blood, with which they seemed incapable of being satiated.

And yet, strange as it may seem, and strange as it does now seem
even to ourselves, there was a splendour, a magnificence about that
revolution that riveted our admiration and sympathy with a force that
could not be at once detached by all the horrors that accompanied it.

In the first burst of the revolution, nothing was seen by us but a
brave and generous effort by the people for the recovery of their long
lost rights and liberties. The spectacle of such a people, a people so
endeared to us by recent services, rising, in such a cause, against
the whole wealth and power of the court and the vast body of the
nobles, temporal and spiritual, who had so long lorded it over France,
was well calculated to enlist our strongest sympathies.--The first
movements of the national convention, too, were marked with an energy,
a grandeur, a magnanimity, and a power of eloquence such as the world
had never witnessed, and such as no human heart could withstand.--And,
then, when the combined armies moved upon France, the heroism with
which they were met by the armies of the republic--chaunting, as they
marched up in order of battle, the sublime strains of their national
hymn--and the stupendous power with which they were beaten off, and
their armies crushed and annihilated one after another--threw such
a blaze of glory around the revolution as made us blind to all its
excesses. Those excesses, too, came to us, veiled and softened by the
distance, and by the medium through which they passed: and, however
much to be deplored, we were ready, with the French patriots, to
consider