whose disastrous fate we are, it seems, to learn a
general softening of character, and a revision of our social situations
and duties, appear to me full as little deserving of that fate as the
author, whoever he is, can be. Many of them, I am sure, were such as I
should be proud indeed to be able to compare myself with, in knowledge,
in integrity, and in every other virtue. My feeble nature might shrink,
though theirs did not, from the proof; but my reason and my ambition
tell me that it would be a good bargain to purchase their merits with
their fate.

For which of his vices did that great magistrate, D'Espremenil, lose his
fortune and his head? What were the abominations of Malesherbes, that
other excellent magistrate, whose sixty years of uniform virtue was
acknowledged, in the very act of his murder, by the judicial butchers
who condemned him? On account of what misdemeanors was he robbed of his
property, and slaughtered with two generations of his offspring,--and
the remains of the third race, with a refinement of cruelty, and lest
they should appear to reclaim the property forfeited by the virtues of
their ancestor, confounded in an hospital with the thousands of those
unhappy foundling infants who are abandoned, without relation and
without name, by the wretchedness or by the profligacy of their parents?

Is the fate of the Queen of France to produce this softening of
character? Was she a person so very ferocious and cruel, as, by the
example of her death, to frighten us into common humanity? Is there no
way to teach the Emperor a _softening_ of character, and a review of
his social situation and duty, but his consent, by an infamous accord
with Regicide, to drive a second coach with the Austrian arms through
the streets of Paris, along which, after a series of preparatory horrors
exceeding the atrocities of the bloody execution itself, the glory of
the Imperial race had been carried to an ignominious death? Is this a
lesson of _moderation_ to a descendant of Maria Theresa, drawn from the
fate of the daughter of that incomparable woman and sovereign? If he
learns this lesson from such an object, and from such teachers, the man
may remain, but the king is deposed. If he does not carry quite another
memory of that transaction in the inmost recesses of his heart, he is
unworthy to reign, he is unworthy to live. In the chronicle of disgrace
he will have but this short tale told of him: "He was the first emperor
of h