rone, and shake it to pieces under the feet
of his relative, his Sovereign, the friend of his earliest youth, who was
aware of the treason, and who held the thunderbolt, but would not crush
him. But they have been foiled in their hope of building a throne for
him upon the ruin they had made, and placed an age where they flattered
him he would find a diadem.

The Prince de Conti told me at Barcelona that the Duchesse d'Orleans had
assured him that, even had the Duc d'Orleans survived, he never could
have attained, his object. The immense sums he had lavished upon the
horde of his revolutionary satellites had, previous to his death, thrown
him into embarrassment. The avarice of his party increased as his
resources diminished. The evil, as evil generally does, would have
wrought its own punishment in either way. He must have lived suspected
and miserable, had he not died. But his reckless character did not
desert him at the scaffold. It is said that before he arrived at the
Place de Greve he ate a very rich ragout, and drank a bottle of
champagne, and left the world as he had gone through it.

The supernumerary, the uncalled-for martyr, the last of the four devoted
royal sufferers, was beheaded the following spring. For this murder
there could not have been the shadow of a pretext. The virtues of this
victim were sufficient to redeem the name of Elizabeth

[The eighteen years' imprisonment and final murder of Mary, Queen of
Scots, by Elizabeth of England, is enough to stigmatize her forever,
independently of the many other acts of tyranny which stain her memory.
The dethronement by Elizabeth of Russia of the innocent Prince Ivan, her
near relation, while yet in the cradle, gives the Northern Empress a
claim to a similar character to the British Queen.]

from the stain with which the two of England and Russia, who had already
borne it, had clouded its immortality. She had never, in any way,
interfered in political events. Malice itself had never whispered a
circumstance to her dispraise. After this wanton assassination, it is
scarcely to be expected that the innocent and candid looks and streaming
azure eyes of that angelic infant, the Dauphin, though raised in humble
supplication to his brutal assassins, with an eloquence which would have
disarmed the savage tiger, could have won wretches so much more pitiless
than the most ferocious beasts of the wilderness, or saved him from their
slow but sure poison, whose breath wa