whether in condolence or congratulation) to say, to the most
humiliated creature that crawls upon the earth, that great public
benefits are derived from the murder of his servants, the attempted
assassination of himself and of his wife, and the mortification,
disgrace, and degradation that he has personally suffered. It is a topic
of consolation which our ordinary of Newgate would be too humane to use
to a criminal at the foot of the gallows. I should have thought that the
hangman of Paris, now that he is liberalized by the vote of the National
Assembly, and is allowed his rank and arms in the Herald's College of
the rights of men, would be too generous, too gallant a man, too full of
the sense of his new dignity, to employ that cutting consolation to any
of the persons whom the _leze-nation_ might bring under the
administration of his _executive powers_.

A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught
of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling
wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to
administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the
ingredients of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of
"the balm of hurt minds," the cup of human misery full to the brim, and
to force him to drink it to the dregs.

Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were so
delicately urged in the compliment on the new year, the king of France
will probably endeavor to forget these events and that compliment. But
History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her
awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not
forget either those events, or the era of this liberal refinement in the
intercourse of mankind. History will record, that, on the morning of the
sixth of October, 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of
confusion, alarm, dismay, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged
security of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite,
and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen was first
startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, who cried out to her
to save herself by flight,--that this was the last proof of fidelity he
could give,--that they were upon him, and he was dead. Instantly he was
cut down. A band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his
blood, rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a hundred
strokes