a consummation.

In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the
eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of
Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that
closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the
Fourteenth. His policy--his achievements--his failures, and, still more,
his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the
hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of
himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of
selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his
relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous
aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every
affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition
and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power--no
prudence of personal deportment--no brilliancy of external achievement,
can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and
impressionable as the French, save to make additionally insupportable a
character which, even on the smallest scale, is, of all others, the most
odious and repulsive. The stern unity and perfection of order in which
he was enabled to present political power--that necessary evil of human
existence--but added intensity to the hate, as it added grandeur to the
idea of his despotism. In the eyes of his suffering subjects it brought
him face to face with the catastrophes no less than with the glories of
his reign, and without the merit of the avowal--_adsum qui feci!_ gave
him all its dread responsibilities. An old despot surviving his
greatness while retaining the stinging irony of its title--a saint amid
the standing reminiscences of his adulteries, expiating his pleasures by
annihilating those of others, and tormenting consciences to save his
own--his suffering and downcast people became at length disabused but
too utterly of the base apotheosis of his person and character, so long
maintained by him in the name of a false glory and debased religion.
They even publicly rejoiced at a death-bed made pitiable by the absence
of his mistress, confessor, and family; and meeting in mobs that,
encountering his corpse on its way through by-lanes to hugger-mugger
interment at St. Denis, they might tear it into shreds, gave early and
portentous evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy
h