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Camille lost all temper. "Let them alone," said Danton, casting on them a look of cold contempt; "let them alone, the vile canaille !"

"We are sacrificed," he said, on another occasion, "to a few cowardly brigands, but they will not long enjoy their victory; I drag Robespierre after me; Robespierre follows me these brothers of Cain (he said) know nothing about government. I leave everything in a frightful disorder." When they arrived at the Conciergerie, they occupied the same dungeon which the Girondists had done before them, the Girondists whom they had sent there. This sort of retributive justice was often and amply experienced in the course of this memorable Revolution. "It was on such a day as this," he said, "that I instituted the revolutionary tribunal. I beg pardon of God and man; but my meaning was to have prevented a new September, not to have let loose such a scourge of humanity." Önce, and once only, he showed a slight regret at having taken part in the Revolution. "Better far," he said, "to be poor and be a fisherman, than to be a governor of men."

"No

A meeting took place between Robespierre and Danton, sought by the latter, for the purpose of an accommodation. doubt," said Danton, "we must keep down the Royalists, but we should only strike where the cause of the Republic requires; the innocent should not be confounded with the guilty." "And who told you," replied Robespierre, sharply, "that any innocent person had perished?" Danton turned to his friend who had accompanied him, and with a bitter smile, "What say you," said he, "not an innocent perished!!!" Robespierre and he then separated; and all friendship was now at an end for ever. Danton was in vain urged to exert and defend himself. "I had rather," he said, "be the one to be guillotined, than the one to guillotine." And again, "My life is not worth the trouble; I am sick of mankind."

He contented himself with insisting, that Robespierre and the committee durst not attempt his life; and with no other answer than "they dare not," in a sort of morbid indifference and indolence, he was dead to the entreaties of his friends, and waited the event.

But Danton, by retiring awhile a short time before from the scene, had suffered his influence to part away from him. Robespierre had got possession of the Jacobins; the Cordeliers belonged to the Hebertists; and the Convention passive, spiritless, and fallen, could afford him no efficient support. Robes

pierre, too, had one virtue which Danton had not; he had remained poor. He could always, therefore, represent himself as having no object but the republic; could always obtain an audience, belief for his assertions, and turn his own purity and merits to the destruction of his opponents.

The account given of Danton is everywhere the same, but it is best given by Thiers. He was consistent to the last, and not a word or look escaped him that was not worthy of his dreadful career and terrible renown. He appalled the president and the jury, and embarrassed the hardened Fouquier, the public accuser. "Be calm," said the president; "it is the mark of innocence." "Calm!" said Danton, "when I see myself so basely caluminated. It is not from a man of the Revolution like me that you are to expect a cold defence. Men of my temperament are, in revolutions, above all price; on their front is stamped the Genius of Liberty." Danton, at these words, assumed the port and movement of the Jupiter Olympus of the ancients; and the well-known looks that had so often struck terror into the hearts of the spectators, lost not now their impression; and a murmur of approbation was heard.

"Me!" he cried, "accuse me of having conspired with Mirabeau, with Dumourier, with Orleans, of having crawled at the feet of despots!" He then detailed the main incidents of his life; his resistance to Mirabeau; his stopping the royal carriage that was going to St. Cloud; his bringing the people to the Champ de Mars to protest against royalty; his proposing the overthrow of the throne in 1792; his proclaiming the insurrection of the 10th of August; and then, suffocated with indignation, to think that he had been accused of concealing himself on that day. "Who are the men who had to engage Danton to come forward," he cried, "on that occasion? Produce my accusers! Let me unmask the three miserable beings that surrounded at that moment and ruined Robespierre. Produce them, and let them appear, that I may plunge them into that annihilation from which they shall never afterwards emerge."

Danton poured forth the thunder of his indignation till the president attempted to drown his voice by sounding his bell. Danton still went on. 66 Do you not understand me?" said the president. "Your bell!" said Danton. "He who is defending his honour and his life, has a voice that must outsound your bell." But he had exhausted himself, and became silent.

You will read with eagerness whatever relates to Danton ; indeed, there is an unworthy interest that belongs to characters

of this particular description. Energy, decision, courage, contempt of death, the power of confronting dangers, and trampling upon difficulties,-these are all so useful in the warfare of life, and indicate such a superiority of character and mind over our common nature, that our respect gets inextricably associated, even when such qualities are connected with enormous vices and atrocious conduct. We are ever ready to forget the guilt, when great capacity is shown, and a fearless contempt for the common terrors of humanity; but when, as in the case of Danton, there is shown at the same time something of a nature capable of affection, of friendship, and of love, of careless gaiety, of indolence, and a taste for the relaxation of pleasure, every offensive part of the character (more particularly in cases and moments of misfortune) seems to disappear, and ruffians, and pirates, and banditti, men of desperate lives, every hour engaged in scenes of lawless outrage and bloody violence, can be rendered by a Schiller or a Byron the idols and the delight of the gentle, the generous, and the kind, of the young and the beautiful, the studious and the retired; those who would be the first to shrink from deeds of cruelty, and sights of death, and who, of all others, are most interested in the general prevalence of peace and order, of humanity and good sense.

But this must not be. Our moral feelings must not be suffered to tolerate such men, least of all Danton, the dreadful tribune of the worst stages of the French Revolution, who scrupled not, as a mode of resistance to the allies, to institute in September a regular massacre of helpless beings of every description; whose very plan was, so to defile the people of Paris with carnage, that they might be rendered desperate; who was the relentless destroyer of a benevolent king; who was not satiated with blood, nor made to pause till he had passed through the Reign of Terror; and who turned aside from his course of violence and guilt, only that he might the better enjoy his plunder, and profit by his crimes.

LECTURE XLII.

REIGN OF TERROR.

I HAVE been now, for many lectures, endeavouring to convey to you some general impression of the system of terror-of the reign of Robespierre and the Jacobins.

I cannot suppose your minds unaffected by what you have heard.

I must now, however, call upon you to observe, in conclusion, the effect that was produced on others at the time, and above all, the estimate that was formed of the whole by the matured mind of Mr. Burke.

The details of this dreadful portion of history you will enter into hereafter, by the perusal of proper books and memoirs; but already you must have learnt enough, even from these few lectures, to enable you to judge of the remarks I am going to read to you, from his letters on the Regicide Peace, written in 1796. Consider, as you listen to me, how far he is or is not justified in the awful representations he has there given of this system; when you doubt, suspend your opinions till you have read and heard more.

I have before mentioned to you, that I should hold it no mean praise, if I could assist you in properly appreciating the works of this distinguished man on the French Revolution; assist you in separating the wisdom from the enthusiasm, the philosophy from the declamation, the just statement from the violence and exaggeration, which may all alike be occasionally found, it must be confessed, in his immortal pages; but it is for you to observe the one, and be not affected by the other. That he was the first to understand the state of Europe, and that he best understood it, cannot, I think, be now denied. But whether he best understood the remedy that could be best tried for this unparalleled situation of society, is quite another question. Observe, then, the estimate he has given, and how continually every word he writes has a reference to some circumstance or other that took place at Paris, and that you have even already received some notice of, in the course of these lectures, particularly when I was alluding to the pages of the Moniteurs. "Instead of

the religion and the law," says he, speaking of the French Revolutionists, "by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are built. Its foundation is laid in regicide, in Jacobinism, and in atheism; and it has joined to those principles, a body of systematic manners, which secures their operation. I call a commonwealth regicide, which lays it down as a fixed law of nature, and a fundamental right of man, that all government, not being a democracy, is an usurpation; that all kings, as such, are usurpers; and for being kings, may

and ought to be put to death, with their wives, families, and adherents." Mr. Burke then alludes to the festival of the 10th of August, as illustrating these, his representations. "Jacobinism," he continues, "is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property. When private men form themselves into associations for the purpose of destroying the pre-existing laws and institutions of their country; when they secure to themselves an army, by dividing amongst the people of no property the estates of the ancient and lawful proprietors; when a state recognizes those acts, &c. &c., I call this Jacobinism by establishment. I call it atheism by establishment, when any state, as such, shall not acknowledge the existence of God as a moral governor of the world; when it shall offer to him no religious or moral worship; when it shall abolish the Christian religion by a regular decree; when it shall persecute with a cold, unrelenting, steady cruelty, by every mode of confiscation, imprisonment, exile, and death, all its ministers; when it shall generally shut up or pull down churches; when the few buildings that remain of this kind shall be opened only for the purpose of making a profane apotheosis of monsters, whose vices and crimes have no parallel amongst men, and whom all other men consider as objects of general detestation, and the severest animadversion of the law; when in the place of that religion of social benevolence, and of individual self-denial" (you will observe these comprehensive words), " in mockery of all religion, they institute impious, blasphemous, indecent, theatric rites, in honour of their vitiated, perverted reason, and erect altars to the personification of their own corrupted and bloody republic; when schools and seminaries are founded at public expense to poison mankind, from generation to generation, with the horrible maxims of their impiety; when, wearied out with incessant martyrdom, and the cries of a people hungering and thirsting for religion, they permit it only as a tolerated evil; I call this atheism by establishment. When to these establishments of regicide, of jacobinism, and of atheism, you add the correspondent system of manners, no doubt can be left on the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the human race. Manners are of more importance than laws; upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend: the law touches us but here and there, and now and then; manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, and insensible operation, like the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives, accord

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