s attached to, national representative assemblies, but must turn with
horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable
perversion of that sacred institute? Miserable king, miserable assembly!

History, who exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all
sorts of sovereigns, will not forget how the king, and his queen, and
their infant children, who once would have been the pride and hope of a
great and generous people, were forced to abandon the sanctuary of the
most splendid palace in the world, which they left polluted by massacre
and strewn with mutilated carcases, and were made to taste, drop by
drop, more than the bitterness of death. Is this a triumph to be
consecrated at altars?

I rejoice to hear that the great lady, an object of that triumph, has
borne that day--one is interested that beings made for suffering should
suffer well--and that she bears the whole weight of her accumulated
wrongs with a serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race;
that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in the last
extremity she will save herself from the last disgrace; and that, if she
must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand. It is now sixteen years
since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles, and
surely never lighted on this orb a more delightful vision. I saw her
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy.
Oh! what a revolution!

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and
of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their
scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the
age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never,
never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that
proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the
heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an
exalted freedom. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that
chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired
courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all
its grossness.

If the king and queen of France and their children were to fall into our
hands by t