es at last in despair from the appalling spectacle.

It was this slow, vacillating, indecisive course of the former
revolution which generated all the causes that conspired to defeat
it. The Bastile was stormed in 1789. It was not until the latter part
of 1792 that the unfortunate monarch was deposed. During these three
years, though strokes of great boldness were struck, one after
another, yet none of them were of a decisive character: none of them
indicated a fixed point at which the revolution was to stop: while
they were all of a character to alarm, to exasperate and to raise up
powerful enemies to the revolution both at home and abroad.

Thus, in 1789 privileges and distinctions of orders were abolished,
and the hitherto sacred revenues of the church suffered a deep
encroachment.

In 1790 titles of nobility, with all their _insignia_ of emblasoned
arms and feudal power, were annihilated, and the estates attached to
them were seized for the public use. These measures drove from France
a numerous and powerful body of emigrants, inflamed with resentment
and despair, who preached up, at every court in Europe, the cause of
kings, which they represented, with reason, to be menaced with general
destruction; and they left in France an equally numerous and powerful
body of malcontents, whose cabals kept every part of the kingdom in
a state of constant ferment and insurrection. The people, released at
once from the restraints of the clergy and of their feudal lords, and
suddenly become their own masters, without the discretion necessary
for their guidance, became licentious and turbulent, and the whole
kingdom presented a scene of riot and disorder which there were no
laws to repress. And now was hatched that political hydra, the Jacobin
faction, which no Frenchman will ever be able to remember without an
involuntary shudder.

In 1791 the affrighted king made an unsuccessful attempt to escape
with his family. They were arrested near the confines of the kingdom
and brought back to Paris under the most humiliating circumstances;
but still he was acknowledged to be the king of France, and a
constituent part of the existing government. A new constitution was
then framed, to which he was required to take an oath of obedience,
and he took it _per_ force. The leading patriots, who had nothing more
in view than the enjoyment of rational liberty under a regular
government, attempted to stop the revolution at the point of a limite