period I have to remark the destruction of
the saints--at another the adoration of Marat. One half of the newspaper
is filled with a list of names of the guillotined, and the other with
that of places of amusement; and every thing now more than ever marks
that detestable association of cruelty and levity, of impiety and
absurdity, which has uniformly characterized the French revolution. It
is become a crime to feel, and a mode to affect a brutality incapable of
feeling--the persecution of Christianity has made atheism a boast, and
the danger of respecting traditional virtues has hurried the weak and
timid into the apotheosis of the most abominable vices. Conscious that
they are no longer animated by enthusiasm,* the Parisians hope to imitate
it by savage fury or ferocious mirth--their patriotism is signalized only
by their zeal to destroy, and their attachment to their government only
by applauding its cruelties.--If Robespierre, St. Just, Collot d'Herbois,
and the Convention as their instruments, desolate and massacre half
France, we may lament, but we can scarcely wonder at it. How should a
set of base and needy adventurers refrain from an abuse of power more
unlimited than that of the most despotic monarch; or how distinguish the
general abhorrence, amid addresses of adulation, which Louis the
Fourteenth would have blushed to appropriate?*

* Louis the Fourteenth, aguerri (steeled) as he was by sixty years
of adulation and prosperity, had yet modesty sufficient to reject a
"dose of incense which he thought too strong." (See D'Alembert's
Apology for Clermont Tonnerre.) Republicanism, it should seem, has
not diminished the national compliasance for men in power, thought
it has lessened the modesty of those who exercise it.--If Louis the
Fourteenth repressed the zeal of the academicians, the Convention
publish, without scruple, addresses more hyperbolical than the
praises that monarch refused.--Letters are addressed to Robespierre
under the appellation of the Messiah, sent by the almighty for the
reform of all things! He is the apostle of one, and the tutelar
deity of another. He is by turns the representative of the virtues
individually, and a compendium of them altogether: and this monster,
whose features are the counterpart of his soul, find republican
parasites who congratulate themselves on resembling him.

The bulletins of the Conve