ents; to be borne home shoulder-high. (Deux Amis
de la Liberte, i. 141.) This respectable Guillotin we hope to behold
once more, and perhaps only once; the Parlement not even once, but let
it be engulphed unseen by us.

Meanwhile such things, cheering as they are, tend little to cheer the
national creditor, or indeed the creditor of any kind. In the midst of
universal portentous doubt, what certainty can seem so certain as money
in the purse, and the wisdom of keeping it there? Trading Speculation,
Commerce of all kinds, has as far as possible come to a dead pause; and
the hand of the industrious lies idle in his bosom. Frightful enough,
when now the rigour of seasons has also done its part, and to scarcity
of work is added scarcity of food! In the opening spring, there come
rumours of forestalment, there come King's Edicts, Petitions of bakers
against millers; and at length, in the month of April--troops of ragged
Lackalls, and fierce cries of starvation! These are the thrice-famed
Brigands: an actual existing quotity of persons: who, long reflected
and reverberated through so many millions of heads, as in concave
multiplying mirrors, become a whole Brigand World; and, like a kind of
Supernatural Machinery wondrously move the Epos of the Revolution. The
Brigands are here: the Brigands are there; the Brigands are coming! Not
otherwise sounded the clang of Phoebus Apollos's silver bow, scattering
pestilence and pale terror; for this clang too was of the imagination;
preternatural; and it too walked in formless immeasurability, having
made itself like to the Night (Greek.)!

But remark at least, for the first time, the singular empire of
Suspicion, in those lands, in those days. If poor famishing men shall,
prior to death, gather in groups and crowds, as the poor fieldfares and
plovers do in bitter weather, were it but that they may chirp mournfully
together, and misery look in the eyes of misery; if famishing men (what
famishing fieldfares cannot do) should discover, once congregated, that
they need not die while food is in the land, since they are many, and
with empty wallets have right hands: in all this, what need were there
of Preternatural Machinery? To most people none; but not to French
people, in a time of Revolution. These Brigands (as Turgot's also were,
fourteen years ago) have all been set on; enlisted, though without tuck
of drum,--by Aristocrats, by Democrats, by D'Orleans, D'Artois, and
enemies of the pub