the
slave--the subversion of all the abuses of the ancient thrones--all the
old nominal principles of revolutionary patriotism, were instantly
thrown aside, like the rude weapons of a peasant insurrection, the pike
and the ox-goad, for the polished and powerful weapons of royal
armouries. In all the conquests of France the serf and the slave were
left in their chains; the continental kingdoms, bleeding by the sword
until they lay in utter exhaustion, were suffered to retain all their
abuses; the thrones, stripped of all their gold and jewels, were yet
suffered to stand. Every pretext of moral and physical redress was
contemptuously abandoned, and France herself exhibited the most singular
of all transformations.--The republic naked, frantic, and covered with
her own gore, was suddenly seen robed in the most superb investitures of
monarchy; assuming the most formal etiquette of empire, and covered with
royal titles. This was the most extraordinary change in the
recollections of history, and for the next hundred, or for the next
thousand years, it will excite wonder. But the whole period will be to
posterity what Virgil describes the Italian plains to have been to the
peasant of his day, a scene of gigantic recollections; as, turning up
with the ploughshare the site of ancient battles, he finds the remnants
of a race of bolder frame and more trenchant weapons--the weightier
sword and the mightier arm.

What the next age may develop in the arts of life, or the knowledge of
nature, must remain in that limbo of vanity, to which Ariosto consigned
embryo politicians, and Milton consigned departed friars--the world of
the moon. But it will scarcely supply instances of more memorable
individual faculties, or of more powerful effects produced by those
faculties. The efforts of Conspiracy and Conquest in France, the efforts
of Conservatism and Constitution in England, produced a race of men whom
nothing but the crisis could have produced, and who will find no rivals
in the magnitude of their capacities, the value of their services, in
their loftiness of principle, and their influence on their age; until
some similar summons shall be uttered to the latent powers of mankind,
from some similar crisis of good and evil. The eloquence of Burke, Pitt,
Fox, and a crowd of their followers, in the senate of England, and the
almost fiendish vividness of the republican oratory, have remained
without equals, and almost without imitators--the