whether earned by honour or dishonour. Not one in a million of those who tore down the banners and escutcheons of the French noblesse, who burned their mansions and drank their blood, knew or cared whether they were more or less profligate than their murderers. But they were their superiors; they inherited a place in society which set them over the heads of the clowns, and the clowns were determined to have the grinning triumph of tearing them down.

The cry against the French Clergy was not their impurity or impiety, for individually they were popular; and whether popular or not, the badauds of Paris and Versailles cared nothing for their virtues or vices. The church income was the grand count in the indictment, and on the strength of that they massacred as many of them as they could seize, and banished the remainder. In the war of the peasants against the nobility, it was not the gay man of fashion, or the severe feudalist, whom they held as the enemy; their enemy was the possessor of the neighbouring chateau, the master of so many chariots and horses, the possessor of so many services of plate. The rental was the treason, and the plunder of all that he was worth, the formal execution of national justice. No man in France thought that he would be the wiser, purer, or freer for the murder of his King, but thousands and millions rejoiced in that most remorseless act of blood, as the triumph of their vanity: it made every beggar and bandit in France as great as his King, for the time; and the stimulant was enough with the legislators of the streets, to urge them to the murder of every branch of the

Royal Family in their grasp. Such was the lesson of rabble supremacy in France, and such would be the example in England, if, in the vengeance of Heaven, we should ever suffer its leaders to dictate to our Parliament, or domineer over the educated classes of the Empire. With those teachers all change is rapine in prospect; and all patriotism consists in the art of pulling down. Let England beware, for she will have her trial yet; the ground is shaking under her feet, and nothing but the vigilance and vigour which saved her before, under God, can save her again.

no more.

In all the great stages of public affairs, there is a time when profession has done its work, and can do In the fable, the storm either blows away the cloak, or fastens it closer; in the first instance, it was the encumbrance or the disguise, worn for either vanity or deceit. Whiggism was now forced to exhibit something of its actual form. Specious speeches on general topics were no longer to be borne, at a time when questions of national life and death were busy. Voluble hypocrisy was to be suffered no longer to flourish; facts of the deepest terror had come to supersede the vague and shewy harangues through whose medium all public principles were presented, equally softened and divergent. The breaking out of the French Rebellion was the dissolving of the spell which had disguised the minds of men in and out of Parliament. Every man's character was forced into full and naked display, by the necessities of the struggle. The two leading parties of the State now started asunder by a more complete division than public exigency had

ever witnessed before; the Revolution was the great gulf between, denying access from either side, and while it lay shooting up horrid flame, and startling the eye and ear with the shapes and cries of torment, it gave to both the image of that fate which awaited weakness, perfidy, and perversion of the laws by which nations are secure.

In this crisis Burke chose his way at once, and had the high distinction of being the first to choose his way, and to be the great guide of all that was sound and pure in the nation, up the steep and difficult road of public safety. He had his sacrifices, and his susceptible and ardent nature was formed to feel the keenness of those sacrifices; loving public applause, strongly affected by private friendship, sensitively alive to the slightest imputation of dishonour, and by long habit attached to the party which he had sustained, guided, and adorned for twenty years, he had before him only the alternative of abandoning all, or adopting the Revolution. His choice was soon made. He gave up his feelings, to retain his principles; threw the cause of party overboard, to welcome the cause of humankind; and in both acheived the highest honour that it is in the competence of a statesman or a commonwealth to obtain or to confer.

The process of separation was rapid. He had already fixed the brand on the abettors of France, by pronouncing their plaudits "a tolerance of crime, an absurd partiality to abstract follies and practical wickedness." In those expressions, he chiefly adverted to

the herd of obscure writers, who, from the first outbreak of French violence, had virulently aspersed the Church and King of England. It was among the ignorant, jealous, and envenomed brood, lingering on the confines of Christianity and infidelity, that the atrocities of the French Revolution found their most pertinacious defenders. The great body of the British people had rejected and loathed it, from the moment when it began to be stained with blood. But the new illuminate only loved it the more; identified themselves with its progress at every fresh iniquity; clung to every sanguinary rag that fluttered round its frame; and boasting themselves the elect of religion and freedom, proclaimed day and night the praises of a tyranny that denounced the immortality of the soul, that worshipped a drunken profligate from the streets, and that realized its doctrines of equality, by plundering all alike, and sending the plundered to the promiscuous scaffold.

CHAPTER XIII.

Debate on the Army Estimates-Burke's Schism with Fox-and with Sheridan-Publication of the celebrated "Reflections"Public honours to its Writer-Visit of Paine to England-Pitt's Views of the Revolution.

THE debate on the Army Estimates, (5th and 9th February, 1790,) gave the first decided evidence of the fallen spirit which had entered into the councils of Opposition. In the debate of the 5th, Fox, after a long panegyric on the glories of subversion, had the hardihood to pronounce a direct eulogium on the revolt of the French Guards. He was met by the natural result—a storm of reprobation from the insulted feelings of the House. In the debate of the 9th, Burke spoke, first adverting to the danger of such opinions coming from the authority of such a name. Then entering at large into the question of Democracy, he delivered those immortal sentiments which were to be the sounding of a trumpet to all the generous sympathies of England. While the House was suspended in admiration of the magnificent enthusiasm with which he imagined the grandeur and security of a Revolution founded, like that of 1688, on the true rights of human nature; he suddenly turned to its vio