Volume VI Part 3 (2/2)

What ferocity of character drew on the fate of Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis the Sixteenth? For which of the vices of that pattern of benevolence, of piety, and of all the virtues, did they put her to death? For which of her vices did they put to death the mildest of all human creatures, the d.u.c.h.ess of Biron? What were the crimes of those crowds of matrons and virgins of condition, whom they mas sacred, with their juries of blood, in prisons and on scaffolds? What were the enormities of the infant king, whom they caused, by lingering tortures, to perish in their dungeon, and whom if at last they dispatched by poison, it was in that detestable crime the only act of mercy they have ever shown?

What softening of character is to be had, what review of their social situations and duties is to be taught by these examples to kings, to n.o.bles, to men of property, to women, and to infants? The royal family perished because it was royal. The n.o.bles perished because they were n.o.ble. The men, women, and children, who had property, because they had property to be robbed of. The priests were punished, after they had been robbed of their all, not for their vices, but for their virtues and their piety, which made them an honor to their sacred profession, and to that nature of which we ought to be proud, since they belong to it. My Lord, nothing can be learned from such examples, except the danger of being kings, queens, n.o.bles, priests, and children, to be butchered on account of their inheritance. These are things at which not vice, not crime, not folly, but wisdom, goodness, learning, justice, probity, beneficence, stand aghast. By these examples our reason and our moral sense are not enlightened, but confounded; and there is no refuge for astonished and affrighted virtue, but being annihilated in humility and submission, sinking into a silent adoration of the inscrutable dispensations of Providence, and flying with trembling wings from this world of daring crimes, and feeble, pusillanimous, half-bred, b.a.s.t.a.r.d justice, to the asylum of another order of things, in an unknown form, but in a better life.

Whatever the politician or preacher of September or of October may think of the matter, it is a most comfortless, disheartening, desolating example. Dreadful is the example of ruined innocence and virtue, and the completest triumph of the completest villany that ever vexed and disgraced mankind! The example is ruinous in every point of view, religious, moral, civil, political. It establishes that dreadful maxim of Machiavel, that in great affairs men are not to be wicked by halves.

This maxim is not made for a middle sort of beings, who, because they cannot be angels, ought to thwart their ambition, and not endeavor to become infernal spirits. It is too well exemplified in the present time, where the faults and errors of humanity, checked by the imperfect, timorous virtues, have been overpowered by those who have stopped at no crime. It is a dreadful part of the example, that infernal malevolence has had pious apologists, who read their lectures on frailties in favor of crimes,--who abandon the weak, and court the friends.h.i.+p of the wicked. To root out these maxims, and the examples that support them, is a wise object of years of war. This is that war. This is that moral war.

It was said by old Trivulzio, that the Battle of Marignano was the Battle of the Giants,--that all the rest of the many he had seen were those of the Cranes and Pygmies. This is true of the objects, at least, of the contest: for the greater part of those which we have hitherto contended for, in comparison, were the toys of children.

The October politician is so full of charity and good-nature, that he supposes that these very robbers and murderers themselves are in a course of melioration: on what ground I cannot conceive, except on the long practice of every crime, and by its complete success. He is an Origenist, and believes in the conversion of the Devil. All that runs in the place of blood in his veins is nothing but the milk of human kindness. He is as soft as a curd,--though, as a politician, he might be supposed to be made of sterner stuff. He supposes (to use his own expression) ”that the salutary truths which he inculcates are making their way into their bosoms.” Their bosom is a rock of granite, on which Falsehood has long since built her stronghold. Poor Truth has had a hard work of it, with her little pickaxe. Nothing but gunpowder will do.

As a proof, however, of the progress of this sap of Truth, he gives us a confession they had made not long before he wrote. ”'Their fraternity'

(as was lately stated by themselves in a solemn report) 'has been the brotherhood of Cain and Abel,' and 'they have organized nothing but bankruptcy and famine.'” A very honest confession, truly,--and much in the spirit of their oracle, Rousseau. Yet, what is still more marvellous than the confession, this is the very fraternity to which our author gives us such an obliging invitation to accede. There is, indeed, a vacancy in the fraternal corps: a brother and a partner is wanted. If we please, we may fill up the place of the butchered Abel; and whilst we wait the destiny of the departed brother, we may enjoy the advantages of the partners.h.i.+p, by entering without delay into a shop of ready-made bankruptcy and famine. These are the _douceurs_ by which we are invited to Regicide fraternity and friends.h.i.+p. But still our author considers the confession as a proof that ”truth is making its way into their bosoms.” No! It is not making its way into their bosoms. It has forced its way into their mouths! The evil spirit by which they are possessed, though essentially a liar, is forced by the tortures of conscience to confess the truth,--to confess enough for their condemnation, but not for their amendment. Shakspeare very aptly expresses this kind of confession, devoid of repentance, from the mouth of an usurper, a murderer, and a regicide:--

”We are ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence.”

Whence is their amendment? Why, the author writes, that, on their murderous insurrectionary system, their own lives are not sure for an hour; nor has their power a greater stability. True. They are convinced of it; and accordingly the wretches have done all they can to preserve their lives, and to secure their power; but not one step have they taken to amend the one or to make a more just use of the other. Their wicked policy has obliged them to make a pause in the only ma.s.sacres in which their treachery and cruelty had operated as a kind of savage justice,--that is, the ma.s.sacre of the accomplices of their crimes: they have ceased to shed the inhuman blood of their fellow-murderers; but when they take any of those persons who contend for their lawful government, their property, and their religion, notwithstanding the truth which this author says is making its way into their bosoms, it has not taught them the least tincture of mercy. This we plainly see by their ma.s.sacre at Quiberon, where they put to death, with every species of contumely, and without any exception, every prisoner of war who did not escape out of their hands. To have had property, to have been robbed of it, and to endeavor to regain it,--these are crimes irremissible, to which every man who regards his property or his life, in every country, ought well to look in all connection with those with whom to have had property was an offence, to endeavor to keep it a second offence, to attempt to regain it a crime that puts the offender out of all the laws of peace or war. You cannot see one of those wretches without an alarm for your life as well as your goods. They are like the worst of the French and Italian banditti, who, whenever they robbed, were sure to murder.

Are they not the very same ruffians, thieves, a.s.sa.s.sins, and regicides that they were from the beginning? Have they diversified the scene by the least variety, or produced the face of a single new villany? _Taedet harum quotidianarum formarum_. Oh! but I shall be answered, ”It is now quite another thing;--they are all changed. You have not seen them in their state dresses;--this makes an amazing difference. The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed a Const.i.tution;--the costume of the _sans-culotte_ Const.i.tution of 1793 was absolutely insufferable. The Committee for Foreign Affairs were such slovens, and stunk so abominably, that no _muscadin_ amba.s.sador of the smallest degree of delicacy of nerves could come within ten yards of them; but now they are so powdered, and perfumed, and ribanded, and sashed, and plumed, that, though they are grown infinitely more insolent in their fine clothes even than they were in their rags, (and that was enough,) as they now appear, there is something in it more grand and n.o.ble, something more suitable to an awful Roman Senate receiving the homage of dependent tetrarchs. Like that Senate, (their perpetual model for conduct towards other nations,) they permit their va.s.sals (during their good pleasure) to a.s.sume the name of kings, in order to bestow more dignity on the suite and retinue of the sovereign Republic by the nominal rank of their slaves: _Ut habeant instrumenta servitutis et reges_.” All this is very fine, undoubtedly; and amba.s.sadors whose hands are almost out for want of employment may long to have their part in this august ceremony of the Republic one and indivisible. But, with great deference to the new diplomatic taste, we old people must retain some square-toed predilection, for the fas.h.i.+ons of our youth.

I am afraid you will find me, my Lord, again falling into my usual vanity, in valuing myself on the eminent men whose society I once enjoyed. I remember, in a conversation I once had with my ever dear friend Garrick, who was the first of actors, because he was the most acute observer of Nature I ever knew, I asked him how it happened, that, whenever a senate appeared on the stage, the audience seemed always disposed to laughter. He said, the reason was plain: the audience was well acquainted with the faces of most of the senators. They knew that they were no other than candle-snuffers, revolutionary scene-s.h.i.+fters, second and third mob, prompters, clerks, executioners, who stand with their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime, murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,--in short, the very sc.u.m and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits naturally excited ideas of contempt and ridicule.

So it was at Paris on the inaugural day of the Const.i.tution for the present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this invest.i.ture of the Directory;--for so they call the managers of their burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were quite awe-struck with the ”pride, pomp, and circ.u.mstance” of this majestic senate; whilst the _sans-culotte_ gallery instantly recognized their old insurrectionary acquaintance, burst out into a horse-laugh at their absurd finery, and held them in infinitely greater contempt than whilst they prowled about the streets in the pantaloons of the last year's Const.i.tution, when their legislators appeared honestly, with their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their side-pocket-holes, like a bold, brave banditti, as they are. The Parisians (and I am much of their mind) think that a thief with a c.r.a.pe on his visage is much worse than a barefaced knave, and that such robbers richly deserve all the penalties of all the black acts. In this their thin disguise, their comrades of the late abdicated sovereign _canaille_ hooted and hissed them, and from that day have no other name for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English, impossible to make it very civil English: it belongs, indeed, to the language of the _halles_: but, without being instructed in that dialect, it was the opinion of the polite Lord Chesterfield that no man could be a complete master of French. Their Parisian brethren called them _gueux plumes_, which, though not elegant, is expressive and characteristic: _feathered scoundrels_, I think, comes the nearest to it in that kind of English. But we are now to understand that these _gueux_, for no other reason, that I can divine, except their red and white clothes, form at last a state with which we may cultivate amity, and have a prospect of the blessings of a secure and permanent peace. In effect, then, it was not with the men, or their principles, or their polities, that we quarrelled: our sole dislike was to the cut of their clothes.

But to pa.s.s over _their_ dresses,--good G.o.d! in what habits did the representatives of the crowned heads of Europe appear, when they came to swell the pomp of their humiliation, and attended in solemn function this inauguration of Regicide? That would be the curiosity. Under what robes did they cover the disgrace and degradation of the whole college of kings? What warehouses of masks and dominoes furnished a cover to the nakedness of their shame? The shop ought to be known; it will soon have a good trade. Were the dresses of the ministers of those lately called potentates, who attended on that occasion, taken from the wardrobe of that property-man at the opera, from whence my old acquaintance, Anacharsis Clootz, some years ago equipped a body of amba.s.sadors, whom he conducted, as from all the nations of the world, to the bar of what was called the Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly? Among those mock ministers, one of the most conspicuous figures was the representative of the British nation, who unluckily was wanting at the late ceremony. In the face of all the real amba.s.sadors of the sovereigns of Europe was this ludicrous representation of their several subjects, under the name of _oppressed sovereigns_,[10] exhibited to the a.s.sembly. That a.s.sembly received an harangue, in the name of those sovereigns, against their kings, delivered by this Clootz, actually a subject of Prussia, under the name of Amba.s.sador of the Human Race. At that time there was only a feeble reclamation from one of the amba.s.sadors of these tyrants and oppressors.

A most gracious answer was given to the ministers of the oppressed sovereigns; and they went so far on that occasion as to a.s.sign them, in that a.s.sumed character, a box at one of their festivals.

I was willing to indulge myself in an hope that this second appearance of amba.s.sadors was only an insolent mummery of the same kind; but, alas!

Anacharsis himself, all fanatic as he was, could not have imagined that his opera procession should have been the prototype of the real appearance of the representatives of all the sovereigns of Europe themselves, to make the same prostration that was made by those who dared to represent their people in a complaint against them. But in this the French Republic has followed, as they always affect to do, and have hitherto done with success, the example of the ancient Romans, who shook all governments by listening to the complaints of their subjects, and soon after brought the kings themselves to answer at their bar. At this last ceremony the amba.s.sadors had not Clootz for their Cotterel. Pity that Clootz had not had a reprieve from the guillotine till he had completed his work! But that engine fell before the curtain had fallen upon all the dignity of the earth.

On this their gaudy day the new Regicide Directory sent for that diplomatic rabble, as bad as themselves in principle, but infinitely worse in degradation. They called them out by a sort of roll of their nations, one after another, much in the manner in which they called wretches out of their prison to the guillotine. When these amba.s.sadors of infamy appeared before them, the chief Director, in the name of the rest, treated each of them with a short, affected, pedantic, insolent, theatric laconium,--a sort of epigram of contempt. When they had thus insulted them in a style and language which never before was heard, and which no sovereign would for a moment endure from another, supposing any of them frantic enough to use it, to finish their outrage, they drummed and trumpeted the wretches out of their hall of audience.

Among the objects of this insolent buffoonery was a person supposed to represent the King of Prussia. To this worthy representative they did not so much as condescend to mention his master; they did not seem to know that he had one; they addressed themselves solely to Prussia in the abstract, notwithstanding the infinite obligation they owed to their early protector for their first recognition and alliance, and for the part of his territory he gave into their hands for the first-fruits of his homage. None but dead monarchs are so much as mentioned by them, and those only to insult the living by an invidious comparison. They told the Prussians they ought to learn, after the example of Frederick the Great, a love for France. What a pity it is, that he, who loved France so well as to chastise it, was not now alive, by an unsparing use of the rod (which, indeed, he would have spared little) to give them another instance of his paternal affection! But the Directory were mistaken.

These are not days in which monarchs value themselves upon the t.i.tle of _great_: they are grown _philosophic_: they are satisfied to be good.

Your Lords.h.i.+p will pardon me for this no very long reflection on the short, but excellent speech of the plumed Director to the amba.s.sador of Cappadocia. The Imperial amba.s.sador was not in waiting, but they found for Austria a good Judean representation. With great judgment, his Highness, the Grand Duke, had sent the most atheistic c.o.xcomb to be found in Florence, to represent at the bar of impiety the House of Apostolic Majesty, and the descendants of the pious, though high-minded, Maria Theresa. He was sent to humble the whole race of Austria before those grim a.s.sa.s.sins, reeking with the blood of the daughter of Maria Theresa, whom they sent half dead, in a dung-cart, to a cruel execution; and this true-born son of apostasy and infidelity, this renegado from the faith and from all honor and all humanity, drove an Austrian coach over the stones which were yet wet with her blood,--with that blood which dropped every step through her tumbrel, all the way she was drawn from the horrid prison, in which they had finished all the cruelty and horrors not executed in the face of the sun. The Hungarian subjects of Maria Theresa, when they drew their swords to defend her rights against France, called her, with correctness of truth, though not with the same correctness, perhaps, of grammar, a king: ”_Moriamur pro rege nostro, Maria Theresa._” SHE lived and died a king; and others will have subjects ready to make the same vow, when, in either s.e.x, they show themselves real kings.

When the Directory came to this miserable fop, they bestowed a compliment on his matriculation into _their_ philosophy; but as to his master, they made to him, as was reasonable, a reprimand, not without a pardon, and an oblique hint at the whole family. What indignities have been offered through this wretch to his master, and how well borne, it is not necessary that I should dwell on at present. I hope that those who yet wear royal, imperial, and ducal crowns will learn to feel as men and as kings: if not, I predict to them, they will not long exist as kings or as men.

Great Britain was not there. Almost in despair, I hope she will never, in any rags and _covers.l.u.ts_ of infamy, be seen at such an exhibition.

The hour of her final degradation is not yet come; she did not herself appear in the Regicide presence, to be the sport and mockery of those b.l.o.o.d.y buffoons, who, in the merriment of their pride, were insulting with every species of contumely the fallen dignity of the rest of Europe. But Britain, though not personally appearing to bear her part in this monstrous tragi-comedy, was very far from being forgotten. The new-robed regicides found a representative for her. And who was this representative? Without a previous knowledge, any one would have given a thousand guesses before he could arrive at a tolerable divination of their rancorous insolence. They chose to address what they had to say concerning this nation to the amba.s.sador of America. They did not apply to this amba.s.sador for a mediation: that, indeed, would have indicated a want of every kind of decency; but it would have indicated nothing more.

But in this their American apostrophe, your Lords.h.i.+p will observe, they did not so much as pretend to hold out to us directly, or through any mediator, though in the most humiliating manner, any idea whatsoever of peace, or the smallest desire of reconciliation. To the States of America themselves they paid no compliment. They paid their compliment to Was.h.i.+ngton solely: and on what ground? This most respectable commander and magistrate might deserve commendation on very many of those qualities which they who most disapprove some part of his proceedings, not more justly than freely, attribute to him; but they found nothing to commend in him ”_but the hatred he bore to Great Britain_.” I verily believe, that, in the whole history of our European wars, there never was such a compliment paid from the sovereign of one state to a great chief of another. Not one amba.s.sador from any one of those powers who pretend to live in amity with this kingdom took the least notice of that unheard-of declaration; nor will Great Britain, till she is known with certainty to be true to her own dignity, find any one disposed to feel for the indignities that are offered to her. To say the truth, those miserable creatures were all silent under the insults that were offered to themselves. They pocketed their epigrams, as amba.s.sadors formerly took the gold boxes and miniature pictures set in diamonds presented them by sovereigns at whose courts they had resided.

It is to be presumed that by the next post they faithfully and promptly transmitted to their masters the honors they had received. I can easily conceive the epigram which will be presented to Lord Auckland, or to the Duke of Bedford, as hereafter, according to circ.u.mstances, they may happen to represent this kingdom. Few can have so little imagination as not readily to conceive the nature of the boxes of epigrammatic lozenges that will be presented to them.

But _hae nugae seria duc.u.n.t in mala_. The conduct of the Regicide faction is perfectly systematic in every particular, and it appears absurd only as it is strange and uncouth, not as it has an application to the ends and objects of their policy. When by insult after insult they have rendered the character of sovereigns vile in the eyes of their subjects, they know there is but one step more to their utter destruction. All authority, in a great degree, exists in opinion: royal authority most of all. The supreme majesty of a monarch cannot be allied with contempt. Men would reason, not unplausibly, that it would be better to get rid of the monarchy at once than to suffer that which was inst.i.tuted, and well inst.i.tuted, to support the glory of the nation, to become the instrument of its degradation and disgrace.

A good many reflections will arise in your Lords.h.i.+p's mind upon the time and circ.u.mstances of that most insulting and atrocious declaration of hostility against this kingdom. The declaration was made subsequent to the n.o.ble lord's encomium on the new Regicide Const.i.tution,--after the pamphlet had made something more than advances towards a reconciliation with that ungracious race, and had directly disowned all those who adhered to the original declaration in favor of monarchy. It was even subsequent to the unfortunate declaration in the speech from the throne (which this pamphlet but too truly announced) of the readiness of our government to enter into connections of friends.h.i.+p with that faction.

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