* Les Ecoles Normales were schools where masters were to be instructed in the art of teaching.  Certain deputies objected to them, as being of feudal institution, supposing that Normale had some reference to Normandy.

** This was a mistake, for the French seem to have adopted the maxim, “that man is never too old to learn;” and, accordingly, at the opening of the Normal schools, the celebrated Bougainville, now eighty years of age, became a pupil.  This Normal project was, however, soon relinquished—­for by that fatality which has hitherto attended all the republican institutions, it was found to have become a mere nursery for aristocrats.

But this revolutionary barbarism, not content with stopping the progress of the rising generation, has ravaged without mercy the monuments of departed genius, and persecuted with senseless despotism those who were capable of replacing them.  Pictures have been defaced, statues mutilated, and libraries burnt, because they reminded the people of their Kings or their religion; while artists, and men of science or literature, were wasting their valuable hours in prison, or expiring on the scaffold.—­The moral and gentle Florian died of vexation.  A life of abstraction and utility could not save the celebrated chymist, Lavoisier, from the Guillotine.  La Harpe languished in confinement, probably, that he might not eclipse Chenier, who writes tragedies himself; and every author that refused to degrade his talents by the adulation of tyranny has been proscribed and persecuted.  Palissot,* at sixty years old, was destined to expiate in a prison a satire upon Rousseau, written when he was only twenty, and escaped, not by the interposition of justice, but by the efficacity of a bon mot.

* Palissot was author of “The Philosophers,” a comedy, written thirty years ago, to ridicule Rousseau.  He wrote to the municipality, acknowledged his own error, and the merits of Rousseau; yet, says he, if Rousseau were a god, you ought not to sacrifice human victims to him.—­The expression, which in French is well tuned, pleased the municipality, and Palissot, I believe, was not afterwards molested.

—­A similar fate would have been awarded Dorat, [Author of “Les Malheurs de l’Inconstance,” and other novels.] for styling himself Chevalier in the title-pages of his novels, had he not commuted his punishment for base eulogiums on the Convention, and with the same pen, which has been the delight of the French boudoir, celebrated Carrier’s murders on the Loire under the appellation of “baptemes civiques.”  Every province in France, we are informed by the eloquent pedantry of Gregoire, exhibits traces of these modern Huns, which, though now exclusively attributed to the agents of Robespierre and Mr. Pitt,* it is very certain were authorized by the decrees of the Convention, and executed under the sanction of Deputies on mission, or their subordinates.