we could behold, engraved in the same manner, the heads of all Kings, done from nature!  We might then reconcile ourselves to seeing a ridiculous embellishment of heraldry accompany them.”

—­“When I first arrived at Versailles, (says Gregoire,) as member of the Constituent Assembly, (in 1789,) I met with Lanjuinais, and we took an oath in concert to dethrone the King and abolish Nobility.”  Now, this was before the alledged provocations of the King and Nobility—­before the constitution was framed—­before the flight of the royal family to Varennes—­and before the war.  But almost daily confessions of this sort escape, which at once justify the King, and establish the infamy of the revolutionists.

These are circumstances not to be forgotten, did not the sad science of discriminating the shades of wickedness, in which (as I have before noticed) the French have been rendered such adepts, oblige them at present to fix their hopes—­not according to the degree of merit, but by that of guilt.  They are reduced to distinguish between those who sanction murders, and those who perpetrated them—­between the sacrificer of one thousand victims, and that of ten—­between those who assassinate, and those who only reward the assassin.*

* Tallien is supposed, as agent of the municipality of paris, to have paid a million and a half of livres to the Septembrisers or assassins of the prisons!  I know not whether the sum was in assignats or specie.—­If in the former, it was, according to the exchange then, about two and thirty thousand pounds sterling:  but if estimated in proportion to what might be purchased with it, near fifty thousand.  Tallien has never denied the payment of the money—­ we may, therefore, conclude the charge to be true.

—­Before the revolution, they would not have known how to select, where all were objects of abhorrence; but now the most ignorant are casuists in the gradations of turpitude, and prefer Tallien to Le Bon, and the Abbe Sieyes to Barrere.

The crimes of Carrier have been terminated, not punished, by death.  He met his fate with a courage which, when the effect of innocence, is glorious to the sufferer, and consoling to humanity; but a career like his, so ended, was only the confirmation of a brutal and ferocious mind.*

* When Carrier was arrested, he attempted to shoot himself, and, on being prevented by the Gens-d’armes, he told them there were members of the Convention who would not forgive their having prevented his purpose—­implying, that they apprehended the discoveries he might make on his trial.  While he was dressing himself, (for they took him in bed,) he added, “Les Scelerats! (Meaning his more particular accomplices, who, he was told, had voted against him,) they deserved that I should be as dastardly as themselves.”  He rested his defence entirely on the decrees of the Convention.

—­Of thirty who were tried with him as his