Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged.  Poets who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation.  There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny.  They would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained.  No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day:  a principal actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much actual crime against so much contingent advantage,—­and after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the advantages.  They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling to pay the balance.  In the theatre, the first intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, would show that this method of political computation would justify every extent of crime.  They would see, that, on these principles, even where the very worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery and blood.  They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.  They present a shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral virtues.  Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end,—­until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.  Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.

But the reverend pastor exults in this “leading in triumph,” because, truly, Louis the Sixteenth was “an arbitrary monarch”:  that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put him in possession.  A misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was born king of France.  But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt.  I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects, who was willing to