say-Ah mon Dieu, Je suis perdue! One of the mob instantly turned back her hair, and, in a few minutes from her first appearance, her head was struck off.-The relation of this fact, with which the Author concludes his Preface, may be misinterpreted into a wish to excuse barbarity, or be supposed to flow from party-motives; but, as its authenticity can be readily proved, he leaves imagination to indulge itself."

In the body of the work, Mr. James makes use of the following observations:

"It has of late been the practice of almost all our Political Authors to investigate public Disturbances, without honestly exposing the cause in its effect, or candidly tracing the various circumstances which would convince mankind, that national cruelty is too often said to exist, where revolted nature is merely discovered to have acted from partial rage. On the demolition of the Bastile-an event that will ever do honour to the inhabitants of Paris-it was called cruelty to execute justice on a man who could in cool blood order five hundred unarmed citizens to be butchered within its walls, and who only waited for an opportunity to sacrifice many thousands without ;-it was called cruelty to take momentary vengeance where there had been perpetual torture and despair:-to strike off the head of a luxurious and dissipated Governor, who had for years been the instrument of murder and oppression! It was called cruelty to annihilate the

grossest

grossest monopoly in Foulon and Berthier, and to exercise awakened rage upon the remains of a wretch who had wantonly trifled with the necessities of the poor and the industrious! It was called cruelty to place a truss of hay within the lifeless lips of a detested usurer, who, when asked for bread by thousand of his expiring countrymen and fellow-citizens, insolently bade them be satisfied with straw; while the grain they had reaped was rotting in his granaries; but it was mercy to excuse the vilest debauchery of the nobles, and to palliate their excesses by a mockery of punishment; it was mercy to withhold from the hands of justice the titled assassin, or to chastise, as a frailty of nature only, every infraction of truth, honour, and integrity. The Court of Versailles could see no crime where there was birth to protect, or wealth and interest to buy off. What was sufficiently criminal to plunge the common individual into impenetrable darkness by the tyrannical sanction of a Lettre de Cachet, scarcely drew upon the culprit of distinction the temporary frown of Majesty; which was readily removed by the interference of a concubine, or the accidental mention of a parasite. It was enough to have been found subservient to the excesses of Royal Vice and Imbecillity, to have enlivened the growing languor of debauchery by wit and pleasantry, or to have satisfied the inordinate wishes of a mistress, for guilt to remain unpunished, and infamy to be caressed.

VOL. III.

Q

"An

"An impartial view of the Court of Versailles from the beginning of the reign of Louis XIV. down to the Revolution, will convince mankind, that twenty-six millions of inhabitants have been barbarously trampled upon by despotic arrogance; it will open to the world the finest country in Europe rendered ine most abortive in all its possible advantages by the worst of governments; shew insolence plumed in dissipation, poverty punished without one proof of guilt, and grandeur recompensed without one instance of honour and desert.-It will display bigotry and superstition in all their ephemeral colours distinguished by deluded royalty; persecutions fostered by intrigue, and private hatred glutted by religion. It will hold up real instances of corruption in contrast to fictitious crimes; mark out tyranny in full maturity striding over the enfeebled members of the people; public property taxed by private want, and individual safety respected, only when dominion had nothing to exact, or passion to indulge. But it will, above all, display that universal system of treachery among the leaders in government which has ever rendered the most glorious

*In the year 1791, a work appeared at Paris under the following title: "Vie Privée du Maréchal de Richelieu, contenant ses Amours et Intrigues." Any Englishman who may imagine, that the account given in the "Extenuation" of the Excesses of the French Court is too highly coloured is referred to this Publication for materials of a similar description, which far exceed the strongest tint it possesses.

undertakings

undertakings fruitless, and the largest contributions of the people wretchedly deficient.

"The nation at large-which should always be the primary object of ministerial consideration-was a weak and secondary cause, that only produced a semblance of public spirit, and was invariably made the specious instrument of private accommodation. Kings were warily led from the cradle into the darkest avenues of human intelligence; they were shut from the light of general information, and cautiously conducted, from infancy to manhood through a settled system of ignorance and insensibility. Hence unavoidably arose a necessity for secret agents and confidants; we cannot call those men ministers, who, for their own aggrandizement, make majesty descend to meanness, in order to preserve the reins of government at the expence of every honest subject in the land *.

*The mysterious business of the Diamond Necklace, in which the Queen with Cardinal de Rohan are said to have been implicated, and the subsequent punishment of Madame de la Motte, was a powerful instrument in the hands of a designing Faction; and the avowed hostility of the Queen towards the Duke of Orleans, as well as towards Neckar, was no less conducive to that popular cry against the Court of Versailles, which ultimately ended in the ruin of the Royal Family. This unfortunate Lady, in 1786, was publickly whipped and marked in the Place de Greve, and afterwards confined in the Salpêtrière. Her husband and she came over to England after the murders of September 1792. Madame de la Motte was a woman of high spirit and great intrepidity. To avoid being arrested for debt in St. George's Fields, she suddenly leaped out of the window, and broke both her thighs; of which fall she died in St. George's Hospital.

Q2

" When

"When dispassionate and candid men shall have seriously weighed the long successive train of oppressions which have marked the reigns of Louis XIV, and his successor, with established facts of the most galling tyranny and unexampled falsehood since the accession of the present deposed Monarch; when they have visited the arcana of the Courts of Versailles and Fontainebleau; pierced through the well-supported bigotry of Maintenon, the subservient gallantries of Pompadour, and the studied impudence of Du Barry, into the more refined and complicated creed of vice of the female triumvirate; when they shall have spread into public light unnumbered proofs of the most unnatural, and the most digusting depravity of the heart and mind, and placed them, with their rampant satellites of base corruption, in contrast to the bold struggles of insulted nature; when this shall be done, will justified vengeance be construed into cruelty, because it punishes convicted perjury, falsehood, and cabal? Will not the subsequent calamities be judged in their original causes, and, if resentment is to be roused by suffering humanity, should it not be pointed at the source of the evil?

"How wretchedly distempered, how infectious in its principles, and lamentably bad in its effects, must the old government of France have been, to render the minds of the lower order susceptible of impressions at which the most barbarous