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THE MAGDALEN CHURCHYARD.

whether this act ought to be ranked among the most execrable deeds of man, or as the result of the most unbounded political fanaticism, and revolutionary enthusiasm.

END OF THE MEMOIR.

TENTH NIGHT.

HERE begin, with new objects of grief, other subjects for deep meditation, a new order of recital. I will no longer engross your melancholy thoughts with the dethroned, captive, and martyred monarch. The grave has devoured the man, who commanded kingdoms, and already the grass has grown over his mangled remains. Other actors are about to appear on the scene of desolation; women wrapped in mourning and calamities, a tender child, whose graces are withered by misfortunes!.....

Ah! if in this age of confusion, some souls, having escaped from the snares of a selfish calculation, are yet uncontaminated with its corruption; if the groans

of melancholy and the tears of pity can yet offer them charms, let them come forth and devour this funeral tale, in which I pour my whole heart. Sacred food of feeling hearts! you would afford a cold enjoyment to the frozen souls of the selfish. Come, sweet, angelic, and virtuous beings, come and listen to me ! May the fruit of my sad lucubrations awake in your broken hearts some delicious sighs! May the pages intrusted with mine be moistened with your tears! For the friend, for the painter of sorrow, what reward can exceed this!

Hardly, continued the respectable Fermont, as he began the tenth night of his narration, hardly had Louis XVI. fallen under the axe, when the anarchists turned against social order the arms hitherto directed against the monarch. It seemed as if the blood, of which they had all sipped some drops, enkindled in their bosoms a thirst for crimes, ardour for pillage, rage, and destruction. The most exaggerated opinions, the most sweeping measures were exhaled from the crater of the mountain, as the burning lava rushes from the mouth of a volcano. The cries of fury, the

bloody imprecations, the clamours of death, which resounded incessantly under the roof of the hall of the convention, and were reechoed through France, were accompanied by a frenetic fever, which seized on a part of her inhabitants, and by the chills of terror, which kept the other in constant fear. With the ruins of the Bastille, levelled by the hand of liberty, they reared a thousand new Bastilles, which were indifferently peopled by the friends and enemies of the country. The decrees of an usurping decemvirate, more absolute than the Divan of Constantinople, were written in blood, which they ordered to be profusely spilt, and were strictly obeyed. The bloody cap of licentiousness reigned over the political horizon, as a frightful meteor amidst tempests; and the level of an undefined equality was kept by the axe of the executioners. Then were accomplished the predictions of the expiring monarch. Then two convulsive affections ruled every heart; a part were impelled by an uncontrolable spirit of destruction, the rest by an absolute indifference for their own safety. Deplorable overthrow of nature, which tends always to create and

preserve! More than one human slaughter house offered the unnatural spectacle of a struggle between the executioners and victims, vieing with each other, the latter in offering their throats, and the former in plunging their knives into them. The revolutionary scythe spared neither the hair grown grey under caducity, nor the bloom of adolescence, the tenderness of mothers, nor the pleasures of lovers. It mowed down at once the timid virgin in the arms of her mother, the wife trembling on the bosom of her husband, and the debilitated old man leaning on his son; the infirm man, whom disease slowly consumed, the sick man struggling with natural death, did not escape its repeated strokes. It spared neither sublime talents, heroic virtues, nor estimable qualities. It strewed the scaffold with the pencils of the painter, the pen of the writer, and the compasses of the geometrician. Oh! bitter and killing recollection! Oh bloody night lasting for more than two years! Less fatal by the mischief, which thou hast perpetrated, than by the seed of evil, which thou hast left behind! What vestiges of devastation have covered my country