At one period I have to remark the destruction of
the saints--at another the adoration of Marat. One half of the newspaper
is filled with a list of names of the guillotined, and the other with
that of places of amusement; and every thing now more than ever marks
that detestable association of cruelty and levity, of impiety and
absurdity, which has uniformly characterized the French revolution. It
is become a crime to feel, and a mode to affect a brutality incapable of
feeling--the persecution of Christianity has made atheism a boast, and
the danger of respecting traditional virtues has hurried the weak and
timid into the apotheosis of the most abominable vices. Conscious that
they are no longer animated by enthusiasm,* the Parisians hope to imitate
it by savage fury or ferocious mirth--their patriotism is signalized only
by their zeal to destroy, and their attachment to their government only
by applauding its cruelties.--If Robespierre, St. Just, Collot d'Herbois,
and the Convention as their instruments, desolate and massacre half
France, we may lament, but we can scarcely wonder at it. How should a
set of base and needy adventurers refrain from an abuse of power more
unlimited than that of the most despotic monarch; or how distinguish the
general abhorrence, amid addresses of adulation, which Louis the
Fourteenth would have blushed to appropriate?*
* Louis the Fourteenth, aguerri (steeled) as he was by sixty years
of adulation and prosperity, had yet modesty sufficient to reject a
"dose of incense which he thought too strong.
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