The
affrighted musician begged to be heard in his defence; and declaring he
only meant, by the adoption of these gentle airs, to express the
tranquillity and happiness enjoyed under the republican constitution,
struck off Ca Ira.
When the ceremony was over, one Brival proposed, that the young King
should be put to death; observing that instead of the many useless crimes
which had been committed, this ought to have had the preference. The
motion was not seconded; but the Convention, in order to defeat the
purposes of the royalists, who, they say, increase in number, have
ordered the Committees to consider of some way of sending this poor child
out of the country.
When I reflect on the event which these men have so indecently
commemorated, and the horrors which succeeded it, I feel something more
than a detestation for republicanism. The undefined notions of liberty
imbibed from poets and historians, fade away--my reverence for names long
consecrated in our annals abates--and the sole object of my political
attachment is the English constitution, as tried by time and undeformed
by the experiments of visionaries and impostors. I begin to doubt either
the sense or honesty of most of those men who are celebrated as the
promoters of changes of government which have chiefly been adopted rather
with a view to indulge a favourite theory, than to relieve a people from
any acknowledged oppression.
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