represented in the theatre; the Cardinal de Lorraine, in his robes of function,' being depicted as the chief actor and instigator.-Nor was it in vain. At Paris, (witness especially the Septembrist massacres in the prisons,) at Lyons, in La Vendée, and elsewhere, the examples thus set before them were copied too faithfully: -copied by a populace again" drunk with fanaticism; only not, as once, that of Popery, but of Atheism,—not as once against Protestant fellow-citizens, but against Papists. The shootings, the drownings, the roastings of the Roman Catholic loyalists, both priests and nobles, (not to speak of other injuries great, yet less atrocious,) had all their prototypes in the barbarities of another age, practised under the direction of the Pope and French Papists, both priests and nobles, against their innocent Hugonot fellow-countrymen.3 the heat of passion, with the absence of all formalities of law, and by the aid of a populace drunk with fanaticism."-The famous Sully describes the difficulty which the Principal of his college had in saving him from the ferocious priests, who endeavoured to tear him to pieces; declaring that the orders were to slaughter all Protestants, even infants at the breast.-Voltaire in his Henriade thus paints the scene: Ces monstres furieux, de carnage altérés, Excités par la voix des prêtres sanguinaires, Invoquaient le Seigneur en egorgeant leurs freres ; See the interesting account in Sir William Cockburn's History of the Massacre; and the medal at my p. 159 suprà. The fact, which seems to me very striking, is thus stated by Burke, in his Thoughts on the French Revolution. "It is but the other day that they (the Parisian revolutionary leaders) caused this massacre (of St. Bartholomew's day) to be acted on the stage, for the diversion of the descendants of those who committed it. In this tragic farce they produced the Cardinal de Lorraine, in his robes of function, ordering general slaughter. Was this spectacle intended to make the Parisians abhor persecution, and loathe the effusion of blood? No! it was to teach them to persecute their own pastors :-to excite them, by raising a disgust and horror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting them down to destruction;-to stimulate their cannibal appetites ;-to quicken them to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it should suit the purpose of the Guises of the day.—An assembly, in which sate a multitude of priests and prelates, was obliged to suffer this indignity at its door." Works, Vol. iii. p. 191. 2 A full description of the horrid scene is given by Alison, i. 450, and Fysh, p. 164, &c.—The former, after describing the horrid massacres of the prisoners, begun on Sunday Sept. 2, 1792, and continued for three days after, suggests the parallel of the 400 Albigeois burnt at Carcassone. 3 M. Claude, in his Complaints of Protestants, quoted by Bicheno (Signs of the Times, p. 33) says; "They cast some into large fires, and took them out when they were half roasted. They hanged others with ropes under their armpits, and plunged them several times into wells, till they promised to renounce Thus if the Apocalyptic figure of a noisome and grievous sore indicate the outbreak into painful ulceration, of corruptions previously existing in the body politic of them that worshipped the Beast's image and bore his mark, the figure was fulfilled in the history of the French Revolution. Whether we consider the horrors and sufferings arising out of the national atheism, licentiousness, revolutionary democratism, or bloodthirstiness of spirit then exhibited, they were but the evolution into violent action of the corrupt principles, religious, moral, social, and political, infused and cherished long before in the nation, and indeed for the most part as a part of its religious system,-by the Papal Beast that it worshipped. I have only to make two further observations, in conclusion of this Chapter. The first is, that the Apocalyptic figure, or some others very similar, (figures not unused we saw, and with similar application, by ancient writers alike sacred and profane,1) have been applied not unfrequently by the best modern writers, to characterize the actuating spirit, symptomatic phases, sufferings, and evils of the French Revolu their religion," &c. Again at p. 49 Mr. Bicheno adds, with reference to the St. Bartholomew massacre, "that the butchers received orders to slaughter all, even babes at the breast and that the king himself stood at the windows of his palace, endeavouring to shoot those who fled; and crying to their pursuers, Kill them! Kill them !" Among the lesser points of parallelism between the two series of atrocities may be mentioned the shutting up of Protestant churches, confiscation of their property, forcing them into emigration, (800,000 were then the Protestant emigrés,) and sometimes stopping them on the frontiers, as the unhappy Louis was stopt, and bringing them back again for trial and punishment: also, at their executions, stifling their voice by beat of drum, when addressing the bystanders in assertion of their innocence; just as the voice of the same unhappy monarch was stifled by sound of the drum at his place of execution. Ibid.-Let me add, with regard to Lyons and its revolutionary horrors, that it was the Lyonnese Roman Catholic operatives that drove out all Protestant workmen from Lyons under Louis XIV. "In our days," says Schlegel, (Philos. of Hist. ii. 253,) "the emigration of the French nobility has been the great historical counter-blow to the banishment of the Hugonots." The circumstance, again, that Voltaire refers to, of the French Romish priests then offering the blood of the innocent Protestants as incense to God, may be compared with that of the atheist democrats of the Revolution, offering the blood of the Romish priests and aristocrats of France as incense to the manes of departed Revolutionists: so as by Fouchet and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons. See the Note p. 308. 4 tion. Thus by the most eminent of cotemporary writers, Mr. Burke, the revolutionary spirit is spoken of as "the fever of aggravated Jacobinism," the "epidemic of atheistical fanaticism," "an evil lying deep in the corruptions of human nature," 3 "the malignant French distemper," of which the Jacobinical writers were "the disgusting symptoms," and "a plague, with its fanatical spirit of proselytism, that needed the strictest quarantine to guard against: "6 whereof, though the mischief might be skinned over" for a time, yet the result, into whatever country it entered, was "the corruption of all morals," 998 "the decomposition of all society: "9 from which, in France, where it had outbroken in all its venom, the sufferings were to its victims, even in the remembrance, as living ulcers; 10 while the governing Jacobins "fed like vermin on this distemper, and these festering wounds, of the carcase of their country." "—I might add expressions similar from other authors who have written on the same subject.12 But what has been said may suffice. My second observation is, that though the outbreak 1 Burke's Works, Vol. iv. p. 115. 2 Ibid. iii. 204. 5 Ibid. iii. 506. 6 I rather combine in this than quote. At iii. 126, he calls it, "Such a plague that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it;" and elsewhere frequently speaks of its fanatical spirit of propagandism. 7 Ibid. iv. 402. 8 Ibid. iv. 429. 9 Burke's Works, Vol. iv. 424, 440. 10 iii. 104, "The living ulcer of a corroding memory : "-said of the unhappy royal sufferer, before the termination of his sufferings in death. iv. 562: "It seems that a hope is entertained that the Directory will have tenderness for the carcase of their country; by whose very distemper, and on whose festering wounds, like vermin, they are fed."-Compare Job's description of his ulcerated frame, "My flesh is clothed with worms." Job vii. 5. 12 As the financial difficulties of France arose in part, as I have before observed, from the moral corruptions and profligacy of the French Court, I must not omit Sir Walter Scott's comparison of Necker's Compte Rendu to "the disclosure of a wasting sore, useless and disgusting, unless when shewn to a surgeon, and for the purpose of cure." Mr. Fysh quotes this p. 28: and also, after mentioning the fact that Louis XV died of the small-pox, caught from an unfortunate victim of his pleasures, and that his grandson Louis XVI, on ascending the throne, was, together with the rest of the royal family, attacked by that loathsome malady, well observes that "it was an expressive emblem of the grievous and noisome sore about to break out on unhappy France." p. 19.— Compare what I have sa d of the eλkos, p. 308, and of the taking of symbols from living realities, p. 296 suprà. Dr. Baron, in his Life of Jenner, notes the remarkable prevalence of smallpox in Europe, in the last thirty years of the 18th century. i. 12. was first and chiefly in France, the most Christian of the ten Papal kingdoms, yet the noisome democratic plaguefever spread speedily to other kingdoms also. It has been noted, both by Burke at the time and by historians subsequently, how the distemper spread, by means of its revolutionary newspapers and affiliated Jacobin clubs, into Savoy and Switzerland, Italy and Germany, the countries of the Rhine, Belgium and Spain, and even Holland and England. In England, through God's great mercy, the true and scriptural religion professed and established in its reformed church, was made the means of repelling and (for a time at least) almost expelling the mischief. In the countries of the Popedom however, (that is, in the countries specially marked out as the objects of the first Apocalyptic Vial,) it so rooted itself as to be like a plague afflicting them :-the plague of a seditious spirit in the lower classes against the higher; which prepared every where, as will soon appear, for the Gallic sword to follow it. And so we are led onward. In the Apocalyptic Vialoutpourings one quickly followed another and scarce 1 Burke, Vol. iii. p. 205. Again iv. 21: "The seeds of the French spirit of proselytism are sown almost everywhere; chiefly by newspaper circulations, infinitely more efficacious and extensive than they ever were: " and 23; ་་ The doctrine of the Rights of Man has made amazing progress in Germany, along the whole course of the Rhine, Meuse, Moselle, in Suabia, Franconia, and especially the ecclesiastical Electorates." He afterwards specifies Switzerland, Savoy, Lombardy, Naples, the Papal States, (where it was more poisonous than the miasma from the Pontine marshes, iv. 535,) and Spain: and he observes, p. 73, that France had fitted out a fleet in the Mediterranean to compel the Italian princes to admit French commerce, and with it, its constant concomitant of affiliated Jacobin Societies.-In his Letter on the Regicide Peace, written in 1796, he speaks of the evil as spread in every country of Europe, and among all orders of men who look up to France as a head its centre being there, its circumference the world of Europe. 'Elsewhere," he adds, "the faction is militant; in France triumphant." iv. 460. So Alison states (pp. 593, 661) how as early as 1792 the imperialists complained that French affiliated societies spread the fever of democracy through the whole Maritime Alps, and all the contumacious states.-And Schlegel, in his Philosophy of Hist. ii. 233, writes: "The infidel party in the last century by no means constituted a distinct and separate sect; but was like a deadly contagion of the spirit of the times, infecting all beside and around, above and beneath it; wherever the wind of chance or breath of fanatic zeal might carry it." And again, p. 296: "The French Revolution was a general political malady, an universal epidemic of the age." οργή had the noisome ulcer of the first Vial developed its earliest malignity in France, and begun to taint with its contagion the states conterminous, when other Vials of wrath,—a second, third, and fourth,-involving terrific judgments of war and bloodshed, by sea and by land, succeeded. How could it be otherwise? The malignant spirit of the first Vial had a fury of propagandism in itself, like as if the phrensy of the madman (the gym following the AKO1) was on him that had the plague and its lazarsores. As well might the smoke of Mahommedism from the abyss fail of sending forth its locust-like fanatics to propagate it, as the infidel democratic spirit of the Revolution.3 The first burst of popular fury," says Alison, "was followed by an ardent and universal passion for arms. The "infernal energies of the destroying principle" were to be manifested :5-that principle which, as the same writer elsewhere says, "not oceans of blood have yet washed away; and which was destined to convulse the world." 6 2 1 Thucydides, in his sketch of the outbreak of the democratic spirit at Corcyra, before referred to, uses the Apocalyptic word opyn (Tα en wylonoav) of the infuriate political passions and animosities of the antagonist factions; Oi μev & τοιούταις οργαις ες αλλήλες εχρησαντο—απαιδευσία οργής εκφερομενοι. iii. 84, 85, &c. 2 See Vol. i. p. 416. 3 "Never shall I think any country in Europe secure, whilst there is established in the very centre of it a state which is in reality a college of armed fanatics, for the propagation of the principles of assassination, rebellion, fraud, faction, impiety.. What if Mahomet had erected his fanatic standard for the destruction of the Christian religion in luce Asia," &c. Burke, iii. 337. I have already at p. 317 noticed other passages in which Burke makes the same comparison. It is a favourite with him. Let me, ere I close my references to this great writer, extract one other passage in which he makes the Apocalyptic emblem of an ulcerated decomposing carcase the groundwork of another picture of this fanatic propagandism of the Revolution".... the regicides and robbers, that from the rotten carcase of their own murdered country have poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest and the most destructive of the classes of animated nature; which, like columns of locusts, have laid waste the fairest part of the world." Letter to a Noble Lord, iv. 344. 4 i. 58. 5 Burke, iv. 582. 6 i. 514. |