devoted subjects, whom I could not imitate, but whom I would place on my right hand, if I were a king, reserved to themselves this honour, and united to defend the grandson of Saint Louis. Should they survive this courageous act, I will never pass by them without a respectful bow."

ADDENDA, dated 20th February.

Having gone to Versailles, on some private business, I did not return to Paris before the 16th of January. I lost, consequently, three or four scenes of this dark, ambitious tragedy; but I was present, on the 18th, at the Convention. Ah! Dangeais, in spite of all that may have been advanced by the furies of the revolution, a king is not a mere man. His head falls, it is true, like that of a peasant; but he who commits the murder inwardly shudders at the deed; and if inferior motives, which direct him, did not benumb his senses, he would not dare to utter the fatal condemnation.

"I eagerly contemplated the determined wretches who were about to pronounce sentence on their virtuous sovereign. I watched every motion of their countenance. I probed into their very hearts. The magnitude and importance of the crime alone supported them. The name and rank of their victim secretly alarmed them, and had they hesitated, the prince would have been saved. Unfortunately, they had said to each other, 'If this head do not fall to-day, ours must soon hereafter fall under the axe of the executioner.' It was this thought, more than anything else, that influenced the votes. What pen would be sufficiently skilful to depict the situation of the assembly? Pensive, mute, hardly daring to breathe, their eyes were fixed alternately on the accused, the judge, and the counsel. Unparalleled circumstance! This dreary pause terminates. D'Orleans exclaims, 'I vote for death!'.... Electricity itself could not have produced a more instantaneous effect. Directors and judges rose dismayed, and the court re-echoed with a murmur of horror. One man alone, immoveable as a rock, remained seated. I was that man! The reason I gave myself for this insensibility was found, first, in my innocence of participation in the guilt,

secondly, in my ambition; and as an ambitious man, the Duke of Orleans' action appeared to me perfectly natural. He aimed at a throne that belonged not to him, and certainly such an acquisition could not be made by a possessor of virtue and general esteem.

Now, my friend, I must be brief. Dismal subjects are not to my taste. The king was condemned to death; and on the 21st of the same month, if the French name was stained with an odious epithet, the martyrology was augmented with an illustrious name!" N.B. The remainder details the programme of the execution, &c.

It will be seen, by reference to the notes, that M. D'Angeais boldly accuses M. Fouché, Duke D'Otranto, with having unjustly deprived him of a portion of his papers previously to the period of the second restoration. It may well be imagined, that Fouché, who, there can be little reason at present for doubting, betrayed to the Allied Powers the intended route of Napoleon, on his departure from Paris after the battle of Waterloo, wished, from interested personal, as well as po-litical motives, to conceal every circumstance of a favorable description towards the Bourbons, in the first part of that extraordinary man's public life and principles, the object, that of throwing as much obloquy as possible upon his political career. But the conduct of Napoleon towards Monsieur at Lyons, on his return from Elba, and his peremptory refusal to receive into his body-guard the corps which deserted that prince, justify a full belief in the sincerity of the sentiments he expresses, with reference to the proceedings of the States General, the impolitic moderation of Louis the Sixteenth, and the subsequent proceedings of the National Convention. could profit of treasons, yet despised traitors, as his known abhorrence of Santerre, who commanded the soldiery (les automates) at the execution of the king, verifies. He was the creature of ambition, and "aimed at a throne," although

He

he execrated the means adopted by Philippe d'Egalité to obtain it; and he saw no prospect of gratifying his desire, or attaining his object, but by yielding to the circumstances of the times, sailing with the prejudices of the French people against the Bourbon dynasty, and turning them to his own advantage; as his early correspondence with M. D'Angeais, in whom he appears to have reposed unlimited confidence, abundantly

attests.

The originals of these extraordinary letters were left by M. D'Angeais to his personal friend, M. d'Ancemont, who had been an early attaché of the Napoleon family; and abundant opportunity was afforded for the denial of their authenticity, if such were doubted, at the time when he publicly accused M. Fouché of having caused the remainder to be abstracted from his possession. They were shown to General Lamarque and many others, well acquainted with the character of Napoleon's handwriting, who expressed themselves fully satisfied on the point. Amongst them were also original documents, letters, and official correspondence of Josephine, Lucien Buonaparte, Murat, Barras, &c. from 1781 to 1798, extracts from which were arranged and published by Mademoiselle d'Ancemont, in French, with fac-similes of the different handwriting, after the death of her father, and designed as an illustration of the manuscript of St. Helena. General Savary (who has refuted the charge of Napoleon's having given the orders for the execution of the Duke d'Enghien,) and M. De las Casas have each expressed themselves in similar terms, with regard to his views of the former French revolution; but few authors more decidedly than M. de Bourrienne.

The circumstances connected with the revolution of 1789 must ever form a subject of the highest interest for the pen of the historian and the contemplation of the philosopher. If England had her Protestant, France has also had her

Catholic martyr. The revolution of 1830 sinks into insignificant importance in the comparison, as it was only an effect or consequence of the former. Mr. Burke's eloquent eulogium on the virtues of Maria Antoinette, and his lamentation for the departure of chivalry, and Napoleon's homage to the virtuous deportment of Louis the Sixteenth, are keen satires upon the justice and honour of human nature in popular proceedings; they afford a moral lesson, which kings and statesmen may study with real advantage.

The notice of these important topics will hardly be deemed a digression by the intelligent reader, who will at once see, that Napoleon took the model of the institutions he designed for the French people from those of Rome; and notwithstanding that he exhibited many blemishes of character in his career (and all great conquerors have had their blemishes), the French nation is indebted to his genius and firmness for the restoration of its chivalric character-its emancipation from that vortex of revolutionary degradation, and desertion of religious and moral obligation, which desolated its hearths, desecrated its altars, and depopulated its soil! Under his rule the arts and sciences revived, and the man of letters or of genius, from whatever clime, found in him a patron and a friend;-his reception of, and the honours he conferred on, our own countryman, Sir Humphry Davy, in the height of our national animosity, evidence this fact. How marked the contrast, then, between his government (however despotic), and that of republicanism, which peremptorily sent, in derision of science and learning, the unfortunate Lavoisier to the scaffold! From the mire of revolutionary degradation we come at length to a system of some form, possessing the classic title of Consular Government.

This government was to consist of a conservative senate— a legislative body of three hundred members—and a tribunal

of one hundred members. The consular government was accepted on the 7th of February, 1800, and this may be called the fourth constitution with which the French nation had been honoured with in a very short time. Buonaparte was named First Consul, and shortly afterwards his celebrated code of laws, entitled the Code Napoleon, was promulgated. Under this popular legislative protection, the Concordat stood at once most conspicuous, allowing full protection to the French clergy of all classes for the exercise of their religious duties; social security was revived; and the churches were once more opened for public devotion. These were certainly redeeming points in the career of ambition; and the Christian patriot may view in him a second Cyrus rebuilding the Temple, as an instrument of Almighty Power!

There is something melancholy, and appaling to the reflecting mind, when taking a retrospective view of those revolting and gloomy scenes which were enacted during the nine years that France proscribed the Christian Religion from her bosom. What a nation of freemen, reduced below the level of Mahomeddan morality!—a nation, which, making Liberty its idol, was without religious temples, into which the devout of any class might enter to worship the Author of their being, apart from the maddened din of profligate, political, murderous atheism! "During this period of moral abstraction and dreary solitude," says an elegant writer, "children grew into manhood,' without God and without hope in the world.' The long apprenticeship which the young people of the revolution had served at the altar of Reason rendered their modes of thinking so completely new, that on the restoration of religious worship they stood aloof from the aged few, emerged as it were from the tomb, who assembled with the court to celebrate, in the cathedral of Notre Dame, the ratification for the treaty of peace, in 1802." This, in a great measure, jus