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ART. IX.-The French Revolution: a History. By T. CARSecond edition. 2 vols. Fraser. 1839.

LYLE.

2. Speeches in Parliament during the Session, 1840. London: Painter.

3. Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Bill: a Speech in Behalf of Deans and Chapters, made before the Long Parliament. By JOHN HACKET, D.D., Canon Residentiary of St. Paul's, and afterwards Lord Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry. Now reprinted, with Preface and Notes, by A CLErgyman. London: Painter. 1840.

ALL who remember the early years of the French Revolution, or who are at all acquainted with the history of our own country during the awful course of that momentous period, must remember also the blandishments made use of by the enlightened advocates of the rights of man, both in and out of Parliament, to persuade the British subject to cast off the antiquated trammels of religion and loyalty from his mind, and the superfluous covering from his nether man, and to join, sans culottes, in the revolutionary caramagnole with his ardent and regenerated neighbours on the other side of the channel: how Fox and his allies held up to British admiration, and as a worthy example for the British army, the lust-bought treason of the literally prostituted twice-perjured French guards, thus leaving on record a never-to-be-forgotten example of the readiness with which Whiggery denudes itself of every troublesome vestment of honour or honesty, and steps forth in moral sans culottism, scarcely covered by the scanty fig-leaf of hypocrisy, and is not ashamed. They too will remember with pride and pleasure, that is if they be worthy the name of Englishmen and Christians, how indignantly did the people reject all the treacherous allurements, spurned the insidious and flattering appeals to patriotism, virtue, and enlightened liberality, and held fast to religion and loyalty, as to the best bower and sheet anchors of England's unrivalled constitution, unmoved by the virile but unprincipled eloquence of Fox-the hireling wit and brilliant repartee of Sheridan-the infatuated ravings of Grey, or the incessant wheedling and bullying, snarling and yelping of the unholy and unclean pack of Infidels, Jacobins, and Dissenters who followed in their wake. These last in vain backed them

The Gendarmarie à Cheval which went over in a body to the Jacobin insurgents on the memorable 10th of August, 1792, was chiefly composed of the old French guards, who had been seduced from their allegiance by the Parisian women in July, 1789, and thus twice infamously betrayed their sovereign and their oaths.

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out of the House, by their societies of "Friends of the People," "Corresponding Societies," and other treasonable associations, by means of which they sought to fraternize with the bloodstained democrats of France and to quench the light of the monarchy, and wash out the records of the constitution in the blood of the nobility, clergy, and landed-gentry, and of all that was truly worthy or respectable in the nation. With what honest English enthusiasm and delight did the nation at large listen to the indignant eloquence of the true patriot and advocate of every salutary reform, when turning his back with disgust on his former associates, he declared that from that moment he and they were for ever separated in politics.

Burke, that far-seeing statesman and unrivalled orator, in the very outset of the Revolution, and when the French had not yet advanced near so far in their democratic march as we are now openly called upon to do by our own Radicals, denounced them as having destroyed all those balances and checks which give steadiness to a constitution, and melted down the whole into one incongruous, ill-digested mass,

"Jacet ingens littore truncus

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Avulsumque humeris caput, et sine nomine corpus.' "With the most atrocious perfidy and breach of all faith among men," said he, "they laid the axe to the root of property, and consequently of national prosperity, by the principles they established, and by the example they set in confiscating the possessions of the Church. They made and recorded a sort of institute and digest of anarchy, called the Rights of Man' an institute that subverted the State, and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, had ever been known to suffer. A blind and cruel democracy had carried every thing before them their conduct was marked with the most savage and unfeeling barbarity: they had no other system than a determination to destroy all order, and reduce every rank and description of men to one level: their signal of attack was the war-whoop-their liberty was licentiousness-and their religion Atheism."

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This was the language of truth and genuine patriotism, and it told with amazing power against the flimsy sophistry of Sheridan, who brought forward a shadowy array of by-gone "extortions, dungeons, and tortures," to excuse the atrocious massacres, violations, confiscations, and abominations of those whom he was pleased to designate as the French patriots; and the heart of the whole people, as the heart of one man, swelled with proud satisfaction, when Pitt arose in his inexpressible might, and drew

comparison between the happy and genuine freedom enjoyed by Englishmen and the unqualified nominal liberty of France, which was in fact at that present moment the most absolute, direct, and intolerable slavery.

And we shall never forget how, when goaded beyond all endurance by the base ungrateful crew of pseudo-philosophers, who would have persuaded the English peasant to forsake his God, pull down his Church, and rebel against the best of Kings, he turned upon them with retributive fury, burnt the house and heresy-hutch of the Birmingham apostle of sedition and infidelity over his head, and so upset all his boasted philosophy, that he took to his heels and never looked behind him till he found himself safe among his republican friends and admirers, with the mighty Atlantic rolling between him and the terrible but just indignation of his own countrymen: a tragi-comic episode in our eventful history, the memory of which has been preserved in Peter Porcupine's (W. Cobbett's) inimitable logue of "the bull and the man with the fiery stick."

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And now would not any being endued with reason have supposed, that the whole succession of events consequent to the Revolution in France would have tended not only to confirm every Englishman in an affectionate admiration of the Church and Constitution of his own country, and inspired him with a more decided abhorrence of any change-a dread of even the slightest approximation to those political experiments which had not only poured upon France, but on the whole of Europe, such a deluge of blood and horror; but that they would likewise have converted all the Whigs and Radicals to the same opinion. For what man of common honesty, who was in the habit of listening to or reading the speeches and pamphlets of their leaders and oracles, their Whitbreads and Romillys, their Priestleys and Pricesthose grandiloquent declaimers for peace and philanthropy, and human perfectibility would not have supposed in the innocence of his heart that one-thousandth part of the enormities committed and produced by their friends, the sans-culottes would have more than sufficed to convince them of the folly and wickedness of giving the preponderance of political power into the hands of an unstable and restless democracy; of surrendering all the constitutional counterchecks so necessary to keep the multitude

*We are no advocates of popular tumults at any time, and still less would we be so now. We are quite aware that a mob is a blind thing, and that the mob which burnt the library and demolished the philosphical apparatus of Priestley was an unlawful and highly to be condemned assemblage; but we are not so blinded by Liberalism as to fail being struck with the divine justice in visiting a teacher of sedition with an outbreak of popular vengeance.

in subjection; and thus in fact delivering up the monarch, the aristocracy, the wealth, the respectability, the virtue, and the innocence of a nation, bound hand and foot, into the hands of an infuriated rabble, with nothing to lose and clamorous for plunder. But no nothing could work this change. Not all the accumulated horrors-not the massacres of the 10th of August and of the 2nd September, 1792-not all the subsequent fusillades and noyades of the reign of terror, though accompanied also with the frightful image of the guillotine blood-drooping day and night no, not all the blood of the wise and the brave, the beautiful and the innocent, with which the land of France was saturated during more than a dozen years of "liberty and equality;" nor could it be done by the iron despotism of the Corsican usurper, that ripened fruit from their tree of liberty, whose insatiable conscriptions sent forth the whole. rising youth of the nation, the hope of every family, the pride of every mother's heart, to perish amid the burning sands of Egypt, the dark sierras of Spain, or the chill and trackless snows of Russia-thus visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and making the yatagan of the Mamaluke, the knife of the Guerilla, and the spear of the Cossack, avengers of the victims of the revolutionary mania. No, a Whig

"Convinced against his will,

Is of the same opinion still."

Convinced indeed they have all along been-converted they can never be; for what they seek is not what they profess: it is not the exaltation of human nature to divine, for that they well know to be impossible; the experiment having been tried long ago by our first parents, at the suggestion of the first WhigRadical, when he said, "Ye shall be like gods!" No, it is the degradation of the divine nature in man to their own sensual level. But still, as if to prove the antiquity and nobility of their descent, and that they are no parvenus, but heirs, in the direct, line of a princely house as old as the creation, they still hold out the fruit of the tree of knowledge as the grand panacea for all human miseries, and cry, "in the day that ye eat thereof ye shall be as gods." And the blind multitude follow their blind leaders to their Mechanics' Institutes, their Parthenons and Lyceums, and imbibe, with the utmost greediness, as splendid novelties, the poisonous riffacciamenti of stale blasphemies and worn-out sophistries culled from Voltaire, Volney, and Paine; till, intoxicated with reiterated draughts of French philosophy and philanthropy, and transatlantic religion and patriotism, they "go a-head," puffed up with a vain conceit of their superior

enlightenment and civilization, when they all fall together, and lie wallowing in the filthy ditch of Socialism: and this they call the "march of intellect!" To such a miserable state of corporeal debility and mental imbecility has this march of intellect reduced our quondam stout and honest peasantry. We shall proceed to investigate the causes which, under circumstances apparently favourable to national aggrandizement, have led to so miserable a declension; and to tear off even the last flimsy remnant of the veil of Whig hypocrisy, and place before our readers, in all their native deformity, the impiety and imbecility of the political quacks who having seized on the helm of the State, and are steering the vessel of the Constitution with every of canvas they can crowd on her, right into the maelstrom of revolution and anarchy.

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These are startling assertions, and it is probable that few, very few, perhaps not one of our readers, may view with such gloomy anticipations the present prospects of our once happy and still rich and superficially prosperous land: but let them pause and reflect. There is a volcano beneath their feet-the lava of human passions, a compound of insatiable avarice with reckless profusion, purse-proud arrogance with degraded insulted earth-trodden misery, democratic ambition, popular indignation, universal discontent, religious discord, popish intrigue, lust, rapine, revenge-all these are "set on fire of hell," and are boiling beneath the surface of society, ready every moment to overflow and to cover the land with devastation and slaughter, with all those accompanying horrors which the great adversary of mankind delights in compelling his deluded victims to inflict upon each other: horrors which are described with such soul-harrowing fidelity in the first work which stands at the head of this article, more particularly in the picture of the night of the second of September, 1792. O that the Almighty would yet avert the blow from England; but alas! may we not

say,

"Our fathers would not know his ways,
And he has left us to our own."

Yes, we must go back to look for the causes which have brought us to this state; great revolutions are, like all other mighty productions of nature, of slow and almost imperceptible growth; and thus they arrive at maturity and burst upon the nations with appalling suddenness, and almost invariably when least expected by those most concerned. Thus does "the god of this world" blind men's eyes, lest they should repent of their iniquities, and turn to God with fasting and weeping and mourning, and he should spare them as he did the men of Nineveh.

It is now, however, our business and intention to go back to

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