THE EMIGRANTS AT COBLENTZ.

127 -has swollen to the size of a Phenomenon for the world. Coblentz is become a small extra-national Versailles; a Versailles in partibus: briguing, intriguing, favouritism, strumpetocracy itself, they say, goes on there; all the old activities, on a small scale, quickened by hungry Revenge.

Enthusiasm, of loyalty, of hatred and hope, has risen to a high pitch; as, in any Coblentz tavern you may hear, in speech and in singing. Maury assists in the interior Council; much is decided on: for one thing, they keep lists of the dates of your emigrating; a month sooner, or a month later, determines your greater or your less right to the coming Division of the Spoil. Cazalès himself, because he had occasionally spoken with a Constitutional tone, was looked on coldly at first: so pure are our principles. And arms are ahammering at Liege; 'three thousand horses' ambling hitherward from the Fairs of Germany: Cavalry enrolling ; likewise Foot-soldiers, in blue coat, red waistcoat, and nankeen trousers.' They have their secret domestic correspondences, as their open foreign: with disaffected Crypto-Aristocrats, with contumacious Priests, with Austrian Committee in the Tuileries. Deserters are spirited over by assiduous crimps; Royal-Allemand is gone almost wholly. Their route of march, towards France and the Division of the Spoil, is marked out, were the Kaiser once ready. "It is said, they mean to poison the sources; but," adds Patriotism making report of it, "they will not poison the source of Liberty;" whereat on applaudit,' we cannot but applaud. Also they have manufactories of False Assignats; and men that circulate in the interior, distributing and disbursing the same; one of these we denounce now to Legislative Patriotism: ' a man Lebrun by name; about thirty years of age, with blonde hair and in quantity; has,' only for the time being surely, ‘a black-eye, oil poché;' goes in a wiski with a black horse,always keeping his Gig!

Unhappy Emigrants, it was their lot, and the lot of France! They are ignorant of much that they should know of themselves, of what is around them. A Political Party that knows

:

not when it is beaten, may become one of the fatallest of things, to itself, and to all. Nothing will convince these men, that they cannot scatter the French Revolution at the first blast of their war-trumpet; that the French Revolution is other than a blustering Effervescence, of brawlers and spouters, which at the flash of chivalrous broadswords, at the rustle of gallows-ropes, will burrow itself, in dens the deeper the welcomer. But, alas, what man does know and measure himself, and the things that are around him ;—else where were the need of physical fighting at all? Never, till they are cleft asunder, can these heads believe that a sansculottic arm has any vigour in it: cleft asunder, it will be too late to believe.

One may say, without spleen against his poor erring brothers of any side, that above all other mischiefs, this of the Emigrant Nobles acted fatally on France. Could they have known, could they have understood! In the beginning of 1789, a splendour and a terror still surrounded them: the Conflagration of their Châteaux, kindled by months of obstinacy, went out after the Fourth of August; and might have continued out, had they at all known what to defend, what to relinquish as indefensible. They were still a graduated Hierarchy of Authorities, or the accredited similitude of such: they sat there, uniting King with Commonalty; transmitting and translating gradually, from degree to degree, the command of the one into the obedience of the other; rendering command and obedience still possible. Had they understood their place, and what to do in it, this French Revolution, which went forth explosively in years and in months, might have spread itself over generations; and not a torture-death but a quiet euthanasia have been provided for many things.

But they were proud and high, these men; they were not wise to consider. They spurned all from them in disdainful hate, they drew the sword and flung away the scabbard. France has not only no Hierarchy of Authorities, to translate command into obedience; its Hierarchy of Authorities has fled to the enemies of France; calls loudly on the enemies of France to interfere armed, who want but a pretext to do that.

OLD FRANCE RUSHING DOWN.

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Jealous Kings and Kaisers might have looked on long, meditating interference, yet afraid and ashamed to interfere: but now do not the King's Brothers, and all French nobles, Dignitaries and Authorities that are free to speak, which the King himself is not,-passionately invite us, in the name of Right and of Might? Ranked at Coblentz, from Fifteen to Twenty thousand stand now brandishing their weapons, with the cry: On, on! Yes, Messieurs, you shall on ;-and divide the spoil according to your dates of emigrating.

French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 273.

OLD FRANCE RUSHING DOWN.

In the Months of February and March [1792], it is recorded, the terror, especially of rural France, had risen even to the transcendental pitch: not far from madness. In Town and Hamlet is rumour, of war, massacre: that Austrians, Aristocrats, above all, that The Brigands are close by. Men quit their houses and huts; rush fugitive, shrieking, with wife and child, they know not whither. Such a terror, the eye-witnesses say, never fell on a Nation; nor shall again fall, even in Reigns of Terror expressly so-called. The Countries of the Loire, all the Central and Southeast regions, start up distracted, simultaneously as by an electric shock;' for indeed grain too gets scarcer and scarcer. 'The people barricade the entrances of Towns, pile stones in the upper stories, the women prepare 'boiling water; from moment to moment expecting the attack. 'In the Country, the alarm-bell rings incessant; troops of 'peasants, gathered by it, scour the highways, seeking an 'imaginary enemy. They are armed mostly with scythes stuck ' in wood; and, arriving in wild troops at the barricaded Towns, 'are themselves sometimes taken for Brigands.'

So rushes old France: old France is rushing down. What the end will be is known to no mortal; that the end is near all mortals may know.

French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 280.

K

THE JACOBIN CLUB.

Great is the Mother-Society: she has had the honour to be denounced by Austrian Kaunitz; and is all the dearer to Patriotism. By fortune and valour she has extinguished Feuillantism itself, at least the Feuillant Club. This latter, high as it once carried its head, she, on the 18th of February, has the satisfaction to see shut, extinct; Patriots having gone thither with tumult, to hiss it out of pain. The MotherSociety has enlarged her locality, stretches now over the whole nave of the Church. Let us glance in, with the worthy Toulongeon, our old Ex-Constituent Friend, who happily has eyes to see. 'The nave of the Jacobins church,' says he, 'is changed into a vast Circus, the seats of which mount up 'circularly like an amphitheatre to the very groin of the domed 'roof. A high Pyramid of black marble, built against one of 'the walls, which was formerly a funeral monument, has alone 'been left standing: it serves now as back to the Office-bearers' 'Bureau. Here on an elevated Platform sit President and Secretaries, behind and above them the white busts of Mirabeau, ' of Franklin, and various others, nay finally of Marat. Facing 'this is the Tribune, raised till it is midway between floor and groin of the dome, so that the speaker's voice may be in the centre. From that point thunder the voices which shake all Europe down below in silence, are forging the thunderbolts and the firebrands. Penetrating into this huge circuit, where all is out of measure, gigantic, the mind cannot repress some movement of terror and wonder; the imagination recalls those dread temples which Poetry, of old, had consecrated to the Avenging Deities.'

Scenes too are in this Jacobin Amphitheatre,-had History time for them. Flags of the 'Three Free Peoples of the Universe,' trinal brotherly flags of England, America, France, have been waved here in concert; by London Deputation, of Whigs or Wighs and their Club, on this hand, and by young French Citoyennes on that; beautiful sweet-tongued Female

THE JACOBIN CLUB.

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Citizens, who solemnly send over salutation and brotherhood, also tricolor stitched by their own needle, and finally Ears of Wheat; while the dome rebellows with Vivent les trois peuples libres! from all throats:-a most dramatic scene. Demoiselle Théroigne recites, from that Tribune in mid air, her persecu tions in Austria; comes leaning on the arm of Joseph Chénier, Poet Chénier, to demand Liberty for the hapless Swiss of Château-Vieux. Be of hope, ye forty Swiss; tugging there, in the Brest waters; not forgotten!

Deputy Brissot perorates from that Tribune; Desmoulins, our wicked Camille, interjecting audibly from below," Coquin !" Here, though oftener in the Cordeliers, reverberates the lionvoice of Danton; grim Billaud-Varennes is here; Collot d'Herbois, pleading for the Forty Swiss; tearing a passion to rags. Apophthegmatic Manuel winds up in this pithy way: "A Minister must perish!"-to which the Amphitheatre responds: "Tous, Tous, All, All!" But the Chief Priest and speaker of this place, as we said, is Robespierre, the longwinded incorruptible man. What spirit of Patriotism dwelt in men in those times, this one fact, it seems to us, will evince: that fifteen hundred human creatures, not bound to it, sat quiet under the oratory of Robespierre; nay, listened nightly, hour after hour, applausive; and gaped as for the word of life. More insupportable individual, one would say, seldom opened his mouth in any Tribune. Acrid, implacable-impotent; dulldrawling, barren as the Harmattan-wind. He pleads, in endless earnest-shallow speech, against immediate War, against Woollen Caps or Bonnets Rouges, against many things; and is the Trismegistus and Dalai-Lama of Patriot men. Whom nevertheless a shrill-voiced little man, yet with fine eyes, and a broad beautifully sloping brow, rises respectfully to controvert; he is, say the Newspaper Reporters, M. Louvet, author of the charming Romance of Faublas.' Steady, ye Patriots! Pull not yet two ways; with a France rushing panic-stricken in the rural districts, and a Cimmerian Europe storming in on you! French Revolution, vol. ii., p. 289.