old English churches, where the pavement is covered with sepulchral inscriptions. The contents of these sad records of mortality, the vain sorrows which they preserve, the stern lesson which they teach of the nothingness of humanity, the extent of ground which they so closely cover, and their uniform and melancholy tenor, remind me of the roll of the prophet, which was written within and without, and there was written therein lamentations and mourning and woe."

LXXXVII.

The facts, which have been thus briefly referred to, present a series of phenomena of the most remarkable kind, but on which we cannot speculate in the smallest degree without advancing beyond the sphere of our limited faculties; one thing, however, is certain, that they give no countenance to the doctrine of materialism, which some have presumptuously deduced from a very partial view of the influence of cerebral disease upon the manifestations of mind. They show us indeed, in a very striking manner, the mind holding intercourse with the external world, through the medium of the brain and nervous system; and, by certain diseases of these organs, they show this intercourse impaired or suspended; but they show nothing more. In particular they warrant nothing in any degree analogous to those partial deductions which form the basis of materialism. On the contrary, they show us the brain injured and diseased to an extraordinary extent, without the mental faculties being affected in any sensible degree. They show us, further, the manifestations of mind obscured for a time, and yet reviving in all their original vigour, almost in the very moment of dissolution. Finally, they exhibit to us the mind, cut off from all intercourse with the external world, recalling its old impressions, even of things long forgotten; and exercising its powers on those which had long ceased to exist, in a manner totally irreconcilable with any idea we can form of a material function.

LXXXVIII.

Now raged the war in the streets of Zaragoza, the alarmbell was heard in every quarter, the people crowded the houses nearest to the lodgments of the enemy, additional barricades were constructed across the principal thoroughfares, mines were prepared in the more open spaces, and the internal communications from house to house were multiplied until they formed a vast labyrinth, the intricate windings of which were only to be traced by the weapons and the dead bodies of the defenders. The junta, more powerful from the cessation of regular warfare, urged the defence with redoubled energy, yet increased the horrors of the siege by a ferocity pushed to the verge of frenzy. Every person suspected by these furious men, or those about them, was put to death; and amidst the noble bulwarks of war a horrid array of gibbets was seen, on which crowds of wretches were each night suspended, because their courage sunk under accumulating dangers; or that some doubtful expression, some gesture of distress, had been misconstrued by their barbarous chiefs. From the height of the walls he had won, Lasnes contemplated this terrific scene, and judging that men so passionate and so prepared could not be prudently encountered in open battle, resolved, in unison with the emperor's instructions, to proceed by the slow but certain process of the mattock and the mine.

LXXXIX.

To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, I do not know a more mortifying spectacle than to see the assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in the ante-chamber of Regicide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood of his sovereign. Then, when sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall have sufficiently indulged his meditations with what monarch he shall next glut his ravening

maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his pleasure to be awake, and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them. At the opening of those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their degradation, sneaking into the regicide presence, and with the relics of the smile which they had dressed up for the levée of their masters still flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains of their courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting their size to the slider of the guillotine!

XC.

While these matters were in progress, an important movement was made by the general assembly. William of Orange was formally and urgently invited to come to Brussels to aid them with his advice and presence. The condemned traitor had not set foot in the capital for eleven years. Since that period, although his spirit had always been manifesting itself in the capital like an actual presence, although he had been the magnet towards which the States throughout all their oscillations had involuntarily vibrated, yet he had been ever invisible. He had been summoned to the tribunal to stand his trial, and had been condemned to death by default. He answered the summons by a defiance, and the condemnation by two campaigns, unsuccessful in appearance, but which had in reality overthrown the authority of the sovereign. Since that period, the representative of royalty had sued the condemned traitor for forgiveness. The haughty brother of Philip had almost gone upon his knees, that William might name his terms, and accept the proffered hand of majesty. William had

refused, not from pride, but from distrust. He had spurned the supplications, as he had defied the condemnation of the king. There could be no friendship between the destroyer and the protector of a people. Had William desired only the reversal of his death-sentence, and the infinite aggrandisement of his family, we have seen how completely he had held these issues in his power. Never had it been more easy, plausible, tempting, for a patriot to turn his back upon an almost sinking cause. We have seen how his brave and subtle prototype dealt with the representative of Roman despotism. The possible or impossible Netherland Republic of the first century of our era had been reluctantly abandoned, but the modern patriot had justly more confidence in his people.

XCI.

In the last age we were in danger of being entangled, by the example of France, in the net of a relentless despotisma despotism, indeed, proudly arrayed in manners, gallantry, splendour, magnificence, and even covered over with the imposing robes of science and literature. Our present danger, from the example of a people whose character knows no medium, is a danger from licentious violence—a danger of being led from admiration to imitation of the excesses of an unprincipled, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy—of a people whose government is anarchy, and whose religion is atheism. What they value themselves upon is a disgrace to them. They have gloried, and some people in England have thought fit to take share in that glory, in making a revolution. All the horrors and crimes of the anarchy which led to this revolution, which attend its progress, and which may eventually result from its establishment, pass for nothing. The French have made their way through the destruction of their country to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession of a good one. Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their State, to which they were called by their

monarch and sent by their country, they have rashly destroyed all the balances and counterpoises which serve to fix it and give it a steady direction. These they have melted down into one incongruous ill-connected mass, and, with the most atrocious perfidy, have laid the axe to the root of all property by confiscating the possessions of the church.

XCII.

But these are the pitiable mistakes to which love alone is subject. I have inadvertently wandered from my purpose, which was to expose quite an opposite blunder, into which we are no less apt to fall, through hate. How ugly a person looks upon whose reputation some awkward aspersion hangs, and how suddenly his countenance clears up with his character! That crooked old woman! I once said, speaking of an ancient gentlewoman, whose actions did not square altogether with my notions of the rule of right. The unanimous surprise of the company before whom I uttered these words soon convinced me that I had confounded mental with bodily obliquity, and that there was nothing tortuous about the old lady but her deeds. The humour of mankind to deny personal comeliness to those with whose moral attributes they are dissatisfied, is very strongly shown in those advertisements which stare us in the face from the walls of every street, and, with the tempting bait which they hang forth, stimulate at once cupidity and an abstract love of justice in the breast of every passing peruser: I mean the advertisements offering rewards for the apprehension of absconded culprits, strayed apprentices, bankrupts who have conveyed away their effects, debtors that have run away from their bail. I observe, that in exact proportion to the indignity with which the prosecutor, who is commonly the framer of the advertisement, conceives he has been treated, the personal pretensions of the fugitive are denied, and his defects exaggerated.