ing en masse the land of their birth, and bearing away upon the seas their riches and their gods, by the flames of a city in conflagration. About seven thousand inhabitants of Toulon, exclusive of the officers and seamen, found shelter on board the English and Spanish vessels. The crime of having delivered over the stores and arms of France to the foe, and of having hoisted the flag of royalty, was not to be forgiven. They uttered from the crests of the waves a last adieu to the hills of Provence, lighted up by the flames which consumed their roofs and olive trees. At this awful moment the explosion of two frigates, containing several thousand barrels of gunpowder, which the Spaniards had neglected to throw overboard, burst like a volcano over the city and sea, a fearful farewell of civil war, which rained down its fiery fragments alike on the conquerors and the conquered.

The English weighed anchor, carrying off the vessels they had not destroyed by fire, and put to sea. The refugees of Toulon were nearly all conveyed to Leghorn, and established themselves at Tuscany. Their families still dwell there, and we hear French names of that period amongst the foreign appellations on the hills of Leghorn, Florence, and Pisa.

XX. Next day, 20th December, 1793, the representatives entered Toulon at the head of the republican army. Dugommier, pointing to the city in ashes, and the houses nearly empty of inhabitants, entreated the conventionalists to content themselves with this vengeance, and to suppose generously that all the guilty had gone into exile, and thus spare the rest. The representatives despised the magnanimity of the aged general, their office was not only to vanquish, but to terrify. The guillotine entered Toulon with the artillery of the army, and blood flowed as it had at Lyons. Fouché urged on the punishments. The Convention, by a decree, struck out the name of the city of traitors. "Let the shell and mine," said Barrère, "crush every roof and merchant in Toulon; let there remain only in their place a military post, peopled by the defenders of the Republic."

BOOK LI.

I. THE Contests between the republic and her enemies, sometimes heroic and sometimes brutal, alternating between the battle-field and the scaffold, had in no manner interrupted the sacrifice of human life either in Paris or the provinces. Since the death of the Girondists the guillotine appeared to have risen in public estimation. It unceasingly devoured victims taken indiscriminately from all those different parties the parties the Revolution had encountered either in its past or onward course. Some sanguinary demagogues of the Commune, in conjunction with la Montagne, demanded that the instrument of death should be constructed of hewn stone, and erected in the Place de la Concorde, opposite the Tuileries. According to their ideas, the guillotine should be considered as a public national building, capable of explaining to all and for ever, that the surveillance of the people was as lasting as its vengeance was unceasing. The Revolutionary Tribunal, attentive to the slightest hint from the Committee of Public Safety, lost not a moment in sending all those to perish on a scaffold whose names were given to them. A trial was but a mockery of justice, a mere farce.

It was impossible that the name of Madame Roland should long escape the resentment of the people. That name alone comprised an entire party. The soul of the Gironde, this woman might one day prove a very Nemesis, if permitted to survive those illustrious individuals who had preceded her to the grave.

Among such of the Girondists as survived, it was deemed necessary to strike terror, by destroying their idol-while the memory of the dead was degraded by its association with the popular execration excited by a female odious to the people, and a supposed foe to liberty. Such were the motives which induced the Commune and Jacobins to demand that Madame Roland should be brought to trial.

II. The Committee of Public Safety, the ever-ready, (though sometimes pained) executor of the wishes of the populace, inscribed the name of Madame Roland on a list

presented every evening to Fouquier-Tinville, and which Robespierre signed with visible disquietude. During the early part of his abode in Paris, the deputy of Arras, then but little known, had been a constant visitor at Madame Roland's house. And when the Constituent Assembly wounded the pride, and disdained the words of Robespierre, Madame Roland discerned his genius, honoured his pertinacity, and encouraged his despised eloquence. The recollection of this glanced across the mind of Robespierre, as he signed an order for appearing before a tribunal, which he well knew was the same thing as signing a death-warrant. Madame Roland and Robespierre had commenced their revolutionary career together, and by the workings of that same revolution, the one had attained unlimited power, while the other had been precipitated into the very depths of adversity, and it was in all probability, from the encouragement bestowed on his abilities by Madame Roland, that Robespierre owed the elevated position he now occupied, and the power it gave him of decreeing life or death to his early friend. Any other man than Robespierre would have felt the influence of these reminiscences, and a feeling of generous pity steal over his mind; but Robespierre was a mere stoic, who mistook inflexibility for strength of character, and obstinacy for firmness; he would have plucked out his own heart had he believed it capable of counselling the slightest weakness. Calculation had superseded all natural feelings in his mind, and the more he stifled every sentiment of humanity the nearer did he in his own imagination approach superhuman greatness, and the more he endured from the struggle the more persuaded was he of its justice. He had in fact arrived at that excess of sophistry and false sentiment that makes a man mistrust every virtuous impulse of his heart.

On the 31st May, Madame Roland was committed to the prison of l'Abbaye. It is the lot of some individuals to attract a greater degree of interest and curiosity on the part of posterity than the records of an empire, for such persons have united in their situation and feelings - their alternate rise and fall-all the vicissitudes, catastrophes, glories, and misfortunes of the time in which they lived. Madame Roland was one of this class. Her enthusiasm and passion, her illusions, her martyrdom, her unextinguishable hope for the

future, amid the actual discouragement of the present, rendered her, even in the very depths of her dungeon, a living personification of the whole Revolution.

Separated from the world, torn from her father, husband, and child, she bathed in floods of inward tears the ardours of an imagination, whose fires, though smouldering, were not extinct.

III. The gaolers of the Abbaye sought by every means a prison afforded, to soften the captivity of Madame Roland. Some beings can only be persecuted from a distance-beauty subdues and disarms all who approach it.

Unknown to the commissioners, Madame Roland was placed in a chamber into which a ray of light could find entrance. She was even indulged with flowers, of which she was so passionately fond; in the days of her happiness it had been her delight to surround herself with these lovely productions of nature, and she had ever esteemed them among her choicest delights. Climbing and leafy plants were twined around the iron bars of her window, in order that by concealing the thick grating the prisoner might dream she was free. A few of her particular friends were allowed to visit and converse with her. Books were supplied, and thus she was enabled to pursue her favourite studies, and hold converse with the illustrious characters of antiquity.

Tranquil respecting the fate of her husband, whom she was aware had found refuge with faithful friends at Rouen; fully satisfied as to her daughter's safety, from the knowledge of her having been consigned by her friend Bosc, administrator of the Jardin des Plantes, to the care of Madame Creuzé de la Touche, her adopted mother; proud to suffer for liberty, happy to undergo any suffering for her friends, Madame Roland felt a soft calm steal over her, even amid the horrors of a dungeon. Nature has ordained that every excess of misfortune shall be followed by a sort of lull, in the same manner as a soft couch, placed at the bottom of an abyss, might be supposed to diminish the suffering of such as were unlucky to fall into it.

The certainty of having arrived at the worst that can happen to us, the unwillingness to believe that man will carry his vengeance any further, added to the inward consciousness of courage to bear all,- raises the prisoner far

above his executioner. sustained the energy of Madame Roland, and made the contemplation of her sufferings glorious in her sight, creating a drama of which she was at once the subject, the heroine, and the audience.

The union of these three sentiments

She separated herself in thought from the world, time, and herself, and desired to anticipate her place in posterity. No modern feelings or Christian sentiments taught her to bow with resignation to her lot, and to look to Heaven for help; her intense abhorrence of superstition had destroyed in her the belief of a present Deity, or a sure immortality. A heathen in the midst of a Christian country, her virtue partook of the same character as her opinions; her Providence consisted in the opinion of men, her heaven in that of posterity. The only God she invoked was the future: a species of abstract and stoical duty, itself its own judge and reward, supplied the place, with her, of hope, consolation, or piety. But such was the strength as well as purity of her mind, that this virtue, without proof or recompence, sufficed to support her in all her adversity, and enabled her to face death without shrinking.

Deprived of the power of acting, she concentrated her powers of thought. Through the indulgence of her gaolers, she procured some sheets of paper, pens, and ink, and with these she commenced writing portions of both her public and private life, contriving each day to conceal one of these pages from the surveillance of her gaolers. These detached pages she confided to her friend Bosc, who carried them away concealed beneath his clothes, and kept them as a sacred deposit against better days; while it rejoiced Madame Roland to believe that she had thus preserved the records of at least one year of her life from perishing, and that she might hope to preserve from oblivion that which she esteemed by far the most valuable part of herself her memory. In these papers are mingled, with a disorder and haste that seems to count only upon the present chance of communicating them, the most feminine thoughts and feelings of her childhood, and the gloomiest picture of her imprisonment. In the same book might be read the description of the young and ardent girl seated in her chamber on the Quai des Orfévres, dreaming of love, and aspiring after glory; then, by a rapid