The Revolution of France, which had been growing violence and havoc for the last four years, had now arrived at its height. The change, beginning with popular reform in 1789, had, in 1793, been consummated in regicide. The republic proclaimed in the year before, within three months had darkened into a democracy. The general alarm of the continental kings; combined them in an attempt to overthrow a government which threatened them all; the attempt was found to result only in consolidating its power; and, in the first year of war, France presented to the disaffected of all nations, the tempting spectacle of a land in which the foremost prizes of power had fallen into the hands of men of the humblest condition; and in which those men humbled to the dust the proudest diadems of Europe. Obscure pamphleteers, country advocates, monks, and editors of struggling journals, were suddenly seen in the first offices of state, wielding the whole power of the mightiest kingdom of the Continent, absorbing its revenues, directing its armies, and moving in the rank of princes among the proud hereditary sovereignties of the world. To the crowd of unprincipled men, engendered by the habits of European life, and their consciousness of abilities fully equal to those which had won such opulent enjoyments and lofty distinctions in France, the success of the Revolution was an universal summons to conspiracy. On the Continent that conspiracy was, according to the habits of the people, crafty and concealed. In England, equally according to the habits of the people, it was bold and public, daring and defying. Great meetings of the population were held in the open air; committees of grievance were appointed; correspondences were spread through the country; the whole machinery of overthrow was openly erected, and worked by visible hands. Even where secresy was deemed useful by the more cautious or the more fearful, it was of a different character from the assassin-like secresy of the foreign insurgent; it was more the solemn and regulated observance of a secret tribunal. The papers which have transpired of those secret committees have all the forms of diplomacy, combined with a determination of language, and an intensity of purpose, which would do honour to a nobler cause. But the contest was now at hand, and on three men in England depended the championship of the monarchy. These three were the King, the Minister, and the Attorney-General. There were never three individuals more distinctly, and we shall scarcely hesitate to say, more providentially, prepared to meet the crisis. George III., a sovereign of the most constitutional principles, and of the most unshaken intrepidity; William Pitt, the most sagacious and the most resolute statesman that England had ever seen, formed by his manly eloquence to rule the legislature, and, by his character for integrity, to obtain the full confidence of the empire; and Sir John Scott, at once wise, calm, and bold, profoundly