The former revolution was one long-protracted tragedy of horrors to which there seemed to be no end, and of which the most sagacious men among us could not guess the _denouement_, except that from its very protraction and violence it would probably end in a despotism. At the close of every scene of horror, we kept saying to ourselves, "surely it will close _now_, and France will at length have rest and peace." But we were doomed to be disappointed, time after time. One explosion followed another until the heart sickened "with hope deferred," and we turned away our eyes at last in despair from the appalling spectacle. It was this slow, vacillating, indecisive course of the former revolution which generated all the causes that conspired to defeat it. The Bastile was stormed in 1789. It was not until the latter part of 1792 that the unfortunate monarch was deposed. During these three years, though strokes of great boldness were struck, one after another, yet none of them were of a decisive character: none of them indicated a fixed point at which the revolution was to stop: while they were all of a character to alarm, to exasperate and to raise up powerful enemies to the revolution both at home and abroad. Thus, in 1789 privileges and distinctions of orders were abolished, and the hitherto sacred revenues of the church suffered a deep encroachment. In 1790 titles of nobility, with all their _insignia_ of emblasoned arms and feudal power, were annihilated, and the estates attached to them were seized for the public use. These measures drove from France a numerous and powerful body of emigrants, inflamed with resentment and despair, who preached up, at every court in Europe, the cause of kings, which they represented, with reason, to be menaced with general destruction; and they left in France an equally numerous and powerful body of malcontents, whose cabals kept every part of the kingdom in a state of constant ferment and insurrection. The people, released at once from the restraints of the clergy and of their feudal lords, and suddenly become their own masters, without the discretion necessary for their guidance, became licentious and turbulent, and the whole kingdom presented a scene of riot and disorder which there were no laws to repress. And now was hatched that political hydra, the Jacobin faction, which no Frenchman will ever be able to remember without an involuntary shudder.