In 1791 the affrighted king made an unsuccessful attempt to escape with his family. They were arrested near the confines of the kingdom and brought back to Paris under the most humiliating circumstances; but still he was acknowledged to be the king of France, and a constituent part of the existing government. A new constitution was then framed, to which he was required to take an oath of obedience, and he took it _per_ force. The leading patriots, who had nothing more in view than the enjoyment of rational liberty under a regular government, attempted to stop the revolution at the point of a limited monarchy. Mirabeau, that prodigy of genius and vice, was believed to have been of this number. The virtuous Lafayette certainly was, and so was a host of others of the brightest names in France. But the ball had rolled beyond their reach, and had acquired a _momentum_ which they could no longer control. A set of unprincipled men, engendered by the slow progress of the revolution, had, by their flatteries and appeals to the worst passions of the populace, worked themselves up to the head of affairs and drove on the revolution before the storm, without any fixed object on their own part. These infamous men infused suspicions into the minds of the people against their best friends, and even Lafayette had to defend himself against their accusations. In 1792 the king was tried, condemned and deposed, and a republic was established; but it was a republic of bedlamites. The revolution now assumed a most dreadful form. France, delivered up, at once, to the fury of a foreign and a civil war, and at the same time rent asunder by the most frightful anarchy, exhibited a picture which the heart quails to contemplate even at this distance of time. All was chaos and confusion, and Lafayette perceiving that the great object for which he had contended was lost, retired from the kingdom, and was doomed to mourn, for years, in an Austrian dungeon, the disappointment of his patriot hopes.