In 1793 the amiable and unfortunate king was torn from his family, and bade adieu, on the scaffold, to all the troubles of life; and thenceforth the guillotine streamed with the blood of the best patriots of France. No confidence existed any where. Every one was distrusted. Generals, whose victories had shed the highest glory upon their country, were called from the head of their armies to perish in disgrace. Denunciation and massacre were the order of the day. Suspicion became full proof, and every accusation was fatal. To consummate the horror of the scene, the christian religion was formally abolished, and a sort of heathen worship was substituted in its place. The republic was dissolved, the government was declared to be revolutionary, and a dictatorship was established, compared with which those of Marius and Sylla formed a golden age. Terror, death, and rapine walked abroad in triumph, and the diabolical spirits which had set the mischief afoot, hovered over the bloody spectacle and mocked at the misery which they had created. In 1794 the ruffians, Danton and Robespierre, fell in succession, and expiated their crimes (if indeed such crimes be expiable at all) on that guillotine which they had so often deluged with the blood of innocence, even of female innocence and beauty. But the reign of terror still held on its course. The government was continually shifting its form. In truth, there was virtually no government at all. It was one continued scene of anarchy and confusion. Those terrible factions, the Jacobin, the Gironde, the Mountain, in their struggles for power, and their alternate ascendancy, continued to exhibit France as one great slaughter-house of human victims, without regard to guilt or innocence, sex or age. The whole nation seemed to have been metamorphosed into a nation of demons, wild and frightful, and drunk with human blood, with which they seemed incapable of being satiated. And yet, strange as it may seem, and strange as it does now seem even to ourselves, there was a splendour, a magnificence about that revolution that riveted our admiration and sympathy with a force that could not be at once detached by all the horrors that accompanied it.