In the first burst of the revolution, nothing was seen by us but a brave and generous effort by the people for the recovery of their long lost rights and liberties. The spectacle of such a people, a people so endeared to us by recent services, rising, in such a cause, against the whole wealth and power of the court and the vast body of the nobles, temporal and spiritual, who had so long lorded it over France, was well calculated to enlist our strongest sympathies.--The first movements of the national convention, too, were marked with an energy, a grandeur, a magnanimity, and a power of eloquence such as the world had never witnessed, and such as no human heart could withstand.--And, then, when the combined armies moved upon France, the heroism with which they were met by the armies of the republic--chaunting, as they marched up in order of battle, the sublime strains of their national hymn--and the stupendous power with which they were beaten off, and their armies crushed and annihilated one after another--threw such a blaze of glory around the revolution as made us blind to all its excesses. Those excesses, too, came to us, veiled and softened by the distance, and by the medium through which they passed: and, however much to be deplored, we were ready, with the French patriots, to consider them as the unavoidable consequences of such a struggle, and to charge all the blood that was spilt in France, to the tyrants, abroad and at home, who chose to resist, to death, the rightful demands of the people.