In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the Fourteenth. His policy--his achievements--his failures, and, still more, his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power--no prudence of personal deportment--no brilliancy of external achievement, can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and impressionable as the French, save to make additionally insupportable a character which, even on the smallest scale, is, of all others, the most odious and repulsive. The stern unity and perfection of order in which he was enabled to present political power--that necessary evil of human existence--but added intensity to the hate, as it added grandeur to the idea of his despotism. In the eyes of his suffering subjects it brought him face to face with the catastrophes no less than with the glories of his reign, and without the merit of the avowal--_adsum qui feci!_ gave him all its dread responsibilities. An old despot surviving his greatness while retaining the stinging irony of its title--a saint amid the standing reminiscences of his adulteries, expiating his pleasures by annihilating those of others, and tormenting consciences to save his own--his suffering and downcast people became at length disabused but too utterly of the base apotheosis of his person and character, so long maintained by him in the name of a false glory and debased religion. They even publicly rejoiced at a death-bed made pitiable by the absence of his mistress, confessor, and family; and meeting in mobs that, encountering his corpse on its way through by-lanes to hugger-mugger interment at St. Denis, they might tear it into shreds, gave early and portentous evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to _complete_ the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy, and a discontented and impoverished people, the robed Louis the