Equal in fatuity, almost 150 years later, were the several attempts at escape concerted on behalf of the French royal family. The abortive escape to Varennes is now familiarly known to all the world, and impeaches the good sense of the king himself not less than of his friends. The arrangements for the falling in with the cavalry escort could not have been worse managed had they been intrusted to children. But even the general outline of the scheme, an escape in a collective family party--father, mother, children, and servants--and the king himself, whose features were known to millions, not even withdrawing himself from the public gaze at the stations for changing horses--all this is calculated to perplex and sadden the pitying reader with the idea that some supernatural infatuation had bewildered the predestined victims. Meantime an earlier escape than this to Varennes had been planned, viz., to Brussels. The preparations for this, which have been narrated by Madame de Campan, were conducted with a disregard of concealment even more astounding to people of ordinary good sense. "Do you really need to escape at all?" would have been the question of many a lunatic; "if you do, surely you need also to disguise your preparations for escape." But alike the madness, or the providential wisdom, of such attempts commands our profoundest interest; alike--whether conducted by a Cæsar or by the helpless members of families utterly unfitted to act independently for themselves. These attempts belong to history, and it is in that relation that they become philosophically so impressive. Generations through an infinite series are contemplated by us as silently awaiting the turning of a sentinel round a corner, or the casual echo of a footstep. Dynasties have trepidated on the chances of a sudden cry from an infant carried in a basket; and the safety of empires has been suspended, like the descent of an avalanche, upon the moment earlier or the moment later of a cough or a sneeze. And, high above all, ascends solemnly the philosophic truth, that the least things and the greatest are bound together as elements equally essential of the mysterious universe. FOOTNOTES: [D] "Feels by a secret instinct;"--A sentiment of this nature is finely expressed by Lucan in the passage beginning, "Advenisse diem," &c. The circumstance by which Lucan chiefly defeats the grandeur and simplicities of the truth, is, the monstrous numerical exaggeration of the combatants and the killed at Pharsalia.