shrinking from violence with a craven horror, and women driven by a sense of wrong to show how disgusting physical courage may be made. Here were also sons led on to the attack by their hitherto anxious fathers; husbands thrust forward into danger by their wives; and little children upreared by their mothers amidst the fire and smoke, to take one last look of the hated edifice which was soon to be levelled with the ground. The towers of palaces might be seen afar, where princes were quaking at this final assurance of the downfall of their despotic sway, knowing that the assumed sanctity of royalty was being wafted away with every puff of smoke which spread itself over the sky, and their irresponsibility melting in fires lighted by the hands which they had vainly attempted to fetter, and blown by the breath which they had imagined they could stifle. They had denied the birth of that liberty whose baptism in fire and in blood was now being celebrated in a many-voiced chaunt with which the earth should ring for centuries. Some from other lands were already present to hear and join in it; some free Britons to aid, some wondering slaves of other despots to slink homewards with whispered tidings of its import; for from that day to this, the history of the fall of the Bastille has been told as a secret in the vineyards of Portugal, and among the groves of Spain, and in the patriotic conclaves of the youth of Italy, while it has been loudly and joyfully proclaimed from one end to the other of Great Britain, till her lisping children are familiar with the tale. The congregation would not have been complete without the presence of another class of witnesses whose very existence will perhaps be matter of incredulity in some future age of the world;—that class which man has taken upon himself to institute, and which will one day rise up against him in judgment of his abused power. There were captives present in this scene of lawless freedom,—or rather of freedom above the law. They were there, first trembling before the assailants, and then marvelling at the treatment they received, as the kid would marvel at being dandled by the lion. So it appeared to be with most of them, while one or two caught the tone of popular triumph before the doors of their cells were opened, and others received their deliverance in a manner that rent the heart of the deliverers.