It is impossible to pronounce the word _guillotine_, without associating with it its grand mover Robespierre, that modern Procrustes, who sought to contract or extend to the standard of his own opinion, a mighty people; before whom neither elevation of virtue or talents could erect a shield, or insignificancy of birth and situation creep beneath a shelter. Without aiming to become his defender, I must, however, be permitted to observe, that many of the relations, which, on authority seemingly good, I every day hear and read of his towering ambition and capricious cruelty, are too extravagant to be credited, and, if true, too degrading to our nature to be repeated. In the general horror and indignation excited by his remembrance, I am sensible (especially among this declamatory people) that truth will often be sacrificed to passion. There is, besides, a second reason, that increases the distrust with which I listen:----to screen themselves from odium, all the subordinate tyrants fix upon him, and attribute to his orders, the innumerable butcheries and acts of oppression which they have perpetrated.----They who were once his closest imitators, are now loudest in their outcries against his memory; which, in many instances, is loaded with the crimes of his contemporaries. I had not been taken twenty-four hours when Captain Le Franq, either from credulity, or a wish to impress me with an early belief of his not being attached to a sinking party, told me, among similar tales, that Robespierre had, in the townhall of Paris, caused himself to be proclaimed, “Maximilian the First, Emperor of the French.” Upon finding that a man, whose relative rank and situation in life entitled him to respectable sources of information, could thus, either from ignorance, prejudice, or a less laudable motive, be guilty of so gross a misrepresentation, it became doubly incumbent upon me to restrain my belief.