The blindness of the sovereigns, who, still continuing a war on France, suffered such fine troops to be dissolved for want of the means of support, was inexcusable; their cold and hard-hearted conduct towards a body of gentlemen, who, if politically wrong, were at least devoted to the cause for which Austria asserted that she continued in arms, was equally unwise and ungenerous. These gallant gentlemen might have upbraided the Kings who had encouraged, and especially the general who led, this ill-fated expedition, in the words of Shakspeare, if he had been known to them,-- "Hast thou not spoke like thunder on our side, Been sworn our soldier--bidding us depend Upon thy stars, thy fortune, and thy strength?"[299] But the reproaches of those who have no remedy but the exposition of their wrongs, seldom reach the ears of the powerful by whom these wrongs have been committed. It is not difficult to conceive the agony with which these banished gentlemen abandoned all hopes of saving the life of their King, and the recovery of their rank and fortune. All their proud vaunts of expected success were lost, or converted into serpents to sting them. They had no hope before them, and, what is worst to men of high spirit, they had fallen with scarce a blow struck for honour, far less for victory. They were now doomed, such as could, to exercise for mere subsistence the prosecution of sciences and arts, which they had cultivated to adorn prosperity--to wander in foreign lands, and live upon the precarious charity of foreign powers, embittered every where by the reflections of some, who pitied the folly that could forfeit rank and property for a mere point of honour; and of others, who saw in them the enemies of rational liberty, and upbraided them with the charge, that their misfortunes were the necessary consequence of their arbitrary principles. It might have in some degree mitigated their calamity, could some gifted sage have shown them, at such distance as the Legislator of Israel beheld the Promised Land from Mount Pisgah, the final restoration of the royal house, in whose cause they had suffered shipwreck of their all. But how many perished in the wilderness of misfortune which intervened--how few survived the twenty years wandering which conducted to this promised point! and of those few, who, war-worn and wearied by misfortunes, survived the restoration of royalty, how very few were rewarded by more than the disinterested triumph which they felt on that joyful occasion! and how many might use the simile of a royalist of Britain on a similar occasion,--"The fleece of Gideon remained dry, while the hoped-for restoration shed showers of blessing on all France beside!"