“This sublime sally of a too-confiding imagination, has made the poet and his work countless foes. They triumphed over him,” says his fair biographer, “on a result so contrary,—on the mortal wounds given by French crimes to real Liberty. They forget, or choose to forget, that this part of the poem (though published after the other) appeared in 1791, antecedent to the dire regicide, and to all those unprecedented scenes of sanguinary cruelty inflicted on France, by three of her republican tyrants; compared to whom, the most remorseless of her monarchs was mild and merciful.” ----- Notwithstanding the criminal excesses committed by many of the French revolutionists, before the institution of their short lived and turbulent republic, it was hoped by most true Americans, attached by fidelity as well as principle to that system of government, which was then the legitimate one in their own country, that its ultimate establishment in France would produce permanent benefits, to that country at least, which would infinitely overbalance what were considered, by zealous republicans, as temporary and partial evils, such as seemed to be unavoidable, in bringing about a radical change in the fundamental institutions of a great and powerful empire. Many Americans were not, indeed, so sanguine in their expectations: but such were, nevertheless, the prevailing sentiments of the citizens of the United States,—even among the best-informed men. The deliberative and cautionary proceedings (as they purported to be) of the more prominent revolutionary characters in France, in their minor popular assemblies, prior to the establishment of their national constitutional form of government, were judged of, in the United States, with respect to their objects and utility, as similar assemblies, under the denominations of councils of safety, committees of safety, &c. were considered by their own citizens, at the commencement of the American revolution: they were deemed to be necessary agents of the people in each country, respectively, during the interregnum which succeeded the abandonment of their ancient governments. The Jacobin Club of Paris was one of these political engines of the French revolution, for some time after its commencement; and, perhaps, that assembly contained many worthy members, originally, although it afterwards became notoriously infamous, by the monstrous enormity of the crimes it countenanced and produced. Chief Justice Marshall has observed (in his _Life of Washington_,) that “soon after the arrival of Mr. Genet,[278] a Democratic Society was formed in Philadelphia, which seems to have taken for its model the Jacobin Club of Paris:”—“Its organization,” continues the historian, “appears to have been completed on the 30th of May, 1793.” ----- Footnote 278: