NOTE 33, p. 223.—This passage and what follows on the rule of the Jacobins is the one of which Madame de Staël wrote in her “Ten Years of Exile”: “It was during this stormy period of my existence that I received the speech of Mr. Mackintosh; and there read his description of a Jacobin, who had made himself an object of terror during the Revolution to children, women, and old men, and who was now bending himself double under the rod of the Corsican, who tears from him, even to the last atom, that liberty for which he pretended to have taken arms. This _morceau_ of the finest eloquence touched me to my very soul; it is the privilege of superior writers sometimes unwittingly to solace the unfortunate in all countries and at all times. France was in a state of such complete silence around me, that this voice, which suddenly responded to my soul, seemed to me to come down from heaven—_it came from a land of liberty_.” NOTE 34, p. 236.—Allusion is made to the fact, humiliating to every Englishman, that Charles II. and James II. both received pensions from Louis XIV. NOTE 35, p. 252.—Aloys Reding, the Burgomaster of Schweitz, in 1798, put himself at the head of a few followers and attacked the invading French with so much energy that he broke their ranks and repelled them. Afterward, however, he was overpowered and taken prisoner. After being held in prison for a time he was driven into exile. NOTE 36, p. 296.—At the conclusion of the trial, the jury without hesitation found a verdict of “guilty.” But the subsequent history of the case is one of peculiar interest. The judges decided that the defendant Williams should suffer one year’s imprisonment at hard labor. But before sentence was to be pronounced, Erskine declined to go forward with the case and returned his retainer. The reason was never made public till Erskine himself explained the matter in a letter written in February of 1819 to the editor of Howell’s “State Trials.” He was one day walking in a narrow lane in London when he felt something pulling him by the coat, and, turning around, he saw a woman in tears and emaciated with disease and sorrow. The woman pulled him forward into a miserable hovel where in a room not more than ten or twelve feet square were two children with confluent small-pox and the wretched man whom he had just convicted. The man was engaged in sewing up little, religious tracts, which had been his principal employment in his trade. Erskine was convinced that Williams had been urged to the publication of Paine by his extreme poverty and not by his will. The advocate was so deeply affected by what he saw and heard that he believed the cause for which he had pleaded would best be subserved by the policy of mercy. He wrote to the Society in whose behalf he had been retained by the crown urging such a course. His advice, after due consideration, was rejected, whereupon Erskine abandoned the case and returned the fees he had received. The incident is an admirable