It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in--glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 54: From "The Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful."] [Footnote 55: Written in 1796. The occasion for this celebrated letter was an attack on Burke by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale in connection with his pension. The attacks were made from their places in the House of Lords.] [Footnote 56: Burke's son was Richard Burke, who died on August 2, 1790. He was 32 years of age. The blow shattered Burke's ambition. He himself died in 1797. One other son, Christopher, had been horn to Burke, but he died in childhood. Burke's domestic life was otherwise exceptionally happy. He was noted among his contemporaries for his "orderly and amiable domestic habits."] [Footnote 57: From the "Reflections on the Revolution in France."] WILLIAM COWPER Born in 1731, died in 1800; son of a clergyman; educated at Westminster School; admitted to the bar in 1754, but melancholia unfitted him for practise; temporarily confined in an asylum in 1763; afterward lived in private families, being subject to repeated attacks of mental disorder tending to suicide, ending in permanent insanity; published "The Task" in 1785, a translation of Homer in 1791. I