The French revolution in general, taking it from its very commencement to its close, produced some good amidst a mass of evil; but there were particular periods, when all thought of right seemed abandoned, which did as much as the destruction of all order, the abolition of all law, the contempt of all religion; and the annihilation of every principle and every feeling, can effect towards a nation's overthrow. It often happens that man in doing wrong in one way, unintentionally do good in another; but those who governed France at the periods of which I speak, with a comprehensiveness of mind which, happily for the world, is not always attendant upon crime, contrived to be uniform at least in evil; and left no one good act for which history could accuse them of inconsistency. At the same time, they took care to prove to the world, by a rare combination of qualities, that it was in ill alone that they were uniform, by mixing the maddest display of folly with the affectations of philosophy, and uniting levity with slaughter. Humanity shudders at the remembrance of such deeds; not alone because they were bloody, but at the horrid frivolities with which they were accompanied. It appears as if the love of destruction had seized like a mania upon all the nation with a power ungovernable, had taken the place of every better feeling, and left every weakness and every defect in more than original force. Never was the national levity of the French more conspicuous than during great part of the reign of terror. While every day shed fresh blood, and the deputy who superintended the work of murder at Nantes, found the guillotine but a means of slaughter in detail, not at all suited to his comprehensive mind; while he fell upon the happy expedient of embarking his victims in a covered boat, and sinking them wholesale in the river: at that very time the opera was as fully attended and the card-tables as gay as ever; jokes were cut upon the guillotine by those who were next to undergo its stroke, and the murderer handed his snuff-box to the victim whom to-morrow he condemned to death. In future ages the minute points of this vast tragedy will scarcely be believed. Many of its horrors are but faintly remembered even now, and the benefits which accrued from it are far overrated. The _dîme_, the _corvée_, and almost all the _droits seigneuriaux_ were falling or had fallen even before the actual revolution began, and every other abuse would have gradually yielded to the power of time and the increase of knowledge. But the French were not contented to wait; they slew a good king, deluged their fields in blood, and stained their annals with crime, to obtain what a few years would have peaceably brought about.