As soon as the cry of reform and change was sounded, every furious and ignoble passion--every sordid and profligate and depraved motive, hoping to profit by the confusion, entered into the strife, and corrupted the whole mass. Then it was that in the heart of Christendom, we saw a city, associated in our minds with every refinement of civilization--the emporium of science, literature and the arts--suddenly transformed into a moral desert. The annals of mankind had recorded no such metamorphosis. To the _senses_ indeed, all the monuments of science and art and social improvement remained, but they seemed to belong to other times. Every thing relative to the human character was forcibly overturned, or wrested from its natural position. Women without humanity or timidity, at one moment braving death, and at another thirsting for blood. Science and practical art employed in devising new modes of taking away life. Statesmen and legislators engrossed by the one great subject of how they might exterminate citizens no less than foreign enemies. Speculative minds racking their inventions to frame excuses for these enormities, or in making frivolous changes in the names of streets and provinces--of the months and days--while _Religion_, finding nothing congenial to her own mildness and purity, fled from the country, and the infuriated multitude hallooed and exulted in her retreat: and in the metropolis of fashion, which had given the laws of dress to all Europe, and one of whose most distinguished literati[5] had asserted that the apparel was a part of the man, an attention to outward appearance was deemed presumptive evidence of aristocracy. Nor was there a more certain mode of awakening suspicion of _incivism_, than to seem to be devout, or moral, or gentlemanly, unless these obnoxious qualities were redeemed by some accompaniment of crime. [Footnote 5: The Count de Buffon.]