(Fils Adoptif, Memoires de Mirabeau, iv.

325.) How is our bright Era of Hope dimmed: and the whole sky growing bleak with signs of hurricane and earthquake! It is a doomed world: gone all 'obedience that made men free;' fast going the obedience that made men slaves,--at least to one another.

Slaves only of their own lusts they now are, and will be.

Slaves of sin; inevitably also of sorrow.

Behold the mouldering mass of Sensuality and Falsehood; round which plays foolishly, itself a corrupt phosphorescence, some glimmer of Sentimentalism;--and over all, rising, as Ark of their Covenant, the grim Patibulary Fork 'forty feet high;' which also is now nigh rotted.
Add only that the French Nation distinguishes itself among Nations by the characteristic of Excitability; with the good, but also with the perilous evil, which belongs to that.