faith-when children were torn* from their parents to have their consciences trimmed by Jesuits, do you think that the glittering rank of this high priestess of church government could hide from an enlightened community the cruelty of such measures, or inspire them with respect for a system of government which invested her with power? The extremes of opinion have been justly said to be nearer each other than the means, as the ends of a cord may be drawn around a circle till they meet. Thus in speculative matters a man is almost invariably in the wrong in proportion to the violence of his opinions, or his positiveness of being in the right. Reason and virtue occupy the centre, or middle ground. Hence a levelling Jacobin is easily converted into a despotist, and a religionist into an infidel. The most vicious of monarchs, Louis XV. was a miserable bigot. Under him when a man was ill and refused the Roman sacrament and died, his goods were confiscated and his body dragged through the streets and thrown into a ditch-if he recovered, he was condemned to confiscation of property and perpetual labour at the gallies. Such intolerance disgusted the nation; for religion cannot be created by secular power-those only love it who embrace it from reason. Indeed from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes not only were manufactures and agriculture checked, but literature and the fine arts began to decline, and the church to relax the severity of its moral discipline. The great men who adorned the pulpit during the religious controversy successively disappeared without leaving a single character of resembling dignity to fill their places. The zeal of emulation among the clergy gradually sunk into the repose of indolence, and their chief solicitude during the 18th century was for the conservation in both church and state of the prejudices of the feudal ages. In proportion as they fell off from their duties, religion declined into superstition or infidelity as it happened to light on a weak or a vicious mind, and long before the storm of the revolution broke on their heads, their dissolute habits and extortions had not only destroyed the proper respect for the clerical body, but led the nation to imagine a priest a hypocrite and a monk a glutton. No couplet *The sister of Dutens, and a thousand others. from the stage was ever applauded more than this of Edipe in 1716. "Nos prêtres ne sont pas ce qu'un vain peuple pense Notre credulité fait toute leur science." But although literature, had lost something of that purity of taste which characterized the writings of the preceding age, the multiplication of these had prodigiously diffused the superficial intelligence they contained. The art of printing had thrown open the doors of the temple of science to the whole nation, and though reading had not yet made the French profound thinkers on moral subjects, it gave an impulse to the public mind which sent it in pursuit of truth. Literature had not been as powerful a promoter of the prosperity of the nations of antiquity as it might have been, because they did not possess the means of diffusing it; and hence among the earlier authors of France none seem to have been aware that their writings might advance the happiness of mankind, or that the discoveries of philosophy might influence the fate of nations. Under the administration of Cardinal Dubois in particular a band of mercenary and depraved writers became the oracles of fashion and obscenity, and emptied out a stream of rancid pollution in a style just suited to demoralize the half educated part of the nation. If the corrupt government of France did not produce this state of things, how does it happen that England (a country not less advanced at that time before France in political and moral science, than she was in physical, by the preference of the Newtonian over the Carthesian system) how does it happen that she too was not inundated by drains from this pool of corruption? To what are we to attribute her escape but to toleration, and to the free principles which time and patriotism had incorporated into her constitution? In the enjoyment of toleration she had grown wise; for toleration acts on a nation as if God were to open "the windows of heaven and send the sun of righteousness with glorious apparition" to discover the abysses of his own wisdom. Had the same light shone on France at that time she too might have acquired liberty and become happy; for few governments have united greater oppression to rouse resistance 财 with less ability to conquer it, than France after the explosion of the wild schemes of Mr. Law. Indeed I can never read such a fact as that stated by Boulainvilliers, that more than ten thousand persecuted persons were destroyed by the flames, the wheel and the gibbet under Louis XIV. without a feeling of surprise at the patience and good humour with which this nation submitted to be thus outraged. The spirit of liberty, however, which had never been a very active principle in France had at that time from the long prevalence of arbitrary power, lost nearly all the spring which once animated it. Wealth and knowledge were not yet sufficiently diffused among the middling and lower classes of society to give buoyancy to this sentiment; and among nobles, enriched by exclusive privileges, inured to habits of submission, and then falling into decay, it shewed no symptom of life. But although the spirit of liberty had been covered up and seemingly extinguished under the mass of rubbish, which it had suited the purposes of petty tyrants and splendid despots to throw upon it, there is something so immortal in its nature, that it can never be extinct in a nation in which the human mind is cultivated. Thus, in France, at the era to which I allude, it found an asylum in the hearts and heads of a few honest men, who gradually imparted it to others. The government severely prohibited any strictures on itself, but suffered the translation of works hostile to the doctrine of divine right, and passive obedience. The casual reflections of its own authors of the preceding age too, may have slightly touched the spring of moral and political inquiry; but it was the English philosophers and statesmen, (Mr. Locke and his pupils) who struck, like Moses, the rock of ignorance, and opened the fountains of wisdom. Those who perceived the beginning of this stream, were probably as little aware of the fulness it was one day to acquire, as the persons who view the sources of the Nile are from imagining that it may gather water enough in its course, first to inundate, and afterwards to fertilize the plains of Egypt. If France had possessed a free press, bad writers would never have found encouragement to pervert her moral sentiments. The permission to publish any thing soon ceases to be an evil in a community that is tolerably honest and free, for that which nobody buys, it is nobody's interest to publish. In this country, during the reign of Louis XV. the burning of a book by the hands common hangman, only heightened its reputation, by leading the public to think the Court had not sense enough to of a answer it. Hence, it was observed, by one of the mischievous wits of that reign, (I think Voltaire,) on hearing that one of his books had been condemned, "so much the better: books are like Lyon's chesnuts, the more you toast them, the better they are." The diffusion of education and knowledge was working a change in the French nation throughout the last century. In Great Britain, the political powers of the nobility gave them personal independence and dignity, whilst their frequent intermarriage with the commons blended them with the nation. But in France, the noblesse seem to have fancied themselves another race from the people, and could never render great enough the distance which separated them from the bourgoisie. This arrogance might have been supportable when learning was nearly confined to them, but it became intolerable after the diffusion of education and wealth had begun to level the arbitrary distinctions of society. The tree of aristocracy had grown to a majestic height in the preceding reign of Louis XIV. because it had cast root in a soil enriched by letters; but that very soil which thus enabled it to carry its branches high, and to extend them wide, had now vegetated other scions, and pushed them forward so fast, that they soon united the elevation of age to the vigour of youth. The natural consequence of this was, that the old tree should become less useful, and should soon cease to be either cherished for its shade, or venerated for its antiquity. Aristocracy was no doubt, in ancient times, a great benefit to free states, because the cultivation of the mind of a part, at least, of a nation, is essential to its prosperity, and because the means of acquiring knowledge were then too costly to admit of its general diffusion. But, in consequence of this restraint on education, the greatness or the decay of the free states of antiquity, was dependent on the virtue or the corruption of one class of men. Luxury was therefore fatal to them; and hence, precipitate thinkers are in the habit of concluding that a taste for the fine arts leads to the decline of a state. But there is no idea more erroneous in its application to modern nations; for the discovery of the art of printing, has created in these a capacity of self-regeneration, which prevents them from being enervated by the luxury of their nobles, and which, in fact, has done away with the chief use of aristocracy. Under Cardinal Fleury, who, in every thing except cupidity, possessed the morality of a courtier, and who lived in a society odiously dissolute, without either encouraging or condemning its practices, France enjoyed a repose dangerous to despotism. Educated people, when their curiosity is not taken up by the bustle of military operations, begin to think; and although Fleury had the address to pass off his elegant prattling for the trifling of a sage, he had not ability enough to turn the tide of opinion which was then beginning to run, with a steady current, against existing establishments. The restrictions on the press began to be very sensibly felt, and the censorship (which acted as a quarantine on every book, in order to spunge out of it every bold truth it might contain,) to be condemned. Authors fell into Milton's opinion, that to kill a man is to kill a reasoning creature; but to stifle a good book, is to kill reason itself; and Voltaire, whose writings exercised great influence over the age in which he lived did not hesitate to declare: "Qu'il ne doit pas etre pius defendu d'ecrire que de parler; que telle est la loi D'Angleterre, pays monarchique, mais ou les hommes sont plus libre qu'ailleurs parce qu'ils sont plus eclairés." When the Encyclopedia made its appearance, the reins of the French government were in the hands of the wanton De Pompadour, the accomplished daughter of a butcher. She sat on the box too, in a very commanding attitude, cheering philosophy at one moment by a smile, and withering it at another by a reprimand-braving public opinion with the most unwinking effrontery, she conducted the chariot of state sometimes according to the calculations of her own interest, but much more frequently after the dictates of her caprice. Is it to be wondered at, then, that it encountered some dissolving jars as it went along; or that the French nation should not have seen with any patience the victorious legions of Britain planting at that time the standard of St. George on the ramparts of Quebec? The destinies of England, during this regency of Madame de Pompadour, had fallen into hands of as opposite a description, as if Providence had designed to contrast the institutions of the two rival nations. Though the king of England might not have been more highly gifted with talent than the king of France, the free spirit of his people had called into his council, men of the most gigantic talents. The "bright orb" of |