The best and bravest of the French must have beheld this spectacle with secret apprehension and awe. However bold and resolute a man may be in the discharge of duty, it is an anxious and fearful thing to be-called on to encounter danger among comrades of whose steadiness you can feel no certainty. Each soldier of Kellerman's army must have remembered the series of panic routs which had hitherto invariably taken place on the French side during the war; and must have cast restless glances to the right and left, to see if any s3nnptoms of wavering began to show themselves, and to calculate how long it was likely to be before a general rush of his comrades to the rear would either hurry him off with involuntary disgrace, or leave him alone and helpless to be cut down by assailing multitudes.
On that very morning, and at the self-same hour, in which the allied forces and the emigrants began to descend from La Lune to the attack of Valmy, and while the cannonade was opening between the Prussian and the Revolutionary batteries, the debate in the National Convention at Paris commenced on the proposal to proclaim France a Republic.
The old monarchy had little chance of support in the ball of the Convention; but if its more effective advocates at Valmy had triumphed, there
