all, that The Brigands are close by. Men quit their houses and huts; rash fugitive, shrieking, with wife and child, they know not whither. Such a terror, the eye-witnesses say, never fell on a Nation; nor shall again fall, even in Reigns of Terror expressly so called. The Countries of the Loire, all the Central and Southeast regions, start up distracted, 'simultaneously as by an electric shock';—for indeed grain too gets scarcer and scarcer. 'The people barricade the entrances of Towns, pile stones in the upper stories, the women prepare boiling water; from moment to moment, expecting the attack. In the Country, the alarm-bell rings incessant; troops of peasants, gathered by it, scour the highways, seeking an imaginary enemy. They are armed mostly with scythes stuck in wood; and, arriving in wild troops at the barricaded Towns, are themselves sometimes taken for Brigands.'[1]
So rushes old France: old France is rushing down. What the end will be is known to no mortal; that the end is near all mortals may know.
CONSTITUTION WILL NOT MARCH
To all which our poor Legislative, tied up by an unmarching Constitution, can oppose nothing, by way of remedy, but mere bursts of parliamentary eloquence! They go on, debating, denouncing, objurgating: loud weltering Chaos, which devours itself.
But their two thousand and odd Decrees? Reader, these happily concern not thee, nor me. Mere Occasional-Decrees, foolish and not foolish; sufficient for that day was its own evil! Of the whole two thousand there are not now half a score, and these mostly blighted in the bud by royal Veto, that will profit or disprofit us. On the 17th January, the
- ↑ Newspapers, etc. (in Hist. Parl. xiii. 325).
