ed. practice of mutual guillotining was establish- | purity and tranquillity. Stupendous halluciAfter him, Vergniaud, the leader of nation! And did this fanatic really feel no the Girondists, was perhaps the most effect- pang of conscience? That will afterwards ive speaker; and till his fall, he possessed a engage our consideration. Frequently, he commanding influence in the Convention. was called on to proscribe and execute his Danton was likewise a speaker of vast power, most intimate friends; but it does not appear and from his towering figure, he seemed like that any personal consideration ever stayed a giant among pigmies. Marat might be his proceedings. First, he swept away Roytermed the representative of the kennel. He alists and aristocrats; next he sacrificed the was a low demagogue, flaunting in rags, Girondists; last, he came to his companiondirty, and venomous: he was always calling Jacobins. Accusing Danton and his friends out for more blood, as if the grand deside- of a tendency to moderation, he had the ratum was the annihilation of mankind. dexterity to get them proscribed and beheadAmong the extreme men, Robespierre, by ed. When Danton was seized, he could his eloquence, his artifice, and his bold coun- hardly credit his senses: he who had long sels, contrived to maintain his position. This felt himself sure of being one day dictator was no easy matter, for it was necessary to by public acclamation, and to have been deremain firm and unfaltering in every emer- ceived by that dreamer, Robespierre, was gency. He, like the others at the helm of most humiliating. But Robespierre would affairs, was constantly impelled forward by not dare to put him to death! Grave misthe clubs, but more so by the incessant cla- calculation! He was immolated like the mors of the mob. At the Hotel de Ville rest; the crowd looking on with indifference. sat at the Commune, a crew of blood-thirsty Along with him perished Camille Desmouvillains, headed by Hebert; and this mis- lins, a young man of letters, and a Jacobin, creant, with his armed sections, accompanied but convicted of advocating clemency. Roby paid female furies, beset the Convention, bespierre was one of Camille's private and and carried measures of severity by sheer most valued friends; he had been his instructintimidation. Let it further be remembered or in politics, and had become one of the that, in 1793, France was kept in apprehen- trustees under his marriage-settlement. Rosion of invasion by the Allies under the bespierre visited at the house of his protege ; Duke of Brunswick, and the army of emi- chatted with the young and handsome grant noblesse under the command of Condé. Madame Desmoulins at her parties; and The hovering of these forces on the frontiers, frequently dandled the little Horace Desand their occasional successes, produced a moulins on his knee, and let him play with constant alarm of counter revolution, which his bunch of seals. Yet because they were was believed to be instigated by secret in- adherents of Danton, he sent husband and triguers in the very heart of the Convention. wife to the scaffold within a few weeks of It was alleged by Robespierre in his greatest each other! What eloquent and touching orations, that the safety of the Republic de- appeals were made to old recollections by pended on keeping up a wholesome state of the mother of Madame Desmoulins. Robesterror; and that all who, in the slightest de- pierre was reminded of little Horace, and of gree, leaned towards clemency, sanctioned his duty as a family guardian. All would the work of intriguers, and ought, accord- not do. His heart was marble; and so the ingly, to be proscribed. By such harangues wretched pair were guillotined. Camille's in the main, miserable sophistry-he ac- letter to his wife, the night before he was quired prodigious popularity, and was in led to the scaffold, cannot be read without fact irresistible. emotion. He died with a lock of her hair clasped convulsively in his hand. Thus was legalized the Reign of Terror, which, founded in false reasoning and insane fears, we must, nevertheless, look back upon as a thing, at least to a certain extent, reconcilable with a sense of duty; inasmuch as even while signing warrants for transferring hundreds of people to the Revolutionary Tribunal-which was equivalent to sending them to the scaffold-Robespierre imagined that he was acting throughout under a clear, an imperious necessity: only ridding society of the elements that disturbed its Having thus cleared away to some extent all those who stood in the way of his views, Robespierre bethought himself of acting a new part in public affairs, calculated, as he thought, to dignify the Republic. Chaumette, a mean confederate of Hebert, and a mouth-piece of the rabble, had, by consent of the Convention, established Paganism, or the worship of Reason, as the national religion. Robespierre never gave his approval to this outrage, and took the earliest op bare idea of doing anything to endanger the Republic amounted, in his mind, to a species of sacrilege. At this crisis in his fate, therefore, he temporised; he sought peace, if not consolation, in solitude. He took long walks in the woods, where he spent hours tree, his face buried in his hands, or earnest. ly bent on the surrounding natural objects. What was the precise tenor of his meditations, it would be deeply interesting to know. Did the great promoter of the Revolution ponder on the failure of his aspirations after a state of human perfectibility? Was he torn by remorse on seeing rise up, in imagination, the thousands of innocent individuals whom, in vindication of a theory, he had consigned to an ignominious and violent death, yet whose removal had, politically speaking, proved altogether fruitless? portunity of restoring the worship of the Supreme. It is said, that of all the missions with which he believed himself to be charged, the highest, the holiest in his eyes, was the regeneration of the religious sentiment of the people: to unite heaven and earth by this bond of a faith which the Re-seated on the ground, or leaning against a public had broken, was for him the end, the consummation of the Revolution. In one of his paroxysms, he delivered an address to the Convention, which induced them to pass a law, acknowledging the existence of God, and ordaining a public festival to inaugurate the new religion. This fete took place on the 8th of June, 1794. Robespierre headed the procession to the Champ de Mars; and he seemed on the occasion to have at length reached the grand realization of all his hopes and desires. From this coup de theatre he returned home, magnified in the estimation of the people, but ruined in the eyes of the Convention. His conduct had been too much that of one whose next step was to the restoration of the throne, with himself as its occupant. By Fouché, Tallien, Collot-d' Herbois, and some others, he was now thwarted in all his schemes. His wish was to close the Reign of Terror and allow the new moral world to begin; for his late access of devotional feeling had, in reality, disposed him to adopt benign and clement measures. But to arrest carnage was now beyond his power; he had invoked a demon which would not be laid. Assailed by calumny, he made the Convention resound with his speeches; spoke of fresh proscriptions to put down intrigue: and spread universal alarm among the members. In spite of the most magniloquent orations, he saw that his power was nearly gone. Sick at heart, he began to absent himself from committees, which still continued to send to the scaffold numbers whose obscure rank should have saved them from suspicion or vengeance. At this juncture, Robespierre was earnesty entreated by one of his more resolute adherents, St. Just, to play a bold game for the dictatorship, which he represented as the only means of saving the Republic from anarchy. Anonymous letters to the same effect also poured in upon him; and prognostics of his greatness, uttered by an obscure fortune-teller, were listened to by the great demagogue with something like superstitious respect. But for this personal elevation he was not prepared. Pacing up and down his apartment, and striking his forehead with his hand, he candidly acknowledged that he was not made for power; while the It is the more general belief that, in these solitary rambles, Robespierre was preparing an oration, which, as he thought, should silence all his enemies, and restore him to parliamentary favor. A month was devoted to this rhetorical effort; and, unknown to him, during that interval all parties coalesced, and adopted the resolution to treat his oration when it came with contempt, and, at all hazards, to have him proscribed. The great day came, July 26 (8th Thermidor), 1794. His speech, which he read from a paper, was delivered in his best style-in vain. It was received with yells and hootings; and, with dismay, he retired to the Jacobins, to deliver it over again-as if to seek support among a more subservient audience. Next day, on entering the Conventtion, he was openly accused by Tallien and Billaud-Varennes of aspiring to despotic power. A scene of tumult ensued, and, amid cries of down with the tyrant! a writ for his committal to prison was drawn out, It must be considered a fine trait in the char acter of Robespierre the younger, that he begged to be included in the same decree of proscription with his brother. This wish was readily granted; and St. Just, Couthon (who had lost the use of his legs, and was always carried about in an arm chair), and Le Bas, were added to the number of the proscribed. Rescued, however, from the gendarmes by an insurrectionary force, headed by Barras, Robespierre and his colleagues were conducted in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville. Here, during the night, earnest consultations were held; and the adherents of Robespierre implored him in desperation, as the last chance of safety for them all, to While residing for a short time in Paris in 1849, we were one day conducted by a friend to a large house, with an air of faded grandeur, in the eastern faubourgs, which had belonged to an aged republican, recently deceased. He wished me to examine a literary curiosity, which was to be seen among other relics of the great Revolution. The curiosity in question was the proclamation, in the handwriting of Robespierre, to which he was in the act of inscribing his signature, when assaulted and made prisoner in the Hôtel de Ville. It was a small piece of paper, contained in a glass-frame; and, at this distance of time, could not fail to excite an interest in visitors. The few lines of writing, commencing with the stirring words: "Courage, mes compatriotes!" ended with only a part of the subscription. The letters, Robes, were all that were appended, and were followed by a blur of the pen; while the lower part of the paper showed certain discolorations, as if made by drops of blood. And so this was the last surviving token of the notorious Robespierre! It is somewhat curious, that no historian seems to be aware of its exist Stretched on a table in one of the anterooms of the Convention; his head leaning against a chair; his fractured jaw supported by a handkerchief passed round the top of his head; a glass with vinegar and a sponge at his side to moisten his feverish lips; speechless and almost motionless, yet conscious-there lay Robespierre-the clerks, who, a few days ago, had cringed before him, now amusing themselves by pricking him with their penknives, and coarsely jesting over his fall. Great crowds, likewise, flocked to see him while in this undignified posture, and he was overwhelmed with the vilest expressions of hatred and abuse. The mental agony which he must have experienced during this humiliating exhibition, could scarcely fail to be increased on hearing himself made the object of unsparing and boisterous declamations from the adjoining tribune. At three o'clock in the afternoon (July 28), the prisoners were placed before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and at six, the whole were tied in carts, the dead body of Le Bas included, and conducted to execution. To this wretched band were added the whole family of the Duplays, with the exception of the mother; she having been strangled the previous night by female furies, who had broken into her house, and hung her to the iron rods of her bedstead. They were guiltless of any political crime; but their private connection with the principal object of pro'scription was considered to be sufficient for their condemnation. The circumstance of these individuals being involved in his fate, could not fail to aggravate the bitterness of Robespierre's reflections. As the dismal cortege wended its way along the Rue St. Honoré, he was loaded with imprecations by women whose husbands he had destroyed, and the shouts of children, whom he had deprived of parents, were the last sounds heard by him on earth. Yet he betrayed not the slightest emotion-perhaps he only pitied the ignorance of his persecutors. In the midst of the feelings of a misunderstood and martyred man, his head dropped into the basket! These few facts and observations respecting the career of Robespierre, enable us to form a tolerably correct estimate of his character. The man was a bigot. A perfect Republic was his faith, his religion. To integrity, perseverance, and extraordinary selfdenial under temptation, he united only a sanguine temperament and moderate abilities for the working-out of a mistaken principle. Honest and zealous in his purpose, his conduct was precisely analogous to that of all religious persecutors-sparing no pain or bloodshed to accomplish what he believed to be a good end. Let us grant that he was a monomaniac, the question remains as to his general accountability. If he is to be acquitted on the score of insanity, who is to be judged? Not so are we to exempt great criminals from punishment and obloquy. Robespierre knew thoroughly what he was about; and far as he was misled in his motives, he must be held responsible for his actions. Before entering on the desperate enterprise of demolishing all existing institutions, with the hope of reconstructing the social fabric, it was his duty to be assured that his aims were practicable, and that he was himself authorised to think and act for the whole of mankind, or specially commis- | sioned to kill and terrify into his doctrines. Instead of this, there is nothing to show that he had formed any distinct scheme of a government to take the place of that which he had aided in destroying. All we learn is, that there hovered in his mind's eye some vague Utopia, in which public affairs would go on very much of themselves, through the mere force of universal Benevolence, liberated from the bosom of Nature. For his folly and au dacity in nourishing so wild a theory, and still more for the reckless butcheries by which he sought to bring it into operation, we must, on a review of his whole character, adhere to the popular belief on the subject. Acquitted, as he must necessarily be, of the charge of personal ambition, he was still a monster, only the more dangerous and detestable for justifying murder on the ground of principle. From Sharpe's Magazine. PICTURES OF SWEDEN.* A PICTURE in words must needs be a poetical description. Such, accordingly, is the character of these sketches of Swedish life and scenery by the Danish poet, Andersen. He depicts only objects of poetical interest -scenes of natural grandeur, historical institutions, buildings of ancient date and dignity, spots of pastoral beauty and seclusion-and of these, little is presented save the impressions which they severally excited in himself. Legends and historic incidents are introduced into the delineation, but everything appears under the lights and shades of fancy, and is colored by the hues of poetic feeling. Sentiment rather than observation would seem to be the author's tendency. His book will have few charms for those very "practical" people who delight only in "facts." There is nothing of what is called "useful information" in the whole work. It is a record and illustration of the beautiful. Behold the intending traveller, brooding over the thoughts and fancies which a delightful spring time has quickened in his brain, and listening to the suggestions of a rambling inclination. The sunshine of the lengthening day sheds gladness within his mind, and solicits him with gentle promises to go abroad and see the world. The birds warble, and he essays to interpret their song; "Pictures of Sweden." By Hans Christian Andersen, Author of "The Improvisatore," &c. Bentley, London. and thus he reproduces it in a free translation: "Get on my back,' says the stork, our green island's sacred bird, and I will carry thee over the Sound. Sweden also has fresh and fragrant beech woods, green meadows and corn-fields. In Scavia, with the flowering apple-trees behind the peasant's house, you will think that you are still in Denmark.' "Fly with me,' says the swallow; 'I fly over Holland's mountain-ridge, where the beech-trees cease to grow; I fly further towards the north than the stork. You shall see the vegetable mould pass over into rocky ground; see snug, neat towns, old churches and mansions, where all is good and comfortable, where the family stand in a circle around the table, and say grace at meals, where the least of the children says a prayer, and morning and evening sings a psalm. I have heard it, I have seen it, when little, from my nest under the eaves.' 666 Come with me! come with me!' screams the restless sea-gull, and flies in an expecting circle. Come with me to the Skjärgaards, where rocky isles by thousands, with fir and pine, lie like flower-beds along the coast; where the fishermen draw the well-filled nets!' "Rest thee between our extended wings,' sing the wild swans. 'Let us bear thee up to the great lakes, the perpetually roaring Rest elvs (rivers), that rush on with arrowy swift- | fresh green sward. In the early spring, ness; where the oak forest has long ceased, whilst the fields are still covered with snow, and the birch-tree becomes stunted. but which is melted on the roof, the latter afthee between our extended wings we fly fords the first announcement of spring, with up to Sulitelma, the island's eye, as the the young sprouting grass where the sparmountain is called; we fly from the vernal row twitters Spring comes!' green valley, up over the snow-drifts, to the mountain's top, where thou canst see the North Sea, on yonder side of Norway. We fly to Jemteland, where the rocky mountains are high and blue; where the Foss roars and rushes. Up to the deep, coldrunning waters, where the midsummer sun does not set; where the rosy hue of eve is that of morn.' * That is the bird's song, according to our poet's interpretation. However, he declines to sit upon the stork's back, or between the wings of the wild swans. "We will go forward," says he, "with steam, and with horses -yes, also on our own legs, and glance now and then from reality, over the fence into the region of thought, which is always our near neighborhood; pluck a flower or a leaf, to be placed in the note-book-for it sprung out during our journey's flight: we fly and we sing. * Sweden! thou land of deep feeling, of heart-felt songs; home of the limpid elvs, where the wild swans sing in the gleam of the Northern Lights; thou land, on whose deep, still lakes, Scandinavia's fairy builds her colonnades, and leads her battling, shadowy host over the icy mirror! Glorious Sweden, with thy fragrant Linnæus, with Jenny's soul-enlivening songs! to thee will we fly with the stork and the swallow, with the restless sea-gull and the wild swans. Thy birch-woods exhale refreshing fragrance under their sober, bending branches; on the tree's white stem the harp shall hang: the North's summer wind shall whistle therein!" Even so. In reading these pages we have seemed to hear it-that gentle summer wind, breathing a mild, Northern poetry. And now we will take the reader to some of the choicest spots which the poet visited, and he shall see how pleasantly and sweetly they are pictured. Let us go to old Vadstene-a place of ancient palaces, and of a flourishing convent, where once the good St. Bridget ruled, and in whose decayed and dilapidated sacristy, it is said, her bones are now resting. "Between Montola and Vadstene, close by the high road, stands a grass-turf house -one of the most picturesque. It has but one window, broader than it is high, and a wild rose-branch forms the curtain outside. "We see it in the spring. The roof is so delightfully fresh with grass, it has quite the tint of velvet; and close to it is the chimney, nay, even a cherry-tree grows out of its side, now full of flowers; the wind shakes the leaves down on a little lamb that is tethered to the chimney. It is the only lamb of the family. The old dame, who lives here, lifts it up to its place herself in the morning, and lifts it down again in the evening, to give it a place in the room. The roof can just bear the little lamb, but not more-this is an experience and a certainty. Last autumn— and at that time the grass-turf roofs are covered with flowers, mostly blue and yellow, the Swedish colors-there grew here a flower of a rare kind. It shone in the eyes of the old professor, who, on his botanical tour, came past here. The professor was quickly up on the roof, and just as quick was one of his booted legs through it, and so was the other leg, and then half of the professor himself-that part where the head does not sit; and as the house had no ceiling, his legs hovered right over the old dame's head, and that in very close contact. But now the roof is again whole; the fresh grass grows where learning sank; the little lamb bleats up there, and the old dame stands beneath in the door-way, with folded hands, with a smile on her mouth, rich in remembrances, legends and songs; rich in her only lamb on which the cherry-tree strews its flower-blossoms in the warm spring sun. "As a background to this picture lies the Vettern--the bottomless lake, as the commonalty believe-with its transparent water, its sea-like waves, and in calm, with Heyring,' or fata morgana, on its steel-like surface. We see Vadstene palace and town, the city of the dead,' as a Swedish author has called it-Sweden's Herculaneum, reminiscence's city. The grass-turf house must be our box, whence we see the rich mementoes pass before us-memorials from the chronicle of kings, and the love songs that still live with the old dame, who stands in her low house there, where the lamb crops the grass on |