and Astraea Redux, is the sanctuary of Home so often a dreary void, or a dark contentious Hell-on-Earth!  The old Friend of Men has his own divorce case too; and at times, ‘his whole family but one’ under lock and key:  he writes much about reforming and enfranchising the world; and for his own private behoof he has needed sixty Lettres-de-Cachet.  A man of insight too, with resolution, even with manful principle:  but in such an element, inward and outward; which he could not rule, but only madden.  Edacity, rapacity;—­quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart!  Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—­with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no bottom but the Abyss!

Or consider that unutterable business of the Diamond Necklace.  Red-hatted Cardinal Louis de Rohan; Sicilian jail-bird Balsamo Cagliostro; milliner Dame de Lamotte, ‘with a face of some piquancy:’  the highest Church Dignitaries waltzing, in Walpurgis Dance, with quack-prophets, pickpurses and public women;—­a whole Satan’s Invisible World displayed; working there continually under the daylight visible one; the smoke of its torment going up for ever!  The Throne has been brought into scandalous collision with the Treadmill.  Astonished Europe rings with the mystery for ten months; sees only lie unfold itself from lie; corruption among the lofty and the low, gulosity, credulity, imbecility, strength nowhere but in the hunger.  Weep, fair Queen, thy first tears of unmixed wretchedness!  Thy fair name has been tarnished by foul breath; irremediably while life lasts.  No more shalt thou be loved and pitied by living hearts, till a new generation has been born, and thy own heart lies cold, cured of all its sorrows.—­The Epigrams henceforth become, not sharp and bitter; but cruel, atrocious, unmentionable.  On that 31st of May, 1786, a miserable Cardinal Grand-Almoner Rohan, on issuing from his Bastille, is escorted by hurrahing crowds:  unloved he, and worthy of no love; but important since the Court and Queen are his enemies. (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.  Rebellion, explosion, of unknown extent is to be calculated on.  There are, as Chesterfield wrote, ’all the symptoms I have ever met with in History!’