It is a change such as History must beg her readers to imagine, undescribed.  An instantaneous change of the whole body-politic, the soul-politic being all changed; such a change as few bodies, politic or other, can experience in this world.  Say perhaps, such as poor Nymph Semele’s body did experience, when she would needs, with woman’s humour, see her Olympian Jove as very Jove;—­and so stood, poor Nymph, this moment Semele, next moment not Semele, but Flame and a Statue of red-hot Ashes!  France has looked upon Democracy; seen it face to face.—­The Cimmerian Invaders will rally, in humbler temper, with better or worse luck:  the wreck and dissolution must reshape itself into a social Arrangement as it can and may.  But as for this National Convention, which is to settle every thing, if it do, as Deputy Paine and France generally expects, get all finished ‘in a few months,’ we shall call it a most deft Convention.

In truth, it is very singular to see how this mercurial French People plunges suddenly from Vive le Roi to Vive la Republique; and goes simmering and dancing; shaking off daily (so to speak), and trampling into the dust, its old social garnitures, ways of thinking, rules of existing; and cheerfully dances towards the Ruleless, Unknown, with such hope in its heart, and nothing but Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood in its mouth.  Is it two centuries, or is it only two years, since all France roared simultaneously to the welkin, bursting forth into sound and smoke at its Feast of Pikes, “Live the Restorer of French Liberty?” Three short years ago there was still Versailles and an Oeil-de-Boeuf:  now there is that watched Circuit of the Temple, girt with dragon-eyed Municipals, where, as in its final limbo, Royalty lies extinct.  In the year 1789, Constituent Deputy Barrere ‘wept,’ in his Break-of-Day Newspaper, at sight of a reconciled King Louis; and now in 1792, Convention Deputy Barrere, perfectly tearless, may be considering, whether the reconciled King Louis shall be guillotined or not.

Old garnitures and social vestures drop off (we say) so fast, being indeed quite decayed, and are trodden under the National dance.  And the new vestures, where are they; the new modes and rules?  Liberty, Equality, Fraternity:  not vestures but the wish for vestures!  The Nation is for the present, figuratively speaking, naked!  It has no rule or vesture; but is naked,—­a Sansculottic Nation.

So far, therefore, in such manner have our Patriot Brissots, Guadets triumphed.  Vergniaud’s Ezekiel-visions of the fall of thrones and crowns, which he spake hypothetically and prophetically in the Spring of the year, have suddenly come to fulfilment in the Autumn.  Our eloquent Patriots of the Legislative, like strong Conjurors, by the word of their mouth, have swept Royalism with its old modes and formulas to the winds; and shall now govern a France free of formulas.  Free of formulas!  And yet man lives not except with formulas; with customs, ways