CHURCHES USED AS WAREHOUSES. 221 the priest, on a misty day, to depend on his memory in performing the service. The established religion is Lutheran, from which, it seems, there are no dissentients. EXTRAORDINARY SALMON FISHING. He saw much that was grand and inexpressibly dreary in the country, and much that was wretched in the physical condition of the people, on his way back to Reikevig. Thence he made an excursion to be present at an annual salmon-fishing, in the river Lax Elbe, where he saw two thousand two hundred caught in one day. Two-thirds were cured for exportation, and the other given to the persons who had been employed in the fishery. This annual day presents a scene of extraordinary festivity and sociality; as most of the people from a great distance round assemble at the spot, in their best dress, and all classes mix and converse on terms of kindness and equality. FIRE AT SEA. Our author set sail to return to England near the end of August, and when the ship was twenty leagues distant from any shore it was found to be on fire, from the malicious contrivance, as it was afterwards proved, of some Danish prisoners at Reikevig. When they were all in expectation of immediate destruction, they saw a vessel approaching which proved to be an English ship, the Orion, which had quitted the harbour at the same time, but had, by means of superior sailing, been left far behind. The captain of this ship, however, had boldly ventured on a nearer, and reputedly dangerous course, and thus most providentially came up just in time, in time to one moment, to save all the crew. The whole cargo perished however, and all Mr. Hooker's collections and drawings. LIBERTY OF THE PRESS.* HOWEVER limited and precarious may be the Liberty of the Press in this country, we are yet, no doubt, at a considerable distance from the period when the circulation of every book, that may presume to tell a little offensive truth about recent and contemporary public characters, shall become a thing of such extreme difficulty and hazard, as it is now in France and most other parts of the Continent. Our situation in this respect is, perhaps, not entirely what a high-spirited and free people might wish; but still we do, by means of the press, obtain in one way or another, many pieces of such information concerning our occupiers of power, as the people of France have no chance of gaining with respect to their high political class. So much at least of the truth is suffered to be told, as ought to keep actively alive that necessary suspicion, that incredulity of official virtue, which no nation can dismiss without surrendering itself to imposition, extortion, and despotism. But in France, the great authorities now existing, and even those that have had their day, seem to be a subject as sacred and interdicted as the economy of the Grand Turk's seraglio. A book, that in ever so cool and chronicle-like a style undertakes to state plainly why a certain number of persons claim to be more noted for some time to come than the ordinary currency of names, is seized upon at the printing-office, or intercepted on its way to the publisher's; and if by some accident or legerdemain two or three copies escape, and make their way to the extremities of the empire, and this country, it is through such a series of lucky incidents and hair-breadth turns, as to furnish a little romantic history,— as curious as that of Sir Sidney Smith's escape from durance in France, or that of an enslaved captive, who baffles the precautions, the fetters, and the sentinels of the Dey of Algiers. The original of the present work is, it seems, in this catagory, and has had need of all a thief's dexterity. THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONISTS. Excepting the "Annals of Newgate," and two or three * Biographie Moderne. Lives of Remarkable Characters, who have distinguished themselves from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the present time. Three vols. 8vo. 1811. LIBERTY OF THE PRESS. 223 similar repositories of human renown, there never was a biographical work so miscellaneous, and comprising such a multitude of persons, in which the writers have seemed so uniformly willing for their subjects to be detested or despised. It is obvious, however, that such personal histories, written by we know not whom, and published after a great proportion of them were no longer living to contradict erroneous statements, had the work been suffered to circulate, cannot be accepted as a record on which we can confidently rely, or on the authority of which a future. historian can make any one assertion not otherwise to be verified. In attempting to make use of the prodigious contradictory mass of memoirs, laudatory, apologetical, opprobrious, and vindictive, that came out in Paris during both the tumultuous and the declining season of the revolution, we may very well suppose, from the samples that came to this country, that the writers of this work must have found infinite embarrassment. THE FACTIONS OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. A most prominent subject throughout these memoirs, and to which almost every second page unavoidably reverts, is the dreadful and mortal conflict between the faction denominated the Mountain, the Jacobins or Terrorists, and the party of the Gironde. There never was a hostility more truly internecine, by intention, on the one side, and by necessity, and even duty, on the other. The progress and termination of this grand contest form one of the most afflictive views in all history. Whatever degree of visionary theory, or of personal ambition, might be imputable to the Girodins, among the chiefs of whom we hardly need to name Brissot, Roland, Guadet, Gensonně, Louvet, Lanjuinais, Kersaint, &c. &c., it is most evident that they were the only hope of France, after the monarchy was fallen. Theirs was the fine and cultivated talent, the sincere love of freedom, and the solicitude to preserve substantial justice, humanity, and order, amidst the tumultuous breaking loose. of a great and depraved people from an inveterate slavery, to pass, as these eloquent philosophers promised themselves -alas! for the melancholy delusion-into the state of a well-ordered and happy republic. However hopeless this might have been foreseen to be, by less enthusiastic and more religious speculators on the qualities of nations and of mankind, it is not the less grievous to see these men baffled in all their patriotic schemes and efforts; insulted, clamoured against, and menanced by a ferocious rabble that usurped and dishonoured the name of the people; losing ground, notwithstanding their faithful co-operation and their prodigious combination of eloquence, at each successive contest in the hall of what purported to be the national legislature; and finally sinking under the fury and the axe of the most dreadful league of demoniacs that the sun ever shone upon in one place. The mind is appalled in attempting to think what they even ought to have done in a situation quite unparalleled, -a situation in which, unless they could have thought it right to adopt prompt and summary measures for the personal destruction of the dreadful murderers with whom they were committed in a conflict absolutely inevitable, their own fate was but rendered the more certain by every effort they made to save the nation. UNANIMITY OF THE GIRONDISTS. It is some little relief to a tragedy so much more crowded with the novelties and the monsters of evil than poetry has ever presumed to feign, to see the spirit of amity and compact which prevailed among these patriots in their perilous and unsuccessful warfare, as contrasted with the mutual jealousies and deadly rancours by which their antagonists were tormented amidst their triumphs, and stimulated to destroy one another, in successive detachments of such victims as no man but a Christian could commiserate. CAUSES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. If the deplorable state of the very nature of man, as illustrated so awfully by events and characters brought forth in this grand commotion, be a matter really too obvious to need a single remark, it is perhaps little less superfluous to make the more specific remark, that bad government, combined, indeed, with the ignorance and intolerance attendant on superstition, was the great immediate cause that prepared and produced this eruption of evil. The people of civilized nations are almost as unapt to insurrection and rebellion as ponderous bodies to fly off from the centre of attraction. They do not detest their courts and their ADVANTAGES OF ANTIQUARIAN RESEARCH. 225 nobility, and despise their clergy, till the oppression exercised by these governing and enriched classes is become intolerable. When will the other old governments of the world condescend to learn from what has been seen in France, how to prevent revolutions? ADVANTAGES OF ANTIQUARIAN RESEARCH.* IT is a remarkable circumstance, that the further we are removing from ancient times, the better acquainted we are becoming, in various points, with their condition and operations. For instance, in consequence of the labours of a multitude of critical scholars, some of them indefatigable, some of them acute, some of them ingenious, and a proportion of them combining all these qualifications, we are now, it is presumed, much less remote from something like a certainty of what were really the words written by the authors of classical antiquity, than any of their former readers have been, since the times immediately subsequent to their appearance. From a comprehensive investigation and comparison of all the known remains of ancient history, and the exercise of a philosophical speculation on the collective testimony, we have unquestionably attained both a clearer knowledge of the transactions, and a juster estimate of the characters, of ancient nations than were possessed by our forefathers. Our picturesque view, also, if we may be allowed the expression, of the people of remote ages, has distincter lines and more vivid colours; in consequence of liberal antiquarian research, and of fortunate discoveries, which have made us better acquainted with the structure of their abodes, their fortresses, and their temples, with their weapons, their domestic utensils, their dresses, their ornaments. An immense number and variety of faithful memorials of their living economy have been drawn from masses of ruins, have been dug from the ground, and have been discovered in grand assemblages in subterranean • A Description of the Ancient Terracottas in the British Museum. 4to. 1810. |