family of Noailles have long been servants (meritorious servants I admit) to the crown of France, and have had of course some share in its bounties. Why do I hear nothing of the application of their estates to the publick debt? Why is the estate of the duke de Rochefoucault more sacred than that of the cardinal de Rochefoucault? The former is, I doubt not, a worthy person; and (if it were not a sort of profaneness to talk of the use, as affecting the title to property) he makes a good use of his revenues; but it is no disrespect to him to say, what authentick information well warrants me in saying, that the use made of a property equally valid, by his brother* the cardinal archbishop of Rouen, was far more laudable and far more publick-spirited. Can one hear of the proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects, without indignation and horrour? He is not a man who does not feel such emotions on such occasions. He does not deserve the name of a free man who will not express them. Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property. None of the heads of the Roman factions, when they established "crudelem illam hastam" in all their auctions of rapine, have ever set up to sale the goods of the con. quered citizen to such an enormous amount. It must be allowed in favour of those tyrants of anti *Not his brother, nor any near relation; but this mistake does not affect the argument. quity, that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers soured, their understandings confused, with the spirit of revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflictions and retaliations of blood and rapine. They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return of power with the return of property, to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness. These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the elements of tyranny, and were not instructed in the rights of men to exercise all sorts of cruelties on each other without provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of colour over their injustice. They considered the vanquished party as composed of traitors who had borne arms, or otherwise had acted with hostility against the commonwealth. They regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property by their crimes. With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no such formality. You seized upon five millions sterling of annual rent, and turned forty or fifty thousand human creatures out of their houses, because "such was your plea"sure." The tyrant Harry the eighth of England, as he was not better enlightened than the Roman Marius's and Sylla's, and had not studied in your new schools, did not know what an effectual instrument men. strument of despotism was to be found in that grand magazine of offensive weapons, the rights of When he resolved to rob the abbies, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the ecclesiasticks, he began by setting on foot a commission to examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in those communities. As it might be expected, his commission reported truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods. But truly or falsely it reported abuses and offences. However, as abuses might be corrected, as every crime of persons does not infer a forfeiture with regard to communities, and as property, in that dark age, was not discovered to be a creature of prejudice, all those abuses (and there were enough of them) were hardly thought sufficient ground for such a confiscation as it was for his purposes to make. He therefore procured the formal surrender of these estates. All these operose proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided tyrants in the rolls of history, as necessary preliminaries, before he could venture, by bribing the members of his two servile houses with a share of the spoil, and holding out to them an eternal immunity from taxation, to demand confirmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an act of parliament. Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of incanta tion-" Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false colours; yet in these false colours an homage was paid by despotism to justice. The power which was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame. Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants. I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections with our political poet on that occasion, and will pray to avert the omen whenever these acts of rapacious despotism present themselves to his view or his imagination : May no such storm "Fall on our times, where ruin must reform. “Tell me (my muse) what monstrous, dire offence, "What crimes could any Christian king incense "To such a rage? Was't luxury, or lust? "Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just? "Were these their crimes? they were his own "much more, "But wealth is crime enough to him that's poor The rest of the passage is this "Who having spent the treasures of his crown, "Condemns their luxury to feed his own. And yet this act, to `varnish o'er the shame Of sacrilege, must bear devotion's name. "No This same wealth, which is at all times treason and lese nation to indigent and rapacious despo "No crime so bold, but would be understood "Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name, "In empty aëry contemplation dwell; "And like the block, unmoved lay; but ours, "And for that lethargy was there no cure, "But to be cast into a calenture? "Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance "So far, to make us wish for ignorance? "And rather in the dark to grope our way, "Who sees these dismal heaps, but would demand, "When nothing, but the name of zeal, appears COOPER'S HILL, by Sir JOHN DENHAM. |