a-day were promised to the sans culottes for the time they should be under arms, and the Convention was terrified into submission; but the anarchists were not satisfied-they extorted the surrender and arrest of twenty-four of the most distinguished members of the Gironde (2nd June, 1793); that party was ruined; and thus, four years after the commencement of the revolution, the government fell into the hands of Danton, Robespierre, and Marat.

The thirteen months that followed are known as the Reign of Terror. The Girondists, Pétion, and others, raised their friends in the north, with Caen for a centre; and before long sixty departments and most of the principal towns were in arms against the Jacobins. Lyons rose and armed twenty thousand of her citizens; Toulon admitted the English fleet; La Vendée had forty thousand men on foot, and the insurrection spread everywhere. The allies were also successful against the French armies, paralysed by the struggles for supreme power in the capital. But the Mountain were not men of hesitation; they made every Frenchman from eighteen to twenty-five liable to military service, and levied levied fourteen armies amounting to the total of 1,200,000 soldiers. This vast body was supported by multiplied contributions extorted from all who had means to pay; the remedy for any reluctance to meet their demands was simply death. France became a camp for the army, a prison for the tax-payers. Tradesmen and merchants were under the surveillance of the clubs, extended by a thousand ramifications throughout all the lower class in the nation. Every one in want received forty sous per day for assisting at the assemblies of his section, and every section had its revolutionary committees and granted its certificates of civism. By these rough measures the Convention and the Terrorists triumphed; Bordeaux, Toulon, and Lyons were

taken, the Vendeans were defeated, and their country laid waste by movable divisions called the infernal columns, which exhausted the means of rebellion. The victory of the dominant party was signalised by the most frightful executions and carnage. The very name of Lyons was struck out; and because the guillotine could not do its work with sufficient rapidity, the victims were cut down by discharges of grape-shot. At Nantes,

hundreds of persons were tied back to back and thrown into the Loire. The queen, Marie Antoinette, the king's sister Elizabeth, and hundreds of the most important victims, perished in Paris, where a sewer was constructed for the express purpose of carrying off the human blood. The Girondists, arrested on the 2nd of June, walked to the place of execution singing the Marseillaise, a fierce revolutionary hymn; and the Duke of Orleans, who had laid aside his title and adopted the name Egalité, was not spared. Women were not protected by their sex, but fell like the rest; and in the prisons were two hundred thousand persons suspected of incivism. incivism. As the revolutionists were introducing a new order of things, they thought it not beneath their vocation to reform the calendar; they gave new names to all the months, began their reckoning at the time when the republic was proclaimed, and dignified five festal days with the appellation of sans culottides. The municipality of Paris came to a resolution that Christianity should be abjured, and they instituted, in place of it, the worship of the Goddess Reason.

The next step was a schism in the Mountain itself; Danton having acquired the victory, desired to bring back something like order: Marat was gone, he had been assassinated by a young woman named Charlotte Corday, who avenged on him the calamities she had suffered from the revolution, and Danton himself was cut off before his plans came to anything. The Committee of Public Safety,

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with the revolutionary tribunal, were by this time the chief engines of government. The sole means of government was death. Robespierre, Saint Just, and Couthon. wielded despotic power. At length, the remains of the Dantonists proceeded in desperation to attack Robespierre himself, and a contest between the Assembly and the Jacobins of the city ensued; after many times inclining the other way, it was decided in favour of the Convention. The triumvirs, with their friends, had taken refuge in the Hôtel de Ville; Robespierre, in despair, discharged a pistol against himself, but only shattered his jaw Couthon wounded himself with a knife, but was afraid to strike; Henriot was thrown out of window by one of his own comrades, and survived his fall to crawl into a drain. In this mangled condition they were seized and hurried to the guillotine (27th July, 1794), where they suffered part of the punishment due to their accumulated crimes.

The Convention proceeded to assure their victory: seventy-two members of the municipality perished on the scaffold; the forty sous a day were suppressed, a number of prisoners were released; the youth of the middle classes mustered,

armed with bludgeons, and stormed the club of the Jacobins after a lively resistance; seventy-three proscribed representatives were recalled to their seats in the Assembly, and the instruments of the atrocities of the days of terror were tried and executed. But the reaction was not pleasing to the populace: the assignats, no longer maintained at their expressed value by the fear of death, fell to a fifteenth part of their nominal worth, and the repeal of the law of the maximum, which limited the price of food, was followed by a rapid rise and famine prices. Two insurrections planned by the malcontents failed, but in a third, the rioters burst into the chamber of representatives, murdered one, put others to flight, and carried their demands in a tumult; but the battalions of the Sections, on whom the Convention relied, cleared the hall at the point of the bayonet, and some days later disarmed the faubourgs.

Although we cannot say that this was the end of the revolution, yet it was the end of its wildest excesses. Before the year was out France again had a settled government, nor did she again fall under the dominion of men like those who had ruled her in the reign of terror.

Merton, and enjoy the society of his friends; but no sooner was the short and ill-starred peace of Amiens dissolved than his lordship was called upon to take the command of the ships in the Mediterranean. He accordingly repaired thither, on board the Victory, May 20, 1803, and formed the blockade of Toulon with a powerful squadron. Notwithstanding all the vigilance employed, a fleet escaped out of that port on the 30th of March, 1805, and shortly after formed a junction with the Cadiz squadron, Sir John Orde being obliged to retire before such a superiority in point of numbers.

The gallant Nelson no sooner received intelligence of this event, than he followed the enemy to the West Indies; and such was the terror of his name, that they returned without effecting anything worthy of mention, and got into port after running the gauntlet through Sir Robert Calder's squadron. The enemy having thus again eluded his pursuit, he returned almost inconsolable to England; but departed soon after to assume the command of the fleet off Cadiz, where, impatient of further delay, he had recourse to every art to induce them to put once more to sea. In this he at length proved successful; and, while he consummated his glory, lost his life, as he had predicted, in battle.

"On Monday, October the 21st, at daylight," says Lord Collingwood, in his concise and unaffected narrative, "when Cape Trafalgar bore E. by S. about seven leagues, the enemy was discovered six or seven miles to the eastward, the wind about west, and very light. The commander-in-chief immediately made the signal for the fleet to bear up in two columns, as they formed in the order of sailing; a mode of attack his lordship had previously directed, to avoid the inconvenience and delay in forming a line of battle in the usual manner. The enemy's line consisted of thirty-three ships (of which eighteen were French and fifteen Spanish), commanded in chief

by Admiral Villeneuve. The Spaniards, under the direction of Gravina, wore, with their heads to the northward, and formed their line of battle with great closeness and correctness; but as the mode of attack was unusual, so the structure of their line was new; it formed a crescent, convexing to leeward; so that, in leading down to the centre, I had both the van and rear abaft the beam. Before the fire opened, every alternate ship was about a cable's length to windward of her second a-head and a-stern, forming a kind of double line, and appeared, when on their beam, to leave a very little interval between them; and this without crowding their ships. Admiral Villeneuve was in the Bucentaure, in the centre, and the Prince of Asturias bore Gravina's flag in the rear; but the French and Spanish ships were mixed, without any apparent regard to order of national squadron. As the mode of our attack had been previously determined on, and communicated to the flag officers and captains, few signals were necessary. The action began at twelve o'clock, and at three the enemy were in flight. A circumstance occurred during the action, which so strongly marks the invincible spirit of British seamen, when engaging the enemies of their country, that I cannot resist the pleasure I have in making it known to their lordships. The Temeraire was boarded, by accident or design, by a French ship on one side, and a Spaniard on the other; the contest was vigorous; but in the end, the combined ensigns were torn from the poop, and the British hoisted in their places.

Such a battle could not be fought without sustaining a great loss of men. I have not only to lament, in common with the British navy and the British nation, in the fall of the commander-in-chief, the loss of a hero, whose name will be immortal, and his memory ever dear to his country; but my heart is rent with the most poignant grief for the death of