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falls in love with his daughter Celestine. Their loves are mutual, the father discovers it, and gives his consent to their union on the return of St. Aubert from America. He reaches America and immediately joins the revolutionary standard, and in his first rencontre with a party of Indians in the English service, he is taken prisoner. His more fortunate companions having no expectation but that he would be put to death, wrote home to his Celestine and her father that his death was certain. We next drop into all the horrors of the French revolution. Celestine and her father are arrested during the reign of terror, the latter falls a victim, and Celestine after suffering all the pains that a dungeon could inflict, and all the insults that ruffians could offer her, escapes with life through the intercession of a member of the directory, who afterwards marries her. Some years pass away, Celestine still remembers St. Aubert, and has no other feeling for her husband than gratitude for saving her life. St. Aubert at length returns to France after many dangers and long captivity, and finally discovers the situation of Celestine. They meet: St. Aubert urges his prior claim to her, she long struggles between love and duty, and at length yields to the embraces of her lover. Their meetings become regular, until the husband of Celestine has suspicions, watches her, and catches her in the arms of St. Aubert. He draws his sword, and St. Aubert fights and slays him, for which he is again obliged to fly. Celestine at length enters a convent, where she dies, and St. Aubert having retired to a monastery is finally buried in the same grave. In the scenes between Celestine and St. Aubert after her marriage with him who saved her life, Mr. Phillips has taken great pains to justify the adultery of Celestine with St. Aubert, and calls it the height of virtuous feeling to yield to the embraces of her old and constant lover. He calls it a dictate of nature to which he would make every other law subservient. He also justifies the resistance of St. Aubert to the husband of Celestine, and applauds the death of the latter. Yet who more than Mr. Phillips has exclaimed against adultery? Who more than him now clamours about assassination? In this tale Mr. Phillips has ridiculed all existing laws and establishments, he strives to guide us by natural feelings only, and more than any thing else to raise our contempt of priests and all religious establishments. We feel some inclination at present to serve this gentleman as Robert Southey has been served with his Wat Tyler, print it in a cheap form. A present we give a few extracts only.

In an introduction to the tale we have the following sen

tence:-"Frown not, thou canting priest, who under that cowl of sanctity, wearest this world and this world's appetites, Celestine is among the blessed." In opening the tale the reader is thus addressed.

"If thou art a bigot, close the book; it may offend and nothing can improve thee; it flatters no prejudice; it follows no tradition; it speaks the simple language of nature, and is addressed only to those who believe her dictates superior to those of man. Read it not, then, thou who fanciest that what is old must of course be vene. rable, that what is established cannot be erroneous, or that selfapplause should be conceded to worldly opinion. It may shake thy principles and will certainly offend them, for its first assumption is that superstition should give way to truth, and that, neither power, nor age, nor prejudice, can consecrate a custom naturally absurd. Far absent be the slave, the cynic, and the hypocrite; they can feel no sympathy with me: but come, thou child of nature, who canst participate in the joys, and pity the errors of thy species. Come thou man of feeling, who wouldst rather soothe than sadden the misfortunes of life; thou may'st take some interest in the history of Celestine."

In speaking of the celebrated Rousseau, Mr. Phillips makes the following observation.

"That such a man lived and died poor is perhaps one of the strongest arguments for the necessity of that revolution, which afterwards humbled the worthless aristocracy of the land in which he was neglected."

Celestine speaking of the monotony of her father's acquaintance, makes the following exception. "From this description however, I must except one, whose talents great as they confessedly were, could not take precedence of his wickedness: it was the Abbe de l'Enfer, a priest, who was fit for his profession!" We are next introduced into a conversation between young St. Aubert and the Abbe de l'Enfer, in the following words on the subject of the resistance of the American colonies to England their parent country.

"Abbe de l'Enfer.-A people, in rebellion against their lawful sovereign ought not to be encouraged,"

"St. Aubert.-No doubt, a wild, capricious and uncaused sedition ought to be discountenanced; reason censures and social order calls for its suppression: but, when the pride of rulers so predominate that the cries of injury are unheard, or, if they are heard, unheeded; when assumed privileges usurps the garb of law, and law shrinks from the punishment of injustice; then, the monarch's crime becomes the insurgents justification, and the feeling which respects it is not submission but servitude."

(How apt this answer of Mr. Phillips to what has lately occurred in this country-how different his new sentiments or rather words!)

"Abbe de l'Enfer.-And can you think, my young philosopher, that the Lord's anointed is accountable to man, or that any power on earth can excuse the obstinacy which resists his mandates ?"

"St. Aubert.-Excuse, aye, reuder it imperative and praiseworthy. The providence which places one man on a throne, implants the patriot ardour in another; the very voice which gives the sacred trust to majesty, calls loudly on the people to redeem it if abused: that holy voice, the voice of God and nature, has been heard o'er the Atlantic; it never spoke in vain, and what you call the sedition of a colony, will end in the emancipation of an hemisphere."

"Abbe de l'Enfer.-You forget, young man, in your enthusiasm, that you live under a monarchy, where such sentiments are dangerous. Malignity might suspect that disaffection lurked beneath the mask of liberality, though friendship such as ours can see in it but the error of youth and the necessity of experience."

(Recollect, reader, it is Mr. Phillips who now speaks.)

"St. Aubert.-If age brings me but an accession of servility, and my contempt for tyrants is to vanish with my youth, I trust the error will accompany me to a premature grave, and that the day which extinguishes my love of freedom will take my life along with it. I do not forget, father, that I live under a monarchy, and, while the king performs his contract with the people, my allegiance shall be my pride; but if unhappily the day should come, when, renouncing the sovereign, he assumes the despot, then the loyalty now my boast, would become my degradation, and the sword which I wear as his gift should be upraised, the instrument of his punishment."

"Abbe de l'Enfer.--Oh, monstrous !---monstrous doctrine! which would level majesty with the mob, which would elevate the multitude with the holy pontificate, to which alone, under heaven, a king. can be accountable. Why, young man, 'tis constructive treason, positive blasphemy, to think of such a contract; where does it exist? where is it written."

"St. Aubert.---Written, father, in the heart of man, by the hand of the divinity; written in characters which age cannot dim, nor despotism efface, nor sophistry misconstrue. A love of country; a contempt of tyrants; an instinct which tells him that the attribute by which he is raised from the brute to the angel, is liberty ;--these are the holy admonitions which rise up in the conscience of the slave to tell him he is debased and worthless; these are the monitors which warn us all that there are powers we cannot delegate, privileges we cannot part with; these are the guardians of our nature's dignity, the pure associates of our reason, which, if they are not our preservers, will be our punishment, upbraiding the enslaved if they cannot denounce the despot; they search with an eye, which the splendours of the throne cannot dazzle; they speak in a voice, which the bribe of the tempter cannot silence."

"Abbe de l'Enfer.---To the point,---to the point, without decla mation: where is the contract? where does it exist ?”

Vol. III. No. 9.

"St. Aubert.---Speaking as a man, in the heart; as a subject, in the constitution. In France we have ours, by it the king and people have their separate duties; while each performs them, neither can have cause of discontent. In England, they have theirs and they are justly proud of it: the brightest ornaments of their monarch's crown are mercy and affection, while the most severe tribute which the subject pays is the gift of cheerfulness, because 'tis the support of liberty. If then, in that nation, under the nominal shield of their constitution, there should be found a body, isolated from its benefits and oppressed with its burthens; a body whose numbers call for notice, and whose services extort applause; who defend, by their yalour, aid, by their counsel, and support, by their fortunes, the state which, calling them subjects, oppresses them as slaves; what can remain to them, after the failure of a legal though firm remonstrance, but an appeal to heaven for the justice which, denied to their entreaties, must be purchased by their swords? That body is to be found in America; they have made the appeal, and success attend it!"

"Abbe de l'Enfer.---Such are ever the motives of a soldier, no matter how affected liberality may mask them. A fierce byæna, he riots mid the memorials of our nature's frailty, and fattens and enriches himself on the plunder of the grave."

"St. Aubert.--If the soldier pursues to the grave he pauses there : his condemnation should not come from the hypocritic monk who sends his impious anathema beyond it."

"The Abbe de l'Enfer, in his rage appealed to the father of Celestine for protection, who wishing to end the controversy in good humour, playfully replied, 'Not I indeed, my good Abbe, I must preserve a laughing neutrality at the expence of both, You know, though a soldier myself, I have ever regretted the necessity of an army, and often told you that in my mind, both the bishop and the general, though so different in their pursuits, found their common origin in the vices of the world. At all events, it is not policy in the priest to quarrel with the soldier, to whose pious efforts he is indebted for so many fees and so many converts.".

From the foregoing conversation, we are left to assume, that the sentiments of St. Aubert were the then sentiments of Charles Phillips, but those, who have read his Bible Society speeches, and his last at the Sligo county meeting, will without hesitation affirm, that he has painted his present character in that of the Abbe de l'Enfer, as if he had predicted his own. change.

Although Mr. Phillips has of late attempted to attach an odium to the name of Paine, at least, as far as his rhetorical abuse could do it, still in this same little work, from which we have quoted so fully, he speaks in the highest terms of him, and in connection with Rousseau, he ranks him above all those

who figured in or were connected with the French revolution. The reader should recollect that Paine had been dead two years when Mr. Phillips published this romantic tale, so that no change could have taken place in the character of Paine, the change rests with Charles Phillips. This same paragraph has already appeared in the No. 13, Vol. I. of the Republican, still we feel assured, the reader will consider the occasion to excuse the repetition: it is as follows in speaking of the victims of the Directory.

"Among these there was one whom I could not help viewing with peculiar admiration, because by the sole power of a surprising genius, be had surmounted the disadvantages of birth and the difficulties of fortune. It was the celebrated Thomas Paine, a man, who, (no matter what may be the difference of opinion as to his principles) must ever remain a proud example of mind unpatronised and unsupported, eclipsing the factitious beams of rank, and wealth, and pedigree. I never saw him in his captivity, nor heard the revilings with which he has been since assailed, without cursing in my heart that ungenerous feeling which, cold to the necessities of genius, is clamorous in the publication of its defects."

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Ye great ones of his nation! ye pretended moralists! so forward now to cast your interested indignation upon the memory of Paine where were you in the day of his adversity! which of you, to assist his infant merit, would diminish even the surplus of your debaucheries! where was the fostering hand to train his mind to virtue! where the mitred charity! the practical religion! Consistent declaimers, rail on: what, though his genius was the gift of heaven---his heart the altar of friendship! what, though wit and eloquence, and anecdote, flowed freely from his tongue, while conviction made his voice her messenger! what, though thrones trembled, and prejudice fled, and freedom came at his command!--he dared to question the creed which you, believing, contradicted, and to despise the rank, which you, boasting of, debased!"

We have now made all the necessary extracts from Mr. Phillips' romantic tale. To convince the dullest and most dubious mind of his apostacy from former principles, they are quite sufficient. We would ask the reader, whether, that alternative which Mr. Phillips has made St. Aubert point out to De l'Enfer has not taken place in this country, in the most minute and circumstantial manner described by him as the time to justify resistance? Yes it has, and Mr. Phillips instead of finding courage to act on old professions, has servilely sought his own safety by sheltering himself under the wing of despotism. He now flatters that, which he before condemned, for want of honest resolution to oppose it. There are many sentiments expressed in "The loves of Celestine and St.

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