The king still interposed his good intentions, and desired that the princess should, at least, reside under the same roof with her husband. She had apartments in Carlton-house, while the prince spent his time chiefly at Brighton. But Charlton, a village near Blackheath, was finally fixed on for her residence; and there, with the Princess Charlotte, and some ladies in attendance, she lived for several years.

In this whole transaction the prince was culpable. With habits of life totally opposite to those of domestic happiness, he had married for convenience; and, the bond once contracted, he had broken it for convenience again. Following the fatal example of those by whom he was only betrayed, he had disregarded the obligations fixed upon him by one of the most important and sacred rites of society and religion; and without any of those attempts "to bear and forbear," and to endure the frailties of temper as well as the chances of fortune, which he had vowed at the altar, he cast away his duties as a toy of which he was tired; and thus ultimately rendered himself guilty of every error and degradation of the unhappy woman whom he had abandoned.

After a seclusion of ten years, the princess came again before the world. In 1804, her royal husband had insisted on the necessity of withdrawing the Princess Charlotte from her super

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intendence; but the king was prompt in exhibiting his protection, and, after some correspondence, he took the guardianship upon himself.

But the rumours which had produced this discussion at length assumed shape in more formidable charges, which the prince, by the advice of Lord Thurlow, embodied and laid before his majesty. A committee,* consisting of Lords Erskine, Grenville, Spencer, and Ellenborough, examined the papers; which accused the princess of guilty intercourse with the late Sir Thomas Lawrence, Captain Manby, Sir Sidney Smith, and others; but stating Sir Sidney to be the father of a child by her.

The report of the committee fully exculpated her royal highness of crime, simply objecting -"carelessness of appearances," and "levity" in the instance of certain individuals. The king upon this declared her conduct clear, and ordered a prosecution for perjury to be instituted against Lady Douglas, the wife of an officer of marines, who had taken advantage of her hospitality to excite suspicions which might have brought the princess to the scaffold. The child was fully proved to be the son of a poor woman of the name of Austin, in Blackheath. Lady Douglas was covered with obloquy; and her husband, who

appears to have been passive on the occasion, was so deeply affected by the public scorn, that he was said to have died of a broken heart.

His majesty carried on the triumphant vindication to the last; gave the princess apartments in Kensington palace, and directed that she should be received at court with peculiar attention. She appeared at the next birth-day; and so strong was the national feeling, even in those ranks where it is etiquette to suppress emotion, that as her royal highness passed through the crowd, she was received with an universal clapping of hands!

Fortunate for her, if that day had taught her the safety of confiding herself and her cause to a generous people; doubly fortunate for her, if she had for ever shunned the contamination of that foreign residence, and those foreign manners, which are alike pestilent to the honour of man and the virtue of woman.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE French Revolution was the offspring of infidelity. The tyranny of Louis the Fourteenth, one of those monarchs whom Providence gives in its wrath to nations destined to fall, had expelled Protestantism by the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1683. The first punishment of this act of consummate treachery was a general war, which broke down the military character of France, extinguished its alliances, devastated its provinces, and sent the gray hairs of the persecutor to the grave, loaded with useless remorse, with the scorn of his people, and the universal disdain of Europe.

But the sterner punishment was to come, in the degeneracy of the national religion. From the hour in which Protestantism was exiled, the Gallican church ran a race of precipitate corruption. It had lost the great check; and it cast away at once its remaining morals, and its literature. The Jansenists, a feeble reflection of Calvinism, were assailed by the Jesuits, the concentrated subtlety and fierceness of popery. But the struggle between the domineering and

the weak always excites the sympathy of man ; and the whole intelligent body of France were summoned by the contest to examine into the rights of both they were found equally groundless. The arguments of the Jesuits were the dungeon and the sword. The arguments of the Jansenists were pretended miracles, the hysteric follies of nuns, and the artificial enthusiasm of hirelings and impostors. Common sense turned from both the controversialists with equal scorn.

The Jesuits finally trampled down their adversaries; but they had scarcely time to feel their triumph, when ruin fell upon themselves. Their ambition had prompted them to the lofty insolence of mastering the thrones of Europe. Conspiracy and assassination were the means. Kings at length took the alarm; and by a simultaneous resolution the Jesuits were overthrown, amid the general rejoicing of mankind.

But when the national eye was no longer distracted by the minor conflict of the sects, it was raised with new-born astonishment to the enormous fabric of the Gallican church itself. All France suddenly rang with one uproar of scorn and abhorrence at the inordinate power, the shameless corruption, the contemptible fictions, and the repulsive mummeries, of the establishment. Like the prophet, the people had been led within the curtains of the dark chambers, and seen the secret abominations of the shrine; but,