Whole leagues remote the human form is driven, towers. Britons by France instructed to esteem 2915 Their precious birth-right! madness how extreme! 'Tis Borgia's sword,3 to humble papal pride; 'Tis Nero, preaching against parricide. Counts the deep inborn enmity for nought? Are the repeated perfidies forgot? 2920 Unlike their genius, manners, forms, are seen, While surging rolls a roaring sea between ; 2924 3 Cæsar Borgia, natural son of the well-known Pontifical Monster Alexander the sixth, and the worthy offspring of such a father. He murdered his brother the Duke of Gandia, and every other person within his reach, whom he supposed likely to obstruct the views of his ambition. He had a mind of such comprehensive wickedness, not without great boldness, and some capacity, that had he been reserved to be a Frenchman of the present age, he would probably have been the rival of the late Danton, in the favour of the Convention at Paris. Coast Coast frowns on coast, by nature's hand disjoin'd; With binding incantations charm the shade, 2929 2939 Sons brav'd their sires in marshall'd fields of death; In sea-girt Albion, goddess, was thy throne, 2945 Where every generous virtue was thine own; Thine, hard-earn'd rights no tyrant could debase ; Thine, the glad smile on every honest face: And still some ancient worth our isle can boast,— Shade of great Chatham, in thy offspring most: Full of his sire the vigorous counsels flow, 2951 Scorning alike the faction and the foe; While hoary ocean, o'er his caverns spread, Your sovereigns murder'd, and your GOD blas phem'd. O, for O, for a hotter Ætna, to roll down 2965 His firy deluge on the Stygian town! This poem had long been out of the author's hands, and considerably advanced at the press, before accounts arrived of the horrible. murder of the late unfortunate queen of France; exhibiting such a scene of complicated and deliberate barbarity, as makes us almost impatient, as she seemed to be herself, for the last fatal stroke which alone could deliver her from the fangs of those merciless hell-hounds by whom she had been persecuted. Here follows the simple and unexaggerated detail of her sufferings after the butchery of the king her husband. A considerable time before the sixteenth of October 1793, the day of her murder, she was torn from her children and sister-in-law in the Temple, her former prison, and committed to the Conciergerie, one of the most filthy dungeons in Paris. Behold this daughter of an empress, this sister of emperors, the wife of the once most powerful sovereign on the continent of Europe, in the very flower of her age, beautiful, calumniated, and innocent, plunged into a narrow cavern, four feet under ground, aired and lighted towards the top by one small iron-grated window, fetid, damp, and loathsome; four ruffians all day and night pent up with her in the same abyss, to witness every shocking humiliation of female delicacy: fed with the worse sustenance doled out to the vilest criminals, her bed a miserable pallet, with scanty bed-clothes not sufficient to cover her, foul and tattered; hurried from Rich, guiltless, sacred blood; whose steams shall rise To pull the avenging thunder from the skies. 2970 from this gulph of desolation to a mock trial before savages predetermined on her condemnation; accused of impossible crimes, at the very name of which human nature fhudders; a nominal advocate assigned to her, not to defend, but to inveigle and betray her: sentence of ignominious death, in defiance of evidence and conviction, pronounced upon her. In a few hours afterwards her hair cut off, her hands tied behind her back, to prevent her holding a book of prayer or a crucifix; (an indignity offered only to her;) dragged in this manner with her back to the horses' tails upon a dungcart to the scaffold; attended by an impious miscreant dressed up like a constitutional priest, not to console her last moments, but to insult and embitter them; her head severed from her body, and her poor remains thrown into a hole to be consumed with quick-lime before the eyes of her inhuman subjects, who stood round wallowing in delight at the bloody spectacle: without a bosom on which fhe could drop a tear; no ear to which she could impart a dying wish; no hand to which she could confide a lock of hair, or one last pledge of affection for her wretched children and sister-in-law.-She sustained it all to the last with heroick fortitude. Thus perished the beautiful, the generous, the benevolent queen of France, furnishing the most singular example in human records of a life so dignified by birth, rank, and splendour, closed by such a flood of unmerited and overwhelming calamity. She indeed drained the chalice of affliction to its last and foulest dregs. Whatever boundless conceptions good men may form of heavenly mercy, they will hardly imagine it can be extended to such inconceivable wickedness! 7 Deeds |