Note 277 — MEMOIR OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE; CONTINUED, FROM THE TIME OF HIS SETTLEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA.
Reading edition
The deleterious, though—as it might almost be called—fascinating influence, of the revolution undertaken by the people of France, extended itself far and wide, prior to the murder of their king, even in countries under the milder forms of government: many characters of great worth were every where misled by the plausibility of the avowed designs of its authors and supporters; and in no country was the infatuation more general, than in the United States. In England itself, it begat a kind of political frenzy; and, had not the wise and salutary writings of the celebrated Burke arrested its progress, in good time, the most fatal consequences must have ensued. Among the literary and scientific men in Britain, who became deeply infected by the revolution-mania of that day, was Dr. Erasmus Darwin, Miss Anna Seward (one of his biographers) remarks, that the Doctor has introduced into his Botanic Garden an allegory, representing Liberty “as a great form, slumbering within the iron cage and marble walls of the French Bastile, unconscious of his chains; till, touched by the patriot flame, he rends his flimsy bonds, lifts his colossal form, and rears his hundred arms over his foes; calls to the good and brave of every country, with a voice that echoes like the thunder of heaven to the polar extremities;
“Gives to the winds his banner broad, unfurl’d,
“And gathers in its shade the living world!”
In consequence of Darwin’s use of this grossly misapplied figure;—as the issue of the French revolution too fatally proves it to have been,—Miss Seward offers the following apology for the subject of her friendly pen:
“This sublime sally of a too-confiding imagination, has made the poet and his work countless foes. They triumphed over him,” says his fair biographer, “on a result so contrary,—on the mortal wounds given by French crimes to real Liberty. They forget, or choose to forget, that this part of the poem (though published after the other) appeared in 1791, antecedent to the dire regicide, and to all those unprecedented scenes of sanguinary cruelty inflicted on France, by three of her republican tyrants; compared to whom, the most remorseless of her monarchs was mild and merciful.”