Note 38 — No. X.

The reader will find in the works of Peter Porcupine [W. Cobbett] (a spirited and instructive writer) an ample and satisfactory commentary on this and the following stanza. The French themselves inform us, that by the several modes of destruction here alluded to, upwards of 30,000 persons were butchered at Lyons, and this once magnificent city almost levelled to the ground, by the command of a wretched actor (Collot d’Herbois), whom they had formerly hissed from the stage. From the same authorities we learn, that at Nantz 27,000 persons, of both sexes, were murdered; chiefly by drowning them in plugged boats. The waters of the Loire became putrid, and were forbidden to be drunk, by the savages who conducted the massacre:—that at Paris 150,000, and in La Vendée 300,000 persons were destroyed.—Upon the whole, the French themselves acknowledge, that TWO MILLIONS of human beings (exclusive of the military) have been sacrificed to the principles of Equality and the Rights of Man: 250,000 of these are stated to be WOMEN, and 30,000 CHILDREN. In this last number, however, they do not include the unborn; nor those who started from the bodies of their agonizing parents, and were stuck upon the bayonets of those very men who are now to compose the “Army of England,” amidst the most savage acclamations.

[At the beginning of the revolution, some companies of children, called Bonsbons, were dressed and drilled as National Guards, as a compliment to the Dauphin, who to please the Parisians sometimes donned that uniform. Similar companies were afterwards formed in Brittany, and employed to shoot those poor wretches whom the two guillotines could not dispatch in sufficient numbers!—Biog. Univ., art. St. André.—Ed.]