Note 33 — SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. IN BEHALF OF FREE SPEECH, ON THE TRIAL OF JEAN PELTIER, ACCUSED OF LIBELLING NAPOLEON BONAPARTE; COURT OF KING’S BENCH, FEBRUARY 21, 1803.

Note 33, p. 223.—This passage and what follows on the rule of the Jacobins is the one of which Madame de Staël wrote in her “Ten Years of Exile”: “It was during this stormy period of my existence that I received the speech of Mr. Mackintosh; and there read his description of a Jacobin, who had made himself an object of terror during the Revolution to children, women, and old men, and who was now bending himself double under the rod of the Corsican, who tears from him, even to the last atom, that liberty for which he pretended to have taken arms. This morceau of the finest eloquence touched me to my very soul; it is the privilege of superior writers sometimes unwittingly to solace the unfortunate in all countries and at all times. France was in a state of such complete silence around me, that this voice, which suddenly responded to my soul, seemed to me to come down from heaven—it came from a land of liberty.”