Note 55 — Chapter I

Freneau's National Gazette defended the execution of the King and the excesses of the Terror. (Hazen, 256; and see Cobbett, iii, 4.) While Cobbett, an Englishman, was a fanatic against the whole democratic movement, and while his opinions are violently prejudiced, his statements of fact are generally trustworthy. "I have seen a bundle of Gazettes published all by the same man, wherein Mirabeau, Fayette, Brissot, Danton, Robespierre, and Barras, are all panegyrized and execrated in due succession." (Ib., i, 116.) Cobbett did his best to turn the radical tide, but to no purpose. "Alas!" he exclaimed, "what can a straggling pamphlet ... do against a hundred thousand volumes of miscellaneous falsehood in folio?" (Ib., iii, 5.)