so deeply to affect them. If justice requires this, the work itself
requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this
view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with
the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government;
a power like to that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic
nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterward to its
own operation.
E. Burke.


CXLV.

THE QUEEN OF FRANCE AND THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY.

I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of
the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for
suffering should suffer well), and that she bears all the succeeding
days--that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own
captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of
addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene
patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race and becoming the
offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that,
like her, she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a
Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself; and that,
if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then
the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which
she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above
the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to