I saw her just above the horizon, decorating
and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
"Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone!
"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
grossness.
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