of the one, was formerly an advocate of some practice, but attended more to politics than to the business of his clients, and was, therefore, at the end of the session of the first assembly (of which he was a member), forced, for subsistence, to become the editor of an insignificant journal. Here he preached licentiousness, under the name of Liberty, and the agrarian law in recommending Equality. A prudent courtier of all systems in fashion, and of all factions in power, he escaped proscription, though not accusation of having shared in the national robberies. A short time in the summer of 1797, after the dismissal of Cochon, he acted as a Minister of Police; and in 1798 the Jacobins elected him a member of the Council of Ancients, where he, with other deputies, sold himself to Bonaparte, and was, in return, rewarded with a place in the Senate. Under monarchy he was a republican, and under a Republic he extolled monarchical institutions. He wished to be singular, and to be rich. Among so many shocking originals, however, he was not distinguished; and among so many philosophical marauders, he had no opportunity to pillage above two millions of livres. This friend of liberty is now one of the most despotic Senators, and this lover of equality never answers when spoken to, if not addressed as "His Excellency," or "Monseigneur."

Boissy d' Anglas, another member of this commission, was before the Revolution a steward to Louis XVIII. when Monsieur; and, in 1789, was chosen a deputy of the first assembly, where he joined the factions, and in his speeches and writings defended all the enormities that dishonoured the beginning as well as the end of the Revolution. A member afterwards of the National Convention, he was sent in mission to Lyons, where, instead of healing the wounds of the inhabitants, he inflicted new ones. When, on the 15th of March, 1796, in the Council of Five Hundred, he pronounced the oath of hatred to royalty, he added, that this oath was in his heart, otherwise no power upon earth could have forced him to take it; and he is now a sworn subject of Napoleon the First! He pronounced the panegyric of Robespierre, and the apotheosis of Marat. "The soul," said he, "was moved and elevated in hearing Robespierre speak of the Supreme Being with philosophical ideas, embellished by eloquence;" and he signed the removal of the ashes of Marat to the temple consecrated to humanity! In September, 1797, he was, as a royalist, condemned to transportation by the Directory; but in 1799 Bonaparte recalled him, made him first a tribune and afterwards a Senator.

Boissy d' Anglas, though an apologist of robbers and assassins, has neither murdered nor plundered; but, though he has not enriched himself, he has assisted in ruining all his former protectors, benefactors, and friends.

Sers, a third member of this commission, was, before the Revolution, a bankrupt merchant at Bordeaux, but in 1791 was a municipal officer of the same city, and sent as a deputy to the National Assembly, where he attempted to rise from the clouds that encompassed his heavy genius by a motion for pulling down all the statues of Kings all over France. He seconded another motion of Bonaparte's prefect, Jean Debrie, to decree a corps of tyrannicides, destined to murder all Emperors, Kings, and Princes. At the club of the Jacobins, at Bordeaux, he prided himself on having caused the arrest and death of three hundred aristocrats; and boasted that he never went out without a dagger to despatch, by a summary justice, those who had escaped the laws. After meeting with well-merited contempt, and living for some time in the greatest obscurity, by a handsome present to Madame Bonaparte, in 1799, he obtained the favour of Napoleon, who dragged him forward to be placed among other ornaments of his Senate. Sers has just cunning enough to be taken for a man of sense when with fools; when with men of sense, he reassumes the place allotted him by Nature. Without education, as well as without parts, he for a long time confounded brutal scurrility with oratory, and thought himself eloquent when he was only insolent or impertinent. His ideas of liberty are such that, when he was a municipal officer, he signed a mandate of arrest against sixty-four individuals of both sexes, who were at a ball, because they had refused to invite to it one of his nieces.

Abrial, Emmery, Vernier, and Lemercier are the other four members of that commission; of these, two are old intriguers, two are nullities, and all four are slaves.

Of the seven members of the senatorial commission for preserving the liberty of the Press, Garat and Roederer are the principal. The former is a pedant, while pretending to be a philosopher; and he signed the sentence of his good King's death, while declaring himself a royalist. A mere valet to Robespierre, his fawning procured him opportunities to enrich himself with the spoil of those whom his calumnies and plots caused to be massacred or guillotined. When, as a Minister of Justice, he informed Louis XVI. of his condemnation, he did it with such an affected and atrocious indifference that he even shocked his accomplices, whose nature had not much of tenderness. As a member of the first assembly, as a Minister under the convention, and as a deputy of the Council of Five Hundred, he always opposed the liberty of the Press. "The laws, you say" (exclaimed he, in the Council), "punish libellers; so they do thieves and housebreakers; but would you, therefore, leave your doors unbolted? Is not the character, the honour, and the tranquillity of a citizen preferable to his treasures? and, by the liberty of the Press, you leave them at the mercy of every scribbler who can write or think. The wound inflicted may heal, but the scar will always remain. Were you, therefore, determined to decree the motion for this dangerous and impolitic liberty, I make this amendment, that conviction of having written a libel carries with it capital punishment, and that a label be fastened on the breast of the libeller, when carried to execution, with this inscription: 'A social murderer,' or 'A murderer of characters!'"

Roederer has belonged to all religious or antireligious sects, and to all political or anti-social factions, these last twenty years; but, after approving, applauding, and serving them, he has deserted them, sold them, or betrayed them. Before the Revolution, a Counseller of Parliament at Metz, he was a spy of the Court on his colleagues; and, since the Revolution, he served the Jacobins as a spy on the Court. Immoral and unprincipled to the highest degree, his profligacy and duplicity are only equalled by his perversity and cruelty. It was he who, on the 10th of August, 1792, betrayed the King and the Royal Family into the hands of their assassins, and who himself made a merit of this infamous act. After he had been repulsed by all, even by the most sanguinary of our parties and partisans, by a Brissot, a Marat, a Robespierre, a Tallien, and a Barras, Bonaparte adopted him first as a Counsellor of State, and afterwards as a Senator. His own and only daughter died in a miscarriage, the consequence of an incestuous commerce with her unnatural parent; and his only, son is disinherited by him for resenting his father's baseness in debauching a young girl whom the son had engaged to marry.

With the usual consistency of my revolutionary countrymen, he has, at one period, asserted that the liberty of the Press was necessary for the preservation both of men and things, for the protection of governors as well as of the governed, and that it was the best support of a constitutional Government. At another time he wrote that, as it was impossible to fix the limits between the liberty and the licentiousness of the Press, the latter destroyed the benefits of the former; that the liberty of the Press was useful only against a Government which one wished to overturn, but dangerous to a Government which one wished to preserve. To show his