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 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 is 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 rank
and sex, 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 whilst
it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under
which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.