Excerpt from Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Vol. 6 of 7 IT appears to be, if not stated in words, yet tacitly felt and nu derstood everywhere, that the event of these modern ages is the French Revolution. A huge explosion, bursting through all formulas and customs confounding into wreck and chaos the ordered arrangements of earthly life blotting-out, one may say, the very firmament and skyey loadstars, -though only for a season. Once in the fifteen-hundred years such a thing was ordained to come. To those who stood present in the actual midst of that smoke and thunder, the effect might well be too violent: blinding and deafening, into confused exasperation, almost into madness. These onlookers have played their part. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.