Excerpt from Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution I h'ave been requested to revise and collect into one volume the half-dozen Essays which I contributed to the Quarterly Review' on the earlier period of the French Revolution and I am the more willing to do so, because I believe those Essays contain a good deal of curious, and what is rarer and of more importance, authentic, informa tion on that subject that is not, as far as I know, to be found in any single publication. My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken; it naturally made a great im pression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled. 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.