Paris in 1815 Author:George Croly Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE. A Considerable number of the stanzas in this Poem were written in the year 1816, and intended to follow immediately upon the former part, which was p... more »ublished at that time. The causes of the delay must be unimportant to the reader, and the circumstance itself is mentioned only to avoid the appearance of plagiarism from works which have since appeared. The lines on the Louvre Statues, and Pictures, were written before the publication of that Canto of Childe Harold, in which the same subjects are described. The French Revolution was the most stupendous transaction since the Christian jEra, and its close, in the year 1815, the most memorable of all triumphs, not simply as the display of great military skill, or noble national effort; not as a splendid decision of the question of rival prowess on the greatest of its fields,but as a triumph of principle; of good over evil; of the spirit of peace and good-will over the spirit of war and darkness, and boundless, perpetual, insatiable tyranny. If our exultation could be heightened, it must be in the memory, that the brunt of this grand struggle of the earth was4 borne by our country, and the final and consummating blow given by a British army, led by a British hero. The preternatural ambition, magnitude, and strength of the French empire, the suddenness and completeness of its overthrow, and the immediate and involuntary connexion of the catastrophe, in the general mind, with the interference of more than human power, gave the war a character distinct from all the conflicts of nations. It was in all its parts and properties a Sacred War. The first stone of the Revolution was laid in impiety. For the first time in Christian history a whole people was seen rejecting all knowledge of God, and following this tremendous abj...« less