ABSTRACT
THERE is an university at Orleans, founded by Philippe le Bel, in 1312. If one can forgive a tyrant, who pursued his own aggrandizement, sometimes by the most perfidious policy, some-times the most cruel oppressions, and who first -changed offences against the king, which until his reign were only considered as crimes of felony, into crimes of high treason, it must be in consideration of his having, in that barbarous age, done something for the cause of literature. In this instance it appears that he did not reason with his usual subtilty; since the progress of literature is very unfavourable to the interests of tyranny. What example so memorable, and so recent, of this truth, as the event of the French revolution? That glorious event which will probably in its consequences change the face of this earth, and will be marked in the 168page of history as that luminous point of human annals, from which a better order of things is seen to arise: and this event has surely been the work of literature, of philosophy, of the enlarging views of mankind Liberty springs as naturally from knowledge, as light from the fun; and the liberty which the French have acquired, and are determined to maintain, appears to be the deliberate, the noble, the august choice of reason. It has no resemblance to those fiery meteors which sometimes throw a transitory flash across that darkness which they have not sufficient power to dispel: it is the sublime effect of truth visiting the land, like the day-spring from on high, and, with a similar kind of influence over the moral world, warming the heart, in proportion as it enlightens the understanding.
