Men are rarely without some sympathy in the sufferings of others; but in
the immense and diversified mass of human misery, which may be pitied,
but cannot be relieved, in the gross, the mind must make a choice. Our
sympathy is always more forcibly attracted towards the misfortunes of
certain persons, and in certain descriptions: and this sympathetic
attraction discovers, beyond a possibility of mistake, our mental
affinities and elective affections. It is a much surer proof than the
strongest declaration of a real connection and of an overruling bias in
the mind. I am told that the active sympathies of this party have been
chiefly, if not wholly, attracted to the sufferings of the patriarchal
rebels who were amongst the promulgators of the maxims of the French
Revolution, and who have suffered from their apt and forward scholars
some part of the evils which they had themselves so liberally
distributed to all the other parts of the community. Some of these men,
flying from the knives which they had sharpened against their country
and its laws, rebelling against the very powers they had set over
themselves by their rebellion against their sovereign, given up by those
very armies to whose faithful attachment they trusted for their safety
and support, after they had completely debauched all military fidelity
in its source,--some of these men, I say, had fallen into the hands of
the head of that family the most illustrious person of which they had
three times cruelly imprisoned, and delivered in that state of captivity
to those hands from which they were able to relieve neither her, nor
their own nearest and most venerable kindred.
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