"_Our history records, 'with sorrow and with shame.'_"
Marshal Ney was shot in violation of a solemn capitulation--the Convention of Paris;--by the twelfth article of which an amnesty was granted to all persons in the capital, whatever might be their opinions, their offices, or their conduct. Marshal Davoust, who had concluded the Convention, explained it in favour of Ney,--and so will impartial history. The Duke of Wellington, however, on being appealed to by the unfortunate Ney, during the trial returned the cold and lawyer-like answer,--"That the Convention was merely a military convention, and did not, and could not, promise pardon for political offences, on the part of the French government." And so Ney, the most heroic of all the marshals of the French Revolution, was most foully murdered in the garden of the Luxembourg, to satisfy a point of mere military etiquette! Like the Dacian captive of old,--
That the Duke of Wellington did not at once strongly remonstrate against the illegality of the act was unfortunate for his own fame. It required but the saving of Ney's life to have made him the greatest man of his time. That the act was illegal is acknowledged by the ablest jurisconsults of Europe. Well might Ney himself exclaim, when he found that his death was resolved upon:--"I am accused against the faith of treaties, and they will not let me justify myself. I appeal to Europe and to posterity!"
A sophist, wishing to perplex Thales, who was one of the seven wise men of Greece, asked him many difficult questions; to all of which the sage replied without the least hesitation. To one of those questions,--which was the following,--"What is the best of all things?" Thales gave this response: "Virtue; because without it there is nothing good." Such is the conviction of mere unassisted and stumbling reason, the voice of nature, and the unequivocal and direct assertion of a heathen philosopher.--_Preface to Piety and Intellect Relatively Estimated, by Dr Henry Edwards._--An excellent work.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Poems, by William Anderson