The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay — Volume 3

It is biographical book. January. The following section must be pronounced, from the historical point of view, one of the most valuable in the 'Diary. ' It gives us authentic glimpses of some of the actors in that great Revolution, 'the Death-Birth of a new order, ' which was getting itself transacted, with such terrible accompaniments, across the channel. The refugees with whom Fanny grew acquainted, and who formed the little colony at juniper Hall, near Dorking, were not the men of the first emigration—princes and nobles who fled their country, like cowards, as soon as they found themselves in danger, and reentered it like traitors, in the van of a foreign invasion. Not such were the inmates of Juniper Hall. These were constitutional monarchists, men who had taken part with the people in the early stage of the Revolution, who had been instrumental in making the Constitution, and who had sought safety in flight only when the Constitution was crushed and the monarchy abolished by the triumph of the extreme party. To the grands seigneurs of the first emigration, these constitutional royalists, were scarcely less detestable than the jacobins themselves.