Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 18.djvu/21

Rh himself terms them in his Memoirs, "private domestick concerns, and the crying injustice done his family,") he withdrew to his own lands in the province of Rouergue, contiguous to that part of Languedoc called The Cevennes; where he endeavoured to raise insurrections among the discontented people, of which he has published a very foolish account: but, having neither credit nor ability for such an undertaking, his success was answerable. He was forced to fly into Switzerland, without taking any measures for the safety of those poor wretches involved with him, and who had been so unhappy to be wrought by his insinuations. Thirty of the roman catholick persuasion (seduced by Guiscard into the design of rebelling for liberty, not religion) fell under the sentence of the magistrate, and were broken upon the wheel; though it is said, if monsieur de Guiscard, upon whom they depended for intelligence, had but delayed his flight only so long as to send notice to those gentlemen of the danger impending, they might all, or at least the greater number of them, have escaped as well as himself.

The marquis de Guiscard had an early, an undoubted, propensity to mischief and villany, but without those fine parts useful in the cabinet; he had not capacity to conduct a design, though he might have brain enough to form one; was wholly unacquainted with war, had never been in the army, a Rh