The Sun. — 1846-08-01 (London, England)

LOUIS PIIILIPPE. Thanks, however, to the interposition of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, that venerable life, which had already been preserved in six perils of a similar character, has survived this most odious and audacious endeavour. France has been spared the infamy of a crime which, considering the circumstances attendant upon this occasion, would have rendered the murder of their SOVEREIGN an act of atrocity altogether without any precedent. We confess ourselves to be moved to sentiments more intense and overwhelming than those of indignation by this seventh attempt at the destruction of the extraordinary man now seated on the throne of France. We are oppressed with feelings of despondency at the intensity of that most execrable ambition which lures murderer after murderer from seclusion, and places in jeopardy the existence, with the continuance of which the destinies of nations are so intimately and inextricably associated. We are aroused with sentiments of abhorrence at those wretched criminals who endeavour to gain a bloody entrance into history, and inscribe their names upon its pages in characters of immortal gloom. The infamous celebrity which has been conceded to RAVAILLAC, FULTON, CADOUDAL, TYRREL, and that fraternity of villains, appears to act as a species of incitement upon every individual misanthropised by misfortunes, or reckless of punishment. To people of morbid imaginations, saturnine temperaments, audacity, to men so agonised in mind, that oblivion would be welcomed as an exquisite solace ; to men rendered fanatical either by frenzy or impiety, and to others goaded on to the commission of such monster crimes, the execration of contemporaries, and the loathing of an interminable posterity, appear to be objects of mysterious attraction. Legislative wisdom is baffled in its struggle to prevent the recurrence of these terrible deeds. No punishment seems adequate either as an expiation of the blood-guiltiness incurred, or as a preventative of similar catastrophes. Of this lamentable truth centuries of experience are an incontestable evidence ; and supposing any individual instance were requisite for its illustration, none could be adduced more terribly to the point than the one which has only just transpired. 'We have already designated this attempted assassination as more dastardly than the one perpetrated in the forest of Fontainebleau ; we will go further, and call it the most dastardly of the seven attempts at the destruction of Louis Puturre—as the most dastardly attempt at regicide that has ever been recorded in the annals of crime ! That our estimate is no exaggeration the facts themselves testify. These facts are, according to the most accurate of the many versions which here been elicited by public curiosity as follows :—ln accordance with a beautiful custom preserved in the French metropolis, the Citizen King, on the anniversary of the 29th of July, from a window of the Tuileries, receives the homage of his people. Somewhere about half-past seven on 'Wednesday evening, the sixteenth anniniversary of that glorious revolution which had called him to the throne of the greatest continental empire on the globe, LOUIS PIIILLIPPE, surrounded by his august family, presented himself on the Balcony de l'llorloge. At that moment—a moment almost sublime,from the recollections which it evoked—the orchestra performing the "Illarseillaise Hymn," the vast concourse of Parisians assembled in the gardens of the Tuileries, welcoming their SOVEREIGN with acclamations, two explosions are heard in rapid succession. The KING points in the direction from which they have proceeded. His life has been attempted for the seventh time—for the seventh time it has been spared. The murderer is found skulking behind the statue of Venus a la Tortue ; he is with difficulty preserved from the infuriated multitude and placed in confinement. These are the simple circum, stances connected with this calamity, for a mos grievous calamity it unquestionably is. Ilernem,  Bering the solemnity of the occasion during which it transpired, remembering that the crime was attempted in the midst of a concourse abandoned to sentiments of joy, frivolity, and exultation, and that the very moment of its commission was one of national gratitude to that great national  benefactor whose existence was thus suddenly threatened, we cannot surely be accused of exaggeration in regarding this attempt as more dia bolical than the one in the Boulevards or the one a  Fontainebleau, and in regarding JOSEPH HENRI, if possible, with greater indignation than ALIBAUD,  FIESCHI, or