ng any credit. All
the money he extorts or obtains is brought to this capital and laid out
by his agents in purchasing estates, which, from his advanced age and
weak constitution, he has little prospect of long enjoying. He is a
grand officer of Bonaparte's Legion of Honour, and has a long claim to
that distinction, because as early as on the 25th of June, 1790, he made
a motion in the National Assembly to suppress all former Royal Orders in
France, and to create in their place only a national one. Always an
incorrigible flatterer, when Napoleon proclaimed himself Ali the
Mussulman, De Menou professed himself Abdallah the believer in the
Alcoran.

The late vice-president of the Italian Republic, Melzi-Eril, is now in
complete disgrace with his Sovereign, Napoleon the First. If persons of
rank and property would read through the list of those, their equals by
birth and wealth, who, after being seduced by the sophistry of impostors,
dishonoured and exposed themselves by joining in the Revolution, they
might see that none of them have escaped insults, many have suffered
death, and all have been, or are, vile slaves, at the mercy of the whip
of some upstart beggar, and trampled upon by men started up from the mud,
of lowest birth and basest morals. If their revolutionary mania were not
incurable, this truth and this evidence would retain them within their
duty, so corresponding with their real interest, and prevent them from
being any longer borne along by a current of infamy and danger, and
preserve them from being lost upon quicksands or dashed against rocks.

The conduct and fate of the Italian nobleman and Spanish grandee,
Melzi-Eril, has induced me to make these reflections. Wealthy as well as
elevated, he might have passed his life in uninterrupted tranquillity,
enjoying its comforts without experiencing its vicissitudes, with the
esteem of his contemporaries and without reproach from posterity or from
his own conscience. Unfortunately for him, a journey into this country
made him acquainted both with our philosophers and with our philosophical
works; and he had neither natural capacity to distinguish errors from
reality, nor judgment enough to perceive that what appeared improving and
charming in theory, frequently became destructive and improper when
attempted to be put into practice. Returned to his own country, his
acquired half-learning made him wholly dissatisfied with his Government,
with his religion,