great deference to the new
diplomatic taste, we old people must retain some square-toed
predilection, for the fashions of our youth.

I am afraid you will find me, my Lord, again falling into my usual
vanity, in valuing myself on the eminent men whose society I once
enjoyed. I remember, in a conversation I once had with my ever dear
friend Garrick, who was the first of actors, because he was the most
acute observer of Nature I ever knew, I asked him how it happened, that,
whenever a senate appeared on the stage, the audience seemed always
disposed to laughter. He said, the reason was plain: the audience was
well acquainted with the faces of most of the senators. They knew that
they were no other than candle-snuffers, revolutionary scene-shifters,
second and third mob, prompters, clerks, executioners, who stand with
their axe on their shoulders by the wheel, grinners in the pantomime,
murderers in tragedies, who make ugly faces under black wigs,--in short,
the very scum and refuse of the theatre; and it was of course that the
contrast of the vileness of the actors with the pomp of their habits
naturally excited ideas of contempt and ridicule.

So it was at Paris on the inaugural day of the Constitution for the
present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this
investiture of the Directory;--for so they call the managers of their
burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were
quite awe-struck with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of this
majestic senate; whilst the _sans-culotte_ gallery instantly recognized
their old insurrectionary acquaintance, burst out into a horse-laugh at
their absurd finery, and held them in infinitely greater contempt than
whilst they prowled about the streets in the pantaloons of the last
year's Constitution, when their legislators appeared honestly, with
their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their
side-pocket-holes, like a bold, brave banditti, as they are. The
Parisians (and I am much of their mind) think that a thief with a crape
on his visage is much worse than a barefaced knave, and that such
robbers richly deserve all the penalties of all the black acts. In this
their thin disguise, their comrades of the late abdicated sovereign
_canaille_ hooted and hissed them, and from that day have no other name
for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English,
impossible to make it very civil English: it belongs, inde