customed to the benefit of laws and the
enjoyment of arts, suddenly becoming barbarous by system, and sinking
into ignorance from choice.--When the Goths shared the most curious
antiques by weight, were they not more civilized than the Parisian of
1793, who disturbs the ashes of Henry the Fourth, or destroys the
monument of Turenne, by a decree?--I have myself been forced to an act
very much in the spirit of the times, but I could not, without risking my
own safety, do otherwise; and I sat up late last night for the purpose of
burning Burke, which I had brought with me, but had fortunately so well
concealed, that it escaped the late inquisition. I indeed made this
sacrifice to prudence with great unwillingness--every day, by confirming
Mr. Burke's assertions, or fulfilling his predictions, had so increased
my reverence for the work, that I regarded it as a kind of political
oracle. I did not, however, destroy it without an apologetic apostrophe
to the author's benevolence, which I am sure would suffer, were he to be
the occasion, though involuntarily, of conducting a female to a prison or
the Guillotine.

"How chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration up with divers
liquors."--On the same hearth, and in a mingled flame, was consumed the
very constitution of 1789, on which Mr. Burke's book was a censure, and
which would now expose me to equal danger were it to be found in my
possession. In collecting the ashes of these two compositions, the
tendency of which is so different, (for such is the complexion of the
moment, that I would not have even the servant suspect I had been burning
a quantity of papers,) I could not but moralize on the mutability of
popular opinion. Mr. Burke's Gallic adversaries are now most of them
proscribed and anathematized more than himself. Perhaps another year may
see his bust erected on the piedestal which now supports that of Brutus
or Le Pelletier.

The letters I have written to you since the communication was
interrupted, with some other papers that I am solicitous to preserve,
I have hitherto always carried about me, and I know not if any danger,
merely probable, will induce me to part with them. You will not, I
think, suspect me of attaching any consequence to my scribblings from
vanity; and if I run some personal risk in keeping them, it is because
the situation of this country is so singular, and the events which occur
almost daily so important, that the remarks of any o