atesman who often had in his hands the destiny of Empires. Some
few solitary walks, incognito, by Bonaparte, in the streets of his
capital, would perhaps be the best preservative against unbounded
ambition and confident success that philosophy could present to unfeeling
tyranny.

Some author has written that "want is the parent of industry, and
wretchedness the mother of ingenuity." I know that you have often
approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated
countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are
disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter
the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no
other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide. How many
have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no
expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their
necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final
prospect of all their sufferings.

Many of our ballad-singers are disguised emigrants; and I know a
ci-devant Marquis who is, incognito, a groom to a contractor, the son of
his uncle's porter. Our old pedlars complain that their trade is ruined
by the Counts, by the Barons and Chevaliers who have monopolized all
their business. Those who pretend to more dignity, but who have in fact
less honesty, are employed in our billiard and gambling-houses. I have
seen two music-grinders, one of whom was formerly a captain of infantry,
and the other a Counsellor of Parliament. Every, day you may bestow your
penny or halfpenny on two veiled girls playing on the guitar or harp--the
one the daughter of a ci-devant Duke, and the other of a ci-devant
Marquis, a general under Louis XVI. They, are usually placed, the one on
the Boulevards, and the other in the Elysian Fields; each with an old
woman by her side, holding a begging-box in her hand. I am told one of
the women has been the nurse of one of those ladies. What a
recollection, if she thinks of the past, in contemplating the present!

On the day of Bonaparte's coronation, and a little before he set out with
his Pope and other splendid retinue, an old man was walking slowly on the
Quai de Voltaire, without saying a word, but a label was pinned to his
hat with this inscription: "I had sixty thousand livres rent--I am eighty
years of age, and I request alms." Many individuals, even some of
Bonaparte's soldiers, gave him the