ension of its own rules in favor of its own principles, might turn
aside whilst fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruction of a
pretended nobility, which disgraced, whilst it persecuted, human nature.
The persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and arbitrary
confiscation might remain silent spectators of this civil war between
the vices.

But did the privileged nobility who met under the king's precept at
Versailles in 1789, or their constituents, deserve to be looked on as
the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or as the Orsini and Vitelli of
ancient times? If I had then asked the question, I should have passed
for a madman. What have they since done, that they were to be driven
into exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled, and
tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in ashes, and that
their order should be abolished, and the memory of it, if possible,
extinguished, by ordaining them to change the very names by which they
were usually known? Read their instructions to their representatives.
They breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend
reformation as strongly, as any other order. Their privileges relative
to contribution were voluntarily surrendered; as the king, from the
beginning, surrendered all pretence to a right of taxation. Upon a free
constitution there was but one opinion in France. The absolute monarchy
was at an end. It breathed its last without a groan, without struggle,
without convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension, arose
afterwards, upon the preference of a despotic democracy to a government
of reciprocal control. The triumph of the victorious party was over the
principles of a British Constitution.

I have observed the affectation which for many years past has prevailed
in Paris, even to a degree perfectly childish, of idolizing the memory
of your Henry the Fourth. If anything could put any one out of humor
with that ornament to the kingly character, it would be this overdone
style of insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this engine
the most busily are those who have ended their panegyrics in dethroning
his successor and descendant: a man as good-natured, at the least, as
Henry the Fourth; altogether as fond of his people; and who has done
infinitely more to correct the ancient vices of the state than that
great monarch did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it is for
his panegyrists that they have not him to