ors, or else
shadows, and simulacra of Quacks, to be seen in high places, look where
you will! Men that go mincing, grimacing, with plausible speech and
brushed raiment; hollow within: Quacks Political; Quacks scientific,
Academical; all with a fellow-feeling for each other, and kind of Quack
public-spirit! Not great Lavoisier himself, or any of the Forty can
escape this rough tongue; which wants not fanatic sincerity, nor,
strangest of all, a certain rough caustic sense. And then the
'three thousand gaming-houses' that are in Paris; cesspools for the
scoundrelism of the world; sinks of iniquity and debauchery,--whereas
without good morals Liberty is impossible! There, in these Dens of
Satan, which one knows, and perseveringly denounces, do Sieur Motier's
mouchards consort and colleague; battening vampyre-like on a
People next-door to starvation. 'O Peuple!' cries he oftimes, with
heart-rending accent. Treason, delusion, vampyrism, scoundrelism, from
Dan to Beersheba! The soul of Marat is sick with the sight: but what
remedy? To erect 'Eight Hundred gibbets,' in convenient rows, and
proceed to hoisting; 'Riquetti on the first of them!' Such is the brief
recipe of Marat, Friend of the People.

So blow and bluster the Hundred and thirty-three: nor, as would seem,
are these sufficient; for there are benighted nooks in France, to which
Newspapers do not reach; and every where is 'such an appetite for news
as was never seen in any country.' Let an expeditious Dampmartin, on
furlough, set out to return home from Paris, (Dampmartin, i. 184.) he
cannot get along for 'peasants stopping him on the highway; overwhelming
him with questions:' the Maitre de Poste will not send out the horses
till you have well nigh quarrelled with him, but asks always, What news?
At Autun, 'in spite of the rigorous frost' for it is now January, 1791,
nothing will serve but you must gather your wayworn limbs, and
thoughts, and 'speak to the multitudes from a window opening into the
market-place.' It is the shortest method: This, good Christian people,
is verily what an August Assembly seemed to me to be doing; this and no
other is the news;

'Now my weary lips I close;
Leave me, leave me to repose.'

The good Dampmartin!--But, on the whole, are not Nations astonishingly
true to their National character; which indeed runs in the blood?
Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Caesar, with his quick sure eye, took
note how the Gauls waylaid men.