for his own secret behoof!  With all these things the General is wroth; and writes to us in a sharp tone.  Who knows what this hot little General is meditating?  Dumouriez Duke of Belgium or Brabant; and say, Egalite the Younger King of France:  there were an end for our Revolution!—­Committee of Defence gazes, and shakes its head:  who except Danton, defective in suspicion, could still struggle to be of hope?

And General Custine is rolling back from the Rhine Country; conquered Mentz will be reconquered, the Prussians gathering round to bombard it with shot and shell.  Mentz may resist, Commissioner Merlin, the Thionviller, ’making sallies, at the head of the besieged;’—­resist to the death; but not longer than that.  How sad a reverse for Mentz!  Brave Foster, brave Lux planted Liberty-trees, amid ca-ira-ing music, in the snow-slush of last winter, there:  and made Jacobin Societies; and got the Territory incorporated with France:  they came hither to Paris, as Deputies or Delegates, and have their eighteen francs a-day:  but see, before once the Liberty-Tree is got rightly in leaf, Mentz is changing into an explosive crater; vomiting fire, bevomited with fire!

Neither of these men shall again see Mentz; they have come hither only to die.  Foster has been round the Globe; he saw Cook perish under Owyhee clubs; but like this Paris he has yet seen or suffered nothing.  Poverty escorts him:  from home there can nothing come, except Job’s-news; the eighteen daily francs, which we here as Deputy or Delegate with difficulty ‘touch,’ are in paper assignats, and sink fast in value.  Poverty, disappointment, inaction, obloquy; the brave heart slowly breaking!  Such is Foster’s lot.  For the rest, Demoiselle Theroigne smiles on you in the Soirees; ‘a beautiful brownlocked face,’ of an exalted temper; and contrives to keep her carriage.  Prussian Trenck, the poor subterranean Baron, jargons and jangles in an unmelodious manner.  Thomas Paine’s face is red-pustuled, ‘but the eyes uncommonly bright.’  Convention Deputies ask you to dinner:  very courteous; and ’we all play at plumsack.’ (Forster’s Briefwechsel, ii. 514, 460, 631.) ’It is the Explosion and New-creation of a World,’ says Foster; ’and the actors in it, such small mean objects, buzzing round one like a handful of flies.’—­

Likewise there is war with Spain.  Spain will advance through the gorges of the Pyrenees; rustling with Bourbon banners; jingling with artillery and menace.  And England has donned the red coat; and marches, with Royal Highness of York,—­whom some once spake of inviting to be our King.  Changed that humour now:  and ever more changing; till no hatefuller thing walk this Earth than a denizen of that tyrannous Island; and Pitt be declared and decreed, with effervescence, ’L’ennemi du genre humain, The enemy of mankind;’ and, very singular to say, you make an order that no Soldier of Liberty give quarter to an Englishman.  Which order however, the Soldier of Liberty does but partially