You will perceive the kind of publications I allude to; and I hope the situation of France, and the fate of its Monarch, may suggest to the authors a more worthy employ of their talents, than that of degrading the executive power in the eyes of the people.

Amiens, Feb. 25, 1793.

I told you, I believe, in a former letter, that the people of Amiens were all aristocrates:  they have, nevertheless, two extremely popular qualifications—­I mean filth and incivility.  I am, however, far from imputing either of them to the revolution.  This grossness of behavior has long existed under the palliating description of "la franchise Picarde," ["Picardy frankness.”] and the floors and stairs of many houses will attest their preeminence in filth to be of a date much anterior to the revolution.—­If you purchase to the amount of an hundred livres, there are many shopkeepers who will not send your purchases home; and if the articles they show you do not answer your purpose, they are mostly sullen, and often rude.  No appearance of fatigue or infirmity suggests to them the idea of offering you a seat; they contradict you with impertinence, address you with freedom, and conclude with cheating you if they can.  It was certainly on this account that Sterne would not agree to die at the inn at Amiens.  He might, with equal justice, have objected to any other house; and I am sure if he thought them an unpleasant people to die amongst, he would have found them still worse to live with.—­My observation as to the civility of aristocrates does not hold good here—­indeed I only meant that those who ever had any, and were aristocrates, still preserved it.

Amiens has always been a commercial town, inhabited by very few of the higher noblesse; and the mere gentry of a French province are not very much calculated to give a tone of softness and respect to those who imitate them.  You may, perhaps, be surprized that I should express myself with little consideration for a class which, in England, is so highly respectable:  there gentlemen of merely independent circumstances are not often distinguishable in their manners from those of superior fortune or rank.  But, in France, it is different:  the inferior noblesse are stiff, ceremonious, and ostentatious; while the higher ranks were always polite to strangers, and affable to their dependents.  When you visit some of the former, you go through as many ceremonies as though you were to be invested with an order, and rise up and sit down so many times, that you return more fatigued than you would from a cricket match; while with the latter you are just as much at your ease as is consistent with good breeding and propriety, and a whole circle is never put in commotion at the entrance and exit of every individual who makes part of it.  Any one not prepared for these formalities, and who, for the first time, saw an assembly of twenty people all rising from their seats at the entrance of a single