This gloomy aera of the revolution has its frivolities as well as the less disastrous periods, and the barbarism of the moment is rendered additionally disgusting by a mixture of levity and pedantry.—­It is a fashion for people at present to abandon their baptismal and family names, and to assume that of some Greek or Roman, which the debates of the Convention have made familiar.—­France swarms with Gracchus’s and Publicolas, who by imaginary assimilations of acts, which a change of manners has rendered different, fancy themselves more than equal to their prototypes.*

* The vicissitudes of the revolution, and the vengeance of party, have brought half the sages of Greece, and patriots of Rome, to the Guillotine or the pillory.  The Newgate Calendar of Paris contains as many illustrious names as the index to Plutarch’s Lives; and I believe there are now many Brutus’s and Gracchus’s in durance vile, besides a Mutius Scaevola condemned to twenty years imprisonment for an unskilful theft.—­A man of Amiens, whose name is Le Roy, signified to the public, through the channel of a newspaper, that he had adopted that of Republic.

—­A man who solicits to be the executioner of his own brother ycleps himself Brutus, and a zealous preacher of the right of universal pillage cites the Agrarian law, and signs himself Lycurgus.  Some of the Deputies have discovered, that the French mode of dressing is not characteristic of republicanism, and a project is now in agitation to drill the whole country into the use of a Roman costume.—­You may perhaps suspect, that the Romans had at least more bodily sedateness than their imitators, and that the shrugs, jerks, and carracoles of a French petit maitre, however republicanized, will not assort with the grave drapery of the toga.  But on your side of the water you have a habit of reasoning and deliberating —­here they have that of talking and obeying.

Our whole community are in despair to-day.  Dumont has been here, and those who accosted him, as well as those who only ventured to interpret his looks, all agree in their reports that he is in a “bad humour.”—­The brightest eyes in France have supplicated in vain—­not one grace of any sort has been accorded—­and we begin to cherish even our present situation, in the apprehension that it may become worse.—­Alas! you know not of what evil portent is the “bad humour” of a Representant.  We are half of us now, like the Persian Lord, feeling if our heads are still on our shoulders.—­I could add much to the conclusion of one of my last letters.  Surely this incessant solicitude for mere existence debilitates the mind, and impairs even its passive faculty of suffering.  We intrigue for the favour of the keeper, smile complacently at the gross pleasantries of a Jacobin, and tremble at the frown of a Dumont.—­I am ashamed to be the chronicler of such humiliation:  but, “tush, Hal; men, mortal men!” I can add no better apology, and quit you to moralize on it.—­Yours.