to have the power of imprisoning and guillotining all their countrymen!  What halcyon days, when the aristocratic palaces* shall be purified by solacing the fatigues of republican virtue, and the levellers of all distinction travel with four horses and a military escort!—­But, as Robespierre observes, you are two centuries behind the French in patriotism and information; and I doubt if English republicanism will ever go beyond a dinner, and toasting the manes of Hampden and Sydney.  I would, therefore, seriously advise any of my compatriots who may be enamoured of a government founded on the rights of man, to quit an ungrateful country which seems so little disposed to reward their labours, and enjoy the supreme delight of men a systeme, that of seeing their theories in action.

* Many of the emigrants’ houses were bought by members of the Convention, or people in office.  At Paris, crouds of inferior clerks, who could not purchase, found means to get lodged in the most superb national edifices:  Monceaux was the villa of Robespierre—­St. Just occasionally amused himself at Raincy—­Couthon succeed the Comte d’Artois at Bagatelle-and Vliatte, a juryman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, was lodged at the pavillion of Flora, in the Tuilleries, which he seems to have occupied as a sort of Maitre d’Hotel to the Comite de Salut Public.

A propos—­a decree of the Convention has lately passed to secure the person of Mr. Thomas Paine, and place seals on his papers.  I hope, however, as he has been installed in all the rights of a French citizen, in addition to his representative inviolability, that nothing more than a temporary retreat is intended for him.  Perhaps even his personal sufferings may prove a benefit to mankind.  He may, like Raleigh, “in his prison hours enrich the world,” and add new proselytes to the cause of freedom.  Besides, human evils are often only blessings in a questionable form—­Mr. Paine’s persecutions in England made him a legislator in France.  Who knows but his persecutions in France may lead to some new advancement, or at least add another line to the already crouded title-pages that announce his literary and political distinctions!

—­Yours.

January, 1794.

The total suppression of all religious worship in this country is an event of too singular and important a nature not to have been commented upon largely by the English papers; but, though I have little new to add on the subject, my own reflections have been too much occupied in consequence for me to pass it over in silence.

I am yet in the first emotions of wonder:  the vast edifice which had been raised by the blended efforts of religion and superstition, which had been consecrated by time, endeared by national taste, and become necessary by habit, has now disappeared, and scarcely left a vestige of its ruins.  To those who revert only to the genius of the Catholic religion, and to former periods of the history of France, this