It would be too voluminous to enumerate all the contrasts of manners and character exhibited during the French revolution—­The philosophic Condorcet, pursuing with malignancy his patron, the Duc de la Rochefoucault, and hesitating with atrocious mildness on the sentence of the King—­The massacres of the prisons connived at by the gentle Petion—­Collot d’Herbois dispatching, by one discharge of cannon, three hundred people together, “to spare his sensibility” the talk of executions in detail—­And St. Just, the deviser of a thousand enormities, when he left the Committee, after his last interview, with the project of sending them all to the Guillotine, telling them, in a tone of tender reproach, like a lover of romance, “Vous avez fletri mon coeur, je vais l’ouvrir a la Convention.”—­ Madame Roland, in spite of the tenderness of her sex, could coldly reason on the expediency of a civil war, which she acknowledged might become necessary to establish the republic.  Let those who disapprove this censure of a female, whom it is a sort of mode to lament, recollect that Madame Roland was the victim of a celebrity she had acquired in assisting the efforts of faction to dethrone the King—­that her literary bureau was dedicated to the purpose of exasperating the people against him—­and that she was considerably instrumental to the events which occasioned his death.  If her talents and accomplishments make her an object of regret, it was to the unnatural misapplication of those talents and accomplishments in the service of party, that she owed her fate.  Her own opinion was, that thousands might justifiably be devoted to the establishment of a favourite system; or, to speak truly, to the aggrandisement of those who were its partizans.  The same selfish principle actuated an opposite faction, and she became the sacrifice.—­“Oh even-handed justice!”

I do not pretend to decide whether the English are virtually more gentle in their nature than the French; but I am persuaded this douceur, on which the latter pride themselves, affords no proof of the contrary.  An Englishman is seldom out of humour, without proclaiming it to all the world; and the most forcible motives of interest, or expediency, cannot always prevail on him to assume a more engaging external than that which delineates his feelings.

If he has a matter to refuse, he usually begins by fortifying himself with a little ruggedness of manner, by way of prefacing a denial he might otherwise not have resolution to persevere in.  “The hows and whens of life” corrugate his features, and disharmonize his periods; contradiction sours, and passion ruffles him—­and, in short, an Englishman displeased, from whatever cause, is neither “un homme bien doux,” nor “un homme bien aimable;” but such as nature has made him, subject to infirmities and sorrows, and unable to disguise the one, or appear indifferent to the other.  Our country, like every other, has doubtless produced too many examples of human depravity; but I scarcely recollect any, where a ferocious disposition was not accompanied by corresponding manners—­or where men, who would plunder or massacre, affected to retain at the same time habits of softness, and a conciliating physiognomy.