Mirabeaus; traitors, or else shadows, and simulacra of Quacks, to be seen in high places, look where you will!  Men that go mincing, grimacing, with plausible speech and brushed raiment; hollow within:  Quacks Political; Quacks scientific, Academical; all with a fellow-feeling for each other, and kind of Quack public-spirit!  Not great Lavoisier himself, or any of the Forty can escape this rough tongue; which wants not fanatic sincerity, nor, strangest of all, a certain rough caustic sense.  And then the ‘three thousand gaming-houses’ that are in Paris; cesspools for the scoundrelism of the world; sinks of iniquity and debauchery,—­whereas without good morals Liberty is impossible!  There, in these Dens of Satan, which one knows, and perseveringly denounces, do Sieur Motier’s mouchards consort and colleague; battening vampyre-like on a People next-door to starvation.  ‘O Peuple!’ cries he oftimes, with heart-rending accent.  Treason, delusion, vampyrism, scoundrelism, from Dan to Beersheba!  The soul of Marat is sick with the sight:  but what remedy?  To erect ‘Eight Hundred gibbets,’ in convenient rows, and proceed to hoisting; ‘Riquetti on the first of them!’ Such is the brief recipe of Marat, Friend of the People.

So blow and bluster the Hundred and thirty-three:  nor, as would seem, are these sufficient; for there are benighted nooks in France, to which Newspapers do not reach; and every where is ’such an appetite for news as was never seen in any country.’  Let an expeditious Dampmartin, on furlough, set out to return home from Paris, (Dampmartin, i. 184.) he cannot get along for ’peasants stopping him on the highway; overwhelming him with questions:’  the Maitre de Poste will not send out the horses till you have well nigh quarrelled with him, but asks always, What news?  At Autun, ‘in spite of the rigorous frost’ for it is now January, 1791, nothing will serve but you must gather your wayworn limbs, and thoughts, and ’speak to the multitudes from a window opening into the market-place.’  It is the shortest method:  This, good Christian people, is verily what an August Assembly seemed to me to be doing; this and no other is the news;

     ’Now my weary lips I close;
     Leave me, leave me to repose.’

The good Dampmartin!—­But, on the whole, are not Nations astonishingly true to their National character; which indeed runs in the blood?  Nineteen hundred years ago, Julius Caesar, with his quick sure eye, took note how the Gauls waylaid men.  ‘It is a habit of theirs,’ says he, ’to stop travellers, were it even by constraint, and inquire whatsoever each of them may have heard or known about any sort of matter:  in their towns, the common people beset the passing trader; demanding to hear from what regions he came, what things he got acquainted with there.  Excited by which rumours and hearsays they will decide about the weightiest matters; and necessarily repent next moment that they did it, on such guidance of uncertain reports, and many a traveller