thought fit to declare to them, “that the vessel of the state would fly forward in her course towards regeneration with more speed than ever,” from the stiff gale of treason and murder which preceded our preacher’s triumph!  What must they have felt, whilst, with outward patience and inward indignation, they heard of the slaughter of innocent gentlemen in their houses, that “the blood spilled was not the most pure”!  What must they have felt, when they were besieged by complaints of disorders which shook their country to its foundations, at being compelled coolly to tell the complainants that they were under the protection of the law, and that they would address the king (the captive king) to cause the laws to be enforced for their protection, when the enslaved ministers of that captive king had formally notified to them that there were neither law nor authority nor power left to protect!  What must they have felt at being obliged, as a felicitation on the present new year, to request their captive king to forget the stormy period of the last, on account of the great good which he was likely to produce to his people,—­to the complete attainment of which good they adjourned the practical demonstrations of their loyalty, assuring him of their obedience when he should no longer possess any authority to command!

This address was made with much good-nature and affection, to be sure.  But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness.  In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of France.  If so, we are still in the old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature that crawls upon the earth, that great public benefits are derived from the murder of his servants, the attempted assassination of himself and of his wife, and the mortification, disgrace, and degradation that he has personally suffered.  It is a topic of consolation which our ordinary of Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the gallows.  I should have thought that the hangman of Paris, now that he is liberalized by the vote of the National Assembly, and is allowed his rank and arms in the Herald’s College of the rights of men, would be too generous, too gallant a man, too full of the sense of his new dignity, to employ that cutting consolation to any of the persons whom the leze-nation might bring under the administration of his executive powers.

A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered.  The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory.  Thus to administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of “the balm of hurt minds,” the cup of human misery full to the brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs.