After this formal act of degradation, it was but a matter of course that gross insult should be offered to our ambassador, and that he should tamely submit to it.  He found himself provoked to complain of the atrocious libels against his public character and his person which appeared in a paper under the avowed patronage of that government.  The Regicide Directory, on this complaint, did not recognize the paper:  and that was all.  They did not punish, they did not dismiss, they did not even reprimand the writer.  As to our ambassador, this total want of reparation for the injury was passed by under the pretence of despising it.

In this but too serious business, it is not possible here to avoid a smile.  Contempt is not a thing to be despised.  It may be borne with a calm and equal mind, but no man by lifting his head high can pretend that he does not perceive the scorns that are poured down upon him from above.  All these sudden complaints of injury, and all these deliberate submissions to it, are the inevitable consequences of the situation in which we had placed ourselves:  a situation wherein the insults were such as Nature would not enable us to bear, and circumstances would not permit us to resent.

It was not long, however, after this contempt of contempt upon the part of our ambassador, (who by the way represented his sovereign,) that a new object was furnished for displaying sentiments of the same kind, though the case was infinitely aggravated.  Not the ambassador, but the king himself, was libelled and insulted,—­libelled, not by a creature of the Directory, but by the Directory itself.  At least, so Lord Malmesbury understood it, and so he answered it in his note of the 12th November, 1796, in which he says,—­“With regard to the offensive and injurious insinuations which are contained in that paper, and which are only calculated to throw new obstacles in the way of the accommodation which the French government professes to desire, THE KING HAS DEEMED IT FAR BENEATH HIS DIGNITY to permit an answer to be made to them on his part, in any manner whatsoever.”

I am of opinion, that, if his Majesty had kept aloof from that wash and offscouring of everything that is low and barbarous in the world, it might be well thought unworthy of his dignity to take notice of such scurrilities:  they must be considered as much the natural expression of that kind of animal as it is the expression of the feelings of a dog to bark.  But when the king had been advised to recognize not only the monstrous composition as a sovereign power, but, in conduct, to admit something in it like a superiority,—­when the bench of Regicide was made at least coordinate with his throne, and raised upon a platform full as elevated, this treatment could not be passed by under the appearance of despising it.  It would not, indeed, have been proper to keep up a war of the same kind; but an immediate, manly, and decided resentment ought to have been the consequence.  We ought