name for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English, impossible to make it very civil English:  it belongs, indeed, to the language of the halles:  but, without being instructed in that dialect, it was the opinion of the polite Lord Chesterfield that no man could be a complete master of French.  Their Parisian brethren called them gueux plumes, which, though not elegant, is expressive and characteristic:  feathered scoundrels, I think, comes the nearest to it in that kind of English.  But we are now to understand that these gueux, for no other reason, that I can divine, except their red and white clothes, form at last a state with which we may cultivate amity, and have a prospect of the blessings of a secure and permanent peace.  In effect, then, it was not with the men, or their principles, or their polities, that we quarrelled:  our sole dislike was to the cut of their clothes.

But to pass over their dresses,—­good God! in what habits did the representatives of the crowned heads of Europe appear, when they came to swell the pomp of their humiliation, and attended in solemn function this inauguration of Regicide?  That would be the curiosity.  Under what robes did they cover the disgrace and degradation of the whole college of kings?  What warehouses of masks and dominoes furnished a cover to the nakedness of their shame?  The shop ought to be known; it will soon have a good trade.  Were the dresses of the ministers of those lately called potentates, who attended on that occasion, taken from the wardrobe of that property-man at the opera, from whence my old acquaintance, Anacharsis Clootz, some years ago equipped a body of ambassadors, whom he conducted, as from all the nations of the world, to the bar of what was called the Constituent Assembly?  Among those mock ministers, one of the most conspicuous figures was the representative of the British nation, who unluckily was wanting at the late ceremony.  In the face of all the real ambassadors of the sovereigns of Europe was this ludicrous representation of their several subjects, under the name of oppressed sovereigns,[10] exhibited to the Assembly.  That Assembly received an harangue, in the name of those sovereigns, against their kings, delivered by this Clootz, actually a subject of Prussia, under the name of Ambassador of the Human Race.  At that time there was only a feeble reclamation from one of the ambassadors of these tyrants and oppressors.  A most gracious answer was given to the ministers of the oppressed sovereigns; and they went so far on that occasion as to assign them, in that assumed character, a box at one of their festivals.