I was willing to indulge myself in an hope that this second appearance of ambassadors was only an insolent mummery of the same kind; but, alas!  Anacharsis himself, all fanatic as he was, could not have imagined that his opera procession should have been the prototype of the real appearance of the representatives of all the sovereigns of Europe themselves, to make the same prostration that was made by those who dared to represent their people in a complaint against them.  But in this the French Republic has followed, as they always affect to do, and have hitherto done with success, the example of the ancient Romans, who shook all governments by listening to the complaints of their subjects, and soon after brought the kings themselves to answer at their bar.  At this last ceremony the ambassadors had not Clootz for their Cotterel.  Pity that Clootz had not had a reprieve from the guillotine till he had completed his work!  But that engine fell before the curtain had fallen upon all the dignity of the earth.

On this their gaudy day the new Regicide Directory sent for that diplomatic rabble, as bad as themselves in principle, but infinitely worse in degradation.  They called them out by a sort of roll of their nations, one after another, much in the manner in which they called wretches out of their prison to the guillotine.  When these ambassadors of infamy appeared before them, the chief Director, in the name of the rest, treated each of them with a short, affected, pedantic, insolent, theatric laconium,—­a sort of epigram of contempt.  When they had thus insulted them in a style and language which never before was heard, and which no sovereign would for a moment endure from another, supposing any of them frantic enough to use it, to finish their outrage, they drummed and trumpeted the wretches out of their hall of audience.

Among the objects of this insolent buffoonery was a person supposed to represent the King of Prussia.  To this worthy representative they did not so much as condescend to mention his master; they did not seem to know that he had one; they addressed themselves solely to Prussia in the abstract, notwithstanding the infinite obligation they owed to their early protector for their first recognition and alliance, and for the part of his territory he gave into their hands for the first-fruits of his homage.  None but dead monarchs are so much as mentioned by them, and those only to insult the living by an invidious comparison.  They told the Prussians they ought to learn, after the example of Frederick the Great, a love for France.  What a pity it is, that he, who loved France so well as to chastise it, was not now alive, by an unsparing use of the rod (which, indeed, he would have spared little) to give them another instance of his paternal affection!  But the Directory were mistaken.  These are not days in which monarchs value themselves upon the title of great:  they are grown philosophic:  they are satisfied to be good.