France herself was instituted in this revolutionary fury.  The communion of these two factions upon any pretended basis of similarity is a matter of very serious consideration.  They are always considering the formal distributions of power in a constitution:  the moral basis they consider as nothing.  Very different is my opinion:  I consider the moral basis as everything,—­the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not the makers of them, to be of little importance.  What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same?  As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,—­and that was enough; but this new pretended republic has given us more to apprehend from what they call their virtues than we had to dread from the vices of other men.  Avowedly and systematically, they have given the upperhand to all the vicious and degenerate part of human nature.  It is from their lapses and deviations from their principle that alone we have anything to hope.

I hear another inducement to fraternity with the present rulers.  They have murdered one Robespierre.  This Robespierre, they tell us, was a cruel tyrant, and now that he is put out of the way, all will go well in France.  Astraea will again return to that earth from which she has been an emigrant, and all nations will resort to her golden scales.  It is very extraordinary, that, the very instant the mode of Paris is known here, it becomes all the fashion in London.  This is their jargon.  It is the old bon-ton of robbers, who cast their common crimes on the wickedness of their departed associates.  I care little about the memory of this same Robespierre.  I am sure he was an execrable villain.  I rejoiced at his punishment neither more nor less than I should at the execution of the present Directory, or any of its members.  But who gave Robespierre the power of being a tyrant? and who were the instruments of his tyranny?  The present virtuous constitution-mongers.  He was a tyrant; they were his satellites and his hangmen.  Their sole merit is in the murder of their colleague.  They have expiated their other murders by a new murder.  It has always been the case among this banditti.  They have always had the knife at each other’s throats, after they had almost blunted it at the throats of every honest man.  These people thought, that, in the commerce of murder, he was like to have the better of the bargain, if any time was lost; they therefore took one of their short revolutionary methods, and massacred him in a manner so perfidious and cruel as would shock all humanity, if the stroke was not struck by the present rulers on one of their own associates.  But this last act of infidelity and murder is to expiate all the rest, and to qualify them for the amity of an