Order. This is certainly a negative
compliment to him, who, in July, 1798, officially declared to his then
sectaries, the Turks and Mussulmans, "that the Grand Master, Commanders,
Knights, and Order of Malta existed no more."

I have heard it related for a certainty among our fashionable ladies,
that the Empress of the French also intends to institute a new order of
female knighthood, not of honour, but of confidence; of which all our
Court ladies, all the wives of our generals, public functionaries, etc.,
are to be members. The Imperial Princesses of the Bonaparte family are
to be hereditary grand officers, together with as many foreign Empresses,
Queens, Princesses, Countesses, and Baronesses as can be bayoneted into
this revolutionary sisterhood. Had the Continent remained tranquil, it
would already have been officially announced by a Senatus Consultum. I
should suppose that Madame Bonaparte, with her splendid Court and
brilliant retinue of German Princes and Electors at Strasburg, need only
say the word to find hundreds of princely recruits for her knighthood in
petto. Her mantle, as a Grand Mistress of the Order of CONFIDENCE, has
been already embroidered at Lyons, and those who have seen it assert that
it is truly superb. The diamonds of the star on the mantle are valued at
six hundred thousand livres.

LETTER XXVI.

PARIS, October, 1805.

MY LORD:--Since Bonaparte's departure for Germany, fifteen individuals
have been brought here, chained, from La Vendee and the--Western
Departments, and are imprisoned in the Temple. Their crime is not
exactly known, but private letters from those countries relate that they
were recruiting for another insurrection, and that some of them were
entrusted as Ambassadors from their discontented countrymen to Louis
XVIII. to ask for his return to France, and for the assistance of Russia,
Sweden, and England to support his claims.

These are, however, reports to which I do not affix much credit. Had the
prisoners in the Temple been guilty, or only accused of such crimes, they
would long ago have been tortured, tried, and executed, or executed
without a trial. I suppose them mere hostages arrested by our
Government, as security for the tranquillity of the Chouan Departments
during our armies' occupation elsewhere. We have, nevertheless, two
movable columns of six thousand men each in the country, or in its
vicinity, and it would be not only impolitic, but a cruelty