ous
les eveques a la lanterne." All Bishops to be hanged at the lanthorn
or lamp-posts. It is surprising that nobody could hear this but Lally
Tollendal, and that nobody should believe it but Mr. Burke. It has not
the least connection with any part of the transaction, and is totally
foreign to every circumstance of it. The Bishops had never been
introduced before into any scene of Mr. Burke's drama: why then are
they, all at once, and altogether, tout a coup, et tous ensemble,
introduced now? Mr. Burke brings forward his Bishops and his
lanthorn-like figures in a magic lanthorn, and raises his scenes by
contrast instead of connection. But it serves to show, with the rest of
his book what little credit ought to be given where even probability is
set at defiance, for the purpose of defaming; and with this reflection,
instead of a soliloquy in praise of chivalry, as Mr. Burke has done, I
close the account of the expedition to Versailles.*[4]

I have now to follow Mr. Burke through a pathless wilderness of
rhapsodies, and a sort of descant upon governments, in which he asserts
whatever he pleases, on the presumption of its being believed, without
offering either evidence or reasons for so doing.

Before anything can be reasoned upon to a conclusion, certain facts,
principles, or data, to reason from, must be established, admitted, or
denied. Mr. Burke with his usual outrage, abused the Declaration of
the Rights of Man, published by the National Assembly of France, as
the basis on which the constitution of France is built. This he calls
"paltry and blurred sheets of paper about the rights of man." Does Mr.
Burke mean to deny that man has any rights? If he does, then he must
mean that there are no such things as rights anywhere, and that he has
none himself; for who is there in the world but man? But if Mr. Burke
means to admit that man has rights, the question then will be: What are
those rights, and how man came by them originally?

The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the
intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what
was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at
all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct
contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be
authority, a th