ion than at that time he had any
leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown down his first
thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to
write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to
change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater
extent and had received another direction. A different plan, he is
sensible, might be more favorable to a commodious division and
distribution of his matter.

REFLECTIONS

ON

THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.

Dear Sir,--You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for
my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you
reason to imagine that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish
myself to be solicited about them. They are of too little consequence to
be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It was from attention
to you, and to you only, that I hesitated at the time when you first
desired to receive them. In the first letter I had the honor to write to
you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither for nor from any
description of men; nor shall I in this. My errors, if any, are my own.
My reputation alone is to answer for them.

You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that, though
I do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of
rational liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to
provide a permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an
effectual organ by which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain
great doubts concerning several material points in your late
transactions.

You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly be reckoned
among the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn
public seal of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen
in London, called the Constitutional Society, and the Revolution
Society.

I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one in which the
Constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious
Revolution are held in high reverence; and I reckon myself among the
most forward in my zeal for maintaining that Constitution and those
principles in their utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so that
I think it necessary for me that there should be no mistake. Those who
cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those who are attached to
the Constitution of this kingdom, will take good care how