form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such
unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every
well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant
spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely
deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages
entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called victories, and
leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives overpowered
with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much
more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial
nation;--if a civilized nation, or any men who had a sense of
generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and
afflicted.

This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe, that,
as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe
that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest
humiliation in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or
the actors in it, and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry
they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of the appearance
of liberty or impartiality. The apology of that assembly is found in
their situation; but when we approve what they _must_ bear, it is in us
the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind.

With a compelled appearance of deliberation, they vote under the
dominion of a stern necessity. They sit in the heart, as it were, of a
foreign republic: they have their residence in a city whose constitution
has emanated neither from the charter of their king nor from their
legislative power. There they are surrounded by an army not raised
either by the authority of their crown or by their command, and which,
if they should order to dissolve itself, would instantly dissolve them.
There they sit, after a gang of assassins had driven away some hundreds
of the members; whilst those who held the same moderate principles, with
more patience or better hope, continued every day exposed to outrageous
insults and murderous threats. There a majority, sometimes real,
sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as
royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most
licentious and giddy coffee-houses. It is notorious that all their
measures are decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt, that,
under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-po