l it comes into the currency of a proverb,--_To innovate is
not to reform_. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they
refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all,
_unchanged_. The consequences are _before_ us,--not in remote history,
not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They
shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the
growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they
stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our
business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are
saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is
rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful
innovation. The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and
Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally "all
monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their
eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboring
state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what
divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of
prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse
down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or
unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.[15]

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete innovation, or,
as some friends of his will call it, _reform_, in the whole body of its
solidity and compound mass, at which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven
glows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every
reflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought-sick, without
a thorough abhorrence of everything they say and everything they do, I
am amazed at the morbid strength or the natural infirmity of his mind.

It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced my
plan of reform. Without troubling myself with the exactness of the
logical diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite. It
was to prevent that evil, that I proposed the measures which his Grace
is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to my
recollection. I had (what I hope that noble Duke will remember in all
his operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform. I had
a people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claim
half the credit f