ction against the order he lives in, (God forbid he ever
should!) the merit of others will be to perform the duty of insurrection
against him. If he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do not
suspect he will) his ingratitude to the crown for its creation of his
family, others will plead their right and duty to pay him in kind. They
will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. His
deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of his
evidence-room, and burnt to the tune of _Ca, ira_ in the courts of
Bedford (then Equality) House.

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile reproaches to me
with a friendly admonition to himself? Can I be blamed for pointing out
to him in what manner he is like to be affected, if the sect of the
cannibal philosophers of France should proselytize any considerable part
of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should conquer
that government to which his Grace does not seem to me to give all the
support his own security demands? Surely it is proper that he, and that
others like him, should know the true genius of this sect,--what their
opinions are,--what they have done, and to whom,--and what (if a
prognostic is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of men) it
is certain they will do hereafter. He ought to know that they have sworn
assistance, the only engagement they ever will keep, to all in this
country who bear a resemblance to themselves, and who think, as such,
that _the whole duty of man_ consists in destruction. They are a
misallied and disparaged branch of the House of Nimrod. They are the
Duke of Bedford's natural hunters; and he is their natural game. Because
he is not very profoundly reflecting, he sleeps in profound security:
they, on the contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and,
though far removed from any knowledge which makes men estimable or
useful, in all the instruments and resources of evil their leaders are
not meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished. In the French
Revolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation to meet so
unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. Never before this time
was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and
assassins; never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the
garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, monstrous as it
seems, is not made for producing