uished Spain by
destroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of
France in the accession of the forces of its great rival. In Italy the
same family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were
equally visible. What cure for the radical weakness of the French
monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature and
fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give
life or vigor or consistency, but in a republic? Out the word came: and
it never went back.

Whether they reasoned right or wrong, or that there was some mixture of
right and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure that in this manner they
felt and reasoned. The different effects of a great military and
ambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description were
constantly in their mouths. The principle was ready to operate, when
opportunities should offer, which few of them, indeed, foresaw in the
extent in which they were afterwards presented; but these opportunities,
in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for.

When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria and
France was deplored as a national, calamity; because it united France in
friendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope any
Continental aggrandizement. When the first partition of Poland was made,
in which France had no share, and which had farther aggrandized every
one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in
a perfect frenzy of rage and indignation: not that they were hurt at the
shocking and uncolored violence and injustice of that partition, but at
the debility, improvidence, and want of activity in their government, in
not preventing it as a means of aggrandizement to their rivals, or in
not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their
share of advantage from that robbery.

In that or nearly in that state of things and of opinions came the
Austrian match, which promised to draw the knot, as afterwards in effect
it did, still more closely between the old rival houses. This added
exceedingly to their hatred and contempt of their monarchy. It was for
this reason that the late glorious queen, who on all accounts was formed
to produce general love and admiration, and whose life was as mild and
beneficent as her death was beyond example great and heroic, became so
very soon and so very much the object of an implacable rancor, never to
be ex