ed from intercourse, was indulging
in these cheering reflections, he might possibly have had the further
consolation of learning (by means of the insolent exultation of his
guards) that there was an English ambassador at Paris; he might have had
the proud comfort of hearing that this ambassador had the honor of
passing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of a
Regicide pettifogger, and that in the evening he relaxed in the
amusements of the opera, and in the spectacle of an audience totally
new,--an audience in which he had the pleasure of seeing about him not a
single face that he could formerly have known in Paris, but, in the
place of that company, one indeed more than equal to it in display of
gayety, splendor, and luxury,--a set of abandoned wretches, squandering
in insolent riot the spoils of their bleeding country: a subject of
profound reflection both to the prisoner and to the ambassador.

Whether all the matter upon which I have grounded my opinion of this
last party be fully authenticated or not must be left to those who have
had the opportunity of a nearer view of its conduct, and who have been
more attentive in their perusal of the writings which have appeared in
its favor. But for my part, I have never heard the gross facts on which
I ground my idea of their marked partiality to the reigning tyranny in
France in any part denied. I am not surprised at all this. Opinions, as
they sometimes follow, so they frequently guide and direct the
affections; and men may become more attached to the country of their
principles than to the country of their birth. What I have stated here
is only to mark the spirit which seems to me, though in somewhat
different ways, to actuate our great party-leaders, and to trace this
first pattern of a negotiation to its true source.

Such is the present state of our public councils. Well might I be
ashamed of what seems to be a censure of two great factions, with the
two most eloquent men which this country ever saw at the head of them,
if I had found that either of them could support their conduct by any
example in the history of their country. I should very much prefer their
judgment to my own, if I were not obliged, by an infinitely
overbalancing weight of authority, to prefer the collected wisdom, of
ages to the abilities of any two men living.--I return to the
Declaration, with which the history of the abortion of a treaty with the
Regicides is closed.

After su