an family, and driven the only
profitable commerce of Tuscany from its only port: it is not this
sovereign, a far more able statesman than any of the Medici in whose
chair he sits, it is not the philosopher Carletti, more ably speculative
than Galileo, more profoundly politic than Machiavel, that call upon us
so loudly to give the same happy proofs of the same good faith to the
republic always the same, always one and indivisible.

It is not Venice, whose principal cities the enemy has appropriated to
himself, and scornfully desired the state to indemnify itself from the
Emperor, that we wish to convince of the pride and the despotism of an
enemy who loads us with his scoffs and buffets.

It is not for his Holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of our
own weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. That
prince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. The
artists of the French Revolution had given their very first essays and
sketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a far
more cruel "murdering piece" than had over entered into the imagination
of painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing arms
the possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by all
the ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who during that period have
reigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our late
negotiation ceded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, lately
amongst the most flourishing (perhaps the most flourishing for their
extent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove the
sincerity of our resolution to make peace with the Republic of
Barbarism? That venerable potentate and pontiff is sunk deep into the
vale of years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; his
dominions are more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years,
defended as they were, not by force, but by reverence: yet, in all these
straits, we see him display, amidst the recent ruins and the new
defacements of his plundered capital, along with the mild and decorated
piety of the modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome.
Does he, who, though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused to
receive pecuniary compensations for the protection he owed to his people
of Avignon, Carpentras, and the Venaissin,--does he want proofs of our
good disposition to deliver over that people, without any security for
them, or any compensation