ying sentiments of the same kind,
though the case was infinitely aggravated. Not the ambassador, but the
king himself, was libelled and insulted,--libelled, not by a creature of
the Directory, but by the Directory itself. At least, so Lord Malmesbury
understood it, and so he answered it in his note of the 12th November,
1796, in which he says,--"With regard to the _offensive and injurious_
insinuations which are contained in that paper, and which are only
calculated to throw new obstacles in the way of the accommodation which
the French government professes to desire, THE KING HAS DEEMED IT FAR
BENEATH HIS DIGNITY to permit an answer to be made to them on his part,
in any manner whatsoever."

I am of opinion, that, if his Majesty had kept aloof from that wash and
offscouring of everything that is low and barbarous in the world, it
might be well thought unworthy of his dignity to take notice of such
scurrilities: they must be considered as much the natural expression of
that kind of animal as it is the expression of the feelings of a dog to
bark. But when the king had been advised to recognize not only the
monstrous composition as a sovereign power, but, in conduct, to admit
something in it like a superiority,--when the bench of Regicide was made
at least coordinate with his throne, and raised upon a platform full as
elevated, this treatment could not be passed by under the appearance of
despising it. It would not, indeed, have been proper to keep up a war of
the same kind; but an immediate, manly, and decided resentment ought to
have been the consequence. We ought not to have waited for the
disgraceful dismissal of our ambassador. There are cases in which we may
pretend to sleep; but the wittol rule has some sense in it, _Non omnibus
dormio_. We might, however, have seemed ignorant of the affront; but
what was the fact? Did we dissemble or pass it by in silence? When
dignity is talked of, a language which I did not expect to hear in such
a transaction, I must say, what all the world must feel, that it was not
for the king's dignity to notice this insult and not to resent it. This
mode of proceeding is formed on new ideas of the correspondence between
sovereign powers.

This was far from the only ill effect of the policy of degradation. The
state of inferiority in which we were placed, in this vain attempt at
treaty, drove us headlong from error into error, and led us to wander
far away, not only from all the paths whic