The conversation of the prison has been much engaged by the fate of an English gentleman, who lately destroyed himself in a Maison d’Arret at Amiens.  His confinement had at first deeply affected his spirits, and his melancholy increasing at the prospect of a long detention, terminated in deranging his mind, and occasioned this last act of despair.—­I never hear of suicide without a compassion mingled with terror, for, perhaps, simple pity is too light an emotion to be excited by an event which reminds us, that we are susceptible of a degree of misery too great to be borne—­too strong for the efforts of instinct, reflection, and religion.  —­I could moralize on the necessity of habitual patience, and the benefit of preparing the mind for great evils by a philosophic endurance of little ones; but I am at the Bicetre—­the winds whistle round me—­I am beset by petty distresses, and we do not expatiate to advantage on endurance while we have any thing to endure.—­Seneca’s contempt for the things of this world was doubtless suggested in the palace of Nero.  He would not have treated the subject so well in disgrace and poverty.  Do not suppose I am affecting to be pleasant, for I write in the sober sadness of conviction, that human fortitude is often no better than a pompous theory, founded on self-love and self-deception.

I was surprized at meeting among our fellow-prisoners a number of Dutch officers.  I find they had been some time in the town on their parole, and were sent here by Dumont, for refusing to permit their men to work on the fortifications.—­The French government and its agents despise the laws of war hitherto observed; they consider them as a sort of aristocratie militaire, and they pretend, on the same principle, to be enfranchised from the law of nations.—­An orator of the convention lately boasted, that he felt himself infinitely superior to the prejudices of Grotius, Puffendorff, and Vatel, which he calls “l’aristocratie diplomatique.”—­Such sublime spirits think, because they differ from the rest of mankind, that they surpass them.  Like Icarus, they attempt to fly, and are perpetually struggling in the mire.—­Plain common sense has long pointed out a rule of action, from which all deviation is fatal, both to nations and individuals.  England, as well as France, has furnished its examples; and the annals of genius in all countries are replete with the miseries of eccentricity.—­Whoever has followed the course of the French revolution, will, I believe, be convinced, that the greatest evils attending on it have been occasioned by an affected contempt for received maxims.  A common banditti, acting only from the desire of plunder, or men, erring only through ignorance, could not have subjugated an whole people, had they not been assisted by narrow-minded philosophers, who were eager to sacrifice their country to the vanity of making experiments, and were little solicitous whether their systems were good or bad, provided they