* It was not uncommon for a mandate of arrest to direct the taking
     “Citizen Such-a-one, and all persons found in his house.”

A grand-daughter of the celebrated De Witt, who resided thirty leagues from hence, was arrested in the night, put in an open cart, without any regard to her age, her sex, or her infirmities, though the rain fell in torrents; and, after sleeping on straw in different prisons on the road, was deposited here.  As a Fleming, the law places her in the same predicament with a very pretty young woman who has lived some months at Amiens; but Dumont, who is at once the maker, the interpreter, and executor of the laws, has exempted the latter from the general proscription, and appears daily with her in public; whereas poor Madame De Witt is excluded from such indulgence, being above seventy years old—­ and is accused, moreover, of having been most exemplarily charitable, and, what is still worse, very religious.—­I have given these instances not as any way remarkable, and only that you may form some idea of the pretexts which have served to cover France with prisons, and to conduct so many of its inhabitants to the scaffold.

It is impossible to reflect on a country in such a situation, without abhorring the authors of it, and dreading the propagation of their doctrines.  I hope they neither have imitators nor admirers in England; yet the convention in their debates, the Jacobins, and all the French newspapers, seem so sanguine in their expectation, and so positive in their assertions of an English revolution, that I occasionally, and in spite of myself, feel a vague but serious solicitude, which I should not have supposed the apprehension of any political evil could inspre.  I know the good sense and information of my countrymen offer a powerful resource against the love of change and metaphysical subtilties; but, it is certain, the French government have much depended on the spirit of party, and the zeal of their propagandistes.  They talk of a British convention, of a conventional army, and, in short, all France seem prepared to see their neighbours involved in the same disastrous system with themselves.  The people are not a little supported in this error by the extracts that are given them from your orators in the House of Commons, which teem with nothing but complaints against the oppression of their own country, and enthusiastic admiration of French liberty.  We read and wonder—­collate the Bill of Rights with the Code Revolutionnaire, and again fear what we cannot give credit to.

Since the reports I allude to have gained ground, I have been forcibly stricken by a difference in the character of the two nations.  At the prospect of a revolution, all the French who could conveniently leave the country, fled; and those that remained (except adventurers and the banditti that were their accomplices) studiously avoided taking any part.  But so little are our countrymen affected with this selfish apathy,