—­A man who solicits to be the executioner of his own brother ycleps himself Brutus, and a zealous preacher of the right of universal pillage cites the Agrarian law, and signs himself Lycurgus.  Some of the Deputies have discovered, that the French mode of dressing is not characteristic of republicanism, and a project is now in agitation to drill the whole country into the use of a Roman costume.—­You may perhaps suspect, that the Romans had at least more bodily sedateness than their imitators, and that the shrugs, jerks, and carracoles of a French petit maitre, however republicanized, will not assort with the grave drapery of the toga.  But on your side of the water you have a habit of reasoning and deliberating —­here they have that of talking and obeying.

Our whole community are in despair to-day.  Dumont has been here, and those who accosted him, as well as those who only ventured to interpret his looks, all agree in their reports that he is in a “bad humour.”—­The brightest eyes in France have supplicated in vain—­not one grace of any sort has been accorded—­and we begin to cherish even our present situation, in the apprehension that it may become worse.—­Alas! you know not of what evil portent is the “bad humour” of a Representant.  We are half of us now, like the Persian Lord, feeling if our heads are still on our shoulders.—­I could add much to the conclusion of one of my last letters.  Surely this incessant solicitude for mere existence debilitates the mind, and impairs even its passive faculty of suffering.  We intrigue for the favour of the keeper, smile complacently at the gross pleasantries of a Jacobin, and tremble at the frown of a Dumont.—­I am ashamed to be the chronicler of such humiliation:  but, “tush, Hal; men, mortal men!” I can add no better apology, and quit you to moralize on it.—­Yours.

[No date given.]

Were I a mere spectator, without fear for myself or compassion for others, the situation of this country would be sufficiently amusing.  The effects produced (many perhaps unavoidably) by a state of revolution—­the strange remedies devised to obviate them—­the alternate neglect and severity with which the laws are executed—­the mixture of want and profusion that distinguish the lower classes of people—­and the distress and humiliation of the higher; all offer scenes so new and unaccountable, as not to be imagined by a person who has lived only under a regular government, where the limits of authority are defined, the necessaries of life plentiful, and the people rational and subordinate.  The consequences of a general spirit of monopoly, which I formerly described, have lately been so oppressive, that the Convention thought it necessary to interfere, and in so extraordinary a way, that I doubt if (as usual) “the distemper of their remedies” will not make us regret the original disease.  Almost every article, by having passed through a variety of hands, had become enormously dear; which, operating