of virtue is captivating.—­ As far as they dare, the people are partial to them:  bending beneath the weight of a sanguinary and turbulent despotism, if they sigh not for freedom, they do for repose; and the harassed mind, bereft of its own energy, looks up with indolent hope for relief from a change of factions.  They forget that Danton is actuated by ambitious jealousy, that Camille Desmoulins is hacknied in the atrocities of the revolution, and that their partizans are adventurers, with neither honour nor morals.  Yet, after all, if they will destroy a few of the guillotines, open our bastilles, and give us at least the security of servitude, we shall be content to leave these retrospections to posterity, and be thankful that in this our day the wicked sometimes perceive it their interest to do good.

In this state of seclusion, when I remark to you the temper of the public at any important crisis, you are, perhaps, curious to know my sources of intelligence; but such details are unnecessary.  I might, indeed, write you a manuel des prisons, and, like Trenck or Latude, by a vain display of ingenuity, deprive some future victim of a resource.  It is enough, that Providence itself seems to aid our invention, when its object is to elude tyranny; besides that a constant accession of prisoners from all parts, who are too numerous to be kept separate, necessarily circulates among us whatever passes in the world.

The Convention has lately made a sort of pas retrogade [Retrogade movement.] in the doctrine of holy equality, by decreeing, that every officer who has a command shall be able to read and write, though it cannot be denied that their reasons for this lese democratie are of some weight.  All gentlemen, or, as it is expressed here, noblesse, have been recalled from the army, and replaced by officers chosen by the soldiers themselves, [Under the rank of field-officers.] whose affections are often conciliated by qualities not essentially military, though sometimes professional.  A buffoon, or a pot-companion, is, of course, often more popular than a disciplinarian; and the brightest talents lose their influence when put in competition with a head that can bear a greater number of bottles.*

* Hence it happened, that a post was sometimes confided to one who could not read the parole and countersign; expeditions failed, because commanding officers mistook on the map a river for a road, or woods for mountains; and the most secret orders were betrayed through the inability of those to whom they were entrusted to read them.

—­Yet this reading and writing are a sort of aristocratic distinctions, and not among the primeval rights of man; so that it is possible your English patriots will not approve of any regulations founded on them.  But this is not the only point on which there is an apparent discordance between them and their friends here—­the severity of Messrs. Muir and Palmer’s sentence is pathetically lamented