l’etre Supreme!"—­(I entreat that I may not be suspected of levity when I translate this; in English it would be “God Almighty for ever!  The Supreme Being for ever!”)

—­At Avignon the public understanding seems to have been equally enlightened, if we may judge from the report of a Paris missionary, who writes in these terms:—­“The celebration in honour of the Supreme Being was performed here yesterday with all possible pomp:  all our country-folks were present, and unspeakably content that there was still a God—­What a fine decree (cried they all) is this!”

My last letter was a record of the most odious barbarities—­to-day I am describing a festival.  At one period I have to remark the destruction of the saints—­at another the adoration of Marat.  One half of the newspaper is filled with a list of names of the guillotined, and the other with that of places of amusement; and every thing now more than ever marks that detestable association of cruelty and levity, of impiety and absurdity, which has uniformly characterized the French revolution.  It is become a crime to feel, and a mode to affect a brutality incapable of feeling—­the persecution of Christianity has made atheism a boast, and the danger of respecting traditional virtues has hurried the weak and timid into the apotheosis of the most abominable vices.  Conscious that they are no longer animated by enthusiasm,* the Parisians hope to imitate it by savage fury or ferocious mirth—­their patriotism is signalized only by their zeal to destroy, and their attachment to their government only by applauding its cruelties.—­If Robespierre, St. Just, Collot d’Herbois, and the Convention as their instruments, desolate and massacre half France, we may lament, but we can scarcely wonder at it.  How should a set of base and needy adventurers refrain from an abuse of power more unlimited than that of the most despotic monarch; or how distinguish the general abhorrence, amid addresses of adulation, which Louis the Fourteenth would have blushed to appropriate?*

* Louis the Fourteenth, aguerri (steeled) as he was by sixty years of adulation and prosperity, had yet modesty sufficient to reject a “dose of incense which he thought too strong.” (See D’Alembert’s Apology for Clermont Tonnerre.) Republicanism, it should seem, has not diminished the national compliasance for men in power, thought it has lessened the modesty of those who exercise it.—­If Louis the Fourteenth repressed the zeal of the academicians, the Convention publish, without scruple, addresses more hyperbolical than the praises that monarch refused.—­Letters are addressed to Robespierre under the appellation of the Messiah, sent by the almighty for the reform of all things!  He is the apostle of one, and the tutelar deity of another.  He is by turns the representative of the virtues individually, and a compendium of them altogether:  and this monster, whose features are the counterpart of