I envy your Strawberry tide, and need not say how much I wish I was there to receive you.  Methinks, I should be as glad of a little grass, as a seaman after a long voyage.  Yet English gardening gains ground here prodigiously—­not much at a time, indeed—­I have literally seen one, that is exactly like a tailor’s paper of patterns.  There is a Monsieur Boutin, who has tacked a piece of what he calls an English garden to a set of stone terraces, with steps of turf.  There are three or four very high hills, almost as high as, and exactly in the shape of, a tansy pudding.  You squeeze between these and a river, that is conducted at obtuse angles in a stone channel, and supplied by a pump; and when walnuts come in I suppose it will be navigable.  In a corner enclosed by a chalk wall are the samples I mentioned; there is a strip of grass, another of corn, and a third en friche, exactly in the order of beds in a nursery.  They have translated Mr. Whately’s book,[1] and the Lord knows what barbarism is going to be laid at our door.  This new Anglomanie will literally be mad English.

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Whately, the Secretary to the Treasury, had published an essay on Gardening.]

New arrets, new retrenchments, new misery, stalk forth every day.  The Parliament of Besancon is dissolved; so are the grenadiers de France.  The King’s tradesmen are all bankrupt; no pensions are paid, and everybody is reforming their suppers and equipages.  Despotism makes converts faster than ever Christianity did.  Louis Quinze is the true rex Christianissimus, and has ten times more success than his dragooning great-grandfather.  Adieu, my dear Sir!  Yours most faithfully.

Friday 9th.

...  It is very singular that I have not half the satisfaction in going into churches and convents that I used to have.  The consciousness that the vision is dispelled, the want of fervour so obvious in the religious, the solitude that one knows proceeds from contempt, not from contemplation, make those places appear like abandoned theatres destined to destruction.  The monks trot about as if they had not long to stay there; and what used to be holy gloom is now but dirt and darkness.  There is no more deception than in a tragedy acted by candle-snuffers.  One is sorry to think that an empire of common sense would not be very picturesque; for, as there is nothing but taste that can compensate for the imagination of madness, I doubt there will never be twenty men of taste for twenty thousand madmen.  The world will no more see Athens, Rome, and the Medici again, than a succession of five good emperors, like Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonines.

August 13.