In short, Sir, I think this resistance of the Parliament to the adorable reformation planned by Messrs. de Turgot and Malesherbes[1] is more phlegmatically scandalous than the wildest tyranny of despotism.  I forget what the nation was that refused liberty when it was offered.  This opposition to so noble a work is worse.  A whole people may refuse its own happiness; but these profligate magistrates resist happiness for others, for millions, for posterity!—­Nay, do they not half vindicate Maupeou, who crushed them?  And you, dear Sir, will you now chide my apostasy?  Have I not cleared myself to your eyes?  I do not see a shadow of sound logic in all Monsieur Seguier’s speeches, but in his proposing that the soldiers should work on the roads, and that passengers should contribute to their fabric; though, as France is not so luxuriously mad as England, I do not believe passengers could support the expense of their roads.  That argument, therefore, is like another that the Avocat proposes to the King, and which, he modestly owns, he believes would be impracticable.

[Footnote 1:  Malesherbes was the Chancellor, and in 1792 he was accepted by Louis XVI. as his counsel on his trial—­a duty which he performed with an ability which drew on him the implacable resentment of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and which led to his execution in 1794.]

I beg your pardon, Sir, for giving you this long trouble; but I could not help venting myself, when shocked to find such renegade conduct in a Parliament that I was rejoiced had been restored.  Poor human kind! is it always to breed serpents from its own bowels?  In one country, it chooses its representatives, and they sell it and themselves; in others, it exalts despots; in another, it resists the despot when he consults the good of his people!  Can we wonder mankind is wretched, when men are such beings?  Parliaments run wild with loyalty, when America is to be enslaved or butchered.  They rebel, when their country is to be set free!  I am not surprised at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows.  They who invented him, no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend.  Don’t you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of Poland!  Adieu, dear Sir.  Yours most sincerely.

HIS DECORATIONS AT “STRAWBERRY”—­HIS ESTIMATE OF HIMSELF, AND HIS ADMIRATION OF CONWAY.

TO THE HON.  H.S.  CONWAY.

STRAWBERRY HILL, June 20, 1776.

I was very glad to receive your letter, not only because always most glad to hear of you, but because I wished to write to you, and had absolutely nothing to say till I had something to answer.  I have lain but two nights in town since I saw you; have been, else, constantly here, very much employed, though doing, hearing, knowing exactly nothing.  I have had a Gothic architect [Mr. Essex] from Cambridge to design