The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven or eight years’ standing.  The institution of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far of a laudable nature:  it was intended for the circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men.  Whether the books so charitably circulated were ever as charitably read is more than I know.  Possibly several of them have been exported to France, and, like goods not in request here, may with you have found a market.  I have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence.  What improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never heard a man of common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society; nor have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of any serious consequence.

Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that I do of this poor charitable club.  As a nation, you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their fellows in the Constitutional were in equity entitled to some share.  Since you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object of your national thanks and praises, you will think me excusable in making its late conduct the subject of my observations.  The National Assembly of France has given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of the National Assembly.  Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body.  This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity and distinction to undiscerned merit.  Until very lately I do not recollect to have heard of this club.  I am quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my thoughts,—­nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set.  I find, upon inquiry, that, on the anniversary of the Revolution in 1688, a club of Dissenters, but of what denomination I know not, have long had the custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches, and that afterwards they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern.  But I never heard that any public measure or political system, much less that the merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible surprise, I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory address, giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National Assembly in France.