insurrection against him.  If he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do not suspect he will) his ingratitude to the crown for its creation of his family, others will plead their right and duty to pay him in kind.  They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax.  His deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber of his evidence-room, and burnt to the tune of Ca, ira in the courts of Bedford (then Equality) House.

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace’s hostile reproaches to me with a friendly admonition to himself?  Can I be blamed for pointing out to him in what manner he is like to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philosophers of France should proselytize any considerable part of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should conquer that government to which his Grace does not seem to me to give all the support his own security demands?  Surely it is proper that he, and that others like him, should know the true genius of this sect,—­what their opinions are,—­what they have done, and to whom,—­and what (if a prognostic is to be formed from the dispositions and actions of men) it is certain they will do hereafter.  He ought to know that they have sworn assistance, the only engagement they ever will keep, to all in this country who bear a resemblance to themselves, and who think, as such, that the whole duty of man consists in destruction.  They are a misallied and disparaged branch of the House of Nimrod.  They are the Duke of Bedford’s natural hunters; and he is their natural game.  Because he is not very profoundly reflecting, he sleeps in profound security:  they, on the contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and, though far removed from any knowledge which makes men estimable or useful, in all the instruments and resources of evil their leaders are not meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished.  In the French Revolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation to meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous.  Never before this time was a set of literary men converted into a gang of robbers and assassins; never before did a den of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers.

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despicable enemies.  But if they are formidable as foes, as friends they are dreadful indeed.  The men of property in France, confiding in a force which seemed to be irresistible because it had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflict with their enemies at their own weapons.  They were found in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, the cavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of an handful of bearded men, whom they did not know to exist in Nature.  This is a comparison that some, I think, have made; and it is just.  In France they had their enemies within their houses.