They were even in the bosoms of many of them.  But they had not sagacity to discern their savage character.  They seemed tame, and even caressing.  They had nothing but douce humanite in their mouth.  They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on the greatest criminals.  The slightest severity of justice made their flesh creep.  The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed their repose.  Military glory was no more, with them, than a splendid infamy.  Hardly would they hear of self-defence, which they reduced within such bounds as to leave it no defence at all.  All this while they meditated the confiscations and massacres we have seen.  Had any one told these unfortunate noblemen and gentlemen how and by whom the grand fabric of the French monarchy under which they flourished would be subverted, they would not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have turned from him as what they call a mauvais plaisant.  Yet we have seen what has happened.  The persons who have suffered from the cannibal philosophy of France are so like the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace’s probably not speaking quite so good French could enable us to find out any difference.  A great many of them had as pompous titles as he, and were of full as illustrious a race; some few of them had fortunes as ample; several of them, without meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of honor, as he is; and to all this they had added the powerful outguard of a military profession, which, in its nature, renders men somewhat more cautious than those who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed possessions.  But security was their ruin.  They are dashed to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the wrecks.  If they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never could have happened.

I assure his Grace, that, if I state to him the designs of his enemies in a manner which may appear to him ludicrous and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not exactly happened, point by point, but twenty-four miles from our own shore.  I assure him that the Frenchified faction, more encouraged than others are warned by what has happened in France, look at him and his landed possessions as an object at once of curiosity and rapacity.  He is made for them in every part of their double character.  As robbers, to them he is a noble booty; as speculatists, he is a glorious subject for their experimental philosophy.  He affords matter for an extensive analysis in all the branches of their science, geometrical, physical, civil, and political.  These philosophers are fanatics:  independent of any interest, which, if it operated alone, would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such an headlong rage towards every desperate trial that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments.