was a low-minded absurdity, fit only for those detestable “fools aspiring to be knaves” who began to forge in 1789 the false money of the French Constitution; that it is one fatal objection to all new fancied and new fabricated republics, (among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it,) that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that cannot be made.  It may be improved, it may be corrected, it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but the thing itself is matter of inveterate opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive institution.  He felt that this nobility, in fact, does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for them.

I knew the man I speak of:  and if we can divine the future out of what we collect from the past, no person living would look with more scorn and horror on the impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate attainder passed on all their posterity, by the Orleans, and the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de Noailles, and the false Perigords, and the long et cetera of the perfidious sans-culottes of the court, who, like demoniacs possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, abdicated their dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most sacred of all trusts, and, by breaking to pieces a great link of society and all the cramps and holdings of the state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their country.  For the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves he would have had no pity.  Compassion for the myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room in his, or in any well-formed mind, for any such sensation.  We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, more than all the canals, meres, and inundations of their country, protected their independence, to behold them bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race,—­in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in dignity or could aspire to a better place than that of hangmen to the tyrants to whose sceptred pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that surmounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance of France?