Could he with patience bear that the children of that nobility who would have deluged their country and given it to the sea rather than submit to Louis the Fourteenth, who was then in his meridian glory, when his arms were conducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers, when his councils were directed by the Colberts and the Louvois, when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoignons and the D’Aguesseaus,—­that these should be given up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the Santerres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas, and Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and revolutionary judges, that from the rotten carcass of their own murdered country have poured out innumerable swarms of the lowest and at once the most destructive of the classes of animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laid waste the fairest part of the world?

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous patricians, that happy union of the noble and the burgher, who with signal prudence and integrity had long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protection?  Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favor of a robbing democracy founded on the spurious rights of man?

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with patience that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic.

Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau, who was himself given to England along with the blessings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with Revolutions of stability, with Revolutions which consolidated and married the liberties and the interests of the two nations forever,—­could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude to France?  Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of contumely, from the country which that family of deliverers had so often rescued from slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, which owes its liberty to his house?