into the Regicide presence, and, with the relics of the smile which they had dressed up for the levee of their masters still flickering on their curled lips, presenting the faded remains of their courtly graces, to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, whilst he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine!  These ambassadors may easily return as good courtiers as they went; but can they ever return from that degrading residence loyal and faithful subjects, or with any true affection to their master, or true attachment to the constitution, religion, or laws of their country?  There is great danger that they, who enter smiling into this Trophonian cave, will come out of it sad and serious conspirators, and such will continue as long as they live.  They will become true conductors of contagion to every country which has had the misfortune to send them to the source of that electricity.  At best, they will become totally indifferent to good and evil, to one institution or another.  This species of indifference is but too generally distinguishable in those who have been much employed in foreign courts, but in the present case the evil must be aggravated without measure:  for they go from their country, not with the pride of the old character, but in a state of the lowest degradation; and what must happen in their place of residence can have no effect in raising them to the level of true dignity or of chaste self-estimation, either as men or as representatives of crowned heads.

Our early proceeding, which has produced these returns of affront, appeared to me totally new, without being adapted to the new circumstances of affairs.  I have called to my mind the speeches and messages in former times.  I find nothing like these.  You will look in the journals to find whether my memory fails me.  Before this time, never was a ground of peace laid, (as it were, in a Parliamentary record,) until it had been as good as concluded.  This was a wise homage paid to the discretion of the crown.  It was known how much a negotiation must suffer by having anything in the train towards it prematurely disclosed.  But when those Parliamentary declarations were made, not so much as a step had been taken towards a negotiation in any mode whatever.  The measure was an unpleasant and unseasonable discovery.

I conceive that another circumstance in that transaction has been as little authorized by any example, and that it is as little prudent in itself:  I mean the formal recognition of the French Republic.  Without entering, for the present, into a question on the good faith manifested in that measure, or on its general policy, I doubt, upon mere temporary considerations of prudence, whether it was perfectly advisable.  It is not within, the rules of dexterous conduct to make an acknowledgment of a contested title in your enemy before you are morally certain that your recognition