than formerly it had been.  As to Prussia, a merely military power, they observed that one war had enriched her with as considerable a conquest as France had acquired in centuries.  Russia had broken the Turkish power, by which Austria might be, as formerly she had been, balanced in favor of France.  They felt it with pain, that the two Northern powers of Sweden and Denmark were in general under the sway of Russia,—­or that, at best, France kept up a very doubtful conflict, with many fluctuations of fortune, and at an enormous expense, in Sweden.  In Holland the French party seemed, if not extinguished, at least utterly obscured, and kept under by a Stadtholder, leaning for support sometimes on Great Britain, sometimes on Prussia, sometimes on both, never on France.  Even the spreading of the Bourbon family had become merely a family accommodation, and had little effect oh the national politics.  This alliance, they said, extinguished Spain by destroying all its energy, without adding anything to the real power of France in the accession of the forces of its great rival.  In Italy the same family accommodation, the same national insignificance, were equally visible.  What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature and fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give life or vigor or consistency, but in a republic?  Out the word came:  and it never went back.

Whether they reasoned right or wrong, or that there was some mixture of right and wrong in their reasoning, I am sure that in this manner they felt and reasoned.  The different effects of a great military and ambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description were constantly in their mouths.  The principle was ready to operate, when opportunities should offer, which few of them, indeed, foresaw in the extent in which they were afterwards presented; but these opportunities, in some degree or other, they all ardently wished for.

When I was in Paris in 1773, the treaty of 1756 between Austria and France was deplored as a national, calamity; because it united France in friendship with a power at whose expense alone they could hope any Continental aggrandizement.  When the first partition of Poland was made, in which France had no share, and which had farther aggrandized every one of the three powers of which they were most jealous, I found them in a perfect frenzy of rage and indignation:  not that they were hurt at the shocking and uncolored violence and injustice of that partition, but at the debility, improvidence, and want of activity in their government, in not preventing it as a means of aggrandizement to their rivals, or in not contriving, by exchanges of some kind or other, to obtain their share of advantage from that robbery.