Dear Sir,—­I thank you for the bundle of state-papers which I received yesterday.  I have travelled through the negotiation,—­and a sad, founderous road it is.  There is a sort of standing jest against my countrymen,—­that one of them on his journey having found a piece of pleasant road, he proposed to his companion to go over it again.  This proposal, with regard to the worthy traveller’s final destination, was certainly a blunder.  It was no blunder as to his immediate satisfaction; for the way was pleasant.  In the irksome journey of the Regicide negotiations it is otherwise:  our “paths are not paths of pleasantness, nor our ways the ways to peace.”  All our mistakes, (if such they are,) like those of our Hibernian traveller, are mistakes of repetition; and they will be full as far from bringing us to our place of rest as his well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn.  Yet I see we persevere.  Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore a new one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have been in motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance we resolve to measure back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track.  Backward and forward,—­oscillation, space,—­the travels of a postilion, miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage,—­we have been, and we are yet to be, jolted and rattled over the loose, misplaced stones and the treacherous hollows of this rough, ill-kept, broken-up, treacherous French causeway!

The Declaration which brings up the rear of the papers laid before Parliament contains a review and a reasoned summary of all our attempts and all our failures,—­a concise, but correct narrative of the painful steps taken to bring on the essay of a treaty at Paris,—­a clear exposure of all the rebuffs we received in the progress of that experiment,—­an honest confession of our departure from all the rules and all the principles of political negotiation, and of common prudence in the conduct of it,—­and to crown the whole, a fair account of the atrocious manner in which the Regicide enemies had broken up what had been so inauspiciously begun and so feebly carried on, by finally, and with all scorn, driving our suppliant ambassador out of the limits of their usurpation.

Even after all that I have lately seen, I was a little surprised at this exposure.  A minute display of hopes formed without foundation and of labors pursued without fruit is a thing not very flattering to self-estimation.  But truth has its rights, and it will assert them.  The Declaration, after doing all this with a mortifying candor, concludes the whole recapitulation with an engagement still more extraordinary than all the unusual matter it contains.  It says that “His Majesty, who had entered into the negotiation with good faith, who had suffered no impediment to prevent his prosecuting it with earnestness and sincerity, has now only to lament its abrupt termination, and to renew in the face of all Europe the solemn declaration, that, whenever his enemies shall be disposed to enter on the work of general pacification in a spirit of conciliation and equity, nothing shall be wanting on his part to contribute to the accomplishment of that great object.”