I am told that the active sympathies of this party have been chiefly, if not wholly, attracted to the sufferings of the patriarchal rebels who were amongst the promulgators of the maxims of the French Revolution, and who have suffered from their apt and forward scholars some part of the evils which they had themselves so liberally distributed to all the other parts of the community.  Some of these men, flying from the knives which they had sharpened against their country and its laws, rebelling against the very powers they had set over themselves by their rebellion against their sovereign, given up by those very armies to whose faithful attachment they trusted for their safety and support, after they had completely debauched all military fidelity in its source,—­some of these men, I say, had fallen into the hands of the head of that family the most illustrious person of which they had three times cruelly imprisoned, and delivered in that state of captivity to those hands from which they were able to relieve neither her, nor their own nearest and most venerable kindred.  One of these men, connected with this country by no circumstance of birth,—­not related to any distinguished families here,—­recommended by no service,—­endeared to this nation by no act or even expression of kindness,—­comprehended in no league or common cause,—­embraced by no laws of public hospitality,—­this man was the only one to be found in Europe, in whose favor the British nation, passing judgment without hearing on its almost only ally, was to force (and that not by soothing interposition, but with every reproach for inhumanity, cruelty, and breach of the laws of war) from prison.  We were to release him from that prison out of which, in abuse of the lenity of government amidst its rigor, and in violation of at least an understood parole, he had attempted an escape,—­an escape excusable, if you will, but naturally productive of strict and vigilant confinement.  The earnestness of gentlemen to free this person was the more extraordinary because there was full as little in him to raise admiration, from any eminent qualities he possessed, as there was to excite an interest, from any that were amiable.  A person not only of no real civil or literary talents, but of no specious appearance of either,—­and in his military profession not marked as a leader in any one act of able or successful enterprise, unless his leading on (or his following) the allied army of Amazonian and male cannibal Parisians to Versailles, on the famous 6th of October, 1789, is to make his glory.  Any otter exploit of his, as a general, I never heard of.  But the triumph of general fraternity was but the more signalized by the total want of particular claims in that case,—­and by postponing all such claims in a case where they really existed, where they stood embossed, and in a manner forced themselves on the view of common, shortsighted benevolence.  Whilst, for its improvement, the humanity of these gentlemen was thus on its travels, and had got as far off as Olmuetz, they never thought of a place and a person much nearer to them, or of moving an instruction to Lord Malmesbury in favor of their own suffering countryman, Sir Sydney Smith.