have had the proud comfort of hearing that this ambassador had the honor of passing his mornings in respectful attendance at the office of a Regicide pettifogger, and that in the evening he relaxed in the amusements of the opera, and in the spectacle of an audience totally new,—­an audience in which he had the pleasure of seeing about him not a single face that he could formerly have known in Paris, but, in the place of that company, one indeed more than equal to it in display of gayety, splendor, and luxury,—­a set of abandoned wretches, squandering in insolent riot the spoils of their bleeding country:  a subject of profound reflection both to the prisoner and to the ambassador.

Whether all the matter upon which I have grounded my opinion of this last party be fully authenticated or not must be left to those who have had the opportunity of a nearer view of its conduct, and who have been more attentive in their perusal of the writings which have appeared in its favor.  But for my part, I have never heard the gross facts on which I ground my idea of their marked partiality to the reigning tyranny in France in any part denied.  I am not surprised at all this.  Opinions, as they sometimes follow, so they frequently guide and direct the affections; and men may become more attached to the country of their principles than to the country of their birth.  What I have stated here is only to mark the spirit which seems to me, though in somewhat different ways, to actuate our great party-leaders, and to trace this first pattern of a negotiation to its true source.

Such is the present state of our public councils.  Well might I be ashamed of what seems to be a censure of two great factions, with the two most eloquent men which this country ever saw at the head of them, if I had found that either of them could support their conduct by any example in the history of their country.  I should very much prefer their judgment to my own, if I were not obliged, by an infinitely overbalancing weight of authority, to prefer the collected wisdom, of ages to the abilities of any two men living.—­I return to the Declaration, with which the history of the abortion of a treaty with the Regicides is closed.

After such an elaborate display had been made of the injustice and insolence of an enemy who seems to have been irritated by every one of the means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage of intemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard in which we in vain attempted to plunge our sword should have been thrown away with scorn.  It would have been natural, that, rising in the fulness of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice, rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured out all the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so long restrained.  It might have been expected, that, emulous of the glory of the youthful hero[37] in alliance with him, touched by the example of what one man well