Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction?  Are they apprehensive, that, if an atom of me remains, the sect has something to fear?  Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca’s, my skin might be made into a drum, to animate Europe to eternal battle against a tyranny that threatens to overwhelm all Europe and all the human race?

My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation.  Before this of France, the annals of all time have not furnished an instance of a complete revolution.  That revolution seems to have extended even to the constitution of the mind of man.  It has this of wonderful in it, that it resembles what Lord Verulam says of the operations of Nature:  It was perfect, not only in its elements and principles, but in all its members and its organs, from the very beginning.  The moral scheme of France furnishes the only pattern ever known which they who admire will instantly resemble.  It is, indeed, an inexhaustible repertory of one kind of examples.  In my wretched condition, though hardly to be classed with the living, I am not safe from them.  They have tigers to fall upon animated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon carcasses.  The national menagerie is collected by the first physiologists of the time; and it is defective in no description of savage nature.  They pursue even such as me into the obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary tribunals.  Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of the tomb, is sacred to them.  They have so determined a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the departed the sad immunities of the grave.  They are not wholly without an object.  Their turpitude purveys to their malice; and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the living.  If all revolutionists were not proof against all caution, I should recommend it to their consideration, that no persons were ever known in history, either sacred or profane, to vex the sepulchre, and by their sorceries to call up the prophetic dead, with any other event than the prediction of their own disastrous fate.—­“Leave me, oh, leave me to repose!”

In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his attack upon me and my mortuary pension:  He cannot readily comprehend the transaction he condemns.  What I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the production of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect of no solicitation.  The first suggestion of it never came from me, mediately or immediately, to his Majesty or any of his ministers.  It was long known that the instant my engagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of all calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity and sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat.  I had executed that design.  I was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurting any statesman or any party, when the ministers so generously and so nobly carried into effect the spontaneous bounty of the crown.  Both descriptions have acted as became them.  When