As, notwithstanding the endeavours of our Government, we are more fond of foreign prints, and have more confidence in them than in our own, official presses have lately been established at Antwerp, at Cologne, and at Mentz, where the ‘Gazette de Leyden’, ‘Hamburg Correspondenten’, and ‘Journal de Frankfort’ are reprinted; some articles left out, and others inserted in their room.  It was intended to reprint also the ’Courier de Londres’, but our types, and particularly, our paper, would detect the fraud.  I have read one of our own Journal de Frankfort, in which were extracts from this French paper, printed in your country, which I strongly suspect are of our own manufacture.  I am told that several new books, written by foreigners, in praise of our present brilliant Government, are now in the presses of those our frontier towns, and will soon be laid before the public as foreign productions.

A clerk of a banking-house had lately the imprudence to mention, during his dinner at the restaurateur’s of ‘Cadran Vert’, on the Boulevards, some doubt of the veracity of an official article in the ‘Moniteur’.  As he left the house he was arrested, carried before Fouche, accused of being an English agent, and before supper-time he was on the road to Rochefort on his way to Cayenne.  As soon as the banker Tournon was informed of this expeditious justice, as it is called here, he waited on Fouche, who threatened even to transport him if he dared to interfere with the transactions of the police.  This banker was himself seized in the spring of last year by a police agent and some gendarmes, and carried into exile forty leagues from this capital, where he remained six. months, until a pecuniary douceur procured him a recall.  His crime was having inquired after General Moreau when in the Temple, and of having left his card there.

LETTER XVI.

Paris, September, 1805.

My lord:—­The Prince Borghese has lately been appointed a captain of the Imperial Guard of his Imperial brother-in-law, Napoleon the First, and is now in Germany, making his first campaign.  A descendant of a wealthy and ancient Roman family, but born with a weak understanding, he was easily deluded into the ranks of the revolutionists of his own country, by a Parisian Abbe, his instructor and governor, and gallant of the Princesse Borghese, his mother.  He was the first secretary of the first Jacobin club established at Rome, in the spring of 1798; and in December of the same year, when the Neapolitan troops invaded the Ecclesiastical States, he, with his present brother-in-law, another hopeful Roman Prince, Santa Cruce, headed the Roman sans-culottes in their retreat.  To show his love of equality, he had previously served as a common man in a company of which the captain was a fellow that sold cats’ meat and tripe in the streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother’s kitchen.  Since