I beg your pardon, Sir, for giving you this long trouble; but I could not help venting myself, when shocked to find such renegade conduct in a Parliament that I was rejoiced had been restored.  Poor human kind! is it always to breed serpents from its own bowels?  In one country, it chooses its representatives, and they sell it and themselves—­in others, it exalts despots—­in another, it resists the despot when he consults the good of his people!  Can we -wonder mankind is wretched, when men are such beings?  Parliaments run wild with loyalty, when America is to be enslaved or butchered.  They rebel, when their country is to be set free!  I am not surprised at the idea of the devil being always at our elbows.  They who invented him, no doubt could not conceive how men could be so atrocious to one another, without the intervention of a fiend.  Don’t you think, if he had never been heard of before, that he would have been invented on the late partition of Poland!  Adieu, dear Sir.  Yours most sincerely.

(247) An English physician long settled at Paris, no less esteemed for his professional knowledge, than for his kind attention to the poor who applied to him for medical assistance.

(248) The first lit de justice held by Louis XVI.

(249) Messieurs de Malesherbes and Turgot.  When the intrigues which had been set on foot to overthrow the administration of Turgot had accomplished that object, an event which took place shortly after the date of this letter Louis XVI requested Malesherbes to remain in office; but when he refused to do so, seeing that his friend Turgot had been dismissed, Louis conscious of the increased anxieties in which he should be involved, exclaimed, with a sigh, “Que vous `etes heureux! que ne Puis-je aussi quitter ma place."-E.

(250) Monsieur de Seguier.

Letter 107 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.  April 16, 1776. (page 153)

You will be concerned, my good Sir, for what I have this minute heard from his nephew, that poor Mr. Granger was seized at the communion table on Sunday With an apoplexy, and died yesterday morning at five.  I have answered the letter with a word of advice about his manuscripts, that they may not fall into the hands of booksellers.  He had been told by idle people so many gossiping stories, that it would hurt him and living persons, to be printed; for as he Was incapable of 1, if all his collections were telling an untruth himself, he suspected nobody else—­too great goodness in a biographer.

P. S. The whole world is occupied with the Duchess of Kingston’s trial.(251) I don’t tell you a word of it; for you will not care about it these two hundred years.