Mirabeau is dead;(770) ay, miraculously; for it was of a putrid fever (that began in his heart).  Dr. Price is dying also.(771) That Mr. Berry, with so much good nature and good sense should be staggered, I do not wonder.  Nobody is more devoted to liberty than I am.  It is therefore that I abhor the National Assembly, whose outrageous violence has given, I fear, a lasting wound to the cause; for anarchy is despotism in the hands of thousands.  A lion attacks but when hungry or provoked; but who can live in a desert full of hyennas?—­nobody but Mr. Bruce; and we have only his word for it.  Here is started up another corsair; one Paine, from America, who has published an answer to Mr. Burke.(7722) His doctrines go to the extremity of levelling and his style is so coarse, that you would think he meant to degrade the language as much as the government:  here is one of his delicate paragraphs:—­“We do not want a king, or lords of the bedchamber, or lords of the kitchen,” etc.  This rhetoric, I suppose, was calculated for our poissardes.

(763) Miss Berry had fallen down a bank in the neighbourhood of Pisa, and received a severe cut on the nose.

(764) Sir Charles Hotham Thompson, married to Lady Dorothy Hobart, sister of John second Earl of Buckinghamshire.

(765) A daughter of Lady Cecilia Johnstone’s, married to a brother of Charles Anderson Pelham, Lord Garborough.

(766) A nickname, which had been given by the writer to a lady of the society.

(767)Afterwards married to Lord Henry Fitzgerald.

(768) Afterwards married to Sir James Murray.

(769) Lord Malden, afterwards Earl of Essex, was a first cousin of Miss Boyle.  This journey did not take place.

(770) Mirabeau died on the 2d of April, at the age of forty-two, a victim to his own debaucheries.  His friend, M. Dupont, says of him, that, “trusting to the strength of his constitution he gave himself up, without restraint, to every kind of pleasure.”  Madame de Stael states, that he suffered cruelly in the last days of his life, and when no longer able to speak, wrote to his physician for a dose of opium, in the words of Hamlet, “to die—­to sleep!” His obsequies were celebrated with great pomp, and his body placed in the Pantheon, by the side of that of Descartes.  In two short years his ashes were removed, by order of the Convention, and scattered abroad by the populace; who, at the same time, burned his bust in the Place de Gr`eve.-E.

(771) Dr. Price died on the 19th of April.-E.

(772) This was the first part of the " Rights of Man,” in answer to the celebrated “Reflections.”  At the commencement of the year Paine had published in Paris, under the borrowed name of Achille Duchatellet, a tract recommending the abolition of royalty.-E.

Letter 376 To Miss Berry.  Berkeley Square, Friday night, April 15, 1791. (page 490)