It is much cooler to-day, yet still delicious; for be it known to you that I have enjoyed weather worthy of Africa,(853) and yet without swallowing mouthfuls of musquitos, nor expecting to hear hyenas howl in the village, nor to find scorpions in my bed.  Indeed, all the way I came home, I could but gaze at the felicity of my countrymen.  The road was one string of stage-coaches loaded within and without with noisy jolly folks, and chaises and gigs that had been pleasuring in clouds of dust; every door and every window of every house was open, lights in every shop, every door with women sitting in the street, every inn crowded with jaded horses, and every alehouse full of drunken topers; for you know the English always announce their sense of heat or cold by drinking.  Well! it was’ impossible not to enjoy such a scene of happiness and affluence in every village, and amongst the lowest of the people; and who are told by villanous scribblers, that they are oppressed and miserable.  New streets, new towns, are rising every day and every where; the earth is covered with gardens and crops of grain.

How bitter to turn from this Elysiurn to the temple at Paris!  The fiends there have now torn her son from the Queen!(854) Can one believe that they are human beings, who ’midst all their confusions sit coolly meditating new tortures, new anguish for that poor, helpless, miserable woman, after four years of unexampled sufferings?  Oh! if such crimes are not made a dreadful lesson, this world might become a theatre of cannibals!

I hope the checks in Bretagne are legends coined by miscreants at Paris.  What can one believe?  Well, I will go to bed, and try to dream of peace and plenty; and though my lawn is burnt, and my peas and beans, and roses and strawberries parched, I will bear 4 with patience till the harvest is got in.  Saint Swithin can never hold his water for forty days, though he can do the contrary.  Good night!

(853) Bishop Porteus, writing to Miss More on the 12th of August says, “Your friend Lord Orford and myself are, I believe, the only persons in the kingdom who are worthy of the hot weather—­ the only true genuine summer we have had for the last thirty years:  we both agreed that it was perfectly celestial, and that it was quite scandalous to huff it away as some people did.  A few days before it arrived, all the world was complaining of the dreadfully cold northeast wind; and in three days after the warmer weather came in every body was quarrelling with the heat, and sinking under the rays of the sun.  Such is that consistent and contented thing called human nature!"-E.

(854) Marie Antoinette was separated from her sister, her daughter, and her son, by virtue of a decree which ordered the trial.  Weber, in his memoirs of her, states, that the separation from her son was so touching, so heartrending that the very gaolers who witnessed the scene confessed, when they were giving an account of’ it to the authorities, that they could not refrain from tears.-E.