the practical demonstrations of their loyalty, assuring him of their obedience, when he should no longer possess any authority to command?
This address was made with much good-nature and affection, to be sure. But among the revolu|tions in France, must be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our be|haviour in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the old cut; and have not so far con|formed to the new Parisian mode of good-breeding, as to think it quite in the most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in con|dolence or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature that crawls upon the earth, that great public benefits are derived from the murder of his servants, the attempted assassination of himself and of his wife, and the mortification, disgrace, and degradation, that he has personally suffered. It is a topic of consolation which our ordinary of Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the gallows. I should have thought that the hangman of Paris, now that he is liberalized by the vote of the Na|tional Assembly, and is allowed his rank and arms in the Herald's College of the rights of men, would be too generous, too gallant a man, too full of the sense of his new dignity, to employ that cutting consolation to any of the persons whom the leze nation might bring under the adminis|tration of his executive powers.
A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flat|tered.
