and take this test; wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and observation. Every man has his own relish. But I think, if I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These gentlemen deal in regeneration; but at any price I should hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them; nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. Si isti mihi largiantur ut repueriscam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde recusem!
The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic system, which they call a constitution, can|not be laid open without discovering the utter in|sufficiency and mischief of every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears any the remotest relation to it. You cannot propose a re|medy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying the debility of the assembly. You cannot deliberate on the confusion of the army of the state, without disclosing the worse disorders of the armed municipalities. The military lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy. I wish every body carefully to peruse the eloquent speech (such it is) of Mons. de la Tour du Pin. He attri|butes the salvation of the municipalities to the good behaviour of some of the troops. These troops are to preserve the well-disposed part of those municipali|ties, which is confessed to be the weakest, from the pillage of the worst disposed, which is the strongest. But the municipalities affect a sovereignty, and
