you make the application of my anecdote, and I shall persevere in
scribbling.--Every Yours.




Arras.

It is not fashionable at present to frequent any public place; but as we
are strangers, and of no party, we often pass our evenings at the
theatre. I am fond of it--not so much on account of the representation,
as of the opportunity which it affords for observing the dispositions of
the people, and the bias intended to be given them. The stage is now
become a kind of political school, where the people are taught hatred to
Kings, Nobility, and Clergy, according as the persecution of the moment
requires; and, I think, one may often judge from new pieces the meditated
sacrifice. A year ago, all the sad catalogue of human errors were
personified in Counts and Marquisses; they were not represented as
individuals whom wealth and power had made something too proud, and much
too luxurious, but as an order of monsters, whose existence,
independently of their characters, was a crime, and whose hereditary
possessions alone implied a guilt, not to be expiated but by the
forfeiture of them. This, you will say, was not very judicious; and that
by establishing a sort of incompatibility of virtue with titular
distinctions, the odium was transferred from the living to the dead--from
those who possessed these distinctions to those who instituted them.
But, unfortunately, the French were disposed to find their noblesse
culpable, and to reject every thing which tended to excuse or favour
them. The hauteur of the noblesse acted as a fatal equivalent to every
other crime; and many, who did not credit other imputations, rejoiced in