No wonder that the author should tell us that the whole consideration
might be varied _whilst he was writing those pages_. In one, and that
the most material instance, his speculations not only might be, but were
at that very time, entirely overset. Their war-cry for peace with France
was the same with that of this gentle author, but in a different note.
His is the _gemitus columbæ_, cooing and wooing fraternity; theirs the
funereal screams of birds of night calling for their ill-omened
paramours. But they are both songs of courtship. These Regicides
considered a Regicide peace as a cure for all their evils; and so far
as I can find, they showed nothing at all of the timidity which the
noble lord apprehends in what they call the just cause of liberty.

However, it seems, that, notwithstanding these awkward appearances with
regard to the strength of government, he has still his fears and doubts
about our liberties. To a free people this would be a matter of alarm;
but this physician of October has in his shop all sorts of salves for
all sorts of sores. It is curious that they all come from the
inexhaustible drug-shop of the Regicide dispensary. It costs him nothing
to excite terror, because he lays it at his pleasure. He finds a
security for this danger to liberty from the wonderful wisdom to be
taught to kings, to nobility, and even, to the lowest of the people, by
the late transactions.

I confess I was always blind enough to regard the French Revolution, in
the act, and much more in the example, as one of the greatest calamities
that had ever fallen upon mankind. I now find that in its effects it is
to be the greatest of all blessings. If so, we owe _amende honorable_ to
the Jacobins. They, it seems, were right; and if they were right a
little earlier than we are, it only shows that they exceeded us in