their absurd finery, and held them in infinitely greater contempt than
whilst they prowled about the streets in the pantaloons of the last
year's Constitution, when their legislators appeared honestly, with
their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their
side-pocket-holes, like a bold, brave banditti, as they are. The
Parisians (and I am much of their mind) think that a thief with a crape
on his visage is much worse than a barefaced knave, and that such
robbers richly deserve all the penalties of all the black acts. In this
their thin disguise, their comrades of the late abdicated sovereign
_canaille_ hooted and hissed them, and from that day have no other name
for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English,
impossible to make it very civil English: it belongs, indeed, to the
language of the _halles_: but, without being instructed in that dialect,
it was the opinion of the polite Lord Chesterfield that no man could be
a complete master of French. Their Parisian brethren called them _gueux
plumés_, which, though not elegant, is expressive and characteristic:
_feathered scoundrels_, I think, comes the nearest to it in that kind of
English. But we are now to understand that these _gueux_, for no other
reason, that I can divine, except their red and white clothes, form at
last a state with which we may cultivate amity, and have a prospect of
the blessings of a secure and permanent peace. In effect, then, it was
not with the men, or their principles, or their polities, that we
quarrelled: our sole dislike was to the cut of their clothes.

But to pass over _their_ dresses,--good God! in what habits did the
representatives of the crowned heads of Europe appear, when they came to
swell the pomp of their humiliation, and attended in solemn function
this inauguration of Regicide? That would be the curiosity. Under what
robes did they cover the disgrace and degradation of the whole college
of kings? What warehouses of masks and dominoes furnished a cover to the