so well as to chastise it, was not now alive, by an unsparing use of the
rod (which, indeed, he would have spared little) to give them another
instance of his paternal affection! But the Directory were mistaken.
These are not days in which monarchs value themselves upon the title of
_great_: they are grown _philosophic_: they are satisfied to be good.

Your Lordship will pardon me for this no very long reflection on the
short, but excellent speech of the plumed Director to the ambassador of
Cappadocia. The Imperial ambassador was not in waiting, but they found
for Austria a good Judean representation. With great judgment, his
Highness, the Grand Duke, had sent the most atheistic coxcomb to be
found in Florence, to represent at the bar of impiety the House of
Apostolic Majesty, and the descendants of the pious, though high-minded,
Maria Theresa. He was sent to humble the whole race of Austria before
those grim assassins, reeking with the blood of the daughter of Maria
Theresa, whom they sent half dead, in a dung-cart, to a cruel execution;
and this true-born son of apostasy and infidelity, this renegado from
the faith and from all honor and all humanity, drove an Austrian coach
over the stones which were yet wet with her blood,--with that blood
which dropped every step through her tumbrel, all the way she was drawn
from the horrid prison, in which they had finished all the cruelty and
horrors not executed in the face of the sun. The Hungarian subjects of
Maria Theresa, when they drew their swords to defend her rights against
France, called her, with correctness of truth, though not with the same
correctness, perhaps, of grammar, a king: "_Moriamur pro rege nostro,
Maria Theresa._" SHE lived and died a king; and others will have
subjects ready to make the same vow, when, in either sex, they show
themselves real kings.

When the Directory came to this miserable fop, they bestowed a