upon authority, I am apprehensive lest the doctrines which they will
there find should derive a weight from your name to which they are by no
means intrinsically entitled. I will therefore examine what you have
advanced, from a hope of being able to do away any impression left on
the minds of such as may be liable to confound with argument a strong
prepossession for your Lordship's talents, experience, and virtues.

Before I take notice of what you appear to have laid down as principles,
it may not be improper to advert to some incidental opinions found at
the commencement of your political confession of faith.

At a period big with the fate of the human race I am sorry that you
attach so much importance to the personal sufferings of the late royal
martyr, and that an anxiety for the issue of the present convulsions
should not have prevented you from joining in the idle cry of modish
lamentation which has resounded from the Court to the cottage. You wish
it to be supposed you are one of those who are unpersuaded of the guilt
of Louis XVI. If you had attended to the history of the French
Revolution as minutely as its importance demands, so far from stopping
to bewail his death, you would rather have regretted that the blind
fondness of his people had placed a human being in that monstrous
situation which rendered him unaccountable before a human tribunal. A
bishop, a man of philosophy and humanity[15] as distinguished as your
Lordship, declared at the opening of the National Convention--and
twenty-five millions of men were convinced of the truth of the
assertion--that there was not a citizen on the tenth of August who, if
he could have dragged before the eyes of Louis the corpse of one of his
murdered brothers, might not have exclaimed to him: 'Tyran, voilà ton
ouvrage.' Think of this, and you will not want consolation under any
depression your spirits may feel at the contrast exhibited by Louis on