quiet accurate-minded Scotchman tells us how a pack of tipsy
ruffians sat abusing Pitt and George to him, over a fricassee of
his own fowls, and among the wreck of his lamps and mirrors which
they had smashed as a protest against aristocratic luxury.

"There is not a boy among them who has not learnt to accompany
the name of Pitt with an execration. When I went to bed, there
was no sleep to be had on account of the sentinels thinking fit
to amuse me the whole night through with the revenge they meant
to take on him when they got him to Paris. Next morning I went on
board the 'Experiment.' The Commodore and all his officers messed
together, and I was admitted among them. They are truly the
poorest-looking people I ever saw. Even the Commodore has only
one suit which can at all distinguish him, not to say from the
officers, but from the men. The filth and confusion of their
meals was terrible. A chorus of boys usher in the dinner with the
Marseilles hymn, and it finishes in the same way. The enthusiasm
of all ranks among them is astonishing, but not more so than
their blindness. They talk with ecstasy of their revolutionary
government, of their bloody executions, of their revolutionary
tribunal, of the rapid movement of their revolutionary army with
the Corps of justice and the flying guillotine before it;
forgetting that not one of them is not liable to its stroke on
the accusation of the greatest vagabond on board. They asked me
with triumph if yesterday had not been Sunday. 'Oh,' said they,
'the National Convention have decreed that there is no Sunday,
and that the Bible is all a lie.'" After such an experience it is
not difficult to account for the keen and almost personal
interest with which, to the very day of Waterloo, Mr. Macaulay
watched through its varying phases the rise and the downfall of