has entirely absorbed me. Except the period of the illness of our
own inestimable king, 1 have never been so overcome with grief
and dismay, for any but personal and family calamities. O what a
tragedy! how implacable its villainy, and how severe its sorrows!
You know, my dearest father, how little I had believed such a
catastrophe possible: with all the guilt and all the daring
already shown, I had still thought this a height of enormity
impracticable. And, indeed, without military law throughout the
wretched city, it had still not been perpetrated. Good heaven!-
-what must have been the sufferings of the few unhardened in
crimes who inhabit that city of horrors!--if I, an English
person, have been so deeply afflicted, that even this sweet house
and society--even my Susan and her lovely children--have been
incapable to give me any species of pleasure, or keep me from a
desponding low-spiritedness, what must be the feelings of all but
the culprits in France?

M. de Narbonne and M. d'Arblay have been almost annihilated :
they are for ever repining that they are French, and, though two
of the most accomplished and elegant men I ever saw, they break
our hearts with the humiliation they feel for their guiltless
birth in that guilty country!

We are all here expecting war every day. This dear family has
deferred its town journey till next Wednesday. I have not been
at all at Mickleham, nor yet settled whether to return to town
with the Lockes, or to pay my promised visit there first, All has
been so dismal, so wretched, that I have scarce ceased to regret
our living at such times, and not either Sooner or later.
These immediate French sufferers here interest us, and these