MY DEAR LORD,

I AM not sure, that the best way of discussing any subject, except those that concern the abstracted sciences, is not somewhat in the way of dialogue. To this mode, however, there are two objections; the first, that it happens, as in the puppet-show, one man speaks for all the personages. An unnatural uniformity of tone is in a manner unavoidable. The other, and more serious objection is, that as the author (if not an absolute sceptick) must have some opinion of his own to enforce, he will be continually tempted to enervate the arguments he puts into the mouth of his adversary, or to place them in a point of view most commodious for their refutation. There is, however, a sort of dialogue not quite so liable to these objections, because it approaches more nearly to truth and nature: it is called CONTROVERSY. Here the parties speak for themselves. If the writer, who attacks another's notions, does not deal fairly with his adversary, the diligent reader has it always in his power, by resorting to the work examined, to do justice to the original author and to himself. For this reason you will not blame me, if, in my discussion of the merits of a regicide peace, I do not choose to trust to my own statements, but to bring forward along with them the arguments of the advocates for that measure. If I choose puny adversaries, writers of no estimation or authority, then, you will justly blame me. I might as well bring in at once a fictitious speaker, and thus fall into all the inconveniences of an imaginary dialogue. This I shall avoid; and I shall take no notice of any author, who, my friends in town do not tell me, is in estimation with those whose opinions he supports.

A piece has been sent to me, called "Remarks on the apparent Circumstances of the War in the fourth week of October, 1795," with a French motto, que faire encore une fois dans une telle nuit? Attendre le jour. The very title seemed to me striking and peculiar, and to announce something uncom mon. In the time I have lived to, I always seem to walk on enchanted ground. Every thing is new, and, according to the fashionable

phrase, revolutionary. In former days authors valued themselves upon the maturity and fulness of their deliberations. Accordingly they predicted (perhaps with more arrogance than reason) an eternal duration to their works. The quite contrary is our present fashion. Writers value themselves now on the instability of their opinions, and the transitory life of their productions. On this kind of credit the modern institutors open their schools. They write for youth, and it is sufficient if the instruction "last as long as a present love; or as the painted silks and cottons of the

The doctrines in this work are applied, for their standard, with great exactness, to the shortest possible periods both of conception and duration. The title is, "Some Remarks on the apparent Circumstances of the war in the fourth week of October, 1795." The time is critically chosen. A month or so earlier would have made it the anniversary of a bloody Parisian September, when the French massacre one another. A day or two later would have carried it into a London November, the gloomy month, in which it is said by a pleasant author that Englishmen hang and drown themselves. In truth, this work has a tendency to alarm us with symptoms of public suicide. However, there is one comfort to be taken even from the gloomy time of year. It is a rotting season. If what is brought to market is not good, it is not likely to keep long. Even buildings run up in haste with untempered mortar in that humid weather, if they are ill-contrived tenements. do not threaten long to encumber the earth. The author tells us (and I believe he is the very first author that ever told such a thing to his readers) "that the entire fabric of his speculation might be overset by unforeseen vicissitudes ;" and what is far more extraordinary, "that even the whole consideration might be varied whilst he was writing those pages." Truly, in my poor judgment, this circumstance formed a very substantial motive for his not publishing those ill-considered considerations at all. He ought to have followed the good advice of his motto; Que faire encore dans une telle nuit?

Attendre le jour. He ought to have waited till he had got a little more day-light on this subject. Night itself is hardly darker than the fogs of that time.

Finding the last week in October so particularly referred to, and not perceiving any particular event relative to the war, which happened on any of the days in that week, I thought it possible, that they were marked by some astrological superstition, to which the greatest politicians have been subject. I therefore had recourse to my Rider's Almanac. There I found indeed something that characterised the work, and that gave directions concerning the sudden political and natural variations, and for eschewing the maladies that are most prevalent in that aguish intermittent season," the last week of October." On that week the sagacious astrologer, Rider, in his note on the third column of the calender side, teaches us to expect "variable and cold weather," but instead of encouraging us to trust ourselves to the haze and mist and doubtful lights of that changeable week, on the answerable part of the opposite page, he gives us a salutary caution, (indeed it is very nearly in the words of the author's motto:) "Avoid (says he) being out late at night, and in foggy weather, for a cold now caught may last the whole winter." This ingenious author, who disdained the prudence of the almanac, walked out in the very fog he complains of, and has led us to a very unseasonable airing at that time. Whilst this noble writer, by the vigour of an excellent constitution, formed for the violent changes he prognosticates, may shake off the importunate rheum and malignant influenza, of this disagreeable week, a whole parliament may go on spitting and snivelling, and wheezing and coughing during a whole session. All this from listening to variable, hebdomedal politicians, who run away from their opinions without giving us a month's warning; and for not listening to the wise and friendly admonitions of Dr. Cardanus Rider, who never apprehends he may change his opinions before his pen is out of his hand, but always enables us to lay in, at least, a year's stock of useful information.

At first I took comfort. I said to myself, that if I should, as I fear I must, oppose the doctrines of the last week of October, it is pro

Here I have fallen into an unintentional mistake. Rider's Almanac for 1794 lay before me and, in truth, I then had no other. variety, that sage astrologer has made some small changes on the weather side of 1795;

For

but the caution is the same on the opposite page of instruction.

bable that, by this time, they are no longer those of the eminent writer, to whom they are attributed. He gives us hopes, that long before this he may have embraced the direct contrary sentiments. If I am found in a conflict with those of the last week of October, I may be in full agreement with those of the last week in December, or the first week in January, 1796. But a second edition, and a French translation (for the benefit, I must suppose, of the new regicide directory) have let down a little of these flattering hopes. We and the directory know, that the author, whatever changes his works seemed made to indicate like a weather-cock grown rusty, remains just where he was in the last week of last October. It is true, that his protest against binding him to his opinions, and his reservation of a right to whatever opinions he pleases, remain in their full force. This variability is pleasant, and shows a fertility of fancy;

Qualis in æthereo felix Vertumnus Olympo Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet Yet, doing all justice to the sportive variability of these weekly, daily, or hourly speculators, shall I be pardoned, if I attempt a word on the part of us simpic country folk? It is not good for us, however it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with variable politics. I consider different relations as prescribing a different conduct. I allow, that in transactions with an enemy, a minister may, and often must, vary his demands with the day, possibly with the hour. With an enemy, a fixed plan, variable arrangements. This is the rule the nature of the transaction prescribes. But all this belongs to treaty. All these shifting and changes are a sort of secret among the parties, till a definite settlement is brought about. Such is the spirit of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of things between enmity and friendship. In this change the subjects of the transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their coccoons. The gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state. This mutability is allowed to a foreign negociator; but when struct his own countrymen, on a matter which a great politician condescends publicly to inmay fix their fate for ever, his opinions ought not to be diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for our slow and coarse understandings. Our appetite demands a piece of resistance. We require some food that will stick to the ribs. We call for sentiments, to which we can attach ourselves; sentiments, in which we can take

an interest; sentiments, on which we can warm, on which we can ground some confidence in ourselves or in others. We do not want a largess of inconstancy. Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of poverty at home. There is a difference too between deliberation and doctrine: a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts to teach. His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region, but they cannot free us from the effects of the error, into which we have been betrayed. His active Will-o'-the-Wisp may be gone, nobody can guess where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets, I come to the lesson itself. On the fullest consideration of it, I am utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is in the detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or recommend. His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion. It is not only fugitive in its duration, but is slippery, in the extreme whilst it lasts. Examining it part by part, it seems almost every where to contradict itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his opinions, has exercised this privilege in every section of his remarks. For this reason, among others, I follow the advice which the able writer gives in his last page, which is "to consider the impression of what he has urged, taken from the whole, and not from detached paragraphs." That caution was not absolutely necessary. I should think it unfair to the author and to myself, to have proceeded otherwise. This author's whole, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be again referred to the whole. Without this latter attention, several of the passages would certainly remain covered with animpenetrable and truly oracular obscurity.

The great general pervading purpose of the whole pamphlet is to reconcile us to peace with the present usurpation in France. In this general drift of the author I can hardly be mistaken. The other purposes, less general, and subservient to the preceding scheme, are to show first, that the time of the remarks was the favourable time for making that peace upon our side; secondly, that on the enemy's side their disposition towards the acceptance of such terms, as he is pleased to offer, was rationally to be expected; the third purpose

was to make some sort of disclosure of the terms, which, if the regicides are pleased to grant them, this nation ought to be contented to accept: these form the basis of the negociation, which the author, whoever he is, proposes to open.

Before I consider these Remarks along with the other reasonings, which I hear on the same subject, I beg leave to recall to your mind the observation I made early in our correspondence, and which ought to attend us quite through the discussion of this proposed peace, amity, or fraternity, or whatever you may call it; that is, the real quality and character of the party you have to deal with. This, I find, as a thing of no importance, has every where escaped the author of the October Remarks. That hostile power, to the perjod of the fourth week in that month, has been ever called and considered as an usurpation. In that week, for the first time, it changed its name of an usurped power, and took the simple name of France. The word France is slipped in just as if the government stood exactly as before that revolution, which has astonished, terrified, and almost overpowered Europe. "France," says the author, "will do this;" "it is the interest of France;" "the returning honour and generosity of France;" &c. &c. always merely France; just as if we were in a common political war with an old recognized member of the commonwealth of christian Europe; and as if our dispute had turned upon a mere matter of territorial or commercial controversy, which a peace might settle by the imposition or the taking off a duty, with the gain, or the loss of a remote island, or a frontier town or two, on the one side or the other. This shifting of persons could not be done without the hocus-pocus of abstraction. We have been in a grievous error; we thought that we had been at war with rebels against the lawful government, but that we were friends and allies of what is properly France; friends and allies to the legal body politic of France. But by slight of hand the Jacobins are clean vanished, and it is France we have got under our cup. Blessings on his soul that first invented sleep, said Don Sancho Pancha the wise! All those blessings, and ten thousand times more, on him who found out abstraction, personification, and impersonals. In certain cases they are the first of all soporifics. Terribly alarmed we should be if things were proposed to us in the concrete; and if fraternity was held out to us with the individuals, who compose this France, by their proper names and descriptions: if we were told that it was

very proper to enter into the closest bonds of amity and good correspondence with the devout, pacific, and tender-hearted Syeyes, with the all-accomplished Rewbel, with the humane guillotinists of Bourdeaux, Tallien and Isabeau; with the meek butcher Legendre, and with "the returned humanity and generosity" (that had been only on a visit abroad) of the virtuous regicide brewer Santerre. This would seem at the outset a very strange scheme of amity and concord;-nay, though we had held out to us, as an additional douceur, an assurance of the cordial fraternal embrace of our pious and patriotic countryman Thomas Paine. But plain truth would here be shocking and absurd; therefore comes in abstraction and personification. "Make your peace with France." That word France sounds quite as well as any other, and it conveys no idea, but that of a very pleasant country and very hospitable inhabitants. Nothing absurd and shocking in amity and good correspondence with France. Permit me to say, that I am not yet well acquainted with this new-coined France, and, without a careful assay, I am not willing to receive it in currency in place of the old Louis d'or.

Having therefore slipped the persons, with whom we are to treat, out of view, we are next to be satisfied, that the French revolution, which this peace is to fix and consolidate, ought to give us no just cause of apprehension. Though the author labours this point, yet he confesses a fact (indeed he could not conceal it) which renders all his labours utterly fruitless. He confesses, that the regicide means to dictate a pacification, and that this pacification according to their decree passed but a very few days before his publication appeared, is to "unite to their empire, either in posses sion or dependence, new barriers, many frontier places of strength, a large sea-coast, and many sea-ports:" he ought to have stated it, that they would annex to their territory a country about a third as large as France, and much more than half as rich; and in a situation he most important for command, that it would be possible for her any where to possess. To remove this terrour (even if the regicides should carry their point) and to give us perfect repose with regard to their empire, whatever they may acquire, or whomsoever they might destroy, he raises a doubt "whether France will not be ruined by retaining these conquests, and whether she will not wholly lose that preponderance, which she has held in the scale of European powers, and will not eventually be destroyed by the effect of her present

successes; or, at least, whether, so far as the political interests of England are concerned, she [France] will remain an object of as much jealousy and alarm, as she was under the reign of a monarch." Here, indeed, is a paragraph full of meaning! It gives matter for meditation almost in every word of it. The secret of the pacific politicians is out. This republic, at all hazards, is to be maintained. It is to be confined within some bounds, if we can; if not, with every possible acquisition of power, it is still to be cherished and supported. It is the return of the monarchy we are to dread, and therefore we ought to pray for the permanence of the regicide authority. Esto perpetua is the ejaculation of our Fra Paolo for the republic one and indivisible. It was the monarchy that rendered France dangerous;-regicide neutralizes all the acrimony of that power, and renders it safe and social. The October speculator is of opinion, that monarchy is of so poisonous a quality, that a moderate territoria. power is far more dangerous to its neighbours under that abominable regimen, than the greatest empire in the hands of a republic. This is jacobinism sublime and exalted into most pure and perfect essence. It is a doctrine, I admit, made to allure and captivate, if any thing in the world can, the jacobin directory, to mollify the ferocity of regicide, and to persuade those patriotic hangmen, after their reiterated oaths for our extirpation, to admit this well-humbled nation to the fraternal embrace. I do not wonder that this tub of October has been racked off into a French cask. It must make its fortune at Paris, That translation seems the language the most suited to these sentiments. Our author tells the French jacobins that the political interests of Great Britain are in perfect unison with the principles of their government; that they may take and keep the keys of the civilized world, for they are safe in their unambitious and faithful custody. We say to them-We may indeed, wish you to be a little less murderous, wicked, and atheistical, for the sake of morals: We may think it were better you were less new-fangled in your speech, for the sake of grammar: but, as politicians, provided you keep clear of monarchy, all our fears, alarms, and jealousies are at an end: at least they sink into nothing in comparison of our dread of your detestable royalty. A flatterer of Cardinal Maxarin said, when that minister had just settled the match between the young Louis XIV. and a daughter of Spain, that this alliance had the effect of faith, and had removed mountains; that the Pyrenees were

levelled by that marriage. You may now compliment Rewbel in the same spirit on the miracles of regicide, and tell him, that the guillotine of Louis XVI. had consummated a marriage between Great Britain and France, which dried up the channel, and restored the two countries to the unity which, it is said, they had, before the unnatural rage of seas and earthquakes had broke off their happy junction. It will be a fine subject for the poets, who are to prophesy the blessings of this peace.

I am now convinced, that the remarks of the last week of October cannot come from the author, to whom they are given; they are such a direct contradiction to the style of manly indignation, with which he spoke of those miscreants and murderers in his excellent memorial to the states of Holland; to that very state, which the author, who presumes to personate him, does not find it contrary to the political interests of England to leave in the hands of these very miscreants, against whom on the part of England he took so much pains to animate their republic. This cannot be; and, if this argument wanted any thing to give it new force, it is strengthened by an additional reason that is irresistible. Knowing that noble person, as well as myself, to be under very great obligations to the crown, I am confident he would not so very directly contradict, even in the paroxysm of his zeal against monarchy, and the declarations made in the name and with the fullest approbation of our sovereign, his master, and our common benefactor. In those declarations you will see, that the king, instead of being sensible of great alarm and jealously from a neighbouring crowned head, than from these regicides, attributes all the dangers of Europe to the latter. Let this writer hear the description given in the royal declaration of the scheme of power of these miscreants, as "a system destructive of all public order; maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without number; by arbitrary imprisonments; by massacres, which cannot be remembered without horrour; and at length by the execrable murder of a just and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who with an unshaken firmness has shured all the misfortunes of her royal consort, his protracted sufferings, his cruel captivity, and his ignominious death." After thus describing, with an eloquence and energy equalled only by its truth, the means by which this usurped power had been acquired and maintained, that government is characterized with equal force. His majesty, far from thinking monarchy in

France to be a greater object of jealousy than the regicide usurpation, calls upon the French to re-establish " a monarchial government" for the purpose of shaking off" the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy; of that anarchy which has broken the most sacred bonds of society, dissolved all the relations of civil life, violated every right, confounded every duty; which uses the name of liberty to exercise the most cruel ty ranny, to annihilate all property, to seize on all possessions; which founds its power on the pretended consent of the people, and itself carries fire and sword through extensive provinces for having demanded their laws, their religion, and their rightful sovereign.

"That strain I heard was of an higher mood." That declaration of our sovereign was worthy of his throne. It is in a style, which neither the pen of the writer of October, nor such a poor crow-quill as mine can ever hope to equal. I am happy to enrich my letter with this fragment of nervous and manly eloquence, which, if it had not emanated from the awful authority of a throne, if it were not recorded among the most valuable monuments of history, and consecrated in the archives of states, would be worthy as a private composition, to live for ever in the memory of men.

In those admirable pieces, does his majesty discover this new opinion of his political security in having the chair of the scorner, that is, the discipline of atheism and the block of regicide set up by his side, elevated on the same platform, and shouldering, with the vile image of their grim and bloody idol, the inviolable majesty of his throne? The senti ments of these declarations are the very reverse: they could not be other. Speaking of the spirit of that usurpation, the royal manifesto describes with perfect truth its internal tyranny to have been established as the very means of shaking the security of all other states; as "disposing arbitrarily of the property and blood of the inhabitants of France, in order to disturb the tranquillity of other nations, and to render all Europe the theatre of the same crimes and the same misfortunes." It was but a natural inference from this fact, that the royal manifesto does not at all rest the justi fication of this war on common principles:"that it was not only to defend his own rights, and those of his allies,"-but " that all the lear est interests of his people imposed upon him a duty still more important; that of exerting his efforts for the preservation of civil society itself, as happily established among the nations of Europe On that ground the protection offered is to those, who, by "declaring for a monarchial