called from Paris. We have the following passage from Walpole's answer, in a note by the Editor.

"

'I should find nothing intolerable in the loss of your Baron. His heart may be right, but his judgement is deplorably wrong. Since Vol. taire took it into his head to be a philosopher, he who of all mankind is so the least, every one thinks himself a genius, the moment he has written philosophy over his door;-without considering, that the philosophy which makes this parade is philosophy no longer. The mountebanks of Greece and those of Paris are equally ridiculous. When all the world. was in darkness, an effort was probably necessary to rise above the common prejudices; but what merit is there in being above them at a time when it is ridiculous not to be so. We all know so little, that it requires no great genius to confess that we know nothing; and this is the sublime of the modern philosophers, of whom, with your permissi on, your triste Baron was one.

Much of this criticism is undoubtedly just. To a manly mind nothing can well be more disgusting than to see a man aping the philosopher, and boasting of his philosophy; and such boasting, perhaps, was never carried to a more disgusting height than at that time in Paris. The Frenchmen, too, who had borrowed most of their philosophy from us, were then felicitating themselves on discoveries with which we had long been familiar; and of superiority to prejudices, which unfortunately Walpole, and many of his countrymen, had long learned to despise. The boasting, therefore, appeared to him, in many, of its instances, supremely ridiculous; while to the philosophy itself he had no particular antipathy. It is certainly true, that almost all the complaint which either he or Mad. du Deffand makes against the philosophers is, that they are, affected, that they are arrogant,- that their writings are inflated, that knowing, in short, nothing extraordinary, they themselves deem their knowledge prodigious, and think them selves intitled to look down upon the rest of mankind. This. is a quarrel, we see, much more about the manner than the matter. With regard to religion, indeed, (about which Mad., du Deffand was absolutely indifferent) there is a passage given us by the Editor from a letter of Mr. Walpole, from which it appears, that professing belief in a Providence and a future state, he did not believe in revelation, a state of mind which exactly resembled that of Voltaire and Rousseau. And with regard to politics, there are passages both in the letters of Mad. du Deffand, and in those of Mr Walpole, which pro nounce as deep a condemnation of the French government in, its ancient state, as was ever pronounced by any of the philosophers; and few persons, we presume, would hesitate to pronounce the condemnation just. On the occasion of the celebrated rupture of Louis XV. with the Parliament of Paris,

on the affair of the Duc d'Aiguillon, of which the particulars were described by Mad. du Deffand to Walpole, the editor of the Letters makes the following remarks,

• Let those, who can yet talk with commendation of the old governnient of France, read this—and recollect the circumstances under which a monarch thus addresses the first court of justice in his kingdom. Let them then own that nothing could exceed the enormity of the evils under which France groaned, but the still greater enormity of the evils that have been since applied as remedies. The Parliament of Paris, notwithstanding the ill success which had hitherto attended it, still persisted in sending repeated deputations and remonstrances to the King; and though the season of the year for their vacation was arrived, had resolved not to adjourn. This occasioned the violent act of authority here recorded. The Parliament, however, had resolution to meet again; and issued an arret, in which, after observing on the many acts of arbitrary power exercised against both the spirit and the letter of the constitution of the French monarchy, they professed their firm resolutions to persevere in carrying truth to the foot of the throne, and postponed the further consideration of what passed at the Lit de Justice here mentioned, to the following December."

In one of the letters is mentioned the trial of M. Beaumarchais, the occasion of which is thus stated by the well informed editor.

He was accused of having offered money to Mad. Goesman, the wife of the Rapporteur, in a cause with the heirs of M. Pâris Duverney, upon the settlement of some pecuniary accounts, which involved not only the fortune but the honour and good fame of Beaumarchais; and he, on his part, accused Mad. Goesman of having obtained several sums of money and presents from him, under fraudulent pretences. Their mutual accusations were probably both true.'

Beumarchais' sentence was, that he should present himself before the Parliament, kneel down, and hear the Judge declare, that the court blamed him, and pronounced him infamous; a sentence which by law made him incapable of holding any place of public trust. The Editor remarks, that,

In spite of this defamatory sentence, Beaumarchais, whose whole life had been a tissue of that ambiguous conduct, and those dishonourable adventures into which a man of lively parts, without principle, born in his rank of life, was so easily betrayed under the old government of France, where, to use a vulgar English expression, no one could be honest and live, from the highest to the lowest order in the hierarchy of absolute power,-Beaumarchais, soon after this sentence, was employed by the court in some confidential commissions, was openly patronized and pròtected by the Prince of Conti; and had interest, two years afterwards, the return of the old Parliament, to obtain a new hearing of his upcn cause, and the reversion of the sentence here recorded, although no one doubted either its justice or its legality.'

We see in this single transaction a specimen of the govern ment in all its branches; in the executive and legislative, which was the Court, and in the judicative, which was the Parliament. We see that no infamy and worthlessness was a bar to employment and favours under the one; and that, no decision, however righteous, might not be reversed in the tribunals of justice, when a person who had interest at court desired the reversal. We see likewise the opinion of an intel ligent man respecting the moral corruption which it was of the essence of the French government, in the good old times, to diffuse among the people, particularly the higher ranks. It was a government, under which, from the highest to the lowest order in the hierarchy of absolute power, no one could be honest and live. It is this moral depravity, the necessary effect of a bad government, that is the circumstance for which perhaps, above all others, a bad government is to be deplored and deprecated. It teaches the people to think light of crimes, and despise the moral sanction of laws. In Mr. Windham's famous speech against reform, in one of the last sessions which he sat in Parliament, one of his points of declamation against the people of England, was, that they were too corrupt to bear to have a good government. Alas! that ingenious person did not reflect, that if this was true, he was pronouncing the deepest condemnation against the government, which it was within the power of thought to conceive-that he was asserting the existence of one of the most unequivocal and certain proofs of a bad government; inasmuch as of all the circumstances which operate upon the moral character of a people, none is so strong as the goodness or badness of the government. The former renders it the people's interest to be virtuous; the latter renders it their interest to be vicious. No truth in moral or political science is more certain, thau that the good qualities of the government, and the good qualities of the people who live under it, are always in proportion to one another. It is a truth, too, which was evident at a very early period in the history of the human mind. The day that makes a man a slave, says Homer, takes away half his virtue.

As to contempt, and even detestation of courts, nothing can surpass the expressions of Walpole himself, in the extracts from the Letters which are now before us. On the occasion of his forming one of a party for the entertainment of the Princess Amelia, on a visit at Lord Temple's, at Stow, he thus writes to Mad. du Deffand:

Strawberry-hill, Sunday.

It is with much satisfaction that I again find myself at home. Ah! how incomprehensible is it, that people like to be attached to princes!

that is to say, that they like to be false, servile, and flattering. I should prefer a cottage and brown bread to all the honours with which it is possible to decorate dependence.'

The following exclamation is a somewhat instructive one, on the experience which those acquire, who approach most of the personages that are admired in high stations. I saw yesterday,' says Mad. du Deffand, M. de Praslin (M. le Duc de Praslin, who had been one of the Secretaries of State during the administration of his cousin, the Duc de Choiseul). Men are not like statues. Statues appear less by being seen at a distance. It is approximation to mankind that almost reduces them to nothing. Oh! what illusions are produced by place! Go, said the Chancellor Oxenstiern to. his son, who was expressing his diffidence at proceeding to transact with a congress of ambassadors; go, and see with your own eyes how small a portion of wisdom governs the world. "What,' says Walpole in one of his letters to the Marchioness, is external grandeur? A homage paid to ranks, in all countries, in all ages; to high born fools, and their high or low born wives; to Kings of Denmark; to Czarinas!-debasement of commoners in presence of Dukes; debasement of Dukes in presence of Princes!-adulation of historians, and lies of genealogists!"

The following remark, made by Mad. du Deffand en passant, draws after it important conclusions, though familiarity with an evil is but too apt to blunt our sensibility to the sufferings which flow from it.

The Pope may be gratified with the dismissal of M. Choiseul, (who had been just deprived of the ministry); but if he congratulates himself upon it, as being his own work, be assured that he is only the fly on the wheel, and here it is court intrigue that produces all the dust: good or bad administration counts for nothing: this has been the case at all times.'

There is a memorable passage given us by the Editor from a letter of Walpole, in which he delivers his opinion of his own country, and his own countrymen, in 1773. He is speaking of a friend of Mad. du Deffand, who had come to visit England, and says:

"If he resolves to contemplate us as a great nation, he will confuse all his ideas; for not speaking our language, he will take his information from the foreign ministers, who are very unskilful personages, and found their reasonings upon our gazettes. He will measure us by the standard of what he has read, or what he has heard of us in France. He will look for philosophy, and he will find none. He will then think that we act by policy, and he will deceive himself still further. We are nothing but the dregs of a great people; and it is only the next age that will

decide what we are, and what we shall be. At present we are creatures of routine. Luxury is the end, and personal interest, the means. Every man strives to be rich, because we have neither principle nor honour. Every man seems to be in haste to ruin himself, because it is the mode, We are not avaricious: we are only corrupt.'

This is a vivid picture. What likeness there was between. it and the original, we do not for the present stop to inquire. We leave it also to our readers to determine what that coming age, of which Walpole speaks, has performed for the improvement of the scene; whether or not, in our policy, we are the same creatures of routine, that we then were; whether the search for philosophy among us would be as vain; whether personal interest governs us as absolutely; whether we have as little of principle or honour; whether luxury and corruption are, to a greater or a less degree, the glaring features of our character. One thing, however, we may remark, which is, that in those days, neither Walpole, nor any other person, thought himself the worse man for having his eyes open to the defects of his country, and for speaking of them freely. It is one of the precious lessons which have been drawn for our use from the experience of the French revolution, that a man is good in proportion as he is blind to the defects of his country, in proportion as he is ready to praise the defects as loudly as the perfections: a delightful doctrine, it is true, for those who profit by the defects; but what is it for those who suffer by them?

In one of her letters, speaking of a female acquaintance, Mad. du Deffand makes the following curious observation.

My situation,' says she, with her is rather nice and difficult; I wish to stand neither well, nor ill; and that middle is as difficult to keep, as that between monarchy and despotism.'

This is a delicate and refined irony upon the distinction which had been drawn by Montesquieu between monarchy and despotism; and insinuates rather pointedly the certainty which the one slides into the other.

Every person of observation and experience must have often reflected, and perceived, that, to mankind in general, despotism, on its own account, and when mildly exercised, is not an object of much terror or dislike; nor liberty, though it may be spoken of and praised, an object of much real admiration or affection. Even the worst species of despotism, oriental despotism, is not an object of horror to those who live under it. Nay, Europeans themselves, who have lived under it so long as to have become familiar with it, lose very often all sense of its enormities. Some instances are to be found among those born and educated under the British Constitu tion, and enjoying the advantages of education and talents.