This address was made with much good nature and affection, to be
sure. But among the revolutions in France must be reckoned a
considerable revolution in their ideas of politeness. In England we
are said to learn manners at second-hand from your side of the
water, and that we dress our behavior in the frippery of France. If
so, we are still in the old cut and have not so far conformed to the
new Parisian mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most
refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence or
congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature that crawls
upon the earth, that great public benefits are derived from the murder
of his servants, the attempted assassination of himself and of his
wife, and the mortification, disgrace, and degradation that he has
personally suffered. It is a topic of consolation which our ordinary
of Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the
gallows. I should have thought that the hangman of Paris, now that
he is liberalized by the vote of the National Assembly and is
allowed his rank and arms in the herald's college of the rights of
men, would be too generous, too gallant a man, too full of the sense
of his new dignity to employ that cutting consolation to any of the
persons whom the lese nation might bring under the administration of
his executive power.
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