reprobates with horror. If any of the French Jacobin leaders are spoken
of with hatred or scorn, he falls upon those who take that liberty with
all the zeal and warmth with which men of honor defend their particular
and bosom friends, when attacked. He always represents their cause as a
cause of liberty, and all who oppose it as partisans of despotism. He
obstinately continues to consider the great and growing vices, crimes,
and disorders of that country as only evils of passage, which are to
produce a permanently happy state of order and freedom. He represents
these disorders exactly in the same way and with the same limitations
which are used by one of the two great Jacobin factions: I mean that of
Pétion and Brissot. Like them, he studiously confines his horror and
reprobation only to the massacres of the 2d of September, and passes by
those of the 10th of August, as well as the imprisonment and deposition
of the king, which were the consequences of that day, as indeed were the
massacres themselves to which he confines his censure, though they were
not actually perpetrated till early in September. Like that faction, he
condemns, not the deposition, or the proposed exile or perpetual
imprisonment, but only the murder of the king. Mr. Sheridan, on every
occasion, palliates all their massacres committed in every part of
France, as the effects of a natural indignation at the exorbitances of
despotism, and of the dread of the people of returning under that yoke.
He has thus taken occasion to load, not the actors in this wickedness,
but the government of a mild, merciful, beneficent, and patriotic
prince, and his suffering, faithful subjects, with all the crimes of the
new anarchical tyranny under which the one has been murdered and the
others are oppressed. Those continual either praises or palliating
apologies of everything done in France, and those invectives as
uniformly vomited out upon all those who venture to express their
disapprobation of such proceedings, coming from a man of Mr. Fox's fame
and authority, and one who is considered as the person to whom a great