liaments, and rejected both by a majority of almost two to one; since when, I cannot see that any thing has happened to convince them of the necessity of these reforms. Your most affectionate brother, SAMUEL ROMILLY. Dear Roget, LETTER XXVIII. Gray's Inn, March 21. 1783. I am very sorry my silence should have occasioned you any uneasiness; my letter of the 10th of last month ought to have arrived at Lausanne before the date of your last; I make no doubt you have received it since. You do me but justice when you suppose that I am prevented from writing to you by business, and that you are never forgotten by me. I lost no time in executing your commission respecting Linguet. Three numbers, containing the Mémoires sur la Bastille, had been published when your letter reached me; these I have sent to you by Lecointe, who will put them in the post at Geneva. I never was more completely disappointed in any book than in this. Before he enters upon his subject, he talks so much of the horrors, and of the unparalleled atrocities of the Bastille, putting his imagination and his language to the rack for the strongest images and expressions, that one is quite astonished, afterwards, to find only a narrative of a confinement, rigorous, indeed, but such as one would expect in almost every prison. He resembles the poet, his countryman, who began, "Je chante le vainqueur des vainqueurs de la Terre;" and one may very well say with Boileau, "Que produira l'auteur après tous ces grand cris ? Even his motto is as injudicious as all the rest. "Non mihi si voces centum sint," &c. After this mighty promise upon the cover, one opens the book, and behold it is with the utmost difficulty that the author is able to spin out three small pamphlets, of which his narrative does not occupy a third part. The memoirs are useful in one respect, as they serve to convince one that no account of the Bastille, coming from a prisoner, can be at all interesting, and that the only men qualified to write a good history of the prison, are the governor of it, or the lieutenant de police. Even with Linguet's exaggerated language, the horrors of the Bastille fall much short of what one's imagination had painted to one. I cannot agree with him " que jamais oppression n'a été si cruelle ;" much less should I say, "que jamais elle n'a été reprochée avec tant d'énergie." ceive, by your letter, that you are still inclined to think Linguet a good writer. It is to myself only I ought to make excuses for differing from you in opinion; but, indeed, upon this subject I do differ from you entirely. This, at least, I think certain : if Linguet is eloquent, we must not call Demosthenes so, or Cicero, or Rousseau, for no two things can differ more than their style of writing and his. We find all those great writers, in differ I per ent parts of their works, pleading their own cause, painting their own sufferings, and reproaching their enemies with the wrongs which they had done them. In doing this, we find that they content themselves with copying faithfully what passes in their own mind, with representing every thing exactly as it struck themselves, and with giving a voice, if I may so express myself, to nature. They keep the attention of their readers fixed upon the single subject they are treating of, because they know that all ambitious ornaments will only weaken its force. We never find them straining their imagination to find out metaphors and similes that were never imagined before. They invite, they even force us to think, but it is on the subject before us, not on the ornaments with which it is profusely covered; they do not oblige us to pause at every figure to consider its meaning; in a word, they do not sacrifice their subject to its ornaments: they seek to show us what they have suffered, and how they have been wronged, not what wit, imagination, and powers of language they possess. I am not surprised that you were in such haste to sell out your stock after reading the author of the Finances d'Angleterre. However, French writers upon our government and politics deserve very little attention; they are commonly very ignorant of the subject on which they write, and very partial against the English. De Lolme, and perhaps Montesquieu, are the only foreigners whom I have read, who have written any thing worth reading upon our constitution. I can say nothing of Mably, for I have not seen his book; but the inac curacies, to use no harsher an expression, of the French writers in general, are unpardonable. Who can imagine that the author of the treatise on Lettres de Cachet believed what he was writing, or that he had taken the trouble to inquire into the fact, when he tells the world that the trial by jury is falling into disuse amongst us, and that the habeas corpus can only be obtained with difficulty. A-propos of the Lettres de Cachet, that book has confirmed me in my opinion, that religion is necessary to excellence even in the arts; and I cannot doubt that, if the Comte de Mirabeau had been as devout as he was animated, he would have been infinitely more eloquent. With what energy might he have invoked the Author of his existence, and have called upon him to witness his veracity, instead of using that cold exclamation, "J'atteste l'honneur que tout dans mon récit est conforme à la vérité!" With how much more eloquence might he have committed his child to the care of Providence, and have implored its vengeance on his head, if ever he became a friend or an instrument of oppression, than have addressed those vows, as one may say, to aërial nothing, "Puisse la mort vous moissoner avant l'age, &c. &c." Swift has written a book* to prove the advantages of Christianity; but the work is ludicrous, and his principal argument is, that if Christianity was utterly destroyed, the wits would want a subject for pleasantry, and minute philosophers an enemy to combat. The subject however might, I think, very well be treated seriously; at least I know that when I was at * Entitled, An Argument against abolishing Christianity. Paris, every thing I saw convinced me that, independently of our future happiness and our sublimest enjoyments in this life, religion is necessary to the comforts, the conveniences, and even to the elegancies and lesser pleasures of life. Not only I never met with a writer truly eloquent, who did not, at least, affect to believe in religion, but I never met with one in whom religion was not the richest source of his eloquence. Cicero, sceptical as he is in his philosophical writings, in his orations always (except once or twice where it was his interest to shake the established faith of his country) appears to be a firm believer. He repeatedly invokes those "Dii immortales" who he knew did not exist, and is never perhaps so eloquent as where he adopts even all the absurdities of paganism: where, for instance, in his pleading for Milo, he attests the sacred hills and groves of Albania, its subverted altars, and the great Jupiter Latiaris, that they were roused to punish the infamous Clodius who had polluted all their holy rites: where, in his oration for Sextius, he invokes to his aid Jupiter Capitolinus, Juno, Minerva, and the Dii Penates, whose temples and shrines he had secured from destruction, and that maternal Vesta, whose priestesses he had saved from violation, and whose eternal fire he had preserved from being extinguished in the blood of his fellow-citizens, or lost in the general conflagration of the city: where, in his defence of Flaccus, he works upon the passions of his audience, by representing the sister of his client, a vestal, in the delirium of her grief, neglecting the sacred fire on which the existence |