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 _leze-nation_ might bring under the
administration of his _executive powers_.
A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught
of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling
wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory.
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