them when flushed with success to quiet that troublesome House of Commons and silence the impudent pamphleteers of London."[1]
Of a similar character were the thoughts of Dumont, who as he believed at the time, had watched over the cradle of French liberty, but now saw Saturn devouring his children; and of John Adams, who knew the difference between liberty and anarchy. "I walk about half the day," the former wrote to Romilly from Bowood, "in a state of the greatest agitation, from the impossibility of remaining still, with my thoughts fixed upon all the sad events which are flowing from a source whence we had flattered ourselves human happiness was to arise."[2] "I think," wrote Adams to Priestley, who forwarded the letter to Lord Lansdowne, "that all the ages and nations of the world never furnished so strong an argument against a pure republic as the French have done. I speak without reserve, in unqualified language, because I am sure, as I am of the future existence of the world, that a very few years will force France into a mixed republic, or into the gulf of destruction."[3]
English reformers were now between two fires. "I need not tell you," Lord Lansdowne wrote to Morellet in reply to the suggestions of a common friend that he should personally intercede with the National Assembly on behalf of some of the condemned, "that we should both of us be just dragged through the kennel and afterwards roasted to powder; or if in their mercy I should have any remains left, they would only serve to be hashed up here in as many ways as your cooks dress eggs."[4]
But even apart from political considerations, there was enough in the events of 1792 and 1793 in France to sadden the mind of the society which gathered at Bowood. How many of the brilliant group which in former days Lord Shelburne had seen gathered in the salons of Mme. Geoffrin and Mme. Helvetius were now perishing by an untimely end; how many more, like
