We had delivered at the gate the German passport, recommended to us by M. de Schwartzkoff, and which had been signed by the Commandant at Mentz; the man, who took it, promising to bring it properly attested to our inn. He returned without the passport, and, as we afterwards found, carried our voiturier to be examined by an officer. We endeavoured in vain to obtain an explanation, as to this delay and appearance of suspicion, till, at supper, the Lieutenant de Place announced himself, and presently shewed, that he was not come to offer apologies. This, man, an illiterate Piedmontese in the Austrian service, either believed, or affected to do so, that our name was not Radcliffe, but something like it, with a German termination, and that we were not English, but Germans. Neither my Lord Grenville's, or M. de Schwartzkoff's passports, our letters from London to families in Switzerland, nor one of credit from the Messrs. Hopes of Amsterdam to the Banking-house of Porta at Lausanne, all of which he pretended to examine, could remove this discerning suspicion as to our country. While we were considering, as much as vexation would permit, what circumstance could have afforded a pretext for any part of this intrusion, it came out incidentally, that the confirmation given to our passport at Mentz, which we had never examined, expressed "returning to England," though the pass itself was for Basil, to which place we were upon our route. Such a contradiction might certainly have justified some delay, if we had not been enabled to prove it accidental to the satisfaction of any person desirous of being right. The passport had been produced at Mentz, together with those of two English artists, then on their return from Rome, whom we had the pleasure to see at Franckfort. The Secretary inscribed all the passports alike of England, and M. de Lucadou, the Commandant, hastily signed ours, without observing the mistake, though he so well knew us to be upon the road to Switzerland, that he politely endeavoured to render us some service there. Our friends in Mentz being known to him, he desired us to accept an address from himself to M. de Wilde, Intendant of salt mines near Bec. We produced to Mr. Lieutenant this address, as a proof, that the Commandant both knew us, and where we were going; but it soon appeared, that, though the former might have honestly fallen into his suspicions at first, he had a malignant obstinacy in refusing to abandon them. He left us, with notice that we could not quit the town without receiving the Commandant's permission by his means; and it was with some terror, that we perceived ourselves to be so much in his power, in a place where there was a pretext for military authority, and where the least expression of just indignation seemed to provoke a disposition for further injustice.