be no secret to the Duc de Choiseul, he suffered rather than encouraged a plan that clashed so much with the service he had rendered to his country by abolishing the Order. Nor was it to his honour that shame and the outcry of mankind rescued M. de la Chalotais, rather than the justice of the Prime Minister.[202] The Parliaments of France were filled with many great, able, and steady magistrates. The philosophy and studies of the age had opened their eyes on the rights of mankind; and they attempted with heroic firmness to shake off the chains that galled their country. Yet a distinction should be made between the magistrates and the men called or calling themselves philosophers. The latter were really a set of authors and beaux esprits, who, aping the sentiments of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, especially of the latter, endeavoured to raise themselves to an independent rank, to a kind of legislation in the community. After attacking and throwing off Christianity, they ran wildly into the fondest and most absurd doctrines of the old Greek philosophers; and, with the lightness of their own nation, and prompted by arrogance and love of pre-eminent singularity, they wrote atheism with little reserve, and talked it without any. The chief of these vain and loquacious witlings were D’Alembert,[203] Diderot, and that puny writer Marmontel. I am sorry to add to the list the name of a far more amiable and more profound man, M. Buffon, though, except in their indecent petulance, he too much resembled the rest of his cotemporaries in his sentiments. The women, who hurry into any new fashion, and then lead it, talked of matter and metaphysics with as little caution and as much ignorance as their directors. The magistrates of the Parliaments were very different men. Sober on the religion of their country, they meddled with it no farther than as it interfered with liberty; and few of them were so audacious in their most private conversation as to adopt the abominable licentiousness of the men I have been describing. But if they were decent on religion, they had not the same prudence in the conduct of their civil views. Heated by the term _Parliament_, they chose to believe, at least to inculcate the belief, that they were possessed of the rights of a British Senate. Nothing could be more meritorious than a struggle for such a system. But the Parliaments of France were not only nothing but courts of judicature, but the pretension was too early and too untimely to be yet pushed. As I had some friends in the Parliament of Paris, I remonstrated to them on the danger they ran of over-turning an excellent cause by their precipitation. To obtain solidly and step by step some material concessions, was the conduct they should have pursued. Whatever little they should so attain would be a benefit to the nation; time and precedent might add more. A minority or national distress would have opened a wider door; but by setting out with unbounded pretensions,