Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund BurkeBurke, Edmund
Philosophy
Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund
Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797; Essays; Political science; Speeches, addresses, etc.
If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home,
Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage.
He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as
Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The
wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his
sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of
the departments. Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall at
the next sheriff's feast. He may open the ball with my Lady Mayoress.
But this will be after he has retired from the public table, and gone
into the private room for the enjoyment of more social and unreserved
conversation with the ministers of state and the judges of the bench.
There these ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain the worthy
aldermen with an instructing and pleasing narrative of the manner in
which he made the rich citizens of Bordeaux squeak, and gently led
them by the public credit of the guillotine to disgorge their
anti-revolutionary pelf.
All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on
a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendour
of the Hotel de la Republique. There another scene of gaudy grandeur
will be opened. When his citizen excellency keeps the festival, which
every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis
the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a
grand ball, of course, will be given on the occasion. Then what a
hurly-burly;--what a crowding;--what a glare of a thousand flambeaux in
the square;--what a clamour of footmen contending at the door;--what a
rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys,
choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle who should be
first to pay her court to the Citoyenne, the spouse of the twenty-first
husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the
rank of honourable matrons, before the four days' duration of marriage
is expired!--Morals, as they were:--decorum, the great outguard of
the sex, and the proud sentiment of honour, which makes virtue more
respectable where it is, and conceals human frailty where virtue may not
be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve.
SIR SYDNEY SMITH.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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