The ‘Reflections on the French Revolution’ was a spiteful and dastard but too successful attempt to _put a spoke in the wheels_ of knowledge and progressive civilization, and throw them back for a century and a half at least. In viewing the change, in the prospects of society, in producing which he had only a slight and indirect hand by his efforts in the cause of American freedom, he seemed to say, with Iago in the play,— ‘Though that their joy be joy, Yet will I contrive To throw such changes of vexations on it; As it may lose some colour.’ He went beyond his own most sanguine hopes, but did not live to witness their final accomplishment, by seeing France literally ‘blotted out of the map of Europe.’ He died in the most brilliant part of Buonaparte’s victorious and captain-like campaigns in Italy. If it could have been foreseen what an ‘ugly customer’ he was likely to prove, the way would have been to have bribed his vanity (a great deal stronger than his interest) over to the other side, by asking his opinion; and, indeed, he has thrown out pretty broad hints in the early stage of his hostility, and before the unexpected success of the French arms, and the whizzing arrows flung at him by his old friends and new antagonists had stung him to madness, that the great error of the National Assembly was in not having consulted able and experienced heads on this side the water, as to demolishing the old, and constructing the new edifice. If he had been employed to lay the first stone, or to assist, by an inaugural dissertation, at the baptism of the new French Constitution, the fabric of the Revolution would thenceforth have risen,— ‘Like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumery,’