The din of all this smithery may some time or other possibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an endeavor to save some little matter from their experimental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has received them from the pillage of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a little, because they are enemies to all corporations and to all religion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his Grace, or his learned council, that all such property belongs to the _nation_,--and that it would be more wise for him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a _citizen_, (that is, according to Condorcet's calculation, six months on an average,) not to pass for an usurper upon the national property. This is what the _serjeants_-at-law of the rights of man will say to the puny _apprentices_ of the common law of England. Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? You may as well think the garden of the Tuileries was well protected with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by the National Assembly to keep the sovereign _canaille_ from intruding on the retirement of the poor King of the French as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the Revolution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no triflers; brave _sans-culottes_ are no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tavistock; the Lord of Woburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they will make no difference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rush whether his coat is long or short,--whether the color be purple, or blue and buff. They will not trouble _their_ heads with what part of _his_ head his hair is out from; and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some oilier of their legislative butchers: How he cuts up; how he tallows in the caul or on the kidneys. Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the _sans-culotte_ carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, and, like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop-windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing, that, all the while they are measuring _him_, his Grace is measuring _me_,--is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor innocent! "Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."