Disappointment and mortification
undoubtedly they feel; but to them repentance is a thing impossible.
They are atheists. This wretched opinion, by which they are possessed
even to the height of fanaticism, leading them to exclude from their
ideas of a commonwealth the vital principle of the physical, the moral,
and the political world engages them in a thousand absurd contrivances
to fill up this dreadful void. Incapable of innoxious repose or
honorable action or wise speculation in the lurking-holes of a foreign
land, into which (in a common ruin) they are driven to hide their heads
amongst the innocent victims of their madness, they are at this very
hour as busy in the confection of the dirt-pies of their imaginary
constitutions as if they had not been quite fresh from destroying, by
their impious and desperate vagaries, the finest country upon earth.
It is, however, out of these, or of such as these, guilty and
impenitent, despising the experience of others, and their own, that some
people talk of choosing their negotiators with those Jacobins who they
suppose may be recovered to a sounder mind.
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