So that no
constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a
pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation,
exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any
shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progress
of experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly!
Such are their sentiments, I assure him; such is their language, when
they dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when they have the
means to act.
Their geographers and geometricians have been some time out of practice.
It is some time since they have divided their own country into squares.
That figure has lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands for
new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the Republic that find
him a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after the
geometricians have done with him. As the first set have an eye on his
Grace's lands, the chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They
consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention, in its present
state, but, properly employed, an admirable material for overturning all
establishments. They have found that the gunpowder of _ruins_ is far
the fittest for making other _ruins_, and so _ad infinitum_. They have
calculated what quantity of matter convertible into nitre is to be found
in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and in what his Grace and his
trustees have still suffered to stand of that foolish royalist, Inigo
Jones, in Covent Garden.
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