All these sudden complaints of injury, and all these deliberate
submissions to it, are the inevitable consequences of the situation in
which we had placed ourselves: a situation wherein the insults were such
as Nature would not enable us to bear, and circumstances would not
permit us to resent.
It was not long, however, after this contempt of contempt upon the part
of our ambassador, (who by the way represented his sovereign,) that a
new object was furnished for displaying sentiments of the same kind,
though the case was infinitely aggravated. Not the ambassador, but the
king himself, was libelled and insulted,--libelled, not by a creature of
the Directory, but by the Directory itself. At least, so Lord Malmesbury
understood it, and so he answered it in his note of the 12th November,
1796, in which he says,--"With regard to the _offensive and injurious_
insinuations which are contained in that paper, and which are only
calculated to throw new obstacles in the way of the accommodation which
the French government professes to desire, THE KING HAS DEEMED IT FAR
BENEATH HIS DIGNITY to permit an answer to be made to them on his part,
in any manner whatsoever."
I am of opinion, that, if his Majesty had kept aloof from that wash and
offscouring of everything that is low and barbarous in the world, it
might be well thought unworthy of his dignity to take notice of such
scurrilities: they must be considered as much the natural expression of
that kind of animal as it is the expression of the feelings of a dog to
bark.
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