ABSTRACT
THE Abbé Maury is one of the mod distinguished members or the National Assembly. He possesses astonishing powers of eloquence; but he has done his talents the injustice to make them subservient to the narrow considerations of self-interest. Had he displayed that ability in defence of civil and religious liberty, which he has employed in the service of the exorbitant pretentions of the church, he would have deserved the highest applause of his country; instead of which, he has called to the aid of his genius an auxiliary it ought to have scorned; that subtlety which tries “to make the worse appear the better reason;” and he is still more detested than admired. I am not surprized that a little mind is sometimes tempted by interest to tread in a mean and sordid path; but I own it does astonish me that genius can be induced from the fair field of honourable fame into those serpentine ways where it can meet with no object worthy of its ambition. “Something too much of this.” You shall hear a repartee of the Abbé Maury, who, after having made a very unpopular motion in the Assembly, was insulted as he was going out; the people crying, as they are too apt to do,* “A la lanterne.” The Abbé, turning to the croud, answered, with equal indignation and spirit, † “Eh! Messieurs, si j’etois à la lanterne, 33seriez vous plus eclairés?” The Abbé Maury, before the revolution, was in poffession of eight hundred farms, and has lost sixty thousand livres a year in consequence of that event. But enough of Mons. l’Abbé, whose picture I have just purchased in a snuff-box. You touch a spring, open the lid of the snuff box, and the Abbé jumps up, and occasions much surprize and merriment. The joke, however, is grown a little stale in France: but I shall bring the Abbé with me to England, where I flatter myself his sudden appearance will afford some diversion.
