on Political Liberty," and he spent the winter of 1792 in Paris, but was glad to get back to England. He is said to have warned the Girondins that unless they put down the Jacobins, whose club had denounced him as a Royalist because he excused Louis XVI., they would be destroyed by them. Aghast at the confusion in the Convention and the uproar in the galleries, he told Madame Roland he expected little good from deputies unable to listen. "You French no longer study that external propriety which stands for so much in Assemblies; heedlessness and coarseness are no recommendations for a Legislature." The clamour in the Assembly shocked, indeed, all English observers, who by 1791 were getting disillusionised; yet even then there were deceptive lulls. George Hammond, afterwards Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, writing to Bland Burges in March 1791, expresses surprise at the tranquillity which prevailed." Except a greater number of men in military uniforms parading the streets, all the common occupations of life proceed as smoothly and regularly as if no event of consequence had occurred, and the public amusements are followed with as much avidity as in the most quiet and flourishing periods of the monarchy." Lafayette, however, about this time bowed, but said nothing when congratulated on the calm by Samuel Rogers, who had fancied on landing at Calais that France might soon prove
