It is not for his Holiness we intend this consolatory declaration of
our own weakness, and of the tyrannous temper of his grand enemy. That
prince has known both the one and the other from the beginning. The
artists of the French revolution had given their very first essays and
sketches of robbery and desolation against his territories, in a far
more cruel "murdering piece" than had ever entered into the imagination
of painter or poet. Without ceremony they tore from his cherishing arms
the possessions which he held for five hundred years, undisturbed by all
the ambition of all the ambitious monarchs who, during that period,
have reigned in France. Is it to him, in whose wrong we have in our
late negotiation ceded his now unhappy countries near the Rhone, lately
amongst the most flourishing (perhaps the most flourishing for their
extent) of all the countries upon earth, that we are to prove the
sincerity of our resolution to make peace with the republic barbarism?
That venerable potentate and pontiff is sunk deep into the vale of
years; he is half disarmed by his peaceful character; his dominions are
more than half disarmed by a peace of two hundred years, defended as
they were, not by forces, but by reverence; yet in all these straits, we
see him display, amidst the recent ruins and the new defacements of
his plundered capital, along with the mild and decorated piety of the
modern, all the spirit and magnanimity of ancient Rome! Does he, who,
though himself unable to defend them, nobly refused to receive pecuniary
compensations for the protection he owed to his people of Avignon,
Carpentras, and the Venaisin;--does he want proofs of our good
disposition to deliver over that people without any security for them,
or any compensation to their sovereign, to this cruel enemy? Does he
want to be satisfied of the sincerity of our humiliation to France, who
has seen his free, fertile, and happy city and state of Bologna,
the cradle of regenerated law, the seat of sciences and of arts, so
hideously metamorphosed, whilst he was crying to Great Britain for aid,
and offering to purchase that aid at any price? Is it him, who sees that
chosen spot of plenty and delight converted into a Jacobin ferocious
republic, dependent on the homicides of France? Is it him, who, from the
miracles of his beneficent industry, has done a work which defied the
power of the Roman emperors, though with an enthralled world to labour
for them; is it him, who has drained and cultivated the PONTINE MARSHES,
that we are to satisfy of our cordial spirit of conciliation, with those
who, in their equity, are restoring Holland again to the seas, whose
maxims poison more than the exhalations of the most deadly fens, and who
turn all the fertilities of nature and of art into a howling desert? Is
it to him, that we are to demonstrate the good faith of our submissions
to the cannibal republic; to him who is commanded to deliver into their
hands Ancona and Civita Vecchia, seats of commerce, raised by the wise
and liberal labours and expenses of the present and late pontiffs; ports
not more belonging to the Ecclesiastical State than to the commerce of
Great Britain; thus wresting from his hands the power of the keys of the
centre of Italy, as before they had taken possession of the keys of
the northern part, from the hands of the unhappy king of Sardinia, the
natural ally of England? Is it to him we are to prove our good faith in
the peace which we are soliciting to receive from the hands of his and
our robbers, the enemies of all arts, all sciences, all civilization,
and all commerce?