ise
demanding a public chastisement. And yet, because this piracy had a
local settlement and nursery, it seemed hardly consonant to the spirit
of public (or international) law, that all civil rights should be denied
them.

Not without reason, not without a profound purpose, did Providence
ordain that our two great precedents upon earth should be Greece and
Rome. In all planets, if you could look into them, doubt not (oh, reader
of ours!) that something exists answering to Greece and Rome. Odd it
would be--_curioes_! as the Germans say--if in Jupiter--or Venus--those
precedents should exist under the same _names_ of Greece and Rome. Yet,
why not? Jovial--and Venereal--people may be better in some things than
our people (which, however, we doubt), but certainly a better language
than the Greek man cannot have invented in either planet. Falling back
from cases so low and so lofty (Venus an inferior, Jupiter a far
superior planet) to our own case, the case of poor mediocre Tellurians,
perhaps the reader thinks that other nations might have served the
purpose of Providentia. Other nations might have furnished those
Providential models which the great drama of earth required. No.
Haughtily and despotically we say it--No. Take France. _There_ is a
noble nation. We honour it exceedingly for that heroic courage which on
a morning of battle does not measure the strength of the opposition;
which, when an enemy issues from the darkness of a wood, does not stop
to count noses, but like that noblest of animals, the British bull-dog,
flies at his throat, careless whether a leopard, a buffalo, or a tiger
of Bengal. This we vehemently admire. This we feel to be an echo, an
iteration, of our own leonine courage, concerning which--take you note
of this, oh, chicken-hearted man! (if any such is amongst _our_
readers)--that God sees it with pleasure, blesses it, and calls it 'very
good!' Next, when we come to think at odd times of that other courage,
the courage of fidelity, which stands for hours under the storm of a
cannonade--British courage, Russian courage--in mere sincerity we cannot
ascribe this to the Gaul. All this is true: we feel that the French is
an imperfect nation. But suppose it _not_ imperfect, would the French
therefore have fulfilled for us the mission of the Greek and the Roman?
Undoubtedly they would not. Far enough are we from admiring either Greek
or Roman in that degree to which the ignorance, but oftener the
hypocr