d Fleetwood's alternative: his wife or Rome!
They say she has an incommunicable charm, accounting for the price he
puts on her now she holds aloof and he misses it. Let her but rescue him
from England's most vigilant of her deadly enemies, she will be entitled
to the nation's lasting gratitude. She has her opportunity for winning
the Anglican English, as formerly she won the Dissenter Welsh. She may
yet be the means of leading back the latter to our fold.

A notation of the cries in air at a time of surgent public excitement can
hardly yield us music; and the wording of them, by the aid of compounds
and transplants, metaphors and similes only just within range of the
arrows of Phoebus' bow (i.e. the farthest flight known), would, while it
might imitate the latent poetry, expose venturesome writers to the wrath
of a people commendably believing their language a perfected instrument
when they prefer the request for a plateful, and commissioning their
literary police to brain audacious experimenters who enlarge or wing it
beyond the downright aim at that mark. The gossip of the time must
therefore appear commonplace, in resemblance to the panting venue a terre
of the toad, instead of the fiery steed's; although we have documentary
evidence that our country's heart was moved;--in no common degree, Dr.
Glossop's lucid English has it, at the head of a broadsheet ballad
discovered by him, wherein the connubially inclined young earl and the
nation in turn beseech the countess to resume her place at Esslemont, and
so save both from a terrific dragon's jaw, scarlet as the infernal
flames; described as fascinating--

'The classes with the crests,
And the lining to their vests,
Till down they jump, and empty leave
A headless trunk that rests.'

These ballads, burlesque to present reading, mainly intended for
burlesque by the wits who dogged without much enlivening an anxious
period of our history, when corner-stones were falling the way the young
lord of the millions threatened to go, did, there is little doubt,
according to another part of their design (Rose Mackrell boasts it
indirectly in his Memoirs), interpret public opinion, that is, the
English humour of it--the half laugh in their passing and not simulated
shudder.

Carinthia had a study of the humours of English character in the person
of the wounded man she nursed on little Croridge, imagining it the most
unobserved of English