ve it,--a new course of education, a higher
tone of moral feeling, more of the grandeur of the imaginative
faculties, and less of the petty processes of the unfeeling and purblind
understanding, that would manage the concerns of nations in the same
calculating spirit with which it would set about building a house. Now a
State ought to be governed (at least in these times), the labours of the
statesman ought to advance, upon calculations and from impulses similar
to those which give motion to the hand of a great artist when he is
preparing a picture, or of a mighty poet when he is determining the
proportions and march of a poem;--much is to be done by rule; the great
outline is previously to be conceived in distinctness, but the
consummation of the work must be trusted to resources that are not
tangible, though known to exist. Much as I admire the political sagacity
displayed in your work, I respect you still more for the lofty spirit
that supports it; for the animation and courage with which it is
replete; for the contempt, in a just cause, of death and danger by which
it is ennobled; for its heroic confidence in the valour of your
countrymen; and the absolute determination which it everywhere expresses
to maintain in all points the honour of the soldier's profession, and
that of the noble Nation of which you are a member--of the Land in which
you were born. No insults, no indignities, no vile stooping, will your
politics admit of; and therefore, more than for any other cause, do I
congratulate my country on the appearance of a book which, resting in
this point our national safety upon the purity of our national
character, will, I trust, lead naturally to make us, at the same time, a
more powerful and a high-minded nation.

Affectionately yours, W. WORDSWORTH.[23]

[22] 'Totis imperii viribus consurgitur,' says the historian, speaking
of the war of the gladiators.

[23] _Memoirs_, vol. i. pp. 406-20.

* * * * *

_Letter enclosing the Preceding to a Friend unnamed_.

MY DEAR SIR,

I have taken the Liberty of addressing the enclosed to you, with a wish
that you would be so kind as to send it by the twopenny Post. The
Letter, though to a personal Acquaintance and to some degree a friend,
is upon a kind of Public occasion, and consists of Comments upon Captain
Pasley's lately published Essay on the Military Policy of Great Britain;
a work which if you have not seen I earnestly r