(all
but the day): That, in the mean while, and surely the sooner the better,
he, Belleisle, Most Christian Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary to the
Reichstag coming,--do, in his most dazzling and persuasive manner, make
a Tour among German Courts. Let us visit, in our highest and yet in our
softest splendor, the accessible German Courts, especially the likely
or well-disposed: Mainz, Koln, Trier, these, the three called Spiritual,
lie on our very route; then Pfalz, Baiern, Sachsen:--we will tour
diligently up and down; try whether, by optic machinery and art-magic of
the mind, one cannot bring them round.

In all these preliminary steps and points, and even in that alpha and
omega of excluding Grand-Duke Franz, and getting a Kaiser of his own,
Belleisle succeeded. With painful results to himself and to millions
of his fellow-creatures, to readers of this History, among others. And
became in consequence the most famous of mankind; and filled the whole
world with rumor of Belleisle, in those years.--A man of such intrinsic
distinction as Belleisle, whom Friedrich afterwards deliberately called
a great Captain, and the only Frenchman with a genius for war; and who,
for some time, played in Europe at large a part like that of Warwick
the Kingmaker: how has he fallen into such oblivion? Many of my readers
never heard of him before; nor, in writing or otherwise, is there
symptom that any living memory now harbors him, or has the least
approach to an image of him! "For the times are babbly," says Goethe,"
And then again the times are dumb:--

Denn geschwatzig sind die Zeiten,
Und sie sind auch wieder stumm."

Alas, if a man sow only chaff, in never so sublime a manner, with the
whole Earth and the long-eared populations looking on, and chorally
singing approval, rendering night hideous,--it will avail him nothing.
And that, to a lamentable extent, was Belleisle's case. His scheme of
action was in most felicitously just accordance with the national sense
of France, but by no means so with the Laws of Nature and of Fact; his
aim, grandiose, patriotic, what you will, was unluckily false and not
true. How could "the times" continue talking of him? They found they had
already talked too much. Not to say that the French Revolution has since
come; and has blown all that into the air, miles aloft,--where even
the solid part of it, which must be recovered one day, much more the
gaseous, which we trust is forever irreco