innumerable improvements in our poor blind methods, of getting
hold of these. Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable
Talking-Apparatus would do very little for us at present;--but an
infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would be
invaluable now and henceforth. The practical question puts itself with
ever-increasing stringency to all English minds: Can we, by no industry,
energy, utmost expenditure of human ingenuity, and passionate invocation
of the Heavens and Earth, get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to
manage the affairs of this nation in Downing Street and the chief posts
elsewhere, who are abler for the work than those we have been used to,
this long while? For it is really a heroic work, and cannot be done by
histrios, and dexterous talkers having the honor to be: it is a heavy
and appalling work; and, at the starting of it especially, will
require Herculean men; such mountains of pedant exuviae and obscene
owl-droppings have accumulated in those regions, long the habitation
of doleful creatures; the old _pavements_, the natural facts and real
essential functions of those establishments, have not been seen by eyes
for these two hundred years last past! Herculean men acquainted with the
virtues of running water, and with the divine necessity of getting down
to the clear pavements and old veracities; who tremble before no amount
of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking of doleful creatures; who
tremble only to live, themselves, like inane phantasms, and to leave
their life as a paltry _contribution_ to the guano mountains, and not as
a divine eternal protest against them!

These are the kind of men we want; these, the nearest possible
approximation to these, are the men we must find and have, or go
bankrupt altogether; for the concern as it is will evidently not hold
long together. How true is this of Crabbe: "Men sit in Parliament
eighty-three hours per week, debating about many things. Men sit in
Downing Street, doing protocols, Syrian treaties, Greek questions,
Portuguese, Spanish, French, Egyptian and AEthiopian questions;
dexterously writing despatches, and having the honor to be. Not a
question of them is at all pressing in comparison with the English
question. Pacifico the miraculous Gibraltar Jew has been hustled by some
populace in Greece:--upon him let the British Lion drop, very rapidly
indeed, a constitutional tear. Radetzky is said to be advancing upon
Milan;--I