est, to fall like a bolt from the blue
on the suspected Prince in the midst of his gathering warriors, was a
handsome piece of daring, and the high-handed treatment of the Prince
was held by his advocates to be justified by the provocation, and the
result. He scattered an unprepared body of many hundreds, who might have
enveloped him, and who would presumptively have stood their ground, had
they not taken his handful to be the advance of regiments. These are the
deeds that win empires! the argument in his favour ran. Are they of a
character to maintain empires? the counter-question was urged. Men of
a deliberative aspect were not wanting in approval of the sharp and
summary of the sword in air when we have to deal with Indians. They
chose to regard it as a matter of the dealing with Indians, and put
aside the question of the contempt of civil authority.

Counting the cries, Lord Ormont won his case. Festival aldermen, smoking
clubmen, buckskin squires, obsequious yet privately excitable tradesmen,
sedentary coachmen and cabmen, of Viking descent, were set to think like
boys about him: and the boys, the women, and the poets formed a tipsy
chorea. Journalists, on the whole, were fairly halved, as regarded
numbers. In relation to weight, they were with the burgess and the
presbyter; they preponderated heavily in the direction of England's
burgess view of all cases disputed between civilian and soldier. But
that was when the peril was over.

Admirers of Lord Ormont enjoyed a perusal of a letter addressed by him
to the burgess's journal; and so did his detractors. The printing of it
was an act of editorial ruthlessness. The noble soldier had no mould in
his intellectual or educational foundry for the casting of sentences;
and the editor's leading type to the letter, without further notice
of the writer--who was given a prominent place or scaffolding for
the execution of himself publicly, if it pleased him to do that
thing--tickled the critical mind. Lord Ormont wrote intemperately.

His Titanic hurling of blocks against critics did no harm to an enemy
skilled in the use of trimmer weapons, notably the fine one of letting
big missiles rebound. He wrote from India, with Indian heat--"curry and
capsicums," it was remarked. He dared to claim the countenance of the
Commander-in-chief of the Army of India for an act disapproved by the
India House. Other letters might be on their way, curryer than the
preceding, his friends feare