of the ambassador?

"It is in the hope that those sentiments were not _entirely effaced_,
that I wished to address myself directly to your Majesty. But it was not
_without fear_ that I approached you. Appearances only too strongly
prove the impressions which you have received from our enemies." And so
goes on the dialogue, like a scene in a play, see-sawing through six
intolerable pages. How differently would Pitt's cabinet have acted, and
how differently did it act! When the Russian councils menaced the
seizure of even a paltry Turkish fortress on the Black Sea, the great
minister ordered a fleet to be ready as _his_ negotiators; and though
the factiousness of Opposition at the time prevented this manly
demonstration of policy and justice, the evidence was given, in the
reign of Paul, when a British fleet crushed the armed neutrality--that
trick of French mountebanks imposing on the ambition of the north--and
restored Russia to so full a sense of the power and the honour of
England, that she sent her fleet into her safe keeping at the approach
of Napoleon's invasion, and has been her fast and honourable ally ever
since. "Cromwell's ambassador" is the true one for England at all times.
A stout British squadron sent to the Baltic in 1780 would have
wonderfully solved the difficulties of the British negotiation, have
completely cleared the empress's conscience, have enlightened Count
Panin's brains, and have convinced even the wily Potemkin himself that
the art of political delusion was too dangerous a game to be tried
against England.

But the true value of history is to instruct the future. We are now in
nearly the same relative position to France in which we were sixty-four
years ago relative to Russia. We are exhibiting the same dilatoriness
which we exhibited then, and we shall be fortunate if we escape the same
consequences. A strong fleet sent to the Mediterranean would do more to
calm the elements of strife effectually, than all the remonstrances of
all our negotiators. Or, if the French were foolish enough to provoke a
battle, a repetition of the 1st of June or the 21st of October would be
the tranquillizer of a restless people, who can never suffer Europe to
rest in peace but when they themselves have been taught the miseries of
war.

In justice to the cabinet of 1780, it must be acknowledged that the
personal tone of the ambassador was criticised; and we thus find him
making his diplomatic apology to Lord S