m into contact with soldiership, from the
quartermaster up to the general. But the contrast of the tumult which
I left behind with the quietness of the scenes around me--the haste,
the anxiety, and the restlessness of a huge camp, with the calm of the
fields, with the regularity which seemed to govern all the operations
of farming life, and with the grave opulence of the old mansions,
which seemed to be formed for the natural receptacles of the wealth of
Flemish fields--at once refreshed me after the mental fever in which I
had tossed so long, and perhaps impressed on me more deeply the
parting advice of my friend the philosopher.

But, from the moment when I touched British ground, the whole sleepy
tranquillity which gathers over every man in the quietude of Flanders,
where man seems to have followed the same plough from the deluge, had
utterly vanished. I was in the midst of a nation in a ferment. The war
was the universal topic; party was in full life. From the inn at Dover
up to the waiting-room at the Horse-Guards, I heard nothing but
politics. The conduct of our army--the absurdity of every thing that
had been done, or left undone--the failures of the Allies--the
fanaticism of the French--the hopes of popular liberty on one side,
and the indignation of established power on the other--came rushing
round me in a chaos of discordant conceptions, that for the time
bewildered me. How simple was the gossip of the camp to this
heterogeneous mass of struggling topics! How straightforward was even
the wild haranguing of the Palais Royal to the thousand reports and
protests, remonstrances and replications, of the whole ringing and
raging, public mind of England! This was the age of pamphleteering.
Every sage who could, or could not, write, flung his pamphlet in the
teeth of the party whose existence he conceived to be ruinous to his
country, or perhaps prejudicial to his own prospect of a sinecure. The
journals printed their columns in gall; the satirists dipped their
pens in concentrated acid; the popular haranguers dashed the oil of
vitriol of contempt in each other's faces. The confusion, the
collision, the uproar, was indescribable.

But my whole experience of public life has told me, that however the
popular opinion may be wrong, the public opinion is right; and I felt
that the nation was already adverse to the conduct of the campaign.
The utmost skill of the cabinet was required to prevent a dangerous
reaction. The