in,
and the grave sophistry, which this extraordinary man could exhibit
with such redundant ease, and wield with such vigorous dexterity. I
must give but an outline:--

"You have made war," said he, "and you have made the arms of your
country contemptible by failures, which you rendered inevitable by
your rashness. You, sir," and he fixed his flashing eye on the
premier, "have commenced that war by a series of declarations,
which made our diplomacy as contemptible as our campaigns. The
national sword had been wrested from our hands. But you were not
content with that humiliation, and you added to it the disgrace of
the national understanding. You laid down a succession of
principles, and then trampled them in the dust on the first
opportunity. You encumbered yourself for action with pledges which
you could never have intended to sustain, or which in the first
collision your pusillanimity threw away. Yet I deprecate your
perfidy even more than I despise your weakness. I can comprehend
the effrontery of a fair aggression; but I scorn the meanness of
intrigue. I may face the man-at-arms, but I shudder at the
assassin. I may determine to hunt down and destroy the lion, but I
disdain the trap and the pitfall. And what has been the pretext of
his majesty's ministers? Moderation. In this spirit of moderation
they invaded France; in this spirit of moderation they captured
her fortresses, and then handed them over to the Emperor; in this
spirit of moderation they denounced the men who had given France a
constitution; and in this spirit of moderation you now prepare to
rebuild her Bastile, to restore her scaffolds, to reforge her
chains, and summon all the kings of Europe, instead of taking a
salutary lesson from the tomb of the monarchy, to see its skeleton
exhumed, and placed, robed and crowned, upon the throne, with the
nation forced to offer homage, at once in mockery and terror, to
the grinning emblem; in which, with all your philtres, you can
never put life again."

The orator then gave a general and singularly imposing view of the
state of our European connexions; which he described as utterly frail,
the result of interested motives, and sure to be broken up at the
first temptation. But the "first lord of the treasury and chancellor
of his majesty's exchequer," said he, "smiles at my alarm; he has his
se