opular, than when he made the House ring with prophecies of
national downfall. His attacks were now incessant. He flung his
hand-grenades night after night into our camp, and constantly with still
greater damage. We still fought, but it was the fight of despair. Pitt
was imperturbable; but there was not one among his colleagues who did
not feel the hopelessness of calling for public reliance, when, in every
successive debate, we heard the leader of Opposition contemptuously
asking, what answer we had to the Gazette crowded with bankruptcy? to
the resolutions of great bodies of the people denouncing the war? or to
the deadly evidence of its effects in the bulletin which he held in his
hand, announcing some new defeat of our allies; some new treaty of
submission; some new barter of provinces for the precarious existence of
foreign thrones?

In all my recollections of public life, this was the period of the
deepest perplexity. The name of the great minister has been humiliated
by those who judge of the past only by the present. But then all was
new. The general eye of statesmanship had been deceived by the formal
grandeur of the continential sovereignties. They had lain untouched,
like the bodies of their kings, with all their armour on, and with every
feature unchanged; and such they might have remained for ages to come,
had not a new force broken open their gilded and sculptured shrines,
torn off their cerements, and exposed them to the light and air. Then a
touch extinguished them; the armour dropped into dust; the royal robes
dissolved; the royal features disappeared; and the whole illusion left
nothing but its moral behind.

It can be no dishonour to the memory of the first of statesmen, to
acknowledge that he had not the gift of prophecy. Europe had never
before seen a war of the people. The burning passions, rude vigour, and
remorseless daring of the multitude, were phenomena of which man knows
no more than he knows of the materials of destruction which lie hid in
the central caverns of the globe, and which some new era may be suffered
to develope, for the new havoc of posterity. Even to this hour, I think
that the true source of revolutionary triumph has been mistaken. It was
not in the furious energy of its factions, nor in the wild revenge of
the people, nor even in the dazzling view of national conquest. These
were but gusts of the popular tempest, currents of the great popular
tide. But the mighty mover of all