like case, and how the Acting-Apparatuses and Affairs generally
will go, with a poor hysterical Newcastle, now when his Common Sense is
fatally withdrawn! The poor man has no resource but to shuffle about in
aimless perpetual fidget; endeavoring vainly to say Yes and No to all
questions, Foreign and Domestic, that may rise. Whereby, in the
Affairs of England, there has, as it were, universal St.-Vitus's dance
supervened, at an important crisis: and the Preparations for America,
and for a downright Life-and-Death Wrestle with France on the
JENKINS'S-EAR QUESTION, are quite in a bad way. In an ominously bad. Why
cannot we draw a veil over these things!"--

2. PITT, AND THE HOUR OF TIDE. "The fidgetings and shufflings, the
subtleties, inane trickeries, and futile hitherings and thitherings of
Newcastle may be imagined: a man not incapable of trick; but anxious
to be well with everybody; and to answer Yes and No to almost
everything,--and not a little puzzled, poor soul, to get through, in
that impossible way! Such a paralysis of wriggling imbecility fallen
over England, in this great crisis of its fortunes, as is still painful
to contemplate: and indeed it has been mostly shaken out of mind by
the modern Englishman; who tries to laugh at it, instead of weeping
and considering, which would better beseem. Pitt speaks with a tragical
vivacity, in all ingenious dialects, lively though serious; and with
a depth of sad conviction, which is apt to be slurred over and missed
altogether by a modern reader. Speaks as if this brave English Nation
were about ended; little or no hope left for it; here a gleam of
possibility, and there a gleam, which soon vanishes again in the fatal
murk of impotencies, do-nothingisms. Very sad to the heart of Pitt. A
once brave Nation arrived at its critical point, and doomed to higgle
and puddle there till it drown in the gutters: considerably tragical
to Pitt; who is lively, ingenious, and, though not quitting the
Parliamentary tone for the Hebrew-Prophetic, far more serious than the
modern reader thinks.

"In Walpole's Book [_Memoirs of the Last Ten Years of George II._] there
is the liveliest Picture of this dismal Parliamentary Hellbroth,--such
a Mother of Dead Dogs as one has seldom looked into! For the Hour is
great; and the Honorable Gentlemen, I must say, are small. The hour,
little as you dream of it, my Honorable Friends, is pregnant with
questions that are immense. Wide Continents, long Ep