ch an elaborate display had been made of the injustice and
insolence of an enemy who seems to have been irritated by every one of
the means which had been commonly used with effect to soothe the rage of
intemperate power, the natural result would be, that the scabbard in
which we in vain attempted to plunge our sword should have been thrown
away with scorn. It would have been natural, that, rising in the fulness
of their might, insulted majesty, despised dignity, violated justice,
rejected supplication, patience goaded into fury, would have poured out
all the length of the reins upon all the wrath which they had so long
restrained. It might have been expected, that, emulous of the glory of
the youthful hero[37] in alliance with him, touched by the example of
what one man well formed and well placed may do in the most desperate
state of affairs, convinced there is a courage of the cabinet full as
powerful and far less vulgar than that of the field, our minister would
have changed the whole line of that unprosperous prudence which hitherto
had produced all the effects of the blindest temerity. If he found his
situation full of danger, (and I do not deny that it is perilous in the
extreme,) he must feel that it is also full of glory, and that he is
placed on a stage than which no muse of fire that had ascended the
highest heaven of invention could imagine anything more awful and
august. It was hoped that in this swelling scene in which he moved, with
some of the first potentates of Europe for his fellow-actors, and with
so many of the rest for the anxious spectators of a part which, as he
plays it, determines forever their destiny and his own, like Ulysses in
the unravelling point of the epic story, he would have thrown off his
patience and his rags together, and, stripped of unworthy disguises, he
would have stood forth in the form and in the attitude of an hero. On
that day it was thought he would have assumed the port of Mars; that he
would bid to be brought forth from their hideous kennel (where his
scrupulous tenderness had too long immured them) those impatient dogs of
war whose fierce regards affright even the minister of vengeance that
feeds them; that he would let them loose, in famine, fever, plagues,
and death, upon a guilty race, to whose frame, and to all whose habit,
order, peace, religion, and virtue are alien and abhorrent. It was
expected that he would at last have thought of active and effectual war;
that h