rful, and always so contemptuous of calculation,
may at some time or other carry the craziest craft into harbour. But the
general order of continental ministers, even of the highest rank, when
abandoned by the monarch, are like men consigned to the dungeon. They go
to their place of sentence at once. The man who to-day figured in the
highest robe of power, to-morrow wears the prison costume. His rise was
the work of the royal will--his fall is equally the work of the royal
will. Having no connexion with the national mind, he has no resource in
the national sympathies. He has been a royal instrument: when his edge
becomes dull, or the royal artificer finds a tool whose fashion he likes
better, the old tool is flung by to rust, and no man asks where or why,
his use is at an end, and the world and the workman, alike, "knoweth it
no more."

But, in England, the condition of public life is wholly different. The
statesman is the creation of the national will, and neither in office,
nor in opposition, does the nation forget the product of its will. The
minister is no offspring of slavery, no official negro, made to be sold,
and, when sold, separated from his parentage once and for ever. If he
sins in power, he is at worst but the Prodigal Son, watched in his
career, and willingly welcomed when he has abjured his wanderings.
Instead of being extinguished by the loss of power, he often more than
compensates the change, by the revival of popularity. Disencumbered of
the laced and embroidered drapery of office, he often exhibits the
natural vigour and proportion of his faculties to higher advantage;
cultivates his intellectual distinctions with more palpable success;
refreshes his strength for nobler purposes than even those of ambition;
and, if he should not exert his renewed popularity for a new conquest of
power, only substitutes for place the more generous and exalted
determination of deserving those tributes which men naturally offer to
great abilities exerted for the good of present and future generations.

We must allude, for the national honour, to this characteristic of
English feeling, in the changes of public men. On the Continent, the
hour which deprived a statesman of office, at once deprived him of every
thing. All the world ran away from him, as they would from a falling
house. The crowded antechamber of yesterday, exhibited nothing to-day
but utter solitude. The fallen minister was a leper; men shrank from his
tou