After such 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 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 useless, prosperous prudence, which
had hitherto 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 for ever 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 a 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 he would no longer amuse the British lion in the
chase of mice and rats; that he would no longer employ the whole naval
power of Great Britain, once the terror of the world, to prey upon
the miserable remains of a peddling commerce, which the enemy did not
regard, and from which none could profit. It was expected that he
would have re-asserted the justice of his cause; that he would have
re-animated whatever remained to him of his allies, and endeavoured
to recover those whom their fears had led astray; that he would have
rekindled the martial ardour of his citizens; that he would have held
out to them the example of their ancestry, the assertor of Europe, and
the scourge of French ambition; that he would have reminded them of a
posterity, which, if this nefarious robbery under the fraudulent name
and false colour of a government, should in full power be seated in the
heart of Europe, must for ever be consigned to vice, impiety, barbarism,
and the most ignominious slavery of body and mind. In so holy a cause it
was presumed that he would (as in the beginning of the war he did)
have opened all the temples; and with prayer, with fasting, and with
supplication (better directed than to the grim Moloch of regicide in
France), have called upon us to raise that united cry which has so often
stormed heaven, and with a pious violence forced down blessings upon
a repentant people. It was hoped that when he had invoked upon his
endeavours the favourable regard of the Protector of the human race,
it would be seen that his menaces to the enemy, and his prayers to the
Almighty, were not followed, but accompanied, with correspondent action.
It was hoped that his shrilling trumpet should be heard, not to announce
a show, but to sound a charge.