was Richelieu. Napoleon was a fine
engine:--there is a difference. Yes, Ironsides is a fine fellow! but he
and I may cross. His ideas are not many. The point to remember is that he
is iron on them: he can drive them hard into the density of the globe. He
has quick nerves and imagination: he can conjure up, penetrate, and
traverse complications--an enemy's plans, all that the enemy will be able
to combine, and the likeliest that he will do. Good. We opine that we are
equal to the same. He is for kingcraft to mask his viziercraft--and save
him the labour of patiently attempting oratory and persuasion, which
accomplishment he does not possess:--it is not in iron. We think the more
precious metal will beat him when the broader conflict comes. But such an
adversary is not to be underrated. I do not underrate him: and certainly
not he me. Had he been born with the gifts of patience and a fluent
tongue, and not a petty noble, he might have been for the people, as
knowing them the greater power. He sees that their knowledge of their
power must eventually come to them. In the meantime his party is forcible
enough to assure him he is not fighting a losing game at present: and he
is, no doubt, by lineage and his traditions monarchical. He is curiously
simple, not really cynical. His apparent cynicism is sheer irritability.
His contemptuous phrases are directed against obstacles: against things,
persons, nations that oppose him or cannot serve his turn against his
king, if his king is restive; but he respects his king: against your
friends' country, because there is no fixing it to a line of policy, and
it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that country the best in Europe
after his own. He is nearest to contempt in his treatment of his dupes
and tools, who are dropped out of his mind when he has quite squeezed
them for his occasion; to be taken up again when they are of use to him.
Hence he will have no following. But let me die to-morrow, the party I
have created survives. In him you see the dam, in me the stream. Judge,
then, which of them gains the future!--admitting that, in the present he
may beat me. He is a Prussian, stoutly defined from a German, and yet
again a German stoutly defined from our borderers: and that completes
him. He has as little the idea of humanity as the sword of our Hermann,
the cannon-ball of our Frederick. Observe him. What an eye he has! I
watched it as we were talking: and he has, I repeat, imaginati