as if by a People in a
state of somnambulism! More confused operation never was. A solid
placid People, heavily asleep (and snoring much, shall we say,
and inarticulately grunting and struggling under indigestions,
Constitutional and other? Do but listen to the hum of those extinct
Pamphlets and Parliamentary Oratories of theirs!),--yet an honestly
intending People; and keenly alive to any commandment from Heaven, that
could pierce through the thick skin of them into their big obstinate
heart. Such a commandment, then and there, was that monition about
Jenkins's Ear. Upon which, so pungent was it to them, they started
violently out of bed, into painful sleep-walking; and went, for twenty
years and more, clambering and sprawling about, far and wide, on the
giddy edge of precipices, over house-tops and frightful cornices and
parapets; in a dim fulfilment of the said Heaven's command. I reckon
that this War, though there were intervals, Treaties of Peace more than
one, and the War had various names,--did not end till 1763. And then, by
degrees, the poor English Nation found that (at, say, a thousand times
the necessary expense, and with imminent peril to its poor head, and all
the bones of its body) it had actually succeeded,--by dreadful exertions
in its sleep! This will be more apparent by and by; and may be a kind of
comfort to the sad English reader, drearily surveying such somnambulisms
on the part of his poor ancestors."

2. TWO DIFFICULTIES.--"There are Two grand Difficulties in this
Farce-Tragedy of a war; of which only one, and that not the worst of
the Pair, is in the least surmised by the English hitherto. Difficulty
First, which is even worse than the other, and will surprisingly
attend the English in all their Wars now coming, is: That their
fighting-apparatus, though made of excellent material, cannot
fight,--being in disorganic condition; one branch of it, especially the
'Military' one as they are pleased to call it, being as good as totally
chaotic, and this in a quiet habitual manner, this long while back.
With the Naval branch it is otherwise; which also is habitual there.
The English almost as if by nature can sail, and fight, in ships; cannot
well help doing it. Sailors innumerable are bred to them; they are
planted in the Ocean, opulent stormy Neptune clipping them in all
his moods forever: and then by nature, being a dumb, much-enduring,
much-reflecting, stout, veracious and valiant kind of People, t