d privately tempted her under
circumstances of no such sense as existed and still exist for Russia.
This policy, as soon as exposed, and not before bitter insults to
herself, England resisted. And therefore it is that at this day we live.
But as to Napoleon, as apart from the policy of Napoleon, no
childishness can be wilder.

At some unlucky moment when the Crown commanded unusual resources, the
De Quinceys met with the fate ascribed, perhaps fabulously, to some
small heavenly bodies (asteroids or what, I do not precisely know): on
some dark day, by mistake perhaps, they exploded, and scattered their
ruins all over the central provinces of England, where chiefly had lain
their territorial influence. Especially in the counties of Leicester,
Lincoln and Rutland were found fragments of the vast landed estates held
by these potentates when Earls of Winchester.

The hatred of truth at first dawning--that instinct which makes you
revolt from the pure beams which search the foul depths and abysses of
error--is well illustrated by the action of the atmospheric currents,
when blowing through an open window upon smoke. What do you see?
Sometimes the impression is strong upon your _ocular_ belief that the
window is driving the smoke in. You can hardly be convinced of the
contrary--scarcely when five or seven minutes has absolutely rarefied the
smoke so much that a book-lettering previously invisible has become even
legible. And at last, when the fact, the result, the experience, has
corrected the contradictory theory of the eye, you begin to suspect,
without any aid from science, that there were two currents, one of which
comes round in a curve [Illustration: )] and effects the exit for the
other which the window had driven in; just as in the Straits of Gibraltar
there is manifestly an upper current setting one way, which you therefore
conjecture to argue a lower current setting the other, and thus
redressing the equilibrium. Here the smoke corresponds to bits of chip or
any loose suspended body in the Gibraltar current. What answers to the
current of water is the air, and if the equilibrium _is_ kept up, the
re-entrant current balances your retiring current, and the latter carries
out the smoke entangled in itself. By the objection, say, of a child,
there ought to be a re-entrant column of smoke, which there is not. For
the air drives the smoke of the fire up the chimney, and of its own
contribution the air has no smoke to