ooks of Horace Walpole, Memoirs of Bubb Doddington,
Memoirs of my Lady Sundon, Lord Fanny Hervey, and innumerable others,
rise on us, beckoning fantastically towards, not an answer, but some
conceivable intimations of an answer, and proclaiming very legibly the
old text, "_Quam parva sapientia_," in respect of this hard-working
much-subduing British Nation; giving rise to endless reflections in a
thinking Englishman of this day. Alas, it is ever so: each generation
has its task, and does it better or worse; greatly neglecting what is
not immediately its task. Our poor grandfathers, so busy conquering
Indias, founding Colonies, inventing spinning-jennies, kindling
Lancashires and Bromwichams, took no thought about the government of
all that; left it all to be governed by Lord Fanny and the Hanover
Succession, or how the gods pleased. And now we the poor grandchildren
find that it will not stick together on these terms any longer; that our
sad, dangerous and sore task is to discover some government for this
big world which has been conquered to us; that the red-tape Offices
in Downing Street are near the end of their rope; that if we can get
nothing better, in the way of government, it is all over with our world
and us. How the Downing-Street Offices originated, and what the meaning
of them was or is, let Dryasdust, when in some lucid moment the whim
takes him, instruct us. Enough for us to know and see clearly, with
urgent practical inference derived from such insight, That they were not
made for us or for our objects at all; that the devouring Irish Giant
is here, and that he cannot be fed with red-tape, and will eat us if we
cannot feed him.

On the whole, let us say Felicissimus made them;--or rather it was
the predecessors of Felicissimus, who were not so dreadfully hunted,
sticking to the wild and ever more desperate Sleswicker in the leafy
labyrinth of lanes, as he now is. He, I think, will never make anything;
but be combed off by the elm-boughs, and left sprawling in the ditch.
But in past time, this and the other heavy-laden red-tape soul had
withal a glow of patriotism in him; now and then, in his whirling
element, a gleam of human ingenuity, some eye towards business that must
be done. At all events, for him and every one, Parliament needed to
be persuaded that business was done. By the contributions of many such
heavy-laden souls, driven on by necessity outward and inward, these
singular Establishments are he