er's position and that of any subsequent Governor of this Country
becomes, the more you reflect on it, the more immeasurable!

Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a balloted soldier
strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life; comports himself
there like a man who carried his own life in his hand; like a man
whose Great Commander's eye was always on him. Not without results.
Oliver, well-advanced in years, finds now, by Destiny and his own
Deservings, or as he himself better phrased it, by wondrous successive
'Births of Providence,' the Government of England put into his hands.
In senate-house and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private
and in public, this man has proved himself a man: England and the
voice of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments,
speaking to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way
of solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what
informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That he,
Oliver, was the Ablest Man of England, the King of England; that he,
Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way of making this same
'assertion,' the one way he had of making it, has given rise to
immense criticism: but the assertion itself, in what way soever
'made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one, somewhat of a tremendous
one!

And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable friend
Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Viscount Mealymouth,
Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro, Cagliostrino,
Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune and Parliamentary Majorities has
constitutionally guided to that dignity, any time during these last
sorrowful hundred-and-fifty years! Windbag, weak in the faith of a
God, which he believes only at Church on Sundays, if even then; strong
only in the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes; that
Force of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of
Things, and highest God we have:--Windbag, if we will consider him,
has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the impossible
class. He is a Columbus minded to sail to the indistinct country of
Nowhere, to the indistinct country of Whitherward, by the _friendship_
of those same waste-tumbling Water-Alps and howling waltz of All the
Winds; not by conquest of them and in spite of them, but by friendship
of them, when once _they_ have made-up their mind! He is the most
original Columbus I ever