nisters, you
have seen too much of our remarks upon the striking features of
their conduct, to make it necessary for me in every letter to
repeat them. Thugut is certainly the only efficient Minister here:
very diligent and laborious in his office, he seems to have
acquired an influence here by being the only man of business about
the Court; and with this recommendation has reached a situation
which the nobility of the country are mortified to see him hold,
because he has no pretensions to hereditary rank, and because they
have been used to see that office for many years filled by Prince
Kavnitz. What _we_, however, miss in him is, either the disposition
or capacity to see the present great crisis of Europe upon the
large scale on which it should be looked at by the leading Minister
of this empire; instead of which, we see in all our discussions a
cold, narrow, and contracted view of this subject, infinitely too
languid and little for the object, and made peculiarly unfavourable
to our propositions, by the disinclination which he certainly feels
to concur heartily with us in the great interests attached to the
Austrian possession of the Low Countries. We have, it is true,
obtained from him assurances of concerting an immediate plan for
the relief of Valenciennes; but even this has not been obtained
without many discouraging tokens of that total want of manly energy
and direct dealing, without which all co-operation must necessarily
be languid and feeble: always taking merit for having sent the most
distinct orders to try the relief of Valenciennes, yet never taking
the obvious mode of satisfying us by communicating those orders to
us; maintaining as an argument for the loan, that without it the
army cannot move, yet at the same time resisting our objections of
the delay of waiting for answers from M. de Merey, by stating this
movement as being actually in great forwardness, and not depending
upon the loan for its execution; acquiescing in the change of
command urged by us, and yet ever since that event reminding us
that in his opinion this very change may defeat the operation which
we wished to assist by it; gratifying our impatience at one time by
counting up the days to the probable time of the desired movement,
and then again stating that Clairfay