rief,
Effects this much: that the whole force of England
Is strengthened by--eleven thousand men!
So sorted that the British infantry
Are now eight hundred less than heretofore!

In Ireland, where the glamouring influence
Of the right honourable gentleman
Prevails with magic might, ELEVEN men
Have been amassed. And in the Cinque-Port towns,
Where he is held in absolute veneration,
His method has so quickened martial fire
As to bring in--one man. O would that man
Might meet my sight! [Laughter.] A Hercules, no doubt,
A god-like emanation from this Act,
Who with his single arm will overthrow
All Buonaparte's legions ere their keels
Have scraped one pebble of our fortless shore!...
Such is my motion, sir, and such my mind.

[He sits down amid cheers. The candle-snuffers go round, and Pitt
rises. During the momentary pause before he speaks the House assumes
an attentive stillness, in which can be heard the rustling of the
trees without, a horn from an early coach, and the voice of the watch
crying the hour.]

PITT

Not one on this side but appreciates
Those mental gems and airy pleasantries
Flashed by the honourable gentleman,
Who shines in them by birthright. Each device
Of drollery he has laboured to outshape,
[Or treasured up from others who have shaped it,]
Displays that are the conjurings of the moment,
[Or mellowed and matured by sleeping on]--
Dry hoardings in his book of commonplace,
Stored without stint of toil through days and months--
He heaps into one mass, and light and fans
As fuel for his flaming eloquence,
Mouthed and maintained without a thought or care
If germane to the theme, or not at all.

Now vain indeed it were should I assay
To match him in such sort. For, sir, alas,
To use imagination as the ground
Of chronicle, take myth and merry tale
As texts for prophecy, is not my gift
Being but a person primed with simple fact,
Unprinked by jewelled art.--But to the thing.

The preparations of the enemy,
Doggedly bent to desolate our land,
Advance with a sustained activity.
They are seen, they are known, by you and by us all.
But they evince no clear-eyed tentative
In furtherance of the threat, whose coming off,
Ay, years may yet postpone; whereby the Act
Will far outstrip him, and the thousands called
Duly to join the ranks by its provisions,
In process sure, if slow, wi