the idea of its own excellence. If
you were to take their word for it, mind and reason are only found with
them; they adore all their opinions and despise those of all other
nations; and it never occurs to them to listen to others, or to doubt
themselves. . . . Examine what are called with them maxims of state;
you will find nothing but the laws of pride itself, adopted through
arrogance or through indolence."

"Placed by nature amidst the tempestuous and variable ocean," he wrote to
his sovereign, "they are as shifting, as impetuous, as changeable as its
waves. So self-contradictory and so inconsistent are their actions almost
in the same instant as to make it impossible that they should proceed
from the same persons and the same mind. Agitated and urged by their
pride and arrogance alone, they take all their imaginations and
extravagances for truths and realities; the objects of their desires and
affections for inevitable events; not balancing and measuring those
desires with the actual condition of things, nor with the character of
the people with whom they have to deal."

When the ambassador arrived in London he was lodged at Arundel palace. He
at once became the cynosure of all indigenous parties and of adventurous
politicians from every part of Europe; few knowing how to shape their
course since the great familiar lustre had disappeared from the English
sky.

Rosny found the Scotch lords sufficiently favourable to France; the
English Catholic grandees, with all the Howards and the lord high admiral
at their head, excessively inclined to Spain, and a great English party
detesting both Spain and France with equal fervour and well enough
disposed to the United Provinces, not as hating that commonwealth less
but the two great powers more.

The ambassador had arrived with the five points, not in his portfolio but
in his heart, and they might after all be concentrated in one
phrase--Down with Austria, up with the Dutch republic. On his first
interview with Cecil, who came to arrange for his audience with the king,
he found the secretary much disposed to conciliate both Spain and the
empire, and to leave the provinces to shift for themselves.

He spoke of Ostend as of a town not worth the pains taken to preserve it,
and of the India trade as an advantage of which a true policy required
that the United Provinces should be deprived. Already the fine
commercial instinct of England had scented a most formidable rival o