gland with mud-blotches, soot-blotches, miscellaneous squalors and
horrors; to be preaching into her amazed heart, which once knew better,
the omnipotence of

SHODDY; filling her ears and soul with shriekery and metallic clangor,
mad noises, mad hurries mostly no-whither;--and are awakening, I
suppose, in such of her sons as still go into reflection at all,
a deeper and more ominous set of Questions than have ever risen in
England's History before. As in the foregoing case, we have to be
patient and keep hoping.

3. In regard to France. It appears, noble old Teutschland, with such
pieties and unconquerable silent valors, such opulences human and
divine, amid its wreck of new and old confusions, is not to be cut in
Four, and made to dance to the piping of Versailles or another. Far the
contrary! To Versailles itself there has gone forth, Versailles may read
it or not, the writing on the wall: "Thou art weighed in the balance,
and found wanting" (at last even "FOUND wanting")! France, beaten,
stript, humiliated; sinful, unrepentant, governed by mere sinners
and, at best, clever fools (FOUS PLEINS D'ESPRIT),--collapses, like
a creature whose limbs fail it; sinks into bankrupt quiescence, into
nameless fermentation, generally into DRY-ROT. Rotting, none
guesses whitherward;--rotting towards that thrice-extraordinary
Spontaneous-Combustion, which blazed out in 1789. And has kindled, over
the whole world, gradually or by explosion, this unexpected Outburst
of all the chained Devilries (among other chained things), this roaring
Conflagration of the Anarchies; under which it is the lot of these poor
generations to live,--for I know not what length of Centuries yet. "Go
into Combustion, my pretty child!" the Destinies had said to this
BELLE FRANCE, who is always so fond of shining and outshining:
"Self-Combustion;--in that way, won't you shine, as none of them yet
could?" Shine; yes, truly,--till you are got to CAPUT MORTUUM, my pretty
child (unless you gain new wisdom!)--But not to wander farther:--

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 16th, Friedrich, all Saxon things being now
settled,--among the rest, "eight Saxon Schoolmasters" to be a model in
Prussia,--quitted Leipzig, with the Seven-Years War safe in his pocket,
as it were. Drove to Moritzburg, to dinner with the amiable Kurprinz
and still more amiable Wife: "It was to your Highness that we owe this
Treaty!" A dinner which readers may hear of again. At Moritzburg; where,
with the Lacys,