isease, into
preternatural strength of frame, and might spring out of the bed where
it had lain down to die, with a force which drove before it all the
ordinary resistance of man. Pitt had still to learn, that this was a
war of Opinion; and had to learn also, that Opinion was a new material
of explosion, against whose agency all former calculation was wholly
unprovided, and whose force was made to fling all the old buttresses and
battlements of European institutions like dust and embers into the air.

It is not worth the trouble now to inquire, whether Pitt's sagacity
equally failed him in estimating the probable effect of the French
Revolution on England. His expression at a dinner party, where
Addington, Grenville, and Burke formed the guests, "Never mind, Mr
Burke, we shall go on as we are until the day of judgment;" shows his
feeling of the stability of the constitution. As we have no love for
discovering the

"Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,"

we are gratified by thinking that both were partly in the right: Burke,
in regarding the Revolution as destined to sweep the Continent with long
and tremendous violence, and Pitt as believing it likely to make but
little _permanent_ impression on the habits, the power, or the heart of
England. Burke argued from the weakness of the Continental governments;
Pitt from the strength of the British constitution: the former having no
connexion with the national interests, the latter being formed from
those interests, for those interests, and being as much supported by
them as a tree by its roots. There was not a portion of that stately
tree, from its solid trunk to the highest ornament of its foliage, which
was not fed from the ground. The truth was, that the Jacobinisim of
England was confined to adventurers, and never obtained any hold on the
great body of the proprietors and the people. Its spirit evaporated in
tavern harangues, to which the multitude went to listen, as to the
chattering and grimaces of a mountebank.

No man of distinction, no man of birth, and no man of property was ever
engaged in those coffee-house conspiracies; their Jaffiers and Pierres
were cobblers and tinkers, with a sprinkling of petty pamphleteers, and
ruined declaimers. When Hardy and Horne Took, were the priests, what
must be the worshippers at the Jacobin shrine? But in France, the temple
of that idol of confusion was crowded with the chiefs of the Noblesse,
the Church, the Law;