c province, the
overthrow of some hostile diadem, or the arrival of some convoy of those
most magnificent of all the spoils of war, the treasures of the Italian
arts. France began to dream of the conquest of the world.

The contrast between her past calamities and her present splendour,
powerfully heightened the illusion. France loves illusion; she has
always rejoiced in glittering deceptions, even with the perfect
knowledge that they were deceptions; and here stood the most dazzling of
political charlatans, the great wonder-worker, raising phantoms of
national glory even out of the charnel. The wrecks of faction, the
remnants of the monarchy, and the corpses lying headless in the shadow
of the guillotine, gave all semblance to the conception--France _was_ a
charnel. Her people, by nature rushing into extremes, wild and fierce,
yet gallant and generous, had become at length conscious of the national
fall in the eyes of Europe. They had been scandalized by the rudeness,
the baseness, and the brutishness, of rabble supremacy. They gazed upon
their own crimsoned hands and tarnished weapons with intolerable
disgust; and it was in this moment of depression that they saw a sudden
beam of military renown shot across the national darkness. After so long
defeat that it had extinguished all but the memory of her old triumphs,
France was a conqueror; after a century of helpless exhaustion, she had
risen into almost supernatural vigour; after a hundred years, scarcely
marked by a single victory, her capital rang with the daily sound of
successful battles against the veterans of Frederick and Maria Theresa;
after lingering for generations in the obscurity so bitter to the
popular heart, France had been suddenly thrown into the broadest lustre
of European sovereignty. The world _was_ changed; and the limits of that
change offered only a more resistless lure to the popular passion, for
their being still indistinct to the keenest eye of man.

But our chief struggle was at home, and the reaction of our foreign
disasters came with terrible weight upon a cabinet already tottering. We
saw its fate. Days and nights of the most anxious consultation, could
not relieve us from the hourly increasing evidence, that the Continent
was on the verge of ruin. The voice of Opposition, reinforced by the
roar of the multitude, could no longer be shut out by the curtains of
the council-chamber. Fox, always formidable, was never more confident
and more p