d to originate a
Suspensorium in England, when I can chance upon a man of intelligence
and scientific knowledge to conduct it. Like mesmerism, the system has
its antipathies; and thus yesterday Crawley fainted twice after a few
minutes' suspension by the arms. But he is a bigot about anything he
hears for the first time, and I was not sorry at his punishment.

I wish you would talk over this matter with any clever medical man in
your neighborhood, and let me hear the result.

And so you are surprised, you say, how little influence English
representations exercise over the determinations of foreign cabinets. I
go farther, and confess no astonishment at all at the no-influence! My
dear dragoon, have you not, some hundred and fifty times in this life,
endured a small martyrdom in seeing a very indifferent rider torment
almost to madness the animal he bestrode, just by sheer ignorance
and awkwardness,--now worrying the flank with incautious heel, now
irritating the soft side of the mouth with incessant jerkings; always
counteracting the good impulses, ever prompting the bad ones of his
beast? And have you not, while heartily wishing yourself in the saddle,
felt the utter inutility of administering any counsels to the rider?
You saw, and rightly saw, that even if he attempted to follow your
suggestions, he would do so awkwardly and inaptly, acting at wrong
moments and without that continuity of purpose which must ever accompany
an act of address; and that for his safety, and even for the welfare
of the animal, it were as well they should jog on together as they
had done, trusting that after a time they might establish a sort of
compromise, endurable, if not beneficial, to both.

Such, my dear friend, in brief, is the state of many of those foreign
governments to whom we are so profuse of our wise counsels. It were
doubtless much better if they ruled well; but let us see if the road to
this knotty consummation be by the adoption of methods totally new to
them, estranged from all their instincts and habits, and full of perils
which their very fears will exaggerate. Constitutional governments, like
underdone roast beef, suit our natures and our latitude; but they would
seem lamentable experiments when tried south of the Alps. Liberty with
us means the right to break heads at a county election, and to print
impertinences in newspapers. With the Spaniard or the Italian it would
be to carry a poniard more openly, and use it more