narchy, and taught an inherency of the office in the person of the King, which made the office itself a nullity, and the Premiership, with its accompanying majority, the sole and permanent power of the State. And now came the French Revolution. This was a new event; the old routine of reasoning, the common trade of politics, were to become obsolete. He appeared wholly unprepared for it. Half favouring, half condemning, ignorant of what he favoured, and why he condemned; he neither displayed the honest enthusiasm and fixed principle of Mr. Fox, nor the intimate acquaintance with the general nature of man, and the consequent prescience of Mr. Burke. After the declaration of war, long did he continue in the common cant of office, in declamation about the Scheld, and Holland, and all the vulgar causes of common contests, and when at last the immense genius of his new supporter had beat him out of these words (words signifying places and dead objects, and signifying nothing more) he adopted other words in their places, other generalities—Atheism and Jacobinism, phrases, which he had learnt from Mr. Burke, but without learning the philosophical definitions and involved consequences, with which that great man accompanied those words. Since the death of Mr. Burke, the forms and the sentiments, and the tone of the French, have undergone many and important changes: how indeed is it possible, that it should be otherwise, while man is the creature of experience? But still Mr. Pitt proceeds in an endless repetition of the same general phrases. This is his element; deprive him of general and abstract phrases, and you reduce him to silence. But you cannot deprive him of them. Press him to specify an individual fact of advantage to be derived from a war, and he answers. Security. Call upon him to particularise a crime, and he exclaims, Jacobinism. Abstractions defined by abstractions—generalities defined by generalities! As a minister of France, he is still, as ever, the man of words and abstractions, figures, Custom-house reports, imports and exports, commerce and revenue all flourishing, all splendid. Never was such a prosperous country as England under his administration. Let it be objected, that the agriculture of the country is, by the
