authorities were adequate enough till they were confronted with General Bonaparte and the new order of things.  If a great man struggling with the storms of fate be the sublimest spectacle, a mediocre man in the same position is surely the most pitiful.  Deserted by his presence of mind, which, indeed, had never been anything but an absence of danger,—­baffled by the inapplicability of his habitual principles of conduct, (if that may be called a principle, which, like the act of walking, is merely an unconscious application of the laws of gravity,) —­helpless, irresolute, incapable of conceiving the flower Safety in the nettle Danger, much more of plucking it thence,—­surely here, if anywhere, is an object of compassion.  When such a one is a despot who has wrought his own destruction by obstinacy in a traditional evil policy, like Francis II. of Naples, our commiseration is outweighed by satisfaction that the ruin of the man is the safety of the state.  But when the victim is a so-called statesman, who has malversated the highest trusts for selfish ends, who has abused constitutional forms to the destruction of the spirit that gave them life and validity, who could see nothing nobler in the tenure of high office than the means it seemed to offer of prolonging it, who knows no art to conjure the spirit of anarchy he has evoked but the shifts and evasions of a second-rate attorney, and who has contrived to involve his country in the confusion of principle and vacillation of judgment which have left him without a party and without a friend,—­for such a man we have no feeling but contemptuous reprobation.  Pan-urge in danger of shipwreck is but a faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor fellow’s craven abjuration of his “former friend,” Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency’s treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress.  There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey.

The question, whether we are a Government or an Indian Council, we do not propose to discuss here; whether there be a right of secession tempered by a right of coercion, like a despotism by assassination, and whether it be expedient to put the latter in practice, we shall not consider:  for it is not always the part of wisdom to attempt a settlement of what the progress of events will soon settle for us.  Mr. Buchanan seems to have no opinion, or, if he has one, it is a halting between two, a bat-like cross of sparrow and mouse that gives timidity its choice between flight and skulking.  Nothing shocks our sense of the fitness of things more than a fine occasion to which the man is wanting.  Fate gets her hook ready, but the eye is not there to clinch with it, and so all goes at loose ends.  Mr. Buchanan had one more chance offered him of showing himself a common-place man, and he has done it full justice.  Even if they could have done nothing for the country, a few manly sentences might have made a pleasing exception in his political history, and rescued for him the fag-end of a reputation.