This seems the temper of the day.  At first the French force was too much despised.  Now it is too much dreaded.  As inconsiderate courage has given way to irrational fear, so it may be hoped, that, through the medium of deliberate, sober apprehension, we may arrive at steady fortitude.  Who knows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival of high sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair which has often subdued distempers in the state for which no remedy could be found in the wisest councils?

Other great states having been without any regular, certain course of elevation or decline, we may hope that the British fortune may fluctuate also; because the public mind, which greatly influences that fortune, may have its changes.  We are therefore never authorized to abandon our country to its fate, or to act or advise as if it had no resource.  There is no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means threaten to fail, that no others can spring up.  Whilst our heart is whole, it will find means, or make them.  The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy to the state.  Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume that it will cease instantly to beat.  The public must never be regarded as incurable.  I remember, in the beginning of what has lately been called the Seven Years’ War, that an eloquent writer and ingenious speculator, Dr. Brown, upon some reverses which happened in the beginning of that war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the distinguishing features of the people of England had been totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character.  Nothing could be more popular than that work.  It was thought a great consolation to us, the light people of this country, (who were and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate,) that we had found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices.  Pythagoras could not be more pleased with his leading discovery.  But whilst, in that splenetic mood, we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which we were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his particular sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper,—­whilst, as in the Alps, goitre kept goitre in countenance,—­whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct confession of our inferiority to France, and whilst many, very many, were ready to act upon a sense of that inferiority,—­a few months effected a total change in our variable minds.  We emerged from the gulf of that speculative despondency, and wore buoyed up to the highest point of practical vigor.  Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder preeminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the good people of this kingdom.