“Where the gaunt mastiff, growling at the gate,
    Affrights the beggar whom he longs to eat,”

I think we might have found, before the rude hand of insolent office was on our shoulder, and the staff of usurped authority brandished over our heads, that contempt of the suppliant is not the best forwarder of a suit,—­that national disgrace is not the high-road to security, much less to power and greatness.  Patience, indeed, strongly indicates the lore of peace; but mere love does not always lead to enjoyment.  It is the power of winning that palm which insures our wearing it.  Virtues have their place; and out of their place they hardly deserve the name,—­they pass into the neighboring vice.  The patience of fortitude and the endurance of pusillanimity are things very different, as in their principle, so in their effects.

In truth, this Declaration, containing a narrative of the first transaction of the kind (and I hope it will be the last) in the intercourse of nations, as a composition, is ably drawn.  It does credit to our official style.  The report of the speech of the minister in a great assembly, which I have read, is a comment upon the Declaration.  Without inquiry how far that report is exact, (inferior I believe it may be to what it would represent,) yet still it reads as a most eloquent and finished performance.  Hardly one galling circumstance of the indignities offered by the Directory of Regicide to the supplications made to that junto in his Majesty’s name has been spared.  Every one of the aggravations attendant on these acts of outrage is, with wonderful perspicuity and order, brought forward in its place, and in the manner most fitted to produce its effect.  They are turned to every point of view in which they can be seen to the best advantage.  All the parts are so arranged as to point out their relation, and to furnish a true idea of the spirit of the whole transaction.

This speech may stand for a model.  Never, for the triumphal decoration of any theatre, not for the decoration of those of Athens and Rome, or even of this theatre of Paris, from the embroideries of Babylon or from the loom of the Gobelins, has there been sent any historic tissue so truly drawn, so closely and so finely wrought, or in which the forms are brought out in the rich purple of such glowing and blushing colors.  It puts me in mind of the piece of tapestry with which Virgil proposed to adorn the theatre he was to erect to Augustus upon the banks of the Mincio, who now hides his head in his reeds, and leads his slow and melancholy windings through banks wasted by the barbarians of Gaul.  He supposes that the artifice is such, that the figures of the conquered nations in his tapestry are made to play their part, and are confounded in the machine,—­

                                     utque
    Purpurea intexti tollant aulaea Britanni;

or, as Dryden translates it, somewhat paraphrastically, but not less in the spirit of the prophet than of the poet,—­