Not meaning to depreciate the minority in Parliament, whose talents are also great, and to whom I do not deny virtues, their system seems to me to be fundamentally wrong.  But whether wrong or right, they have not enough of coherence among themselves, nor of estimation with the public, nor of numbers.  They cannot make up an administration.  Nothing is more visible.  Many other things are against them, which I do not charge as faults, but reckon among national misfortunes.  Extraordinary things must be done, or one of the parties cannot stand as a ministry, nor the other even as an opposition.  They cannot change their situations, nor can any useful coalition be made between them.  I do not see the mode of it nor the way to it.  This aspect of things I do not contemplate with pleasure.

I well know that everything of the daring kind which I speak of is critical:  but the times are critical.  New things in a new world!  I see no hopes in the common tracks.  If men are not to be found who can be got to feel within them some impulse, quod nequeo monstrare, et sentio tantum, and which makes them impatient of the present,—­if none can be got to feel that private persons may sometimes assume that sort of magistracy which does not depend on the nomination of kings or the election of the people, but has an inherent and self-existent power which both would recognize, I see nothing in the world to hope.

If I saw such a group beginning to cluster, such as they are, they should have (all that I can give) my prayers and my advice.  People talk of war or cry for peace:  have they to the bottom considered the questions either of war or peace, upon the scale of the existing world?  No, I fear they have not.

Why should not you yourself be one of those to enter your name in such a list as I speak of?  You are young; you have great talents; you have a clear head; you have a natural, fluent, and unforced elocution; your ideas are just, your sentiments benevolent, open, and enlarged;—­but this is too big for your modesty.  Oh! this modesty, in time and place, is a charming virtue, and the grace of all other virtues.  But it is sometimes the worst enemy they have.  Let him whose print I gave you the other day be engraved in your memory!  Had it pleased Providence to have spared him for the trying situations that seem to be coming on, notwithstanding that he was sometimes a little dispirited by the disposition which we thought shown to depress him and set him aside, yet he was always buoyed up again; and on one or two occasions he discovered what might be expected from the vigor and elevation of his mind, from his unconquerable fortitude, and from the extent of his resources for every purpose of speculation and of action.  Remember him, my friend, who in the highest degree honored and respected you; and remember that great parts are a great trust.  Remember, too, that mistaken or misapplied virtues, if they are not as pernicious as vice, frustrate at least their own natural tendencies, and disappoint the purposes of the Great Giver.