Panic within his bosom) are awful to his friends.  Particular care must be taken after he has begun to cool and calculate his chances of security, that he do not gather to him a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again behind them; for they cost little in proportion to the much they pretend to be to him.  Patriotic taxpayers doubtless exist:  prophetic ones, provident ones, do not.  At least we show that we are wanting in them.  The taxpayer of a free land taxes himself, and his disinclination for the bitter task, save under circumstances of screaming urgency—­as when the night-gear and bed-linen of old convulsed Panic are like the churned Channel sea in the track of two hundred hostile steamboats, let me say—­is of the kind the gentle schoolboy feels when death or an expedition has relieved him of his tyrant, and he is entreated notwithstanding to go to his books.

Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and bleeding is very ingenious?  But whether the ingenuity comes of native sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others, I cannot express an opinion.  I give you the position of the country undisturbed by any moralizings of mine.  The youth I introduce to you will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with so extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all things else of mean importance in comparison:  and our union is one in which, following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for you what is, not that which I imagine.  This day, this hour, this life, and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas of men, which are—­it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms—­are actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites:  these are my theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at bloodheat, and myself calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt!  He sits there waiting for the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical than you think.  I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if at the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat.  I shoot my arrows at a mark that is pretty certain to return them to me.  And as to perfect success, I should be like the panic-stricken shopkeepers in my alarm at it; for I should believe that genii of the air fly above our tree-tops between us and the incognizable spheres, catching those ambitious shafts they deem it a promise of fun to play pranks with.