Nevil soon had to turn his telescope from politics.  The torch of war was actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what surrounded him.  Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion.  Our dauntless Lancastrian thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded.  Our worthy people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted the habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which is the sole excuse for giving way to an irritated pugnacity, and sucked the comforting caramel of an alliance with their troublesome next-door neighbour, profuse in comfits as in scorpions.  Nevil detected that politic element of their promptitude for war.  His recollections of dissatisfaction in former days assisted him to perceive the nature of it, but he was too young to hold his own against the hubbub of a noisy people, much too young to remain sceptical of a modern people’s enthusiasm for war while journals were testifying to it down the length of their columns, and letters from home palpitated with it, and shipmates yawned wearily for the signal, and shiploads of red coats and blue, infantry, cavalry, artillery, were singing farewell to the girl at home, and hurrah for anything in foreign waters.  He joined the stream with a cordial spirit.  Since it must be so!  The wind of that haughty proceeding of the Great Bear in putting a paw over the neutral brook brushed his cheek unpleasantly.  He clapped hands for the fezzy defenders of the border fortress, and when the order came for the fleet to enter the old romantic sea of storms and fables, he wrote home a letter fit for his uncle Everard to read.  Then there was the sailing and the landing, and the march up the heights, which Nevil was condemned to look at.  To his joy he obtained an appointment on shore, and after that Everard heard of him from other channels.  The two were of a mind when the savage winter advanced which froze the attack of the city, and might be imaged as the hoar god of hostile elements pointing a hand to the line reached, and menacing at one farther step.  Both blamed the Government, but they divided as to the origin of governmental inefficiency; Nevil accusing the Lords guilty of foulest sloth, Everard the Quakers of dry-rotting the country.  He passed with a shrug Nevil’s puling outcry for the enemy as well as our own poor fellows:  ‘At his steppes again!’ And he had to be forgiving when reports came of his nephew’s turn for overdoing his duty:  ‘show-fighting,’ as he termed it.

‘Braggadocioing in deeds is only next bad to mouthing it,’ he wrote very rationally.  ’Stick to your line.  Don’t go out of it till you are ordered out.  Remember that we want soldiers and sailors, we don’t want suicides.’  He condescended to these italics, considering impressiveness to be urgent.  In his heart, notwithstanding his implacably clear judgement, he was passably well pleased with the congratulations encompassing him on account