An English soul has small exhilaration, looking into those old expenditures, and bullyings for want of promptitude! But if English souls will solemnly, under high Heaven, constitute a Duke of Newcastle and a George II. their Captains of the march Heavenward, and say, without blushing for it, nay rejoicing at it, in the face of the sun, "You are the most godlike Two we could lay hold of for that object,"--what have English souls to expect? My consolation is, and, alas, it is a poor one, the money would have been mostly wasted any way. Buy men and gunpowder with your money, to be shot away in foreign parts, without renown or use: is that so mnch worse than buying ridiculous upholsteries, idle luxuries, frivolities, and in the end unbeautiful pot-bellies corporeal and spiritual with it, here at home? I am struck silent, looking at much that goes on under these stars;--and find that misappointment of your Captains, of your Exemplars and Guiding and Governing individuals, higher and lower, is a fatal business always; and that especially, as highest instance of it, which includes all the lower ones, this of solemnly calling Chief Captain, and King by the Grace of God, a gentleman who is NOT so (and SEEMS to be so mainly by Malice of the Devil, and by the very great and nearly unforgivable indifference of Mankind to resist the Devil in that particular province, for the present), is the deepest fountain of human wretchedness, and the head mendacity capable of being done!--As for the brave young Queen of Hungary, my admiration goes with that of all the world. Not in the language of flattery, but of evident fact, the royal qualities abound in that high young Lady;had they left the world, and grown to mere costume elsewhere, you might find certain of them again here. Most brave, high and pious-minded; beautiful too, and radiant with good-nature, though of temper that will easily catch fire: there is perhaps no nobler woman then living. And she fronts the roaring elements in a truly grand feminine manner; as if Heaven itself and the voice of Duty called her: "The Inheritances which my Fathers left me, we will not part with these. Death, if it so must be; but not dishonor:--Listen not to that thief in the night!" Maria Theresa has not studied, at all, the History of the Silesian Duchies; she knows only that her Father and Grandfather peaceably held them; it was not she that sent out Seckendorf to ride 25,000 miles, or broke the heart of Friedrich Wilhelm and his Household. Pity she had not complied with Friedrich, and saved such rivers of bitterness to herself and mankind! But how could she see to do it,--especially with little George at her back, and abundance of money? This, for the present, is her method of looking at the matter; this magnanimous, heroic, and occasionally somewhat female one.
Her Husband, the Grand Duke, an inert, but good-tempered, well-conditioned Duke after his sort, goes with her. Him we shall see try various things; and at length take to banking and merchandise, and even meal-dealing on the great scale. "Our Armies had most part of their meal circuitously from him," says Friedrich, of times long subsequent. Now as always he follows loyally his Wife's lead, never she his: Wife being, intrinsically as well as extrinsically, the better man, what other can he do?--Of compliance with Friedrich in this Court, there is practically no hope till after a great deal of beating have enlightened it. Out of deference to George and his ardors, they pretend some intention that way; and are "willing to bargain, your Excellency;"--no doubt of it, provided only the price were next to nothing!
And so, while the watchful edacious Hyndford is doing his best at Strehlen, poor Robinson, blown into triple activity, corresponds in a boundless zealous manner from Vienna; and at last takes to flying personally between Strehlen and Vienna; praying the inexorable young Queen to comply a little, and then the inexorable young King to be satisfied with imaginary compliance; and has a breathless time of it indeed. His Despatches, passionately long-winded, are exceedingly stiff reading to the like of us. O reader, what things have to be read and carefully forgotten; what mountains of dust and ashes are to be dug through, and tumbled down to Orcus, to disengage the smallest fraction of truly memorable! Well if, in ten cubic miles of dust and ashes, you discover the tongue of a shoe-buckle that has once belonged to a man in the least heroic;and wipe your brow, invoking the supernal and the infernal gods.
My heart's desire is to compress these Strehlen Diplomatic horse-dealings into the smallest conceivable bulk. And yet how much that is not metal, that is merely cinders, has got through: impossible to prevent,--may the infernal gods deal with it, and reduce Dryasdust to limits, one day! Here, however, are important Public News transpiring through the old Gazetteers:--"MUNCHEN, JULY 1st [or in effect a few days later, when the Letters DATED July 1st had gone through their circuitous formalities], [Adelung, ii. 421.] Karl Albert Kur-Baiern publicly declares himself Candidate for the Kaisership; as, privately, he had long been rumored and believed to be. Kur-Baiern, they say, has of militias and regulars together about 30,000 men on foot, all posted in good places along the Austrian Frontier; and it is commonly thought, though little credible at Vienna, that he intends invading Austria as well as contesting the Election. To which the Vienna Hofrath answers in the style of 'Pshaw!'