hour! Fleury and George stand looking with intense anxiety into a
certain spectral something, which they call the Balance of Power;
no end to their exorcisms in that matter. Truly, if each of the
Royal Majesties and Serene Highnesses would attend to his own
affairs,--doing his utmost to better his own land and people, in
earthly and in heavenly respects, a little,--he would find it
infinitely profitabler for himself and others. And the Balance of
Power would settle, in that case, as the laws of gravity ordered:
which is its one method of settling, after all diplomacy!--Fleury
and George, by their manifestoing, still more by their levying of
men, George I. shovelling out his English subsidies as usual,
created deadly qualms in the Kaiser; who still found it unpleasant
to "admit Spanish Garrisons in Parma;" but found likewise his
Termagant Friend inexorably positive on that score; and knew not
what would become of him, if he had to try fighting, and the
Sea-Powers refused him cash to do it.

Hereby was the ship trimmed, and more; ship now lurching to the
other side again. George I. goes subsidying Hessians, Danes;
sounding manifestoes, beating drums, in an alarming manner:
and the Kaiser, except it were in Russia, with the new Czarina
Catherine I. (that brown little woman, now become Czarina [8th
February, 1725. Treaty with Kaiser (6th August, 1726) went to
nothing on her death, 11th May, 1727.]), finds no ally to speak
of. An unlucky, spectre-hunting, spectre-hunted Kaiser; who, amid
so many drums, manifestoes, menaces, is now rolling eyes that
witness everywhere considerable dismay. This is the Fourth grand
Crisis of Europe; crisis or travail-throe of Nature, bringing
forth, and unable to do it, Baby Carlos's Apanage and the
Pragmatic Sanction. Fourth conspicuous change of color to the