Majesty's head contain any good counsel, there is great need of it
here just now.

"Captains and men were impatient of that long loitering, hanging
idle about Frankfurt all through May; and they have at length
started real business,--with more valor than discretion, it is
feared. They are some 40 or 44,000 strong: English 16,000;
Hanoverians the like number; and of Austrians [by theory 20,000],
say, in effect, 12,000 or even 8,000: all paid by England.
They have Hanau for Magazine; they have rearguard of 12,000 [the
6,000 Hessians, and 6,000 new Hanoverians], who at last are
actually on march thither, near arriving there: 'Forward!' said the
Captaincy [said Stair, chiefly, it was thought]: 'Shall the whole
summer waste itself to no purpose?'--and are up the River thus far,
not on the most considerate terms.

"What this Pragmatic Army means to do? That is, and has been, a
great question for all the world; especially for Noailles and the
French,--not to say, for the Pragmatic itself! 'Get into Lorraine?'
think the French: 'Get into Alsace, and wrest it from us, for
behoof of her Hungarian Majesty,'--plundered goods, which indeed
belong to the Reich and her, in a sense! ELS-SASS (Alsace, OUTER-
seat), with its ROAD-Fortress (STRASburg) plundered from the Holy
Romish Reich by Louis XIV., in a way no one can forget;
actually plundered, as if by highway robbery, or by highway robbery
and attorneyism combined, on the part of that great Sovereign.
'To Strasburg? To Lorraine perhaps? Or to the Three Bishoprics'"
(Metz, Toul, Verdun:--readers recollect that Siege of Metz, which
broke the great heart of Karl V.? Who raged and fired as man seldom
did, with 50,000 men, against Guise and the intrusive French, for