obstacles: against things, persons, nations that oppose him or cannot
serve his turn against his king, if his king is restive; but he respects
his king: against your friends' country, because there is no fixing it to
a line of policy, and it seems to have collapsed; but he likes that
country the best in Europe after his own. He is nearest to contempt in
his treatment of his dupes and tools, who are dropped out of his mind
when he has quite squeezed them for his occasion; to be taken up again
when they are of use to him. Hence he will have no following. But let
me die to-morrow, the party I have created survives. In him you see the
dam, in me the stream. Judge, then, which of them gains the future!--
admitting that, in the present he may beat me. He is a Prussian, stoutly
defined from a German, and yet again a German stoutly defined from our
borderers: and that completes him. He has as little the idea of humanity
as the sword of our Hermann, the cannon-ball of our Frederick. Observe
him. What an eye he has! I watched it as we were talking: and he has, I
repeat, imagination; he can project his mind in front of him as far as
his reasoning on the possible allows: and that eye of his flashes; and
not only flashes, you see it hurling a bolt; it gives me the picture of a
Balearic slinger about to whizz the stone for that eye looks far, and is
hard, and is dead certain of its mark-within his practical compass, as I
have said. I see farther, and I fancy I proved to him that I am not a
dreamer. In my opinion, when we cross our swords I stand a fair chance
of not being worsted. We shall: you shrink? Figuratively, my darling
have no fear! Combative as we may be, both of us, we are now grave
seniors, we have serious business: a party looks to him, my party looks
to me. Never need you fear that I shall be at sword or pistol with any
one. I will challenge my man, whoever he as that needs a lesson, to
touch buttons on a waistcoat with the button on the foil, or drill fiver
and eights in cards at twenty paces: but I will not fight him though he
offend me, for I am stronger than my temper, and as I do not want to take