They were not orators; they were not men of deep thought or happy
resource, or of penetrative and sagacious minds. Their political ken was
essentially dull and contracted. They expended some energy in obtaining a
defective, blundering acquaintance with foreign affairs; they knew as
little of the real state of their own country as savages of an approaching
eclipse. This factious league had shuffled themselves into power by
clinging to the skirts of a great minister, the last of Tory statesmen,
but who, in the unparalleled and confounding emergencies of his latter
years, had been forced, unfortunately for England, to relinquish Toryism.
His successors inherited all his errors without the latent genius, which
in him might have still rallied and extricated him from the consequences
of his disasters. His successors did not merely inherit his errors; they
exaggerated, they caricatured them. They rode into power on a springtide
of all the rampant prejudices and rancorous passions of their time. From
the King to the boor their policy was a mere pandering to public
ignorance. Impudently usurping the name of that party of which
nationality, and therefore universality, is the essence, these pseudo-
Tories made Exclusion the principle of their political constitution, and
Restriction the genius of their commercial code.

The blind goddess that plays with human fortunes has mixed up the memory
of these men with traditions of national glory. They conducted to a
prosperous conclusion the most renowned war in which England has ever been
engaged. Yet every military conception that emanated from their cabinet
was branded by their characteristic want of grandeur. Chance, however,
sent them a great military genius, whom they treated for a long time with
indifference, and whom they never heartily supported until his career had
made him their master. His transcendent exploits, and European events even
greater than his achievements, placed in the manikin grasp of the English
ministry, the settlement of Europe.