contests of knowledge in which I had been not undistinguished before. I
grew confused and embarrassed in speech; my words expressed a sense
utterly different to that which I had intended to convey; and at last,
as my apathy increased, I sat at my own board, silent and lifeless,
freezing into ice the very powers and streams of converse which I had
once been the foremost to circulate and to warm.

At the time I refer to, I was Minister at one of the small Continental
courts, where life is a round of unmeaning etiquette and wearisome
ceremonials, a daily labour of trifles, a ceaseless pageantry of
nothings. I had been sent there upon one important event; the business
resulting from it had soon ceased, and all the duties that remained for
me to discharge were of a negative and passive nature. Nothing that
could arouse, nothing that could occupy faculties that had for years
been so perpetually wound up to a restless excitement, was left for me
in this terrible reservoir of /ennui/. I had come thither at once from
the skirmishing and wild warfare of a Tartar foe; a war in which, though
the glory was obscure, the action was perpetual and exciting. I had
come thither, and the change was as if I had passed from a mountain
stream to a stagnant pool. Society at this court reminded me of a state
funeral: everything was pompous and lugubrious, even to the
drapery--even to the feathers--which, in other scenes, would have been
consecrated to associations of levity or of grace; the hourly pageant
swept on slow, tedious, mournful, and the object of the attendants was
only to entomb the Pleasure which they affected celebrate. What a
change for the wild, the strange, the novel, the intriguing, the varying
life, which, whether in courts or camps, I had hitherto led! The
internal change that came over myself is scarcely to be wondered at; the
winds stood still, and the straw they had blown from quarter to quarter,
whether in anger or in sport, began to moulder upon the spot where they