Without Spanish and without French, Walpole would have made a good peace; Bolingbroke could not do so with both.
Cold men may be wild in life and not wild in mind. But warm and eager men, fit to be the favourites of society, and fit to be great orators, will be erratic not only in conduct but in judgement.
A man like Walpole, or a man like Louis Napoleon, is protected by an unsensitive nature from intellectual destruction.
After a war which everyone was proud of, we concluded a peace which nobody was proud of, in a manner that everyone was ashamed of.
He hated the City because they were Whigs, and he hated the Dutch because he had deserted them.
But he professed to know nothing of commerce, and did know nothing.
The fierce warlike disposition of the English people would not have endured such dishonour. We may doubt if it would have endured any peace. It certainly would not have endured the best peace, unless it were made with dignity and with honesty,
Using the press without reluctance and without cessation.
He ought to have been able to bear anything, yet he could bear nothing. He prosecuted many more persons than it was usual to prosecute then, and far more than have been prosecuted since... He thought that everything should be said for him, and that nothing should be said against him.
Between these fluctuated the great mass of the Tory party, who did not like the House of Hanover because it had no hereditary right, who did not like the Pretender because he was a Roman Catholic.
He had no popularity; little wish for popularity; little respect for popular judgement.
Here is a writer who, at any rate, has not the vice of 'elegant variation'. Most of the possibilities of repetition, for good and for evil, are here represented. As Bagehot himself might have said, 'we have instances of repetition that are good in themselves; we have instances of repetition that are bad in themselves; and we have instances of repetition that are neither particularly good nor particularly bad in themselves, but that offend simply by recurrence'. The ludicrous appearance presented by our collection as a whole necessarily obscures the merit of individual cases; but if the reader will consider each sentence by itself, he will see that repetition is often a distinct improvement. The point best illustrated here, no doubt, is that it is possible to have too much of
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