"This," said he, "is the most important paper that has reached this country since the taking of the Bastile. THE SCHELDT IS OPENED! This involves an attack on Holland; the defence of our ally is a matter of treaty, and we must arm without delay. The war is begun, but where it shall end"--he paused, and fixing his eyes above, with a solemnity of expression which I had not expected in the stern and hard-lined countenance, "or who shall live to see its close--who shall tell?" "We have been waiting," said he, "for this intelligence from week to week, with the fullest expectation that it would come; and yet, when it has come, it strikes like a thunderclap. This is the third night that I have sat in this hovel, at this table, unable to go to rest, and looking for the despatch from hour to hour.--You see, sir, that our life is at least not the bed of roses for which the world is so apt to give us credit. It is like the life of my own hills--the higher the sheiling stands, the more it gets of the blast." I do not give the name of this remarkable man. He was a Scot, and possessed of all the best characteristics of his country. I had heard him in Parliament, where he was the most powerful second of the most powerful first that England had seen. But if all men were inferior to the prime minister in majesty and fulness of conception, the man to whom I now listened had no superior in readiness of retort, in aptness of illustration--that mixture of sport and satire, of easy jest and subtle sarcasm, which forms the happiest talent for the miscellaneous uses of debate. If Pitt moved forward like the armed man of chivalry, or rather like the main body of the battle--for never man was more entitled to the appellation of a "host in himself"--never were front, flanks, and rear of the host covered by a more rapid, quick-witted, and indefatigable auxiliary. He was a man of family, and brought with him into public life, not the manners of a menial of office, but the bearing of a gentleman. Birth and blood were in his bold and manly countenance; and I could have felt no difficulty in conceiving him, if his course had followed his nature, the chieftain on his hills, at the head of his gallant retainers, pursuing the wild sports of his romantic region; or in some foreign land, gathering the laurels which the Scotch soldier has so often and so proudly added to the honours of the empire.