the other; and gazes, with those proud fish-eyes, into perils and potentialities and a sea of troubles. Wearisome to think of, were not one bound to it! Here, from a singular CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, not yet got into print, are two Excerpts; which I will request the reader to try if he can take along with him, in view of much that is Coming:-- 1. A JUST WAR.--"This War, which posterity scoffs at as the WAR OF JENKINS'S EAR, was, if we examine it, a quite indispensable one; the dim much-bewildered English, driven into it by their deepest instincts, were, in a chaotic inarticulate way, right and not wrong in taking it as the Commandment of Heaven. For such, in a sense, it was; as shall by and by appear. Not perhaps since the grand Reformation Controversy, under Oliver Cromwell and Elizabeth, had there, to this poor English People (who are essentially dumb, inarticulate, from the weight of meaning they have, notwithstanding the palaver one hears from them in certain epochs), been a more authentic cause of War. And, what was the fatal and yet foolish circumstance, their Constitutional Captains, especially their King, would never and could never regard it as such; but had to be forced into it by the public rage, there being no other method left in the case. "I say, a most necessary War, though of a most stupid appearance; such the fatality of it:--begun, carried on, ended, as if by a People in a state of somnambulism! More confused operation never was. A solid placid People, heavily asleep (and snoring much, shall we say, and inarticulately grunting and struggling under indigestions, Constitutional and other? Do but listen to the hum of those extinct Pamphlets and Parliamentary Oratories of theirs!),--yet an honestly intending People; and keenly alive to any commandment from Heaven, that could pierce through the thick skin of them into their big obstinate heart. Such a commandment, then and there, was that monition about Jenkins's Ear. Upon which, so pungent was it to them, they started violently out of bed, into painful sleep-walking; and went, for twenty years and more, clambering and sprawling about, far and wide, on the giddy edge of precipices, over house-tops and frightful cornices and parapets; in a dim fulfilment of the said Heaven's command. I reckon that this War, though there were intervals, Treaties of Peace more than one, and the War had various names,--did not end till 1763. And then, by degrees, the poor English Nation found that (at, say, a thousand times the necessary expense, and with imminent peril to its poor head, and all the bones of its body) it had actually succeeded,--by dreadful exertions in its sleep! This will be more apparent by and by; and may be a kind of comfort to the sad English reader, drearily surveying such somnambulisms on the part of his poor ancestors."