terrors had been communicated to the House, which was willing to grant the King any assistance for any English object. But there was an essential difference between the ministry and that House. The ministry thought of everything but the public interest; the House was ready to afford everything for it. The House, he added mysteriously, was a fluctuating body, but he hoped would be eternal; and he concluded with a prayer for the King, with his royal posterity, and for this 'poor, forlorn, distressed country.' It is not always easy to trace the sequence of Pitt's speeches in Walpole's notes, nor is it possible to tell whether the confusion is due to the oration or the notes. The notes were probably made during the debate with the intention of filling in the outlines while recollection was still fresh; an intention which, as is usual with such intentions, was, it may be safely surmised, never carried out. But we are inclined to attribute obscurity in the main to the abrupt rhapsodical transitions of Pitt's speeches. They require, as reported by Walpole, almost as much interpretation as Cromwell's. In this one we discern great court paid to the House of Commons, so hostile to himself; unrelenting scorn of the Government; and bitter emphasis on British as opposed to Hanoverian interests. The peroration as barely reported seems below the level of a debating society. But, then, we must remember that no fervent and exalted apostrophe, prolonged as this probably was, can be adequately transmitted in a naked sentence, or perhaps in any conceivable report. Fox replied with admirable temper, a self-control all the more laudable and noted because of his usual impetuousness. He took up Pitt's sneer at petty struggles for power. What the motives of these struggles for power had been let those tell who had struggled most and longest for power. They had been told that nobody round the King had sense or virtue, that sense and virtue resided somewhere else. How was the King to know where they are to be found? for he feared that _this_ House of Commons would not point in the required direction. He ended by asking why Pitt had not asked sooner for his augmentation of force.