Dean Swift, in a letter to Lord Bolingbroke, says that he does not "remember to have ever heard or seen one great genius who had long success in the ministry; and recollecting a great many in my memory and acquaintance, those who had the smoothest time were, at best, men of middling degree in understanding." However true this may be in the main,--and it undoubtedly is true that in ordinary times the speculative and innovating temper of an original mind is less safe than the patience of routine and persistence in precedent of a common-place one,--there are critical occasions to which intellect of the highest quality, character of the finest fibre, and a judgment that is inspired rather than confused by new and dangerous combinations of circumstances, are alone equal. Tactics and an acquaintance with the highest military authorities were adequate enough till they were confronted with General Bonaparte and the new order of things. If a great man struggling with the storms of fate be the sublimest spectacle, a mediocre man in the same position is surely the most pitiful. Deserted by his presence of mind, which, indeed, had never been anything but an absence of danger,--baffled by the inapplicability of his habitual principles of conduct, (if that may be called a principle, which, like the act of walking, is merely an unconscious application of the laws of gravity,) --helpless, irresolute, incapable of conceiving the flower Safety in the nettle Danger, much more of plucking it thence,--surely here, if anywhere, is an object of compassion. When such a one is a despot who has wrought his own destruction by obstinacy in a traditional evil policy, like Francis II. of Naples, our commiseration is outweighed by satisfaction that the ruin of the man is the safety of the state. But when the victim is a so-called statesman, who has malversated the highest trusts for selfish ends, who has abused constitutional forms to the destruction of the spirit that gave them life and validity, who could see nothing nobler in the tenure of high office than the means it seemed to offer of prolonging it, who knows no art to conjure the spirit of anarchy he has evoked but the shifts and evasions of a second-rate attorney, and who has contrived to involve his country in the confusion of principle and vacillation of judgment which have left him without a party and without a friend,--for such a man we have no feeling but contemptuous reprobation. Pan-urge in danger of shipwreck is but a faint type of Mr. Buchanan in face of the present crisis; and that poor fellow's craven abjuration of his "_former_ friend," Friar John, is magnanimity itself, compared with his almost-ex-Excellency's treatment of the Free States in his last Message to Congress. There are times when mediocrity is a dangerous quality, and a man may drown himself as effectually in milk-and-water as in Malmsey.