And yet to-morrow was, for good or bad, for better for worse, a favourite phrase with Napoleon. His last words to Murat at nightfall, in the hope of battle with the Russians on the Dwina next day, were, “To-morrow, at five, the sun of Austerlitz!” After the combat of Reichenbach, which lost him Duroc, he sat alone, in moody meditation, neither speaking nor to be spoken with; appealed to in vain for orders by Caulaincourt and Maret: “To-morrow—everything,” was the only answer their most urgent demands could wring from him, in his hour of dejection and theirs of need. In another mood was the emperor when, after Leipsic, he pressed the Austrian cabinet to side with him, and at once. If they were wise, he said, they would do so forthwith. They could do so, he told their representative, that evening. To-morrow it might perhaps be too late; for who could foretell the events of to-morrow?
So thought Sunderland, in that “agony of terror,” almost over-wrought or over-coloured, perhaps, by Macaulay, which impelled him to resign office, in a sort of frenzied haste. He had asked some of his friends to come to his house that he might consult them; they came at the appointed time, but found that he had gone to Kensington, and had left word that he should soon be back. When he joined them, they observed that he had not the gold key which is the badge of the Lord Chamberlain, and asked where it was. “At Kensington,” answered Sunderland. They found that he had tendered his resignation, and that it had been, after a long struggle, accepted. They blamed his haste, and told him that since he had summoned them to advise him on that day, he might at least have waited till the morrow. “To-morrow,” he exclaimed “would have ruined me. To-night has saved me.”
A signal contrast the despairing minister presents to the poet’s picture of credulous hope which ever promises a morrow better than to-day (like the voluptuaries branded by the Hebrew prophet, who hug themselves in the assurance that To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant):
... “Credula vitam
Spes fovet, ac melius cras fore semper ait.”
They say that To-morrow never comes. The great Greek father with the golden mouth seems to have based an ethical warning on this thought, when he bids us defer not till to-morrow, for to-morrow is a vanishing quantity. Μὴ εἰς τὴν αὔριον ἀναβάλλου· ἡ γὰρ αὔριον οὐδέ ποτε λαμβάνει τέγος. The moral is one with that of the Latin satirist—though he makes to-morrow come fast enough, one per diem,—and go quite as fast as it came:
... “Cum lux altera venit,
Jam cras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud cras
Egerit hys annos.”