J. M.—Must you not add home affairs and India? His Thoughts on the Discontents is a masterpiece of civil wisdom, and the right defence in a great constitutional struggle. Then he gave fourteen years of industry to Warren Hastings, and teaching England the rights of the natives, princes and people, and her own duties. So he was right in four out of five.
Mr. G.—Yes, yes—quite true. Those two ought to be added to my three. There is a saying of Burke's from which I must utterly dissent. “Property is sluggish and inert.” Quite the contrary. Property is vigilant, active, sleepless; if ever it seems to slumber, be sure that one eye is open.
Marie Antoinette. I once read the three volumes of letters from Mercy d'Argenteau to Maria Theresa. He seems to have performed the duty imposed upon him with fidelity.
J. M.—Don't you think the Empress comes out well in the correspondence?
Mr. G.—Yes, she shows always judgment and sagacity.
J. M.—Ah, but besides sagacity, worth and as much integrity as those slippery times allowed.
Mr. G.—Yes (but rather reluctantly, I thought). As for Marie Antoinette, she was not a striking character in any senses she was horribly frivolous; and, I suppose, we must say she was, what shall I call it—a very considerable flirt?
J. M.—The only case with real foundation seems to be that of the beau Fersen, the Swedish secretary. He too came to as tragic an end as the Queen.
Tuesday, Dec. 22.—Mr. G. still somewhat indisposed—but reading away all day long. Full of Marbot. Delighted with the story of the battle of Castiglione: how when Napoleon held a council of war, and they all said they were hemmed in, and that their only chance was to back out, Augereau roughly cried that they might all do what they liked, but he would attack the enemy cost what it might. “Exactly like a place in the Iliad; when Agamemnon and the rest sit sorrowful in the assembly arguing that it was [pg 470] useless to withstand the sovereign will of Zeus, and that they had better flee into their ships, Diomed bursts out that whatever others think, in any event he and Sthenelus, his squire, will hold firm, and never desist from the onslaught until they have laid waste the walls of Troy.”[290] A large dose of Diomed in Mr. G. himself.
Talk about the dangerous isolation in which the monarchy will find itself in England if the hereditary principle goes down in the House of Lords; “it will stand bare, naked, with no shelter or shield, only endured as the better of two evils.” “I once asked,” he said, “who besides myself in the party cares for the hereditary principle? The answer was, That perhaps —— cared for it!!”—naming a member of the party supposed to be rather sapient than sage.