Nesselrode.—No psalmist, or engineer, or commissary, or arithmetician, could enumerate the beasts that are harnessed to them, or the fiends that urge them on.
Nicholas.—Nesselrode! you grow more and more serious.
Nesselrode.—Age, sire, even without wisdom, makes men serious whether they are inclined or not. I could hardly have been so long conversant in the affairs of mankind (all which in all quarters your majesty superintends and directs) without much cause for seriousness.
Nicholas.—I feel the consciousness of Supreme Power, but I also feel the necessity of subordinate help.
Nesselrode.—Your majesty is the first monarch, since the earlier Cæsars of Imperial Rome, who could control, directly or indirectly, every country in our hemisphere, and thereby in both.
Nicholas.—There are some who do not see this.
Nesselrode.—There were some, and they indeed the most acute and politic of mankind, who could not see the power of the Macedonian king until he showed his full height upon the towers of Cheronœa. There are some at this moment in England who disregard the admonitions of the most wary and experienced general of modern times, and listen in preference to babblers holding forth on economy and peace from slippery sacks of cotton and wool.
Nicholas.—Hush! hush! these are our men; what should we do without them? A single one of them in the parliament or town-hall is worth to me a regiment of cuirassiers. These are the true bullets with conical heads which carry far and sure. Hush! hush!
Nesselrode.—They do not hear us: they do not hear Wellington: they would not hear Nelson were he living.
Nicholas.—No other man that ever lived, having the same power in his hands, would have endured with the same equanimity as Wellington, the indignities he suffered in Portugal; superseded in the hour of victory by two generals, one upon another, like marsh frogs; people of no experience, no ability. He might have become king of Portugal by compromise, and have added Gallicia and Biscay.