I promised you a brisk war:  we have done our part, but can I help it, if the French will not declare it?-if they are backward, and cautious, and timorous; if they are afraid of provoking too far so great a power as England, who threatens the liberties of Europe?  I laugh, but how not to laugh at such a world as this!  Do you remember the language of the last war?  What were our apprehensions?  Nay, at the conclusion of the peace, nothing was laid down for a maxim but the impossibility of our engaging in another war; that our national debt was at its ne plus ultra; and that on the very next discussion France must swallow us up!  Now we are all insolent, alert, and triumphant:  nay the French talk of nothing but guarding against our piracies, and travel Europe to give the alarm against such an overbearing power as we are.  On their coasts they are alarmed—­I mean the common people; I scarce believe they who know any thing, are in real dread of invasion from us!  Whatever be the reason, they don’t declare war:  some think they wait for the arrival of their Martinico fleet.  You will ask why we should not attack that too?  They tell one, that if we began hostilities in Europe, Spain would join the French.  Some believe that the latter are not ready:  certain it is, Mirepoix gave them no notice nor suspicion of our flippancy; and he is rather under a cloud—­indeed this has much undeceived me in one point:  I took him for the ostensible mister; but little thought that they had not some secret agent of better head, some priest, some Scotch or Irish Papist-or perhaps some English Protestant, to give them better intelligence.  But don’t you begin to be impatient for the events of all our West Indian expeditions?  The Duke,(596) who is now the soul of the Regency, and who on all hands is allowed to make a great figure there, is much dissatisfied at the slowness of General Braddock, who does not march as if he was at all impatient to be scalped.  It is said for him, that he has had bad guides, that the roads are exceedingly difficult, and that it was necessary to drag as much artillery as he does.  This is not the first time, as witness in Hawley,(597) that the Duke has found that brutality did not necessarily consummate a general.  I love to give you an idea of our characters as they rise upon the stage of history.  Braddock is a very Iroquois in disposition.  He had a sister, who having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself(598) with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with those lines “To die is landing on some silent shore,” etc.  When Braddock was told of it, he only said, “Poor Fanny!  I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up!"’ But a more ridiculous story of him, and which is recorded in heroics by Fielding in his Covent-Garden tragedy, was an amorous discussion he had formerly with a Mrs. Upton, who had kept him.  He had gone the greatest lengths with