Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia, to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.
But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more infected us as a whole.

That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet.

We gave the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves.

Our wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not quite believe.

An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself--am I a coward?
It cannot be But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this I should have fatted all the region kites With this slave's offal.
We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.
VII--_The Midnight of Europe_ Among the minor crimes of England may be classed the shallow criticism and easy abandonment of Napoleon III.