Let us visit, in our highest and yet in our softest splendor, the accessible German Courts, especially the likely or well-disposed: Mainz, Koln, Trier, these, the three called Spiritual, lie on our very route; then Pfalz, Baiern, Sachsen:--we will tour diligently up and down; try whether, by optic machinery and art-magic of the mind, one cannot bring them round.
In all these preliminary steps and points, and even in that alpha and omega of excluding Grand-Duke Franz, and getting a Kaiser of his own, Belleisle succeeded.

With painful results to himself and to millions of his fellow-creatures, to readers of this History, among others.

And became in consequence the most famous of mankind; and filled the whole world with rumor of Belleisle, in those years .-- A man of such intrinsic distinction as Belleisle, whom Friedrich afterwards deliberately called a great Captain, and the only Frenchman with a genius for war; and who, for some time, played in Europe at large a part like that of Warwick the Kingmaker: how has he fallen into such oblivion?
Many of my readers never heard of him before; nor, in writing or otherwise, is there symptom that any living memory now harbors him, or has the least approach to an image of him! "For the times are babbly," says Goethe," And then again the times are dumb:-- Denn geschwatzig sind die Zeiten, Und sie sind auch wieder stumm." Alas, if a man sow only chaff, in never so sublime a manner, with the whole Earth and the long-eared populations looking on, and chorally singing approval, rendering night hideous,--it will avail him nothing.
And that, to a lamentable extent, was Belleisle's case.

His scheme of action was in most felicitously just accordance with the national sense of France, but by no means so with the Laws of Nature and of Fact; his aim, grandiose, patriotic, what you will, was unluckily false and not true.

How could "the times" continue talking of him?
They found they had already talked too much.