Quebec is well victualled,
Amherst is not arrived, and fifteen thousand men are encamped to defend
it. We have lost many men by the enemy, and some by our
friends; that is, we now call our nine thousand only seven
thousand. How this little army will get away from a much
larger, and in this season, in that country, I don't guess: yes,
I do."
Hardly were these lines written when tidings came that
Montcalm was defeated, Quebec taken, and Wolfe killed. A
flood of mixed emotions swept over England. Even Walpole
grew half serious as he sent a packet of newspapers to his
friend the ambassador. "You may now give yourself what airs you please.
An ambassador is the only man in the world whom bullying becomes.
All precedents are on your side: Persians, Greeks, Romans, always
insulted their neighbors when they took Quebec. Think how pert the
French would have been on such an occasion! What a scene! An army in
the night dragging itself up a precipice by stumps of trees
to assault a town and attack an enemy strongly intrenched
and double in numbers! The King is overwhelmed with addresses
on our victories; he will have enough to paper his palace."[813]
[Footnote 813: _Letters of Horace Walpole_, III. 254, 257 (ed. Cunningham
1857).]
When, in soberer mood, he wrote the annals of his time,
and turned, not for the better, from the epistolary style to
the historical, he thus described the impression made on the
English public by the touching and inspiring story of Wolfe's
heroism and death: "The incidents of dramatic fiction could
not be conducted with more address to lead an audience from
despondency to sudden exaltation than accident prepared to
excite the passions of a whole people.
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