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Updated: June 4, 2025
What was Howe's explanation of his Lordship's tergiversation? It was the same as that which he had for Hincks's volte-face.
"There is little new to be said; but we must not be silent, or, in these days of baseness and tergiversation, we shall be supposed to have deserted our friend the Pope, and they will say of us, Prostant venales apud Lambeth et Whitehall. God forbid it should ever be said of us with justice.
The evidence of one gentleman in particular drew attention: he was accused of tergiversation, and of showing that partial indulgence which his own conduct required. He publicly defended his character: his performance was censured, and himself dismissed the service of his sovereign.
In the early and middle ages it was universally believed that a devil could, of his own inherent power, call into existence any manner of body that it pleased his fancy to inhabit, or that would most conduce to the success of any contemplated evil. In consequence of this belief the devils became the rivals, indeed the successful rivals, of Jupiter himself in the art of physical tergiversation.
The Cardinal de Joyeuse, Villeroy, and Jeannin were urgent that the former measure should be adopted; assigning as their reason that after the tergiversation and deceit of which the cabal had been convicted, they would profit by any delay on the part of the Government to strengthen their army, and to effect other means of defence, thus augmenting the difficulty of their suppression; the Chancellor was, however, of a different opinion, and counselled the Queen to avert, so long as it might be possible to do so, the horrors of a civil war.
Weary of this uncertainty, and the tergiversation of Austria, which was still under the influence of England, and feeling that the prolongation of such a state of things could only turn to his disadvantage, Bonaparte broke the armistice. He had already consented to sacrifices which his successes in Italy did not justify.
Atwood to trace with minuteness the further details of this affair. It is impossible to withhold from him a certain sympathy, or to avoid feeling that a very worthy man, as the world goes, had entangled himself in an inextricable knot of duplicity and tergiversation, by an ill-advised effort to be two opposite things at once.
One there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners. There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed. The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless.
The eternal question went tick-tack, tick-tack, to the rhythm of his march. He glared at vacancy, and tried hard to make up his mind. "I'm afraid I must be somewhat lacking in decision of character," he said, with pathetic wonder. Then suddenly he stamped his foot. "Come! An end to this tergiversation. Do it. Do it," cried his manlier soul.
But the captious and malignant criticism to which his writings were now subjected would have found heresy in the Sermon on the Mount; and he, unfortunately, was rash enough to publish, at the very moment when the outcry against his political tergiversation was loudest, his thoughts on the mystery of the Trinity.
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