Charles Amadeus had signed the Pragmatic Sanction; but eats his Covenant, like the others, on example of France;--having, as he now bethinks himself, claims on the Milanese.
There are two claimants on the Milanese, then; the Spanish Termagant, and he?
Yes; and they will have their difficulties, their extensive tusslings in Italian War and otherwise, to make an adjustment of it; and will give Belleisle (at least the Doorkeeper will) an immensity of trouble, in years coming.
In this way do the Pragmatic people eat their own Covenant, one after the other, and are not ashamed;--till all have eaten, or as good as eaten; and, almost within year and day, Pragmatic Sanction is a vanished quantity; and poor Kaiser Karl's life-labor is not worth the sheepskin and stationery it cost him.

History reports in sum, That "nobody kept the Pragmatic Sanction; that the few [strictly speaking, the one] who acted by it, would have done precisely the same, though there had never been such a Document in existence." To George II., it is, was and will be, the Keystone of Nature, the true Anti-French palladium of mankind; and he, dragging the unwilling Dutch after him, will do great things for it: but nobody else does anything at all.

Might we hope to bid adieu to it, in this manner, and never to mention it again!-- Document more futile there had not been in Nature, nor will be.
Friedrich had not yet fought at Mollwitz in assertion of his Silesian claim, when the poor Pope--poor soul, who had no Covenant to eat, but took pattern by others--claimed, in solemn Allocution, Parma and Piacenza for the Holy See.

[Adelung, ii.

376 (5th April, 1741)] All the world is claiming.