Hawkesbury from his Majesty’s councils, I think,
whatever might be the effect upon the destinies of
Europe, and however it might retard our own individual
destruction, that the prayer of the petition should
be instantly complied with. Canning’s crocodile
tears should not move me; the hoops of the maids of
honour should not hide him. I would tear him
from the banisters of the back stairs, and plunge him
in the fishy fumes of the dirtiest of all his Cinque
Ports.
Dear Abraham—In the correspondence which
is passing between us, you are perpetually alluding
to the Foreign Secretary; and in answer to the dangers
of Ireland, which I am pressing upon your notice, you
have nothing to urge but the confidence which you
repose in the discretion and sound sense of this gentleman.
I can only say, that I have listened to him long and
often with the greatest attention; I have used every
exertion in my power to take a fair measure of him,
and it appears to me impossible to hear him upon any
arduous topic without perceiving that he is eminently
deficient in those solid and serious qualities upon
which, and upon which alone, the confidence of a great
country can properly repose. He sweats and labours,
and works for sense, and Mr. Ellis seems always to
think it is coming, but it does not come; the machine
can’t draw up what is not to be found in the
spring; Providence has made him a light, jesting, paragraph-writing
man, and that he will remain to his dying day.
When he is jocular he is strong, when he is serious
he is like Samson in a wig; any ordinary person is
a match for him: a song, an ironical letter, a
burlesque ode, an attack in the newspaper upon Nicoll’s
eye, a smart speech of twenty minutes, full of gross
misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language,
a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking
dull men, some half information picked up in Pall Mall
in the morning; these are your friend’s natural
weapons; all these things he can do: here I allow
him to be truly great; nay, I will be just, and go
still further, if he would confine himself to these
things, and consider the facete and the playful
to be the basis of his character, he would, for that
species of man, be universally regarded as a person
of a very good understanding; call him a legislator,
a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a
great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a
butterfly were to teach bees to make honey. That
he is an extraordinary writer of small poetry, and
a diner out of the highest lustre, I do most readily
admit. After George Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell,
there has been no such man for this half-century.
The Foreign Secretary is a gentleman, a respectable
as well as a highly agreeable man in private life;
but you may as well feed me with decayed potatoes
as console me for the miseries of Ireland by the resources
of his sense and his discretion.
It is only the public situation which this gentleman
holds which entitles me or induces me to say so much
about him. He is a fly in amber, nobody cares
about the fly; the only question is, How the devil
did it get there? Nor do I attack him for the
love of glory, but from the love of utility, as a
burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke for fear it
should flood a province.
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