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.

LETTER VII.

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.