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of this kind. Having been a man of fortune and a member of Parliament, and loving his Horace to boot, he could hardly have done without his wine. I saw him once in a state of scornful indignation at being interrupted in the perusal of a manuscript by the monitions of his police-officers, who were obliged to remind him over and over again that he was a magistrate, and that the criminal multitude were in waiting. Every time the door opened, he threatened and he implored.

"Otium divos rogat in patenti
Prensus."

Had you quoted this to Mr. Kinnaird, his eyes would have sparkled with good-fellowship: he would have finished the verse and the bottle with you, and proceeded to as many more as your head could stand. Poor fellow! the last time I saw him, he was an apparition formidably substantial. The door of our host's dining-room opened without my hearing it, and, happening to turn round, I saw a figure in a great coat, literally almost as broad as it was long, and scarcely able to articulate. He was dying of a dropsy, and was obliged to revive himself, before he was fit to converse, by the wine that was killing him. But he had cares besides, and cares of no ordinary description; and, for my part, I will not blame even his wine for killing him, unless his cares

could have done it more agreeably. After dinner that day, he was comparatively himself again, quoted his Horace as usual, talked of lords and courts with a relish, and begged that God save the King might be played to him on the pianoforte; to which he listened, as if his soul had taken its hat off. I believe he would have liked to die to God save the King, and to have "waked and found those visions true."

PITT AND FOX.

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CHAPTER XI.

POLITICAL CHARACTERS.

Ministry of the Pittites.-Time-serving conduct of the Allies.— Height and downfall of Napoleon.-Character of George the Third.-Mistakes and sincerity of the Examiner.-Indictment against it respecting the case of Major Hogan.-Affair of Mrs. Clarke.-Indictment respecting the reign of George the Third.— Perry, proprietor of the Morning Chronicle.-Characters of Lord Canning, Liverpool, and Lord Castlereagh.-Whigs and Whig-Radicals.- Queen Victoria.- Royalty and Republics.— Indictment respecting military flogging.-The Attorney General, Sir Vicary Gibbs.

THE Examiner had been set up towards the close of the reign of George the Third, three years before the appointment of the regency. Pitt and Fox had died two years before; the one, in middle life, of constant ill-success, preying on a sincere but proud, and not very large mind, and unwisely supported by a habit of drinking; the other, of older but more genial habits of a like sort, and of demands beyond his strength by a sudden accession to office. The king—a conscientious but narrow-minded man, ob

stinate to a degree of disease (which had lost him America), and not always dealing ingenuously, even with his advisers-had lately got rid of Mr. Fox's successors, on account of their urging the Catholic claims. He had summoned to office in their stead Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, and others, who had been the clerks of Mr. Pitt; and Bonaparte was at the height of his power as French Emperor, setting his brothers on thrones, and compelling our Russian and German allies to side with him under the most mortifying circumstances of tergiversation.

It is a melancholy period for the potentates of the earth, when they fancy themselves obliged to resort to the shabbiest measures of the feeble; siding against a friend with his enemy; joining in accusations against him at the latter's dictation; believed by nobody on either side; returning to the friend, and retreating from him, according to the fortunes of war; secretly hoping, that the friend will excuse them by reason of the pauper's plea, necessity; and at no time able to give better apologies for their conduct than those "mysterious ordinations of Providence," which are the last refuge of the destitute in morals, and a reference to which they contemptuously deny to the thief and the "king's evidence." It proves to them, to them, “with a vengeance," the " something rotten in the state of Denmark;" and will continue to prove it, and to be despicable, whether

BONAPARTE AND OUR ALLIES.

47

in bad or good fortune, till the world find out a cure for the rottenness.

Yet this is what the allies of England were in the habit of doing, through the whole contest of England with France. When England succeeded in getting up a coalition against Napoleon, they denounced him for his ambition, and set out to fight him. When the coalition was broken by his armies, they turned round at his bidding, denounced England, and joined him in fighting against their ally. And this was the round of their history: a coalition and a tergiversation alternately; now a speech and a fight against Bonaparte, who beat them; then a speech and a fight against England, who bought them off; then, again, a speech and a fight against Bonaparte, who beat them again; and then, as before, a speech and a fight against England, who again bought them off. Meanwhile, they took everything they could get, whether from enemy or friend, seizing with no less greediness whatever bits of territory Bonaparte threw to them for their meanness, than pocketing the millions of Pitt, for which we are paying to this day.

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It becomes us to bow, and to bow humbly, to the mysterious dispensations of Providence;" but in furtherance of those very dispensations, it has pleased Providence so to constitute us, as to render us incapable of admiring such conduct, whether in

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