All that I have so often told you, Mr. Abraham Plymley, is now come
to pass. The Scythians, in whom you and the neighbouring country
gentleman placed such confidence, are smitten hip and thigh; their
Beningsen put to open shame; their magazines of train oil
intercepted, and we are waking from our disgraceful drunkenness to
all the horrors of Mr. Perceval and Mr Canning . . . We shall now
see if a nation is to be saved by school-boy jokes and doggrel
rhymes, by affronting petulance, and by the tones and gesticulations
of Mr. Pitt. But these are not all the auxiliaries on which we have
to depend; to these his colleague will add the strictest attention
to the smaller parts of ecclesiastical government, to hassocks, to
psalters, and to surplices; in the last agonies of England, he will
bring in a bill to regulate Easter-offerings: and he will adjust
the stipends of curates, when the flag of France is unfurled on the
hills of Kent. Whatever can be done by very mistaken notions of the
piety of a Christian, and by a very wretched imitation of the
eloquence of Mr. Pitt, will be done by these two gentlemen. After
all, if they both really were what they both either wish to be, or
wish to be thought; if the one were an enlightened Christian who
drew from the Gospel the toleration, the charity, and the sweetness
which it contains; and if the other really possessed any portion of
the great understanding of his Nisus who guarded him from the
weapons of the Whigs, I should still doubt if they could save us.
But I am sure we are not to be saved by religious hatred, and by
religious trifling; by any psalmody, however sweet; or by any
persecution, however sharp; I am certain the sounds of Mr. Pitt's
voice, and the measure of his tones, and the movement of his arms,
will do nothing for us; when these tones and movements, and voice
brings us always declamation without sense or knowledge, and
ridicule without good humour or conciliation. Oh, Mr. Plymley, this