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.