_Politics and patriotism of a lord: A grand undertaking: Sublime
effusions, or who but I: Politics and taste of Enoch: The honey
changed to gall, or rules for fine writers_


The next day about noon, his lordship sent his compliments, informing
me he should be glad of my company. I hastened to him, eager to have
an opportunity privately to display, before a lord, my knowledge, wit,
and understanding.

After a short introductory dialogue, his lordship turned the
conversation on politics, and it so happened that, though my ideas
on this subject were but feeble and ill arranged, yet it had not
wholly escaped my attention. While I was at Oxford, the want of a
parliamentary reform had agitated the whole nation, and was too real
and glaring an evil not to be convincing to a young and unprejudiced
mind. The extension of the excise laws had likewise produced in me
strong feelings of anger; and the enormous and accumulating national
debt had been described to me as a source of imminent, absolute, and
approaching ruin.

These and similar ideas though all more or less crude I detailed, and
concluded my creed with asserting my conviction that government used
corrupt and immoral means, and that these were destructive of the end
which it meant to obtain.

His lordship was quite in raptures to hear me; and declared he could
not have expected such sound doctrine, from so young a man. 'Yes, Mr.