There are not more than half a dozen dishes which we have reserved for ourselves; the rest has been thrown open to you in the utmost profusion; you have potatoes, and carrots, suet dumplings, sops in the pan, and delicious toast-and-water, in incredible quantities.  Beef, mutton, lamb, pork, and veal are ours; and, if you were not the most restless and dissatisfied of human beings, you would never think of aspiring to enjoy them.”

Is not this, says Peter, the very nonsense and the very insult which you daily practise on the Roman Catholics?  I, though I am an inhabitant of the village and live in one of the three favoured streets, have retained some sense of justice, and I most earnestly counsel these half-fed claimants to persevere in their just demands, till they are admitted to their just share of a dinner for which they pay as much as the others.

“And, if they see a little attenuated lawyer[50] squabbling at the head of their opponents, let them desire him to empty his pockets, and to pull out all the pieces of duck, fowl, and pudding which he has filched from the public feasts, to carry home to his wife and children.”

Before ending his letter, Peter has a fling at the Home Secretary, Lord Hawkesbury, “the lesser of the two Jenkinsons."[51] Lord Hawkesbury has said that “nothing is to be granted to the Catholics from fear.”  Why not, asks Peter, if the thing demanded is just?

“The only true way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of justice is by showing them in pretty plain terms the consequences of injustice.  If any body of French troops land in Ireland, the whole population of that country will rise against you to a man, and you could not possibly survive such an event three years.  Such, from the bottom of my heart, do I believe to be the present state of that country; and so little does it appear to me to be impolitic and unstatesmanlike to concede anything to such a danger, that if the Catholics, in addition to their present just demands, were to petition for the perpetual removal of the said Lord Hawkesbury from his Majesty’s councils, I think 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."[52]

Letter VII. begins with a rebuke to brother Abraham for placing all his hopes for the salvation of England in the “discretion” and “sound sense” of Mr. Secretary Canning.—­