“To call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, 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....  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 that 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 from 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.”

Under the rule of Canning and his colleagues, Ireland has become utterly disloyal.—­

“The great mass of the Catholic population, upon the slightest appearance of a French force in that country, would rise upon you to a man.  There is no loyalty among the Catholics:  they detest you as their worst oppressors, and they will continue to detest you till you remove the cause of their hatred.  It is in your power in six months’ time to produce a total revolution of opinions among these people....  At present see what a dreadful state Ireland is in!  The common toast among the low Irish is, ‘The Feast of the Pass-over.’  Some allusion to Bonaparte, in a play lately acted at Dublin, produced thunders of applause from the pit and the galleries; and a politician should not be inattentive to the public feelings expressed in theatres.  Mr. Perceval thinks he has disarmed the Irish.  He has no more disarmed the Irish than he has resigned a shilling of his own public emoluments.  An Irish peasant fills the barrel of his gun full of tow dipped in oil, butters the lock, buries it in a bog, and allows the Orange bloodhound to ransack his cottage at pleasure.  Be just and kind to the Irish, and you will indeed disarm them; rescue them from the degraded servitude in which they are held by an handful of their own countrymen; and you will add four millions of brave and affectionate men to your strength.”

But instead of these wise remedies, Mr. Secretary Canning only offers the Irish people his incessant, unseasonable, and sometimes indecent jokes.—­

“He jokes upon neutral flags and frauds, jokes upon Irish rebels, jokes upon northern and western and southern foes, and gives himself no trouble upon any subject....  And this is the Secretary whose genius, in the estimation of brother Abraham, is to extinguish the genius of Bonaparte.  Pompey was killed by a slave, Goliath smitten by a stripling; Pyrrhus died by the hand of a woman.  Tremble, thou great Gaul, from whose head an armed