You spend a great deal of ink about the character of the present prime minister.  Grant you all that you write—­I say, I fear he will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest of his country:  and then you tell me, he is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals!  These are, undoubtedly, the first qualifications to be looked to in a time of the most serious public danger; but somehow or another (if public and private virtues must always be incompatible), I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country.

The late administration did not do right; they did not build their measures upon the solid basis of facts.  They should have caused several Catholics to have been dissected after death by surgeons of either religion; and the report to have been published with accompanying plates.  If the viscera, and other organs of life, had been found to be the same as in Protestant bodies; if the provisions of nerves, arteries, cerebrum, and cerebellum, had been the same as we are provided with, or as the Dissenters are now known to possess; then, indeed, they might have met Mr. Perceval upon a proud eminence, and convinced the country at large of the strong probability that the Catholics are really human creatures, endowed with the feelings of men, and entitled to all their rights.  But instead of this wise and prudent measure, Lord Howick, with his usual precipitation, brings forward a bill in their favour, without offering the slightest proof to the country that they were anything more than horses and oxen.  The person who shows the lama at the corner of Piccadilly has the precaution to write up—­Allowed by Sir Joseph Banks to be a real quadruped, so his Lordship might have said—­Allowed by the bench of Bishops to be real human creatures....  I could write you twenty letters upon this subject; but I am tired, and so I suppose are you.  Our friendship is now of forty years’ standing; you know me to be a truly religious man; but I shudder to see religion treated like a cockade, or a pint of beer, and made the instrument of a party.  I love the king, but I love the people as well as the king; and if I am sorry to see his old age molested, I am much more sorry to see four millions of Catholics baffled in their just expectations.  If I love Lord Grenville, and Lord Howick, it is because they love their country; if I abhor ... it is because I know there is but one man among them who is not laughing at the enormous folly and credulity of the country, and that he is an ignorant and mischievous bigot.  As for the light and frivolous jester, of whom it is your misfortune to think so highly, learn, my dear Abraham, that this political Killigrew, just before the breaking-up of the last administration, was in actual treaty with them for a place; and if they had survived twenty-four hours longer, he would have been now declaiming against the cry of No Popery! instead of inflaming it.  With this practical comment on the baseness of human nature, I bid you adieu!