An opinion full as general prevailed also, at the same time, that nothing could be done for the regulation of the civil list establishment.  The very attempt to introduce method into it, and any limitations to its services, was held absurd.  I had not seen the man who so much as suggested one economical principle or an economical expedient upon that subject.  Nothing but coarse amputation or coarser taxation were then talked of, both of them without design, combination, or the least shadow of principle.  Blind and headlong zeal or factious fury were the whole contribution brought by the most noisy, on that occasion, towards the satisfaction of the public or the relief of the crown.

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of that time required something very different from what others then suggested or what his Grace now conceives.  Let me inform him, that it was one of the most critical periods in our annals.

Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold.  Had the portentous comet of the Rights of Man, (which “from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war,” and “with fear of change perplexes monarchs,”) had that comet crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French Revolution.

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized.  Her hostility was at a good distance.  We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body:  we lost our colonies, but we kept our Constitution.  There was, indeed, much intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation.  Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of Reform.  Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms, went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this kingdom.  Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had the honor of leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution.  Other projects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very existence of the kingdom under any Constitution.  There are who remember the blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger,—­there, the same inaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-wishers to the mischief,—­there, indifferent lookers-on.  At the same time, a sort