They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old.  If we travel, they stop our way.  They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country.  Our business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation.  The Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally “all monstrous, all prodigious things,” cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighboring state.  These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.[15]

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, in the whole body of its solidity and compound mass, at which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought-sick, without a thorough abhorrence of everything they say and everything they do, I am amazed at the morbid strength or the natural infirmity of his mind.

It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, that produced my plan of reform.  Without troubling myself with the exactness of the logical diagram, I considered them as things substantially opposite.  It was to prevent that evil, that I proposed the measures which his Grace is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to my recollection.  I had (what I hope that noble Duke will remember in all his operations) a state to preserve, as well as a state to reform.  I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead.  I do not claim half the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from being done.  In that situation of the public mind, I did not undertake, as was then proposed, to new-model the House of Commons or the House of Lords, or to change the authority under which any officer of the crown acted, who was suffered at all to exist.  Crown, lords, commons, judicial system, system of administration, existed as they had existed before, and in the mode and manner in which they had always existed.  My measures were, what I then truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, healing and mediatorial.  A complaint was made of too much influence in the House of Commons:  I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my reasons, article by article, for every reduction, and showed why I thought it safe for the service of the state.  I heaved the lead every inch of way I made.  A disposition to expense was complained of:  to that I opposed,