4.  The reported conversations of Mr. Fish.

In considering Mr. Fish’s letter, we must first notice its animus.  The manner in which Dickens’s two old women are brought in is not only indecorous, but it shows a state of feeling from which nothing but harsh interpretation of every questionable expression of Mr. Motley’s was to be expected.

There is not the least need of maintaining the perfect fitness and rhetorical felicity of every phrase and every word used by him in his interview with Lord Clarendon.  It is not to be expected that a minister, when about to hold a conversation with a representative of the government to which he is accredited, will commit his instructions to memory and recite them, like a school-boy “speaking his piece.”  He will give them more or less in his own language, amplifying, it may be, explaining, illustrating, at any rate paraphrasing in some degree, but endeavoring to convey an idea of their essential meaning.  In fact, as any one can see, a conversation between two persons must necessarily imply a certain amount of extemporization on the part of both.  I do not believe any long and important conference was ever had between two able men without each of them feeling that he had not spoken exactly in all respects as he would if he could say all over again.

Doubtless, therefore, Mr. Motley’s report of his conversation shows that some of his expressions might have been improved, and others might as well have been omitted.  A man does not change his temperament on taking office.  General Jackson still swore “by the Eternal,” and his illustrious military successor of a more recent period seems, by his own showing, to have been able to sudden impulses of excitement.  It might be said of Motley, as it was said of Shakespeare by Ben Jonson, “aliquando sufflaminandus erat.”  Yet not too much must be made of this concession.  Only a determination to make out a case could, as it seems to me, have framed such an indictment as that which the secretary constructed by stringing together a slender list of pretended peccadillos.  One instance will show the extreme slightness which characterizes many of the grounds of inculpation:—­

The instructions say, “The government, in rejecting the recent convention, abandons neither its own claims nor those of its citizens,” etc.

Mr. Motley said, in the course of his conversation, “At present, the United States government, while withdrawing neither its national claims nor the claims of its individual citizens against the British government,” etc.

Mr. Fish says, “The determination of this government not to abandon its claims nor those of its citizens was stated parenthetically, and in such a subordinate way as not necessarily to attract the attention of Lord Clarendon.”

What reported conversation can stand a captious criticism like this?  Are there not two versions of the ten commandments which were given out in the thunder and smoke of Sinai, and would the secretary hold that this would have been a sufficient reason to recall Moses from his “Divine Legation” at the court of the Almighty?