according to his own words, "he has delineated with accuracy and fidelity." If he meant to exalt Mr. Burke, as I suspect he did, his attempt was not wise; if he meant to lower Mr. Fox, as I earnestly hope he did not, it was not good. If his sensibility should not for once quite overpower his sagacity, I think that, upon reviewing the whole of his statement, he can hardly fail to discover some traces of dissimilitude between the sentiments of Mr. Burke, and his own. Was Mr. Fox a most brilliant and accomplished debater only? Or, was he in other respects a great speaker? If Mr. Burke be right, the author of the sketch has ascribed to Mr. Fox too many excellencies-if that author be not wrong, Mr. Burke has ascribed to him too few. Why then did the learned author of the sketch run the hazard of counteracting the stronger praise which was bestowed by himself, by the introduction of the weaker praise, which was bestowed by Mr. Burke ?

Thus, dear Sir, I have endeavoured to discharge a necessary, but most painful duty. Painful indeed it has been for me to assume the language of controversy, especially as in assuming it I have been compelled to lay open the imperfections of the dead, and to censure, but I hope without asperity, the imprudence of one who is alive. But it was necesfor me to develope very fully, all the latent properties of an expression, which, having been used by one celebrated man, and selected for republication by another, might ensnare common readers into imperfect or erroneous conceptions of the uncommon

talents by which Mr. Fox was distinguished as a public speaker. The context itself, as I have already observed to you, contains sufficient matter to refute the insinuation, if they be diligently compared. But ordinary readers are not always upon the alert to make such comparisons, and the insinuation, protected by the high authority of the speaker, and the seeming assent of the sketchwriter, is quite as likely to sink into the memory, and vibrate upon the ear, as the context.

If these strictures should ever be read by the distinguished person whom I believe to be the author of the sketch, let him not impute them to the prejudices of a partizan, or the acrimony of an enemy. His present partiality in favour of Mr. Burke's politics is much greater than my own. His habitual admiration of Mr. Burke's talents is not. The commendation he has lately bestowed upon Mr. Fox, and upon one who inherits all his virtues, and no inconsiderable share of his abilities, is, I am convinced, sincere. He is himself a scholar of no ordinary class, and a philosopher of the highest. In the courts of justice he has already shewn himself to be a most accomplished debater, and were he in Parliament, he would rise by rapid degrees to the most honourable situation among the orators who have survived Mr. Pitt, Mr. Burke, and Mr. Fox.

The frequent, and indeed unavoidable mention of Mr. Burke's behaviour to Mr. Fox, makes it very necessary for me to communicate the opinion I entertain of his political conduct at the time of a separation, which you, dear Sir, and I, shall ever de

plore as an event most afflictive to the feelings of our departed friend.

In the controversy which arose about a late revolution, Mr. Burke is entitled to my gratitude and my respect, for spreading before the world many adamantine and imperishable truths, which are quite worthy of protection from his zeal, and embellishment from his eloquence-many, which unfold the secret springs of human action, and their effects upon human happiness-many, in which he unites the ready discernment of a statesman with the profound views of a philosopher-many, which at all times, and in all countries, must deserve the serious consideration of all governors and all subjectsmany, which at a most important crisis, might have averted the outrages and the calamities we have to lament in a neighbouring kingdom-many, which the principles of our own constitution amply justified, and in which the good morals and the good order of society were interested, deeply and permanently. But I contend, that in a cause to which judicious and temperate management would have ensured success, he was impatient of contradiction, dogmatical in assertion, and intolerant in spiritthat his judgment and his imagination were under the tyranny of his undisciplined and angry passions -that he infused into his writings the same unexampled and unrelenting violence which burst forth in his speeches-that his raillery was sometimes tainted with the venom of vulgar malignity, his statements encumbered with hideous exaggeration, and his metaphors 52 bloated and disfigured by the

introduction of the most loathsome images 53-that in describing the primary agents in the French revolution, he uniformly confounded their better and their worse qualities in one dark and wild chaos of invective-that, astounded with a spectacle of "confusion heaped upon confusion, to which war seemed a civil game," with the wreck of all the materials which hold together the fabric of government, and the extinction of all the charities which sweeten private life, he descried very dimly the intenseness, direction, and numbers of those powers, which enable states, like Antæus, to recover from their fall, and which if a Hercules had been at hand to struggle with them, should have been combated by other stratagems of skill, and other feats of prowess, than those which we have witnessed-that in his general reasonings, he frequently lost sight of those intricate causes in the moral world, by which great and rapid evil is sometimes made the precursor of great and progressive good-that in treating of French politics he foresaw, indeed, much, but predicted 54 far too much—that in adverting to English politics, he often applied very ill, what he expressed very well, and inflamed, 55 where he should have been content to instruct and to warn-that some of the principles he then endeavoured to disseminate were notoriously at variance with those upon which he had long and avowedly given his support to many of his wise and virtuous countrymen-that the unexpected, and almost unparalleled change in public circumstances, was not sufficient to warrant the undistinguishing and total change which marked his public ha

rangues, and his public conduct-that in his pamphleteering attack upon the late Duke of Bedford, he trampled on the ashes of the dead, in order to wreak his spleen against the living-that he played off the most formidable artillery of argument and ridicule that ever was pointed against the interests of that aristocracy which he had undertaken to defend ; and that loosely, but insidiously appealing to history for the proof of facts which historians have no where recorded, he for once was guilty of calumnies which an acute and elegant critic suspected upon the first glance, and traced through all the ramifications of rhetorical mistatement to their root, in the want, "not of veracity, but of other qualities, the opposite of which are as adverse to truth as falsehood itself, in that levity and rashness of assertion which may be as uniform as fraud, and therefore as constantly repugnant to truth," 56-that he was insolent and vindictive against several of the old whigs, such as you and I are, and severe even to savage scurrility against all the new-that he insulted and exasperated, instead of endeavouring to enlighten and conciliate, the lower ranks of the community that he threw an artificial, sombrous, sullen air of mystery, 57 over those rules of government which every man is authorised to explore coolly and respectfully, while he is required to observe them, and which, if pourtrayed by the mighty genius of Mr. Burke in his calmer hours, would have appeared reasonable, equitable, and amiable, to every reader of every class-that he laboured to extort obedience by compulsion, where it might have