eiving that he is eminently deficient in those solid and serious
qualities upon which, and upon which alone, the confidence of a great
country can properly repose. He sweats and labours, and works for
sense, and Mr. Ellis seems always to think it is coming, but it does
not come; the machine can't draw up what is not to be found in the
spring; Providence has made him a light, jesting, paragraph-writing
man, and that he will remain to his dying day. When he is jocular he
is strong, when he is serious he is like Samson in a wig; any ordinary
person is a match for him: a song, an ironical letter, a burlesque
ode, an attack in the newspaper upon Nicoll's eye, a smart speech of
twenty minutes, full of gross misrepresentations and clever turns,
excellent language, a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in
provoking dull men, some half information picked up in Pall Mall in
the morning; these are your friend's natural weapons; all these things
he can do: here I allow him to be truly great; nay, I will be just,
and go still further, if he would confine himself to these things, and
consider the _facete_ and the playful to be the basis of his
character, he would, for that species of man, be universally regarded
as a person of a very good understanding; call him a legislator, a
reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it
seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make
honey. That he is an extraordinary writer of small poetry, and a diner
out of the highest lustre, I do most readily admit. After George
Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell, there has been no such man for this
half-century. The Foreign Secretary is a gentleman, a respectable as
well as a highly agreeable man in private life; but you may as well
feed me with decayed potatoes as console me for the miseries of
Ireland by the resources of his _sense_ and his _discretion_. It is
only the public situation which this gentleman holds which entitles me
or induces me to say so much about him. He is a fly in amber, nobody
cares about the fly; the only question is, How the devil did it get
there? Nor do I attack him for the love of glory, but from the love of
utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke for fear it
should flood a province.

The friends of the Catholic question are, I observe, extremely
embarrassed in arguing when they come to the loyalty of the Irish
Catholics. As for me, I shall go straight forward to my object, an