s wife and
children."

Before ending his letter, Peter has a fling at the Home Secretary, Lord
Hawkesbury, "the lesser of the two Jenkinsons."[51] Lord Hawkesbury has
said that "nothing is to be granted to the Catholics from fear." Why not,
asks Peter, if the thing demanded is just?

"The only true way to make the mass of mankind see the beauty of
justice is by showing them in pretty plain terms the consequences of
injustice. If any body of French troops land in Ireland, the whole
population of that country will rise against you to a man, and you
could not possibly survive such an event three years. Such, from the
bottom of my heart, do I believe to be the present state of that
country; and so little does it appear to me to be impolitic and
unstatesmanlike to concede anything to such a danger, that if the
Catholics, in addition to their present just demands, were to petition
for the perpetual removal of the said Lord Hawkesbury from his
Majesty's councils, I think the prayer of the petition should be
instantly complied with. Canning's crocodile tears should not move me;
the hoops of the Maids of Honour should not hide him. I would tear him
from the banisters of the Back Stairs, and plunge him in the fishy
fumes of the dirtiest of all his Cinque Ports."[52]

Letter VII. begins with a rebuke to brother Abraham for placing all his
hopes for the salvation of England in the "discretion" and "sound sense" of
Mr. Secretary Canning.--

"To call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the
affairs of a great nation, 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.... 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 that 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 from the love of glory, but from the love
of utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke, for fear it
sh