we wondered that on Irish ground No poisonous reptile has e'er
yet been found; Reveal'd the secret stands of nature's work--She saved
her venom to produce her Burke."

[32] In the 'Anti-Jacobin,' Canning, in the mock report of an imaginary
speech, represented Erskine as addressing the 'Whig Club' thus:--"For
his part he should only say that, having been, as he had been, both a
soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either
of these relations to the Directory--as _a_ man and a major-general he
should not have scrupled to direct his artillery against the national
representatives:--as a naval officer he would undoubtedly have
undertaken for the removal of the exiled deputies; admitting the
exigency, under all its relations, as it appeared to him to exist, and
the then circumstances of the times with all their bearings and
dependencies, branching out into an infinity of collateral
considerations and involving in each a variety of objects, political,
physical, and moral; and these, again, under their distinct and separate
heads, ramifying into endless subdivisions, which it was foreign to his
purpose to consider, Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a
strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, the several more prominent
heads of his speech; he had been a soldier and a sailor, and had a son
at Winchester school--he had been called by special retainers, during
the summer, into many different and distant parts of the
country--traveling chiefly in post-chaises. He felt himself called upon
to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his
country--of the free and enlightened part of it at least. He stood there
as a man--he stood in the eye, indeed, in the hand of God--to whom (in
the presence of the company and the waiters), he solemnly appealed. He
was of noble, perhaps royal, blood--he had a house at Hampsted--was
convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform. His
pamphlets had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd
and even numbers. He loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and
grapple--and he was clothed with the infirmities of man's nature."

CHAPTER XLII.

WITNESSES.

In the days when Mr. Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, made a
professional reputation for himself in the committee-rooms of the Houses
of Parliament, he had many a sharp tussle with one of those venal
witnesses who, during the period of excitement