tormont, then secretary for
foreign affairs:--

"I have often been conscious of the remark your lordship makes, and have
myself felt that I was not acting up to the character of an English
minister, in bestowing such _fulsome incense_ on the empress. But here,
too, I was drawn from my system and principles by the conduct of my
adversaries. They ever addressed her as a being of a superior nature;
and as she goes near to think herself infallible, she expects to be
approached with all the reverence due to a divinity." No excuse could be
more unsatisfactory. If other men chose to bow down, there would have
only been the more manliness, and the more effect too, in refusing to
follow such an example.

In 1783, the ambassador obtained permission to return to England. His
correspondence at the period immediately previous, is remarkably
interesting; and it is striking to see that the successive secretaries
for the foreign department, under all changes of administration, formed
the same view of the substantial policy of England. When, in 1783, Fox
assumed the foreign seals, he thus writes to Harris, in the course of a
long letter on the foreign policy of the cabinet:--"You will readily
believe me, that my system of foreign politics was too deeply rooted to
make it likely that I should have changed it. Alliances with the
northern powers _ever have been, and ever will be, the system of every
enlightened Englishman_."

In the year following, Sir James Harris was appointed by Pitt to the
Dutch embassy, to which he had been previously nominated by Fox, his
friend and political leader. The appointment by the new cabinet was thus
the strongest testimony to his talents. His letters from the Hague
contain a very intelligent statement of the parties and principles which
agitated Holland in 1787. The object was the establishment of a
democracy and the extinction of the Stadtholderate, or at least its
suppression as a hereditary dignity. The court of France was busy in
this democratic intrigue; and its partial success unquestionably added
new combustibles to the pile on which that unfortunate monarchy, in the
hour of infatuation, was preparing to throw itself. The ambassador's
language on this occasion is characteristic and memorable. In one of his
despatches to the Marquis of Carmarthen, then secretary of state, he
thus says:--

"The infamy and profligacy of the French make me long to change my
profession, and to fight them with a shar