eople; at least the
former are often gay, and the latter are frequently heavy.
Nonsense and folly gilded over with good breeding and _les usages
du monde_ produce often more agreeable results than a collection
of rude, awkward intellectual powers.

[9] [Afterwards Mr. Justice Maule.]

Roehampton, January 4th, 1831 {p.101}

Called on Lady Canning this morning, who wanted me to read some
of her papers. Most of them (which are very curious) I had seen
before, but forgotten. I read the long minute of Canning's
conversation with the King ten days before his Majesty put the
formation of the Administration in his hands. They both appear to
have been explicit enough. The King went through his whole life,
and talked for two hours and a half, particularly about the
Catholic question, on which he said he had always entertained the
same opinions--the same as those of George III. and the Duke of
York--and that with the speech of the latter he entirely
concurred, except in the 'so help me God' at the end, which he
thought unnecessary. He said _he_ had wished the Coronation Oath
to be altered, and had proposed it to Lord Liverpool. His great
anxiety was not to be annoyed with the discussion of the
question, to keep Canning and Lord Liverpool's colleagues, and to
put at the head of the Treasury some anti-Catholic Peer. This
Canning would not hear of; he said that having lost Lord
Liverpool he had lost his only support in the Cabinet, that the
King knew how he had been thwarted by others, and how impossible
it would have been for him to go on but for Lord Liverpool, that
he could not serve _under_ anybody else, or act with efficacy
except as First Minister, that he would not afford in his person
an example of any such rule as that support of the Catholic
question was to be _ipso facto_ an exclusion from the chief
office of the Government, that he advised the King to try and
make an anti-Catholic Ministry, and thought that with his
feelings and opinions on the subject it was what he ought to do.
This the King said was out of the question. In the course of the
discussion Canning said that if he continued in his service he
must continue as free as he had been before; that desirous as he
was to contribute to the King's ease and comfort, he could not in
any way pledge himself on the subject, because he should be
assuredly questioned in the House of Commons, and he must have it
in his power to reply that he was perfectly free to