sts, he seemed to do
more credit to his diligence as a special pleader than to his invention
as an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources,
both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated
the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in
the magazine of topics and commonplaces which I suppose he keeps by him,
in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity.

Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of his
imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn
special arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, I
must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at
the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when
the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with
still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some
amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace
gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff
which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up
of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork
and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when
that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of
the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed
again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the
high flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale.
Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes,
and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.

I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age
to the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and
his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to put
these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of
letters; but "the field of glory is a field for all." It is a large one,
indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the
boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before
us. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,)
whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, that
Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who
only moves as I drag him along) has a suff