the fault of exclusion lay with the King; that it was not Mr. Pitt, but their Soveseign, whom they had to blame for the blasting of their hopes, and for the perpetuating of political animosities. This was not very decent language, especially from persons who were, at the same time, imputing to their opponents a want of respect for the will and pleasure of his Majesty. The cause of the King's resisting the alleged strenuous efforts of Mr. Pitt was said (at first in whispers but afterwards aloud) to be that great and rooted dislike to Mr. Fox, of which his Majesty gave so striking a proof when he caused his came to be erased from the list of privy counsellors. It is become a fashionable trick to say or insinuate that the King has an unconquerable dislike to whomsoever the party iusinuating wishes to keep out of power. The Near Observer, for instance, in speaking of Lord Grenville's return to power, says, that, "if appearances are not deceitful, there is an obstacle even higher than Mr, Adding

appearances are not deceitful, to the ad"mission of Lord Grenville into office, even

higher than Mr. Addington's reluctance. "Indecent insinuation! Whom, I ask, "whose talents, whose acquirements, whose "services would be advantageous to the

state, has the high personage referred to ever proscribed? Away then with these "shifts and pretences, the refuge of every "minister who shrinks from his own respon "sibility. It is most unseemly, as well as "unconstitutional, to give out that any thing "ungracious can arise in the quarter alluded "to; in a quarter to which, from expe"rience, the people of this country look up "for every thing which is becoming, just, " and honourable; for every thing which is "best calculated to promote their interest, "their happiness, and their prosperity." Excellent observations! But Mr. Long little imagined, that they would apply with still greater aptness and force to the conduct of a ministry of which Mr. Pitt would be at the head! The insinuation was, indeed, most indecent, and, as appears from the recent offer made to Lord Grenville, it was not more indecent than false; but, neither as to indecency or falsehood does it surpass the insinuation of a similar tendency, which the literary partisans and, it is to be feared, some

of the bosom friends, of Mr. Pitt are now throwing out with regard to Mr. Fox; for, it is a fact, which is well known to those who are much conversant in political and party matters, and which ought now to be made well known to every man in the kingdom, that his Majesty has no personal dislike, that he has no private or public abjection to Mr. Fox, much less objections of a nature to outweigh in his gracious and paternal mind every consideration of political harmony and public good; and, that, as to the erasing of that gentleman's name from the list of privy counsellors, the act, so far from originating in the mind of the King, did not even originate in the mind of the minister by whom it was advised, but in that of a person, who, however respectable in point of private character and literary accomplishments, could, in his official capacity, be considered as nothing more, and he was, at that time, nothing more, than a writer of paragraphs for a weekly newspaper called the Anti-Jacobin! This person, towards whom I intend not the least disrespect; this person, and this person only (and the matter was never made a secret of,) it was, who started the idea of cashiering the Duke of Norfolk; and, after the advice had been adopted and acted upon, with respect to the first duke and peer in the realm, the step that was taken with regard to Mr. Fox was a matter of course, I am not condemning either him who gave, or him who adopted the advice and procured his Majesty's assent to act upon it: on the contrary, I, at the time, heartily approved of the erasure, and I am fully persuaded that the gentleman with whom the proposition originated was actuated by no other than public-spirited motives. It was however one of those measures which he, perhaps, would not again recommend, and of which I should not again approve. Hostility was pushed too far on both sides; and this was precisely one of those acts which every generous minded man wished to see buried in eternal oblivion by that union which was prevented by the selfish and domineering ambition of Mr. Pitt. Of the wisdom or folly, of the justice or injustice, of the measure of which I have been speaking, the reader is not, however, now called upon to give or to form any opinion: The origin of that measure is all that he is required to attend to; and, the fact relating to it is very important to state, and that too, as I here have stated it, in the most positive terms; because it completely blows into air all the surmises and insinuations, relative to the disposition of his Majesty, that have beeri founded upon or connected with the circums

stance of Mr. Fox's name having been erased from the list of the privy council; and because it no less completely destroys that other ground of monotorious clamour; to wit; the attempt of Lords Spencer and Grenville and Mr Windham " to force Mr. Fox upon the King."---Having failed, Having failed, as they soon perceived they had, in persuading the people, that the fault of exclusion lay with their Sovereign, and that Mr Pitt almost shed tears of blood to soften the inflexibility of his Majesty's objection to Mr. Fox, the partisans of the new ministry veered short about, and began to accuse Mr. Windham and the Grenvilles, but particularly the latter, with an inconsistency little short of criminal, because they now refused to join in the ministry without the admission of Mr. Fox, a person with whom they had, for so many years been engaged in a political warfare of the most violent and desperate kind. Nor did the accusation stop here: certain opinions and principles, or assumed opinions and principles, of Mr. Fox, were displayed in all their terrors; and, the refractory statesmen were asked, if this was the man, to whom they were all at once become so much attached. The word Jacobin was now and then half articulated; and, in one or two instances, these zealous partizans have gone so far as to call upon the people "to support their tried and faithful pilot and their good old King "against a faction headed by a person noto"riously devoted to disorganizing princi"ples." Any thing at once so base and so preposterous as this never was before committed to the press. There always was amongst the creatures and close adherents of Mr. Pitt, a strange mixture of profligacy and cant: jobbers all the morning and methodists in the afternoon. There was a set that at one time went by the name of Mr. "Pitt's young friends," the least profound of whom would have put the Tartuffe to the blush lads that would literally sing you "a smutty song to a psalm tune." But, to return the exhortation to the people: The partizans of Mr. Pitt have told the people a hundred times, they have dinned it in their ears 'till they were tired of the sound, that Mr. Pitt, the person for whom they now demand support as the wisest and most upright statesman; they have told us, they have assured us, with reiterated declarations and almost with oaths, that Mr. Pitt exerted himself to the utmost to prevail on the King to admit Mr. Fox into the cabinet; not being

:

46

able to succeed with his Majesty, Mr. Pitt did, they next told us, offer to Mr Fox any post that he might choose in the diplomatic line, proposed to send him to the continent with power to treat with whomsoever be pleased and upon his own terms; nay, they themselves have, over and over again, expressed their profound sorrow, that his Majesty did not yield, upon this head," to the

earnest and sincere prayers of the nation 66 put up by the mouth of Mr. Pitt;" and, now behold, they have the unconscionable assurance to tell us, that Mr. Fox is a man of dangerous principles and totally unfit to be trusted in the cabinet! If this be so, if this be not an atrocious calumny, how shall we characterize Mr. Pitt? Did he really endeavour to prevail upon the King to admit Mr. Fox Where then shall we look for his sagacity, or his fidelity? for, in one of these, if his partizans are not calumniators, he must be shamefully deficient. Will his friends say that he did not endeavour to bring about the admission of Mr. Fox? What then becomes of his sincerity ? Thus these indiscreet partizans must make a recantation of what they have lately asserted and insinuated, with respect to Mr. Fox, or they leave their political hero a choice of nothing but different sorts of disgrace.-It has, by many persons, been regarded as a grand error, in Mr. Pilt, to profess a desire to have Mr. Fox in the cabinet with him, and particularly to rest a defence of his conduct upon the circumstance of his having earnestly endeavoured. to prevail upon the king to receive Mr. Fox. This, say these persons, was doing for his rival what noting else could have done: not so completely perhaps: but the truth is, that there remained but little to be done; the whole nation, as I said before, were heartily tired of the political Trojan war, and deprecated the idea of seeing it renewed. Mr. Pitt knew this; and, though it is probable, that, with Lord Grenville and the other leaders of the New Opposition along with him, he would have set the public wish at defiance, and would never have pretended that he had urged the admission of Mr. Fox, without those gentlemen such defiance was more than he could, on any account, think it adviseable to hazard, especially when he was about to take the government upon him, accompa nied with six out of ten of those "weak and inefficient ministers," whom he had so often lashed and ridiculed, and whom he

had been greatly instrumental in turning out, from the avowed motive of their being utterly incapable of conducting the affairs of the state! No: thus to come in, without alleging that he had endeavoured to form a ministry of a different stamp, would have been to deprive his friends of every possible ground whereon to speak in his defence. In this situation, therefore, he was compelled either openly to declare that he despised the opinion and the wishes of the nation, or, to make such a justification as should, at the same time, amount to a solemn and unretractable declaration on his part of Mr. Fox's fitness for the ministry. He saw clearly enough that he was cutting off from his partisans a most abundant supply of war-like mate. rials, but he preferred distant defeat to an immediate surrender. Those partisans are, however, of a sort not to be easily disconcerted: they are such as hardly any minister will want, if he can condescend to make use of them. Mr. Addington was honoured with their support: support, indeed, at the expense of his sincerity and veracity, but it was, nevertheless, not rejected. He and his colleagues, for instance, explicitly declared, that they would, as to the cause of their making peace, never be a party to the plea of pecuniary necessity; but, their partisans, out of doors, constantly and unequivocally urged this necessity in reply to all the facts and arguments that you could produce against the measure; and, when they were reminded, that this plea was rejected with disdain by their principals, they smiled in your face, as if it argued great inexperience in you to suppose, that ministers ever were sincere in their public declarations. Exactly the same course is at this moment pursued by the out-door partisans of Mr. Pitt, who have now no scruple to acknowledge their belief, that he never was so weak as to endeavour, in good earnest, to induce his

Majesty to admit Mr. Fox into the Cabinet! Can such Men be called friends and supporters? Can a minister, trusting to such support, long maintain his ground? Assuredly he cannot; and, if there were wanting indubitable proof of the transitory nature of his power and of his own consciousness of the fact he has recently furnished it in the boasting declaration made to the Parliament." I will take no hint: you may

get rid of my bill, but you shall not get "rid of me." These words did not proceed from his confidence, but from his fear; they can be compared to nothing but the blustering noise of the plough-boy, as he goes trembling through the Church-yard at midnight. The House and the nation must and will get rid of him as Prime Minister, and in no other respect does any man that I know of wish to get rid of him; but, since he has again assumed the reins of power, it is for the benefit of the country, that he should continue to hold them till he is forced to resign them by a fair parliamentary opposition, conveying to his Majesty the deliberate sentiments of his loyal and affec tionate people.---I should now make some remarks on several parts of Mr. Pitt's speech of the 18th instant, particularly on what he is reported to have said as to his being the champion of the royal prerogative. The passage relating to the praises formerly bestowed on him by the members of the Grenville family is also worthy of attention, especially when considered in conjunction with what was said on that subject on a subsequent day. His defence of the character and consistency of bis six colleagues who made part of the late "inefficient" ministry ought not to escape notice; and the sarcastic comparison which he drew between himself and Mr. Addington ought to be so fixed in the memory as never to be forgotten. But these topics must be deferred to my next.

A

A. B's letter on Anglo-Gallic Creditors, 494
Addington, Mr. proceedings of the London Com-
mon Council, on a motion for a vote of thanks
to, 96r.

Admiralty, Y.'s defence of, 470.

Admiraky, Argonaut's Answer to Y.'s defence
+of, 533:

Analytical and Comparative View of the "Cur-
sory Remarks by a Near Observer," and on the
Plain Answer by a More Accurate Observer,"
I, 6;, 97, 321, 449.

Anglo-Gallic Creditors; A. B.'s letter on, 494
Anti-Puritan's Review of Mr. Grimston's Defence
of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, 112.
Argonaut's answer to Y.'s defence of the Admi-
ralty, 533

Artillery Officers; Miles' letter in behalf of, 669
A. W.'s letter on the Corps Diplomatique, 229.

B.

Bankruptcies; table of the Number of, from Ja-
nuary to May, 1804, 1027.

Blockade of Brest; Britannicus' letter on, 257.
Blocking System; Britannicus' letter on, 529.
Britannicus on the blocking system, 529.
Britannicus' letter on the blockade of Brest, 257.
British Creditors on the French Funds; a short
statement of facts relating to the claims of,
366. Remarks on, 240. A British Creditor's
reply to the remarks, 293. Answer to the re-
ply, 298. Defence of, 392. Reply to the de-
fence, 400.

in France; Mercator's letter in
behalf of, 427. A. B.'s letter on the same sub-
ject, 494.

British Critic; its stupidity and servility exposed,
103, 109.

Observer, the; his letters to Lord Redes-
dale, 385, 463, 662.

--

the; his letter on the loyalty of
the Roman Catholics, 737, 859, 894.
Budget, the; examination of, 698.
Buonaparté; proceedings in the Tribunate of the

French Republic, relative to the proposition
for conferring on him, the rank and title o
Emperor of the French, 745. Observations on,
754, 779, 897.

C.

Camillus on the continental powers, 422, 442,
705.

Cape of Good Hope; reflections on an expedition
against, 910.

C. B. on the depreciation of bank dollars, 713.
Centurio, on the military system of Great-Bri-
tain, 170.

Christenings and Burials; table of the number of,
within the bills of mortality, from January to
May, 1804, 1027.

Clericus' letter on consecrating colours, 8o.
Coalition; observations on the, 252.

; F. C.'s letter on, 615.

; reflections on the necessity of, 632.
Cobbett, Mr.; his trial, for publishing in the
Weekly Register, certain libels upon the Earl

Dock Yards; Silva on the state of our, 621.
Dollars; observations on the rise in the value
of,. 123.

Bank; observations on, 444.
Bank; C. B.'s letter on the depreciation
of, 713:

Birmingham; remarks on, 571, 756.
Domestic Official Papers, 84, 145, 173, 366, 396,
626,722,725, 999.

Domingo, St.; state of affairs in, 154.
Drake, Mr.; his correspondence with certain
agents in France, 543. Observations on, 566,
628, 686. Talleyrand's letter to the Foreign
Ministers relative to, with their answers, 606.
Lord Hawkesbury's circular note in reply to,
675. Strictures on, 686.

---; Oxoniensis on the authenticity of
his correspondence, 625. Observations on,

628.

E.

Emperor of the French, see Buonaparté.
Enghuien, Duke d'; official report of the trial of,
495. Observations on, 499, 563. R. S.'s let-
ter on, 618.

E. V.'s letter on the present state of the navy,
387.

Exposé of the state of the French Republic, 205.
Reflections on, 152.

Exposition of the actual state of the trade, re-
venue, expenditure, and debt of Great-Britain,
577, 60g.