[copyist’s hand]

nd [wm 1818]

To Erskine

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8

To return to the Whigs. Notwithstanding this unchangeable determination to keep what power they had, such, as early as the year 1780, was their aptitude for that which they had not, and so deep the game which it was the effect of that appetite to make them play for it that, in 1780, under the lead of Charles Fox, that prince of Gamesters, to which Brooks’s supplied one gaming-table and St Stephen’s another they had actually been brought to continue in their adherence to them, after he had signed a declaration in favour of annuality of elections, even of unlimited universality of suffrage.

If in the course of this contest, this edict of theirs shall be found to have received damage, I am truly sorry for it, but the fault is none of mine. Could his friends but have satisfied themselves with keeping up the image of the amiable man, as I have seen that of a Russian | | all gilt with gold, in a corner Cup-board, on a glass case, for family devotion – nothing of the sort would have happened. But when, like those of Bel and the Dragon, his name is made an instrument of delusion, and the people, whom, while he publickly bowed at, he privately scorned, are called upon, and so indefatigably, to fall down and worship the golden image which party ambition is set up, it will be the fault not of people but of | | if, by the fate of those excellent idols that of the reputation of this modern one shall be found to have been | | and typified.

As to the | | that, on their part, from that time and earlier down to the present, the show of desire of reform, never has been any more than a show – that it has been either their endeavour, or their desire, to help to bestow upon the subject many any the least particle of those means of security which it was in their power to withhold, among the propositions, which by this your Lordship’s defence of them I have been engaged to endeavour to prove: prove more to the conviction than I fear to the satisfaction of a Noble Lord, whose eloquence has lifted him up, as well as so many of his admirers, so much above the sphere of the old philosopher, whose chief study as well as difficulty was as he informs us, to know himself.