University of Virginia Library

It must certainly be allowed, that, even in the very worst of times, the political annals of this country never displayed such a set of statesmen as constitute our present hopeful ministry. Indeed, they appear to me as if set up to be the scare-crows of Reason and of Common Sense; and of them it may be very justly said, by way of closing this note,

There are two species of mourners, the mock and the real. Britain, however, is at the present moment the exact reverse of the undertaker tribe, who weep in proportion to the money paid as earnest for snivelling: but the reason is obvious, we have lost All the Talents, and in their stead have now No Talents at all. Even Polypus could not level his shafts at departed Gr*nv*lle, but very truly salutes him with these lines,

And again,

What more then need be said of this most able peer, when Satire sheaths its dart, and suffers the main spring of the very body it attacks to continue in motion, without any spoke being put into its wheel? But this verifies the words of the Roman,

and consequently all we have now to say, as true mourners, is, Shakspeare.

—That I'll be sworn they will; such wonders as never were before rehearsed, if the selection of officers they have made be a criterion for us to go by: for in the First Lord of the Treasury we have a stone mason;—in the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a vender of sapience, through the medium of wigs and gowns;—in the First Lord of the Admiralty, the muster-roll of rank and file; together with marchings, sieges, sorties, attacks, retrcats, bombardments, &c. &c. all perfectly consistent with naval discipline, and the arcana of a man-of-war! In the Secretary for the Foreign Department, we have a very accommodating weathercock;—in the Lord Chancellor, an old apple-woman, always replete with croakings and sapient saws:—in short, we have Roses, with exotics of every description, which are calculated for any soil but that in which they are now placed to vegetate.

—As his Grace of P*rt*nd commenced his earthly career in 1738, he has, according to Cocker, attained his 69th year—a very pretty time of life, truly, for a man to think of burthening his shoulders with the affairs of a great nation! Instead of elasticity, all is ponderosity; mental vigour has yielded to the burthen of age; and he may consequently well exclaim with Cato,

It must be confessed, that the commencement of this nobleman's career was characterised by many traits which endeared him to the people; having staunchly opposed the Bute and the then Grenville administrations, and remained firm to the principles of Fox, with whom he came into power. But, alas! those halcion days are long passed away! and we now behold in silly Billy a court pander deprived of all consequence and popularity; having sneakingly skulked away from the Whigs, of whom he once ranked Generalissimo, to coincide—I will not say with the Tories, for the present set are, though of that faction, such miserable tail-bearers, that they deserve no other than the designation of Blocks. But their cry is,

and, upon that score, there is no doubt but they will prove themselves precisely fitted to verify the above saying.

—We have an excellent specimen of the mental powers of this nobleman, who, when Secretary of State, dispatched a circular letter through the country, on the subject of the scarcity of corn, which caused the happy effect of immediately raising the prices to such a pitch as had very nearly been productive of a famine: in short, he may be very characteristically denominated Head of the Wrongheads, were it not a matter of great doubt whether he has any head at all, and if he has, it is certainly caput mortuum.

—L---d M*lv*lle, according to report, is the state showman—the puppets being solely under his controul:

But wherefore do I talk of report, his Lordship cannot bear reports; more particularly when they are repeated five or ten times over; for upon such occasions he affirms, that a report becomes a trueism, which is not at all times agreeable, as this hocus pocus peer hath proved beyond all doubt: nay, he positively affirmed, that Messrs. Bonney, Tooke, &c. were guilty, according to the reports which were then spread; and although a jury brought in a verdict of not guilty, he still swears that they were “acquitted felons,”—and he says perfectly right, for felons are very often acquitted.

—The incapacity of this gentleman is by no means a poetical fiction, as he is possessed of none of those requisites so absolutely essential to fit him for the station in which the Blocks have thought proper to place him. And while we are descanting on this topic, it may not be amiss to remind friend Polypus that his quotation from the French, in page 7, of which language he avows himself totally ignorant, had much better have been omitted; not merely because a writer should never venture to publish what he does not understand, but for a still more weighty reason, viz. that he should not give his readers bad French, which is the case, as will be found on referring to “All the Talents.”

Lucan. This general officer, now made commander general of the navy, is as well calculated for his station as any gentleman can possibly be, who undertakes the performance of that which he does not understand: but the Blocks are very happy at this kind of selection, by which they certainly prove themselves novel in their proceedings, and perhaps, like the crab, seek to advance by retrograde steps, as most conducive to the prosperity of the country. However, necessity is truly said to be the mother of invention; and never were a set of poor wretches so dreadfully put to it as the Blocks, who will, it is rather shrewdly surmised, shortly emulate the Roman emperor of old, not, however, by the election of horses, but of long-eared animals, much more congenial to their precious capacities, and fitted to adorn the new cabinet junto, concerning which no man dares affirm—