532 SIR W. FOLLKTT AT EXETER. 



and published, and soon, for the gratification of those on whom his favours 

 were showered, at the expense of the PEOPLE, to have him recorded as 

 a " profound statesman," an exalted character, &c. ; but we of the 

 present day know better. Lord Liverpool was nothing more than a 

 mediocre man ; he was amiable in private life. We forbear to speak of 

 him in his ministerial office. 



But to return, Sir William, to yourself, and consequently the subject 

 matter of our present paper. Your political furor loquendi, as exhibited 

 at Exeter, that sink of corruption and church-pestilent thimbleriggery, 

 will bring you into notice and, peradventure, some briefs. There is 

 something in that. But you are to be the Pitt of 1836, they insanely 

 tell us, with a forced smile of ridiculous gullibility. That you may not 

 lose the best advice we can give you, we shall proceed, immediately, to 

 the letter of the law. 



"A statesman, then, Sir William, (such, as we before announced, we 

 would suppose you now to be,) emboldened by the artful applause of his 

 inflated and crafty party, and instructed by experience in all the arts of 

 unpopular delusion, cannot easily perceive the assailable position of every 

 influential party, the numerous enemies they necessarily provoke, the 

 opposite imputations they unavoidably incur. In your past labours 

 both in and out of parliament you had not striven to avert the fatal 

 collision of the opposing orders of your country men which the late 

 important diffusion of extreme principles threatened. You saw (we 

 give you credit for much political sagacity, Sir William doubt us not) 

 that in all human likelihood, they would be charged by the corrupt with 

 violence, and accused by the violent of insincerity. It was by no means 

 difficult, you know, to paint moderation as the virtue of political coxcombs 

 and hereditary cowards ; and compromise, as the undoubted policy of 

 knaves to the stormy and turbulent enthusiasm of faction : and the 

 malignant denouncements of a wicked, slanderous, and corrupt oligarchy, 

 would, it is sufficiently obvious, be forward to brand every honest 

 sentiment, and every mediatorial effort, as symptoms of collusion with 

 the violent, and of treachery to the cause of public order. It scarcely 

 demanded the incentive and the sanction of a solemn public measure 

 from your supposed government, Sir William, to let loose so many cor- 

 rupt interests and malignant passions on the natural object of their 

 enmity. Nevertheless, such a sanction and incentive might, of a truth, 

 add something to the barefaced activity of these interests, and to the 

 dying virulence of these passions. Such a sanction and incentive you, 

 as it should seem, unhesitatingly gave in your judicial (judicious) discourse 

 delivered to the deluded sons of Devon, at Exeter. To brand the up- 

 rising and all-conquering spirit of civil and religious liberty as treachery, 

 and a love of national freedom as open hostility ; to provoke the violent 

 into fresh indiscretions, and to make these senseless indiscretions the 

 means of aggravating the Toryism of the times, by awakening their 

 alarms ; to bury under one black and indiscriminate obloquy of licenti- 

 ousness the recollection of every principle of freedom ; to rally round the 

 banners of religious persecution, and of political corruption, every man 

 in his most gracious Majesty's dominions, who dreads anarchy as we 

 dread it, and who deprecates confusion ; to establish on a wide basis op- 

 pression and servility -for the present, and to keep up in store all the causes 



