SIR W. FOLLETT AT EXETER. 533 



of anarchy and civil commotion for future times." Such, Sir William' 

 is the malignant procedure the baleful policy such are the mischievous 

 tendencies such are the experienced effects of that demi-official rigma- 

 role, that fine tissue of demonstrable absurdities, which constituted 

 your harangue at the " beef and pudding" feed you gave the unwashed 

 dolts at Exeter the very Sodom and Gomorrah of political cor- 

 ruption. It is enough, for the present, that it converts the kingdom into 

 one wide camp of vigilant political observers, who had long suspected 

 your political intentions, and denounced the motives of your abet- 

 tors your private and public partizans enlisted, strange to say, 

 through you, Sir William but under a banner of a very different kind 

 to that under which you fight, and under which you would have them 

 battle ; you, Sir William, would have enlisted them by their alarms to 

 defend your supposed power. Your political speech, as well as your 

 conduct, are indeed calculated to produce other remote and collateral 

 effects, which the short-sighted politics of the speaker had not, it is pretty 

 evident, discerned. It is, moreover, well calculated to blow into a 

 flame those sparks of radicalism which the calm and sincere moderation 

 of Lord Melbourne's government must have extinguished, but which 

 may, in future conceivable circumstances, produce effects, at the suggestion 

 of which good men will shudder, and on which sensible persons will 

 rather meditate than descant. Thus it has been shewn, Sir William, that, 

 instead of forwarding the prostrate and naked cause, you havedared,in the 

 eyes of England, Ireland, and Scotland, to publicly advocate by your 

 flippant, unwise denunciations, and premature political tomfoolery; we 

 repeat, instead of serving the stinking interests of that wicked and 

 perverse cause, you have done for it what every honest man had 

 long and loudly called for inflicted the punishment of death, and with- 

 out benefit of clergy ; in other words, your harangue has been as effec- 

 tual in irritating a large body of your countrymen who read, and write, 

 and think, and talk, quite as well, as smartly, as acutely, and as sensibly 

 as yourself, Sir William Follett, into Radicalism, as Bishop Phillpott's 

 electioneering pasquinades, (hand-bills) have been in frightening others 

 into Toryism. 



Your iron rule, thank the good sense of the nation, has not been of 

 long continuance ; for now, Sir William, we shall take leave to require 

 your attendance out of doors ; and of course beg you to consider your- 

 self no longer the Pitt of 1835-6, arid in the possession of supposed 

 power. Rise, Sir William Follett, Knight. 



We have, as it were, seen you, Sir William, in power : let us now look 

 upon you a little while apart from your Carlton -confederates, and simply 

 as a young man of moderate pretensions as you told the industrious 

 swillers* of malt liquor at Exeter, beginning your political life as a 

 professional man. This last distinction we hold to be necessary to 

 our purpose. It appears then, to us, quite evident, Sir William, from 

 all we have seen, that the success of such a line of policy as you would 

 pursue if by the remotest possibility you were called upon to fill the 

 office of his Majesty's first minister, to-morrow would certainlv de- 

 mand, in the individual who adopted it, a rare union of talents and ac- 

 quirements a combination of dispositions that have seldom been con- 

 centrated in one human being. Perhaps, even Sir William Follett, and 



