1831.] Affairs jn General. 557 



and pestilential web of sophistry, in order to get me once within the grasp of 

 his deadly, his blasting fangs. I resisted all his attempts, public and private, 

 whether put forth as ' feelers' in his Register, or whether urged by those who 

 professed to be mutual friends. My answer to all was the same, ' I have twice 

 shaken the ruffian old beast from by back, he shall never fix his filthy carcass 

 upon my shoulders again ; I have no connection with him privately or pub- 

 licly.' " 



This is undoubtedly a very handsome specimen of what may be said 

 on a tempting subject. But Cobbett is a master of the art, and Hunt 

 may trust to his skill for due retribution. 



But what can be more precarious than the loves of patriots. Hunt 

 and O'Connell are now at feud, and if both gentlemen were not precluded 

 by their sense of decorum from every thing but foul language, we should 

 doubtless hear of a sanguinary encounter as soon as the April showers 

 are over. Their friendship has been a delightful scene of alternations, 

 full of the caprices of lovers, and worthy to figure in the next novel of 

 the Minerva press. They began by mutual admiration. Hunt then 

 disapproved of something that had fallen from O'Connell, who thereupon 

 addressed to him a tremendous letter, styling him " old Blacking Ball," 

 and giving him other desperate hits. They met at a dinner, shook 

 hands, and again became courteous. To civility friendship succeeded. 

 " My friend O'Connell" and " my friend Hunt," were always on their 

 tongues. O'Connell, on one occasion, declared that he could find no one 

 to support his plans of reform but tf his friend Hunt." Now, he pro- 

 claims the same individual to be an enemy to reform, and to have sold 

 himself to the Tories. Hunt accuses O'Connell of trafficking for a judge's 

 seat, and of being any thing but that high-souled patriot who was to 

 regenerate the fallen honesty of the empire. O'Connell was prodigiously 

 angry at being charged with offering to do, we know not what, if the 

 Irish lord-lieutenant would have given him the chief- justiceship. He 

 called the charge a lie, and promised to bring forward Mr. Bennett, the 

 universal scape-goat, to contradict it, whenever he could find him. But 

 Mr. Bennett, besides having the faculty of being in two places at once, 

 the privilege of his countrymen, seems to have occasionally the still 

 more valuable faculty of being no v/here at all, and this useful friend 

 has not yet started from his invisibility to clear the character of the 

 great agitator. 



One of the strangest sources of disgust to public men is, that let their 

 professions when out of office be what they may, their practice when in 

 is invariably the same. We had Lord Grey but a few months ago pro- 

 testing by himself, and his honour, and his order, and all similar non- 

 sense, that without economy, retrenchment, the extinction of all 

 wasteful, corrupt, and corrupting patronage, and so forth, the state 

 could not go on. Sir James Graham is a dandy and a rhetorician, and 

 so his words may go for nothing, but who clamoured more conscien- 

 tiously for the extinction of all pensions, retiring allowances, &c., than 

 Sir James? Yet of the whole hundred and forty thousand prounds 

 a year to which the pension-list of the empire is acknowledged to 

 amount, and privately it may be much more, have one hundred and forty 

 farthings been lopped off? We have now Lord Grey, the man who has 

 no objection to cut off sixty-eight members of the House of Commons, 

 and to make the most headlong experiment on the constitution, receiving 



