200 Notes of the Month on [FEB. 



parchment, and no more. An inundation of all kinds of muslin and 

 rascality under the name of Free Trade, into the East, from Bombay to 

 Birmah. Discontent, grumbling, and courts martial among the repug- 

 nant officers, with the echo of their parts of speech among the sepoys. 

 Angry rajahs and imprisoned polygars sending missions to the 

 Pindarrees to come down by the half million, and make a general 

 plunder. The Russian army, with all the pikemen of the Don and the 

 Caucasus, quietly gathering like a hurricane cloud on the frontier, until 

 the business is ripe ; and our well paid ambassador at St. Petersburg^ 

 and nincompoop, is though one of the nearest and dearest cousins of the 

 Minister, informed by the Czar that there is no further occasion for his 

 services ; an Ukaze is issued from the throne of earthly thrones, acquaint- 

 ing England, that Russia being displeased with our habit of shaving, 

 and our dislike to train oil, recommends that we should withdraw from 

 India, and keep within our own inland, until further orders. Then 

 explodes the hurricane; Field Marshal Powderowski, with Generals 

 Thunderblastem and Lightningsplitzem, "at the head of separate corps," 

 rush over the Indian Balkan, before the Members in Council at Calcutta 

 have time to secure their dressing boxes. Then come Affghans, Persians, 

 Chinese, Tartars, rolling down like a hundred avalanches from the 

 Pole. And what is to knock out the brains of all those Goths and 

 Vandals? the solitary wisdom of Lord William Bentinck: a very 

 good man, we hope and believe, for a whig ; and endeared to the universe 

 by being at once a son of that very dull nobleman, the late Duke of 

 Portland, and a dependant of that very slippery statesman and poet, the 

 late Mr. Canning. But setting aside his Lordship's duplicate fame, as a 

 retreating warrior in Spain, and as a retreating legislator in Sicily ; we 

 think that he will have quite enough on his hands. We only say, how- 

 ever, as Mr. Dillon, in his celebrated Narrative of the Lord Mayor's 

 Journey up the Thames, said of his Lordship and the goose pye, we 

 wish him well through it. 



As to the complexion that the affair may take at-home, for that we are 

 prepared. There may be two visits to Windsor, and three cabinet 

 councils, for which no man living will be the wiser. The government 

 newspapers may pleasantly hint, in the first instance, that the whole of 

 the Indian news is a fabrication, of which they can point out the fabri- 

 cator, he residing in an attic " not a hundred miles from Leadenhall 

 Street." In the next instance, they may be suffered to declare that the 

 whole is an expedient of the most extraordinary genius that ever bore 

 the destinies of England in his hand, to compel the Russians to throw 

 off the mask, and come to a fair understanding, whether they meant to 

 go to war or not. 



The next information may be of a succession of balls in Whitehall ; a 

 levee at the Pimlico Palace, the minister "most graciously received, and 

 surer than ever of retaining his hold on the confidence of the best of 

 kings, and the affections of the most triumphant of nations." On the 

 very evening of the most glowing paragraph, may come out the Gazette, 

 cashiering every hero of them. 



The papers now are overflowed with such a flood of panegyric on the 

 late President of the Royal Academy, that they have nearly drowned 

 the public sympathy. His life is already announced as on the tapis, 

 by Campbell, who, it seems, was on terms of intimacy with him, and 



