346 MISSION TO PORTUGAL. [1806. 



dinners as the author of the "Tenth Report. "* He 

 said he quite understood what that meant it was on 

 account of Lord Melville ; and that he was extremely 

 vexed at the use to which the party had turned it, 

 and at the very great exaggerations which had been 

 made as regarded Lord Melville, though it was im- 

 possible to exaggerate the other abuses which the 

 inquiry had brought to light. He ascribed Pitt's 

 hostility in part to the inquiry, but I think errone- 

 ously, because the attack on Lord Melville had really 

 not been begun till a year after the motion against 

 the Admiralty. 



The only subject on which we differed was the 

 slave trade, upon which I well knew he had very 

 strong prejudices. Like most seamen, he had im- 

 bibed these in the "West Indies, military men being 

 generally the other way : but he also had conceived 

 false notions of the leaders in that great cause, whom 

 he regarded as among the righteous over-much ; and 

 some of them, by the language they held rather than 

 the topics they used, gave him an unfavourable im- 

 pression. I well remember the strong opinion of the 

 abolitionists against Lord St Vincent. It was a 

 common joke of Wilberforce and Stephen that we, on 

 carrying the abolition, should allow two slavers espe- 

 cially, one for him and the other for Thurlow. When 

 on board the Hibernia in the evening, I have talked 

 with him about the power of sleeping at any time, 

 which, like him, I possessed. Once, when leaning on 



* See above. 



