COLONEL MANNERS IN HIS SENATORIAL CAPACITY.
April 23.—-I shall add nothing at present to my Journal but the summary of a conversation I have had with Colonel Manners, who, at our last excursion, was here without any other gentleman.
Knowing he likes to be considered as a senator, I thought the best subject for our discussion would be the House of Commons; I therefore made sundry political inquiries, so foreign to My Usual mode, that you would not a little have smiled to have heard them. I had been informed he had once made an attempt to speak, during the Regency business, last winter; I begged to know how the matter stood, and he made a most frank display of its whole circumstances. “Why, they were speaking away,” he cried, “upon the Regency, and so,—and they were saying if the king could not reign, and recover; and Burke was making some of his eloquence, and talking; and, says he, ‘hurled from his throne,’—and so I put out my finger in this manner, as if I was in a great passion, for I felt myself very red, and I was in a monstrous passion I suppose, but I was only going to say ‘Hear! Hear!’ but I happened to lean one hand down upon my knee, in this way, just as Mr. Pitt does when he wants to speak, and I stooped forward, just as if I was going to rise up and begin but just then I caught Mr. Pitt’s eye, looking at me so pitifully; he thought I was going to speak, and he was frightened to death, for he thought—for the thing was, he got up himself, and he said over all I wanted to say; and the thing is, he almost always does; for just as I have something particular to say, Mr. Pitt begins, and goes through it all, so that he don’t leave anything more to be said about it; and so, I suppose, as he looked at me so pitifully, he thought I should say it first, or else that I should get into some scrape, because I was so warm and looking so red.”
Any comment would disgrace this; I will therefore only tell you his opinion, in his own words, of one of our late taxes.
“There’s only one tax, ma’am, that ever I voted for against my conscience, for I’ve always been very particular about that; but that is the bacheldor’s tax, and that I hold to be very unconstitutional, and I am very sorry I voted for it, because it’s very unfair; for how can a man help being a bacheldor, if nobody will have him? and besides, it’s not any fault to be taxed for, because We did not make ourselves bacheldors, for we were made so by God, for nobody was born married, and so I think it’s a very unconstitutional tax.”