The embassy at the Hague is in earnest dispute with the King of Holland; a despatch addressed to Sir Charles Bagot arrives—it is in cypher. The most acute of the attachés set to work to discover the meaning of this particular document; they produce a rhyme! they are startled, thrown into confusion; set to work again, and produce another rhyme. The important paper (and it was important) contains something like the following doggrel:
“Dear Bagot, in commerce the fault of the Dutch
Is giving too little, and asking too much,
So since on this policy Mynheer seems bent,
We’ll clap on his vessels just 20 per cent.”
As a specimen of his more private and trivial pleasantries may be mentioned his observation to, I believe, Lord Londonderry, who had been telling a story of some Dutch picture he had seen, in which all the animals of antediluvian times were issuing from Noah’s Ark, “and,” said Lord Londonderry, “the elephant was last.” “That of course,” said Mr. Canning; “he had been packing up his trunk.”
In his celebrated contest with Lord Lyndhurst (then Sir John Copley), that noble lord having appeared in it with a speech borrowed for the most part from a popular pamphlet, written by the late Bishop of Exeter (then Doctor Philpotts), he was overthrown amidst shouts of laughter, by the appropriate recollection of the old song:
“‘Dear Tom, this brown jug that now foams with mild ale,
Out of which I now drink to sweet Nan of the Yale,’