“If you have seen my papers for a twelvemonth past, you will not require from me any additional proof of my respect; the file of papers, which I take the liberty to send you, I therefore beg you to receive as mere vehicles of intelligence. Nothing from this country can be a proper return for your present, unless you will have the goodness to regard as such, the unfeigned thanks of, sir, your most obliged, &c.”
Allusion has been made, in a previous page, to the offers made, on the part of the Government at home, to advance Mr. Cobbett’s interests. One of his own frequent references to that subject will help to illustrate the subject of this chapter:—
“Mr. Liston, our minister in America, informed me, in the year 1798, I think it was, that the ministers at home were fully sensible of the obligations due to me from my country, and that, if I would accept of nothing for myself, they wished me to point out any of my relations, in the army or elsewhere, whom they might serve. To which I answered, as nearly as I can recollect, in the following words:—
“‘As to my relations in the army, I can ask for no promotion for them, because I have no opportunity of knowing whether such promotion would be consistent with the good of the service; and, with respect to my relations out of the army, a sudden elevation might, perhaps, be very far from contributing to their happiness, besides which, though it would be my duty to assist them by means of my own earnings, I should not think it just in me to be instrumental in throwing them as a burden upon the nation.’
“I may now have expressed myself with more perspicuity and conciseness than I did then; but this was the substance of my answer; and, if I may judge from what I have since witnessed amongst public writers, I must suppose that Mr. Liston was utterly astonished. It should be observed, too, that, if there was a man in the world, through whom such an offer could have had a chance of success, that man was Mr. Liston—a gentleman for whom I entertained a very high respect, and whose conduct constantly evinced that he was not merely a receiver of the public money, but one who had the interest and honour of his king and country deeply at heart. I had been a witness of his zeal, of his real public spirit, of his unremitted attention to his duty, of the great mischiefs he prevented, and of the great good which he did; and I respected him accordingly; but neither that respect, nor any other consideration, could induce me to depart from that line of perfect independence which I had at first chalked out to myself, and from which I never have, to the best of my recollection, for one moment deviated.”
FOOTNOTES
[1] I.e. John Gifford.
[2] The British Critic was the joint undertaking of Archdeacon Nares and the Rev. William Beloe, Prebendary of St. Paul’s. Both these gentlemen were staunch supporters of Pitt, and received their due reward in this life. They were also accomplished bibliographers and literary students, and rendered great service to literary history. The British Critic lived far into the nineteenth century.
[3] This gentleman (whose original name was John Richards Green) had got rid of his patrimony, with the assistance of the Jews, at an early age. To avoid his creditors, he took the surname of Gifford; and, having discovered acuteness and talent in writing, he soon found himself under the wing of Pitt, and became one of that statesman’s ablest supporters in the press. Having been bred to the bar, Mr. Pitt was enabled to reward his services by the magistracy of a London police-court, which he held for many years. Gifford wrote, besides several other historical works, a biography of his distinguished patron:—“A History of the Political Life of the Right Honourable William Pitt, including some Account of the Times in which he lived” (3 vols. 4to, London, 1809).