After a short vindication of his friends, he said, “You have never heard Pitt? You would like him beyond any other competitor.”
And then he made his panegyric in very strong terms, allowing him to be equal, ready, splendid, wonderful!—he was in constant astonishment himself at his powers and success;—his youth and inexperience never seemed against him: though he mounted to his present height after and in opposition to such a vortex of splendid abilities, yet, alone and unsupported, he coped with them all! And then, with conscious generosity, he finished a most noble éloge with these words: “Take—you may take—the testimony of an enemy—a very confirmed enemy of Mr. Pitt’s!”
Not very confirmed, I hope! A man so liberal can harbour no enmity of that dreadful malignancy that sets mitigation at defiance for ever.
He then asked me if I had heard Mr. Grey? “No,” I answered, “I can come but seldom, and therefore I reserved myself for to-day.”
“You really fill me with compunction,” he cried. “But if, indeed, I have drawn you into so cruel a waste of your time, the only compensation I can make you will be carefully to keep from you the day when I shall really speak.”
“No,” I answered, “I must hear you; for that is all I now wait for to make up my final opinion.”
“And does it all rest with me?—‘Dreadful responsibility’—as Mr. Hastings powerfully enough expresses himself in his narrative.”
“And can you allow an expression of Mr. Hastings’s to be powerful?—That is not like Mr. Fox, who, in acknowledging some one small thing to be right, in his speech, checked himself for the acknowledgment by hastily saying ‘Though I am no great admirer of the genius and abilities of the gentleman at the bar;’—as if he had pronounced a sentence in a parenthesis, between hooks,—so rapidly he flew off to what he could positively censure.”
“And hooks they were indeed he cried.
“Do not inform against me,” I continued, “and I will give you a little more of Molière’s old woman.”