“Kill’d off,” at Marengo.
I have several times taken a confounded deal of trouble to haul into my poem this beautiful specimen of parliamentary elocution; and, in my opinion, nothing can be better imagined, or more happily accomplished. Poetry and oratory, as the ancients inform us, were both whelped at one litter; consequently the same phrase which glittered in the harangue of my bull-baiting friend, William Windham, a British senator, cannot fail to cut a dash in the stanza of his seraphical friend, Christopher Caustic, a British poet.
Now, as I am a great admirer of French principles, and that new and accommodating kind of morality, by Frenchmen discovered, and which I ever have and ever will eulogize, to the utmost extent of my faculties, perhaps your worships will express no small degree of wonderment why I should be the intimate friend of a gentleman, the blaze of whose oratory, one would suppose, would have blasted Buonaparte, and even singed the whole French republic. But those who are admitted behind the political curtain will perceive that the tendency of the measures which Mr Windham supports is to promote those jacobinic principles, of which Dr Caustic openly and honestly professes himself to be the determined propagator and defender.
And never meddle with a strumpet.
Surely, no person will imagine that I would, for the world, allude to any other lady than madam Fame herself.
And blaze through either frozen zone.
I have very substantial reasons for spreading glad tidings of our redoubtable chieftain among the most distant inhabitants of the globe, in preference to endeavoring to add to his great celebrity “within the periphery of his associates.” And, whereas it has been said that this gentleman’s reputation will ever stand highest where he is either not known at all, or known only by those literary productions, in which he is himself the theme of his own most “ardent praise,” mine shall be the humble task of trumpeting the doctor’s name among the distant inhabitants of this dirty planet; while the doctor shall himself “dip his pen in ethereal and indelible ink, and impress his observations in characters legible in the great volume of the heavens.”