[115]. See The True Briton, of Thursday, Jan. 25.
[116]. Conjuravere Cives nobilissimi Patriam incendere—Gallorum gentem infestissimam nomini Romano in bellum arcessunt—Dux Hostium cum exercitu supra caput est.—Orat. Caton. ap. Sallust.
[117]. Tum Catilina polliceri tabulas novas, proscriptionem locupletium, Magistrates, Sacerdotia, rapinas, alia omnia quæ bellum atque lubido Victorum fert.—Sallust.
[118]. [“A Correspondent cautions us against making a profane use of Mr. Wilberforce’s appearance on Sunday; that gentleman would not have been so ungodly as to gallop there without a sufficient reason—it was the fulfilment of some Prophecy; and the horse he rode might be related to the White Horse of the Revelations.”—Morning Chronicle, Jan. 11, 1798.—Ed.]
[119]. [This refers to Charles Howard, eleventh Duke of Norfolk, (who gave, at a public dinner, the famous toast of “Our Sovereign’s health, the Majesty of the People,”) and to John Horne Tooke, who was a regularly ordained clergyman, and had been tried for High Treason and acquitted.—Ed.]
[120]. [These lines allude to the Empress Catherine’s placing in her gallery the bust of Fox between those of Demosthenes and Cicero, as a token of gratitude for his exertions in defeating the project of Pitt, who, in conjunction with Prussia and Holland, had, in 1791, prepared a powerful armament to compel her to give up Ockzakow, which she had seized. The Court party delighted in stigmatizing Fox as the modern Catiline. “But the part which he took in parliament subsequent to 1793, (says Sir N. W. Wraxall), and the eulogiums lavished by him on the French Revolution, soon changed the Empress’s tone. She caused the bust to be removed; and when reproached with such a change in her conduct, she replied, ‘C’étoit Monsieur Fox de Quatre-vingt-onze que j’ai placé dans mon cabinet’.”—Wraxall’s Posthumous Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 435, 436.
“It seems to have escaped general notice, (says Sir James Prior in his Life of Burke), that the misfortunes of Poland in her final partition may be, in some degree, attributed, however undesignedly on their part, to Mr. Fox and the Opposition, in the strong and unusual means made use of to thwart Mr. Pitt in the business of Ockzakow. They lay claim, it is true, to the merit of having prevented war on that occasion. But if war had then taken place with England for one act of violence comparatively trivial, Russia, in all probability, would not have ventured upon a second and still greater aggression, involving the existence of a nation, with the certainty of a second war. Nothing, after all, might have saved Poland from the combination then on foot against her; but it is certain that Mr. Pitt, from recent experience, had little encouragement to make the attempt.”
It is a curious circumstance that, though the plate illustrating these Lines was published, according to its inscription, on the 17th March, 1792, the five stanzas engraved on it are identical with those which appeared in the Anti-Jacobin of 12th Feb., 1798, though these were introduced as written “by an English Traveller just [sic] returned from Petersburgh”.
Assuming the date on the engraving to be correct, we might account for the parachronism on the supposition that the author of the earlier plate-stanzas availed himself of the appearance of the Lines written under the Bust of Charles Fox at the Crown and Anchor to reproduce them—six years afterwards—with a few verbal alterations, to adapt them to a later period—and with an equivocal statement as to the period of their first production.
The following are the alterations in the reprinted version:—