The Sun.
London, England, 1818-12-02 00:00:00

arid virulent abuse of such men as Lord Gren-
ville, Lot d Castlereagh, and Mr. Grattan, arc,
from the character in which 4vlr.flohhouse writes,
.•
the only tribute of applause which 's% e wish
them to receive at his hands ; and we are particu-
larly delighted with the flippant insolence with
which the defence of Napoleon is ;nixed up with
the attack on Mr. Grattan, for his excellent and
patriotic speech on the preparations for war in the
spring of 1815.
• There must be some mistake in the report of his speech—
" method in his madness, and inadi,e:,s in his method r' But
however he might- have been carried away by the feelings of
the ni.oment, the enthusiasm of nonsense could not have been
communicated to the orator himself; and the applause of the
treasury bench must soon have made him,. like Phocion; sus-
pect he had said some silly thing. ‘Vhenee he gut his elo-
quence we need not ask—there is something not to be mis-
taken in the taste of either of the ttiou,and rills that How
front the harmonious springs of the Irish tielieon—but his
facts, where could he have procured them ? who has autusett
himself at the pitiful sport of playing upon a patriot vene-
rable by his talents and age ?'---,vof. i. p.
Regarding Napoleon and his warriors as the partisans of
the cause of peoples against the conspiracy of Kings, what-
ever may he my regret that that cause has not fallen into
hands so pure as to command unqualified support, I cannot
help wishing, that the French may meet with ac much success
as will not compromise the military character of my own
count p. 475-
Indeed I should presume, that neither in France nor
England will Napoleon want any excuse for having struck
the first blow, except Mr. Grattan should, in hisliot,• have
doomed him to bleed without resistance.'—vol,i. p.4tt3.

In the gross and amusing abuse which the author
lavishes on Lord Castleie.agh, there are some deli-
cious strokes of nature ; at, for instance, when—
at the moment that Path was a second time taken
by the Allies, arid that Lord Castlereagh
.followed
the British army into that 'Capital—Mr. Hob-
house pleasantly describes himself as retiting to his
lodgings, to write an Essay to acquaint his Lord-
ship and the Duke of Wellington with the true
state of France and with t he real interests of Eng-
land in that important conjuncture. In the whole
course of our reading we have never met so full
and so happy a ridicule of the little meddling va-
nity of that class of precocious politicians, who
have lost the modesty-61 childhood, and not yet
attained the reason of man; Who, absorbed in a
contemplation of their own perfections, forget.
that age, rank, and experience are ingredients in
the characters of statesmen, and fancy theniselves
tit to be the rulers of nations, and the at biters of
the world. There is a silly simplicity mixed
up with a turgid arrogane'e in Mr. Hoblionse".B
description of himself in these ridiculous circum-
stances, which attests his comic powers, and
which cannot but entertain, the gravest of our
readers.
So entirely was I wrapt up in the persuasion, that the
truth of the present state Of feeling in France need only be
seen to carry to any mind the-sconvietion of the injustice and
impolicy of bearing back the Bourbons in triumph, over the
trampled necks of Frenchmen; that I was bold enough to
suppose a representation of facts, however faintly and
imper-
fectly drawn,, might. not be totally lost even upon Lord Cas-
,tlereagh, and might arrest his attention sufficiently to make
him wait for better authority before he proceeded todecide.
• 1 was employed in the act of softening down the ridicule
of an'individual imploring mercy for eight and twenty mil-
lions, and praying for reprieve, if not for pardon, when loud
acclamations called me into the street, and saved me alt flu-
ther labour in mitt, by presenting to me another revolution
of hamdlterchiefs. In short, a battalion of the National
Guards were passing with white flags; 'to the shunts of Vive
le Itut. Tbe streets were lined with the same troops, in
white cockades not a national colour was to Int seen; the
white flag was. floating on the column of the grand army, and
the. windows glittered with women and white link. My
eyes were scarcely disenchanted, until I saw the Moniteur,
with its former designation—again the only official journal ;
and read in that paper two ordonnances of Louis, by the
grace of God,, King of France and Navarre; dated the 21st
year of his reign. The same King, I saw, was to enter Paris
about three o'clock in the aftertroon:—vol. ii. p. 154.
No—Footes farces, or Hogarth's Enraged Mu-
sician, have nothing more droll than- this.—Shut
up in his lodgings in a back street of a capital,
of the language of which he knows little,- and of
its ffinl!llerS and feelings still less, our young
statesman is in the midst of an admirable essay,
proving to the monarchs, the statesmen anti ge-
nerals of Europe, that the, people of France were
decidedly_and to a nian hostile to the cause and
colours of the Bourbons, and that they would
die like heroes, rather than subait to the degra-
dation of having ,any sovereign who should
not be of Mr. Hothouse's choosing but---
while employed in rounding the most elo-
quent and cogent sentence of his whole mani-
festo,---he is interrupted by this same people, na-
tional guards, citizens and all, provokingly dress-
ed with white cockades, and vociferating, as if
from mere malice to the essayist, Vive le Roi
All this is very good,: • but there is still a finer
stroke of nature behind. Lord Castlereagh, who
before, stood so high in the essayist's good graces,
that he had selected his Lordship as the chosen
instrument by whoa) he was to deliver mankind,
all of a sudden becontes the object of his utter.
aversion. Nothing but a deep knowledge of the
human heart ttitil.l have enabled Mr, Hobhouse
to have exhibited himself at_once proud 'of his
essay and his inagrianiniity,' and yet conscious of
the ridicule and lolly of the proceeding to the de-
gree of hating Lord .Castlereagh for having been
the involuntary cause of it.
But while we give Mr. Hobhouse this praise
for the scope and general execution of his work,
there are some Points in which we think the vi-
gotir and force of his irony have carried him too
far: The gratitude of Louis XVIII. to heaven,
for his preservation during 25 years of adversity,
and for restoration to his native land and the throne
of his ancestors—anti the more tender and heroic
piety of that child of sorrow, the Duchess of An-
gouleme, are, naturally enough, the objects of ri-
dicule and abhorrence to the bloody and godless
cannibals of the Revolution ; and of course Mr.
Hobhouse, when imitating the style of these
monsters, could not altogether avoid some allu-
sion to the most characteristic and disgusting of
their profane atrocities :• but we believe that our
readers will agree that lie has
,gone too far, and
that the following passages transgress the bounds,
we will not say of piety or good taste only, but
those of common decency, good manners, and
fair ridicule:

The Court carpenter preferred his useless block from a
scarecrow to a saint ; the wax-chandlers contemplated the
inevitable, re-illumination of all the extinguished candlesticks
of every shrine ; days and nights all the gates of all the
churches were expanded, whilst their rival- shops were shut.
Relics rattled together from the four qua►ters of the Capital
to be re-adjusted and re-enshrined by a second St. Louis.
But the King mighx have ' given their daily bread' to his 60
priests! he might have'said his thousand- masses—be might
have devoted his France to the Virgin_ar grubbed up his
brother's bones ! his *Antigone mig4st have shut the Sunday.