ΤΟ THE REV. HENRY PHILLPOTTS, D.D. ON THE SUBJECT OF HIS TWO LETTERS TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE GEORGE CANNING, BY THOMAS GISBORNE, JUN. LONDON:-1827. "Touch Ralph de Vipont's shield-touch the Hospitaller's shield; he has the least sure seat, he is your cheapest bargain. "The knight moving onward amid these well-meant hints, ascended the platform by the sloping alley which led to it from the lists, and to the astonishment of all present, riding straight up to the central pavilion, struck with the sharp end of his spear, the shield of Brian de Bois Guilbert, until it rung again. All stood astonished at his presumption, but none more than the redoubted knight whom he had thus defied to mortal combat."-IVANHOE. Vol. i. p. 165. SIR, Cintra, June 18th, 1827. I AM afraid that an allusion to Ivanhoe may be much more descriptive of the temerity than of the success of my attempt: but it is precisely because you are the boldest champion, because you are the Bois Guilbert of the Anticatholic cause, that I have undertaken to address you. Nor does this, I believe, arise from any overweening idea of my own powers. At the present period of the Catholic controversy all minor obstacles are cleared away; the skirmishers on each side are called in; the forces are concentrated; and it is useless for a combatant to appear in the field, who is not, trusting in the goodness of his cause and the strength of his weapons, prepared to assail the centre of the enemies' position, or to defend the centre of his own. You have placed yourself in the front of the battle, and I cannot enter the field without encountering you. It may be that I had judged better to leave the field to abler combatants, but, being there, to attack you involves no increase of presumption. I have at least this consolation—if I am discomfited, the overthrow of an unknown champion will not injure my cause. If I might succeed in forcing you back from your imposing position, I shall have performed good service. I had just completed the reading of your two letters to Mr. Canning, when I took up M. de Pradt's "Jesuitisme Ancien et Moderne." When in the very first page I encountered the words which I am about to quote, I certainly did seem to be reading a very pithy description of the pamphlets I had just laid down. "Cet écrit fut remarqué dans le temps; il ne manque pas de chaleur on sent que c'est l'ouvrage d'un prédicateur et d'un homme de parti; il ne renferme pas une vue générale.” Though the following sentence dispelled the illusion, it is, mutatis mutandis, sufficiently appropriate to be highly piquant. "Pour l'auteur, le protestantisme de 1787 est encore le protestantisme de 1550; chez lui, c'est un idée fixe. Cet écrit est oublié, comme finissent toujours par l'être les ouvrages de parti; la durée n'appartient qu'aux écrits d'utilité générale." I must speak of myself for a moment to explain why I am so late in the field. Owing to my absence from England, your letters have only just and casually reached me. As I am an habitual reader of the debates in parliament, the first certainly was not new to me. There can be no doubt that it has been " remarqué dans le temps," and though we have not yet heard in Portugal that any English legislator has spoken the second, my copy, which announces itself on the cover as being of the fifth edition, sufficiently vouches for the notoriety which this production also has attained. Your letters, like Père l'Enfant's discourse, will soon be forgotten, but it would be idle to suppose that they are not producing a consider, able present effect. Your attack must remain unnoticed from the quarter against which it is mainly directed. You enjoy the security, I had almost said the impunity, which sometimes attends a flight at very high game. If Mr. Canning needed a defence from your attacks, I possess no materials for making it; I hold no commission for the purpose; and that Statesman would doubtless refuse to commit his cause to such obscure hands. But your attack on Mr. Canning is also essentially an appeal to the public on a political question of great and abiding interest; and on that ground I may deal with it without feeling myself an intruder. To you at least, Sir, no apology can be due. The question, which has called you forth to address the Prime Minister, calls me forth to address the Rector of Stanhope. I shall not set out with professions of an amicable spirit, which are generally unmeaning and frequently insincere; but I trust I shall at least be guilty of no breaches of courtesy, which can entitle the author of the Letters to Mr. Canning to complain. When a writer professing to discuss any question in politics or religion devotes two-thirds of his pages, and at least an equal portion of his zeal, to criticising the conduct and vilifying the character of the most eminent of his opponents, he can claim no other plausible or even producible excuse, for this divergence from his avowed purpose, than the principle-that to weaken a cause, by destroying the character of its influential advocates, is a fair mode of literary warfare. I will not insult you by supposing that you would vindicate your bitterness against Mr. Canning, by assigning a motive which did not actuate you. Your motives are not producible. It would be very easy to name some of which you cannot be unconscious; and they would need only to be stated to carry conviction of their reality to the minds of your readers. But I would willingly travel somewhat further on my journey with you on what Mrs. Winifred Jenkins calls " decent terms of civility" and I shall therefore merely remind you, that coming into the field as your avowed opponent, and having for my object to weaken, or, as far as I may, to destroy the effect produced by your widely-spread pamphlets, I am compelled in some degree to follow the arrangement of matter, as well as the line of argument and style of appeal and invective which you have selected. You have chosen your weapons. To your sword and spear I must oppose a sword and spear also. I own, Sir, I despair of wielding them with the vigor and skill which you have displayed; but I trust that the weapons themselves may prove to be of somewhat higher polish and finer temper.-I am not like you a master of ❝sneer and banter." I do not possess the versatility of feeling which enables you in your second page to speak to Mr. Canning of "the respect which is due above all to his distinguished character," whereas in your forty-second you have seen him "complete the career of defection and apostacy:" to taunt him in p. 164. with "the feeling of self-reproach, which the consciousness of having recourse to such wilful sophistry can hardly fail to inflict," and to assure him in the opposite page, that he was inconstant from generous motives, for no others can influence him: to class yourself in your first Letter among his warm admirers, and to represent him as "worthy to succeed and represent his great master," Mr. Pitt; whereas in your second he has become the evil Genius who has usurped Lord Liverpool's place, and is brought into such very close contact with "the most unprincipled minister that ever betrayed the trust confided in him," that it is quite impossible to discriminate their personal identities. I am not blessed with this happy versatility. There probably will be some sameness, and perhaps some bluntness (for I mean to make myself understood) in the opinions I express of your character and conduct. I must premise, therefore, that I know you only in these Letters, and that my acquaintance with you is only of a few days standing. I had indeed previously heard your name, but in the most casual way. I had heard or read that you had published before on the Catholic question; but with your book I am unacquainted, and I have not here the power of procuring it. I will not knowingly malign you but such as you fairly appear to me in these Letters, I shall not shrink from displaying you. There is nothing in your mode of treating the characters of others, which prescribes to me any tenderness respecting your own. Your principles set critics at defiance; and if this controversy could survive to puzzle a future age of our varying world, when London shall be as Athens, and her writers the classical luminaries of far-coming literati, the Bentley or Dacier of that day might struggle in vain to extract from your pamphlets a consistent scheme of your opinions on that subject, to which you have ap plied the vigor of your understanding, the keenness of your satire, and the perspicuity of your very classical diction. As an enlightened Baronet, now travelling for mental improvement, has been said to be the phoenix of the opposition; so are you the cameleon of the Catholic question; but herein less perplexing than your lacertine prototype, that a mere child may explain the action of that sunshine, in which you love to bask, on your changes of hue. In February you are a stickler for securities, a weigher, nay, a framer of oaths; you almost wish that a measure for the relief of the Catholics might ultimately succeed: whereas in May you discover that securities are moonshine, and Catholic oaths are empty air; a you see "the danger which must follow the removal of those safeguards with which the wisdom of our ancestors has fenced and protected our Protestant church;" and having been pleased to assume that your Sovereign has placed himself at the head of your faction, you glory in the assurance, that for one reign at least that danger is repelled. Between these limits you appear in every variety of hue and every intensity of shade. We look at you-you are a mild and eyeable green; we turn off our eyes, and scarcely have they sought you again, than you are fiery red. In following you almost page by page, and certainly subject by subject, through your somewhat unconnected lucubrations; in confronting you on every occasion where you venture directly to apply your facts or your arguments to the practical question, I shall, of course, have to encounter you in all your varieties. You appear first as a resolute stickler for securities. You are sustaining this character when you introduce Mr. Pitt, by means of extracts from his parliamentary speeches. In bringing that distinguished statesman on the stage, you are not, I apprehend, |