The Enquirer

FROM THE MONITOR.

The following sketch of the character of Mr. Canning, is extracted from a work lately published, entitled "Letters on the subject of the Catholics, to my brother Abraham, who lives in the country. By Peter Plymley." This production is said to be from the pen of Mr. Sheridan. Every person who recollects the note from Mr. Canning to Mr. Pinkney, must perceive the striking similarity between this outline, and some parts of that note. The whole of these letters are well worthy of perusal, as they contain a great number of sound political observations, and many neat touches—if humorous satire:

LETTER VII.

"DEAR ABRAHAM,

"In the correspondence which has been passing between us, you are perpetually alluding to the foreign secretary; and, in answer to the dangers of Ireland, which I am pressing upon your notice, you have nothing to urge but the confidence you repose in the discretion and sound sense of this gentleman. I can only say, that I have listened to him long and often, with the greatest attention: I have used every exertion in my power to take a fair measure of him, and it appears to me impossible to hear him upon any arduous topic, without perceiving, that he is eminently deficient in those solid and serious qualities upon which, and upon which alone, the confidence of a great country can properly repose.—He sweats and labors and works for sense, and Mr. Ellis seems always to think it coming, but it does not come: the machine can't draw up what is not to be found in the spring: Providence has made him a light jesting paragraph writing man, and that he will remain to his dying day. When he is jocular, he is strong; when he is serious he is like Sampson in a wig; any ordinary person is a match for him—a song, an ironical letter, a burlesque ode, an attack upon Nicholl's eye, a smart speech of twenty minutes full of gross misrepresentations and clever turns, excellent language, a spirited manner, lucky quotation, success in provoking dull men; some half information picked up in Pall Mall in the morning: these are your friend's natural weapons; all these things he can do here I allow him to be truly great: nay, I will be just, and go still farther, if he would confine himself to these things, and consider the facete and the playful to be the basis of his character, he would, for that species of man, be universally regarded to be a person of a very good understanding; call him a legislator, a reasoner, and the conductor of the affairs of a great nation, and it seems to me as absurd as if a butterfly were to teach bees to make honey.—That he is an extraordinary writer of small poetry, and a diner out of the highest lustre, I do most readily admit. After George Selwyn, and perhaps Tickell, there has been no such man for this half century. The foreign secretary is a gentleman, a respectable as well as an highly agreeable man in private life; but you may as well feed me with decayed potatoes, as console me for the miseries of Ireland by the resources of his sense and his discretion. It is only the public situation which this gentleman holds, which induces me to say so much about him. He is a fly in amber—nobody cares about the fly; the only question is, how the devil did he get there; Nor do I attack him for the love of glory, but from the love of utility, as a burgomaster hunts a rat in a Dutch dyke, for fear it should flood a province.

"This is the secretary, whose genius, in the estimation of brother Abraham, is to extinguish the genius of Bonaparte. Pompey was killed by a slave, Goliath smitten by a stripling. Pyrrhus died by the hand of a woman; tremble thou great Gaul, from whose head an armed Minerva leaps forth in the hour of danger; tremble thou scourge of God, a pleasant man is come out against thee, and thou shalt be laid low by a joker of jokes, and he shall talk his pleasant talk against thee, and thou shalt be no more." *The attack upon virtue and morals in the debate upon Copenhagen, is brought forward with great ostentation by this gentleman's friends. But is harlequin less harlequin because he acts well? I was present; he leaped about, touched facts with his wand, turned yes into no, and no into yes, it was a pantomime well played, but a pantomime: harlequin deserves higher wages than he did two years ago; is he therefore fit for serious parts?