Note 32 — Chapter XLI

In the 'Anti-Jacobin,' Canning, in the mock report of an imaginary speech, represented Erskine as addressing the 'Whig Club' thus:—"For his part he should only say that, having been, as he had been, both a soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either of these relations to the Directory—as a man and a major-general he should not have scrupled to direct his artillery against the national representatives:—as a naval officer he would undoubtedly have undertaken for the removal of the exiled deputies; admitting the exigency, under all its relations, as it appeared to him to exist, and the then circumstances of the times with all their bearings and dependencies, branching out into an infinity of collateral considerations and involving in each a variety of objects, political, physical, and moral; and these, again, under their distinct and separate heads, ramifying into endless subdivisions, which it was foreign to his purpose to consider, Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, the several more prominent heads of his speech; he had been a soldier and a sailor, and had a son at Winchester school—he had been called by special retainers, during the summer, into many different and distant parts of the country—traveling chiefly in post-chaises. He felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country—of the free and enlightened part of it at least. He stood there as a man—he stood in the eye, indeed, in the hand of God—to whom (in the presence of the company and the waiters), he solemnly appealed. He was of noble, perhaps royal, blood—he had a house at Hampsted—was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform. His pamphlets had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd and even numbers. He loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple—and he was clothed with the infirmities of man's nature."