Note 60 — No. XI.
Reading edition
And loads the blunderbuss with Bedford’s brains.—This line is wholly unintelligible without a note. And we are afraid the note will be wholly incredible, unless the reader can fortunately procure the book to which it refers.
In the “Part of a Letter,” which was published by Mr. Robt. Adair, in answer to Mr. Burke’s “Letter to the D. of B.,” nothing is so remarkable as the studious imitation of Mr. Burke’s style.
His vehemence, and his passion, and his irony, his wild imagery, his far-sought illustrations, his rolling and lengthened periods, and the short quick pointed sentences in which he often condenses as much wisdom and wit as others would expand through pages, or through volumes,—all these are carefully kept in view by his opponent, though not always very artificially copied or applied.
But imitators are liable to be led strangely astray; and never was there an instance of a more complete mistake of a plain meaning, than that which this line is intended to illustrate—a mistake no less than that of a coffin for a corpse. This is hard to believe or to comprehend—but you shall hear.
Mr. Burke, in one of his publications, had talked of the French “unplumbing the dead in order to destroy the living,”—by which he intended, without doubt, not metaphorically, but literally, “stripping the dead of their LEADEN COFFINS, and then making them (not the DEAD but the COFFINS) into bullets”. A circumstance perfectly notorious at the time the book was written.
But this does not satisfy our author. He determines to retort Mr. Burke’s own words upon him; and unfortunately “reaching at a metaphor,” where Mr. Burke only intended a fact, he falls into the little mistake above mentioned, and by a stroke of his pen transmutes the illustrious Head of the house of Russell into a metal, to which it is not for us to say how near or how remote his affinity may possibly have been. He writes thus—“If Mr. Burke had been content with ‘unplumbing’ a dead Russell, and hewing HIM (observe—not the coffin, but HIM—the old dead Russell himself) into grape and canister, to sweep down the whole generation of his descendants,” &c., &c.
The thing is scarcely credible; but IT IS SO! We write with the book open before us.