Note 103 — CANTO IV. GRAND ATTACK!

“Kill’d off,” at Marengo.

I have several times taken a confounded deal of trouble to haul into my poem this beautiful specimen of parliamentary elocution; and, in my opinion, nothing can be better imagined, or more happily accomplished. Poetry and oratory, as the ancients inform us, were both whelped at one litter; consequently the same phrase which glittered in the harangue of my bull-baiting friend, William Windham, a British senator, cannot fail to cut a dash in the stanza of his seraphical friend, Christopher Caustic, a British poet.

Now, as I am a great admirer of French principles, and that new and accommodating kind of morality, by Frenchmen discovered, and which I ever have and ever will eulogize, to the utmost extent of my faculties, perhaps your worships will express no small degree of wonderment why I should be the intimate friend of a gentleman, the blaze of whose oratory, one would suppose, would have blasted Buonaparte, and even singed the whole French republic. But those who are admitted behind the political curtain will perceive that the tendency of the measures which Mr Windham supports is to promote those jacobinic principles, of which Dr Caustic openly and honestly professes himself to be the determined propagator and defender.