person is accused by the landlady of a public-house with having stolen her poker. He swears the most bitter oaths that he has not; "but," says the landlady, "you have not pledged your honour." "Oh," says he, "touch my honour, touch my life. There is your paltry poker!"[1]
He next enlarged, "in glowing terms and at greater detail than was usual with him, on the advantages of union, in church, in state, in army, in navy, in commerce, and in finance. Lord Grenville bowed assent to all his propositions, beat time to his periods, and loudly cheered his declarations; when, at the close of his oration," says Lord Holland, "he added, that there was one thing however, which he could not prevail on himself to approve, or even to harbour an idea of, and that was bringing the two Parliaments together. The ministerial cheers suddenly dropped, and Lord Lansdowne burst forth into one of the most eloquent invectives I ever heard him pronounce against the whole conduct of the Irish Parliament for twenty years, stigmatizing all their acts, and especially the spoliation of Lord Edward FitzGerald's innocent children, as base, servile, barbarous, inhuman, and unprincipled!"[2] His general conclusion however was favourable to a union of some kind, and in the following session, when the Irish Parliament itself had sealed the doom of its own existence, he declared that his chief objection to the scheme of Pitt was thereby removed. To the objection that the real opinion of Ireland ought in reality to be collected rather from petitions than from the votes of her representatives, a plausible objection in the then condition of the Irish Parliament, he replied by an anecdote which is of general application, and worth preserving. He recollected, he said, in the year 1769, when he was Secretary of State, on coming down rather
- ↑ Parliamentary History, xxxiv. 675-678.
- ↑ Memoirs of the Whig Party, by Lord Holland, i. 147. In the debates of 1886, Mr. Childers claimed that Lord Lansdowne's views in 1799 were in favour of union for Imperial affair* and the maintenance of the Irish Parliament for internal or domestic purposes. It has been seen that in 1782 Lord Shelburne had tried to devise a scheme for a permanent Irish contribution to the Imperial Exchequer, which Grattan rejected, and that he clung to the last to the hope of maintaining some connection between the mother-country and the American Colonies of a similar kind by an agreement with the Colonies. (Vol. II. Ch. III.)
