is nowhere lo be found. He was under no obligation to prevent his enemies from running their heads against the wall, by these consummately rash demonstrations; but as a patriotic man, who desired not to profit by the "confusion worse confounded" which their folly might have created, he may be concluded to have mollified the resentment which it is probable his royal Patron would feel (for something most be conceded to human nature) in the first instance, at finding all the trouble he had volunteered to incur, thrown away; by showing him this memorandum of what passed at the Admiralty;[1] in which luckily, the passage referred to, tended to blunt the edge of that cutting instrument, into which they had converted the "brief authority" they were armed with.
A petition to Parliament being now the only
- ↑ The interest which the subject may excite makes it worth while to observe, that, in politics, William Harrison was strenuously opposed to the American war; condemned the coalition between Mr. Fox and Lord North; and deprecated the French revolution in its early stages, though he could not, like the gifted Edmund Burke, foresee all the consequences that followed.[subnote 1] These opinions on by-gone subjects being now those of almost every reflecting person, may be adduced in favour of the correctness of his judgment, though he was not a man of reading.
- ↑ By the way, although Lord Chesterfield's name is not associated with that of Mr. Burke on this subject, yet he discoursed afar the portentous signs in the horizon, and, many years before, predicted to his Son, that 'before the eighteenth century should be out, the trades of king and priest would not be half so good as they were.'
