PREFACE.
xxiii
Parliament, denounced, as follows, to his rival, through the agency of a gentleman in the Lower House, named Grey.[1]—"Tell Mr. Harrison, with-
- ↑ He was chairman of the committee when Lord Morton was nominated one of the eleven Commissioners, under the 2nd George 3rd, but nothing attaches to him in the present affair, further than his being the bearer of this message: which yet becomes a marked curiosity by the Parliamentary management it illustrates at this, if not at a more extended period (or what time is exempt from it?) when an independent member, if such he was, could, as if only a matter of course, be the bearer of a message not with a reference to public business, but administering, could he not see, to the private revenge of this weak but consequential Peer. Such a transaction becomes an aggravated slur on a constitution by all admitted to be the perfection of political wisdom in theory, but yet betraying in practice such an inconsistency as the case herewith discloses; which was not mixed up with the common party distinctions of Whig and Tory, or otherwise. How, under any circumstances, the House could comply with the speechifying of some Popinjay by whom it might be pestered and either forward swimmingly, or swamp by procrastination, a bill brought in to supersede that on which our Mechanician had "pinned his faith" forty years before, is for gentlemen more conversant with the mysteries of legislative etiquette to say—unless they adjudge the astounding denunciation of the p.r.s. to be a sheer rodomontade, worthy of the quarter it came from. But what can be thought of the incapacity or the misconduct of a majority at the Board of Longitude, by whom so improper a character as the Earl of Morton, who insiduously sought to get him within his grasp, was enabled as far as in them lay, to control the destiny of a man of genius who reflected so much credit on his age and country, but towards whom the conduct of their majority, after he had achieved the Longitude of Jamaica nearly within a mile, was any thing but honourable.
