It was upon the clamor, raised at this time by the English manufacturers, at the prospect of the privileges about to be granted to the trade of Ireland, that Tickell, whose wit was always on the watch for such opportunities, wrote the following fragment, found among the papers of Mr. Sheridan: —
“A VISION.
“After supping on a few Colchester oysters and a small Welsh rabbit, I went to bed last Tuesday night at a quarter before eleven o’clock. I slept quietly for near two hours, at the expiration of which period, my slumber was indeed greatly disturbed by the oddest train of images I ever experienced. I thought that every individual article of my usual dress and furniture was suddenly gifted with the powers of speech, and all at once united to assail me with clamorous reproaches, for my unpardonable neglect of their common interests, in the great question of surrendering our British commerce to Ireland. My hat, my coat, and every button on it, my Manchester waistcoat, my silk breeches, my Birmingham buckles, my shirt-buttons, my shoes, my stockings, my garters, and what was more troublesome, my night-cap, all joined in a dissonant volley of petitions and remonstrances — which, as I found it impossible to wholly suppress, I thought it most prudent to moderate, by soliciting them to communicate their ideas individually. It was with some difficulty they consented to even this proposal, which they considered as a device to extinguish their general ardor, and to break the force of their united efforts; nor would they by any means accede to it, till I had repeatedly assured them, that as soon as I heard them separately, I would appoint an early hour for receiving them in a joint body. Accordingly, having fixed these preliminaries, my Night-cap thought proper to slip up immediately over my ears, and disengaging itself from my temples, called upon my Waistcoat, who was rather carelessly reclining on a chair, to attend him immediately at the foot of the bed. My Sheets and Pillow- cases, being all of Irish extraction, stuck close to me, however, — which was uncommonly fortunate, for, not only my Curtains had drawn off to the foot of the bed, but my Blankets also had the audacity to associate themselves with others of the woollen fraternity, at the first outset of this household meeting. Both my Towels attended as evidences at the bar, — but my Pocket-handkerchief, notwithstanding his uncommon forwardness to hold forth the banner of sedition, was thought to be a character of so mixed a complexion, as rendered it more decent for him to reserve his interference till my Snuff-box could be heard — which was settled accordingly.
“At length, to my inconceivable astonishment, my Night-cap, attended as
I have mentioned, addressed me in the following terms:—”
* * * * *
Early as was the age at which Sheridan had been transplanted from Ireland — never to set foot upon his native land again — the feeling of nationality remained with him warmly through life, and he was, to the last, both fond and proud of his country. The zeal, with which he entered, at this period, into Irish politics, may be judged of from some letters, addressed to him in the year 1785, by Mr. Isaac Corry, who was at that time a member of the Irish Opposition, and combated the Commercial Propositions as vigorously as he afterwards, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, defended their “consummate flower,” the Union. A few extracts from these letters will give some idea of the interest attached to this question by the popular party in both countries.
The following, dated August 5, 1785, was written during the adjournment of ten days, that preceded Mr. Orde’s introduction of the Propositions: —
“Your most welcome letter, after hunting me some days through the country, has at length reached me. I wish you had sent some notes of your most excellent speech; but such as we have must be given to the public — admirable commentary upon Mr. Pitt’s Apology to the People of Ireland, which must also be published in the manner fitting it. The addresses were sent round to all the towns in the kingdom, in order to give currency to the humbug. Being upon the spot, I have my troops in perfect order, and am ready at a moment’s warning for any manoeuvre which may, when we meet in Dublin previous to the next sitting, be thought necessary to follow the petitions for postponing.
“We hear astonishing accounts of your greatness in particular.
Paddy will, I suppose, some beau jour be voting you another
50,000, [Footnote: Alluding to the recent vote of that sum to Mr.
Grattan.] if you go on as you have done.
“I send to-day down to my friend, O’Neil, who waits for a signal only, and we shall go up together. Brownlow is just beside me, and I shall ride over this morning to get him up to consultation in town…. we must get our Whig friends in England to engraft a few slips of Whiggism here — till that is done, there will be neither Constitution for the people nor stability for the Government.
“Charlemont and I were of opinion that we should not make the volunteers speak upon the present business; so I left it out in the Resolutions at our late review. They are as tractable as we could desire, and we can manage them completely. We inculcate all moderation — were we to slacken in that, they would instantly step forward.”
The date of the following letter is August 10th — two days before Mr.
Orde brought forward the Propositions.
“We have got the bill entire, sent about by Orde. The more it is read, the less it is liked. I made notable use of the clause you sent me before the whole arrived. We had a select meeting to-day of the D. of Leinster, Charlemont, Conolly, Grattan, Forbes, and myself. We think of moving an address to postpone to-morrow till the 15th of January, and have also some resolutions ready pro re nata, as we don’t yet know what shape they will put the business into; — Conolly to move. To- morrow morning we settle the Address and Resolutions, and after that, to-morrow, meet more at large at Leinster House. All our troops muster pretty well. Mountmorris is here, and to be with us to-morrow morning. We reckon on something like a hundred, and some are sanguine enough to add near a score above it — that is too much. The report of to-night is that Orde is not yet ready for us, and will beg a respite of a few days — Beresford is not yet arrived, and that is said to be the cause. Mornington and Poole are come — their muster is as strict as ours. If we divide any thing like a hundred, they will not dare to take a victory over us. Adieu, yours most truly,
“I. C.”
The motion for bringing in the Bill was carried only by a majority of nineteen, which is thus announced to Mr. Sheridan by his correspondent: —
“I congratulate with you on 108 minority-against 127. The business never can go on. They were astonished, and looked the sorriest devils you can imagine. Orde’s exhibition was pitiful indeed — the support of his party weak and open to attack — the debate on their part really poor. On ours, Conolly, O’Neill, and the other country gentlemen, strong and of great weight — Grattan able and eloquent in an uncommon degree — every body in high spirits, and altogether a force that was irresistible. We divided at nine this morning, on leave to bring in a Bill for the settlement. The ground fought upon was the Fourth Resolution, and the principle of that in the others. The commercial detail did not belong accurately to the debate, though some went over it in a cursory way. Grattan, two hours and a half — Flood as much — the former brilliant, well attended to, and much admired — the latter tedious from detail; of course, not so well heard, and answered by Foster in detail, to refutation.
“The Attorney General defended the constitutional safety under the Fourth-Resolution principle. Orde mentioned the Opposition in England twice in his opening speech, with imputations, or insinuations at least, not very favorable. You were not left undefended. Forbes exerted his warm attachment to you with great effect — Burgh, the flag-ship of the Leinster squadron, gave a well-supported fire pointed against Pitt, and covering you. Hardy (the Bishop of Down’s friend) in a very elegant speech gave you due honor; and I had the satisfaction of a slight skirmish, which called up the Attorney General, &c….”
On the 15th of August Mr. Orde withdrew his Bill, and Mr. Corry writes— “I wish you joy a thousand times o
f our complete victory. Orde has offered the Bill — moved its being printed for his own justification to the country, and no more of it this session. We have the effects of a complete victory.”
Another question of much less importance, but more calculated to call forth Sheridan’s various powers, was the Plan of the Duke of Richmond for the fortification of dock-yards, which Mr. Pitt brought forward (it was said, with much reluctance) in the session of 1786, and which Sheridan must have felt the greater pleasure in attacking, from the renegade conduct of its noble author in politics. In speaking of the Report of a Board of General Officers, which had been appointed to examine into the merits of this plan, and of which the Duke himself was President, he thus ingeniously plays with the terms of the act in question, and fires off his wit, as it were, en ricochet, making it bound lightly from sentence to sentence: —
“Yet the Noble Duke deserved the warmest panegyrics for the striking proofs he had given of his genius as an engineer; which appeared even in the planning and construction of the paper in his hand! The professional ability of the Master-general shone as conspicuously there, as it could upon our coasts. He had made it an argument of posts; and conducted his reasoning upon principles of trigonometry, as well as logic. There were certain detached data, like advanced works, to keep the enemy at a distance from the main object in debate. Strong provisions covered the flanks of his assertions. His very queries were in casements. No impression, therefore, was to be made on this fortress of sophistry by desultory observations; and it was necessary to sit down before it, and assail it by regular approaches. It was fortunate, however, to observe, that notwithstanding all the skill employed by the noble and literary engineer, his mode of defence on paper was open to the same objection which had been urged against his other fortifications; that if his adversary got possession of one of his posts, it became strength against him, and the means of subduing the whole line of his argument.”
He also spoke at considerable length, upon the Plan brought forward by Mr. Pitt for the Redemption of the National Debt — that grand object of the calculator and the financier, and equally likely, it should seem, to be attained by the dreams of the one as by the experiments of the other. Mr. Pitt himself seemed to dread the suspicion of such a partnership, by the care with which he avoided any acknowledgment to Dr. Price, whom he had nevertheless personally consulted on the subject, and upon whose visions of compound interest this fabric of finance was founded.
In opening the Plan of his new Sinking Fund to the House, Mr. Pitt, it is well known, pronounced it to be “a firm column, upon which he was proud to flatter himself his name might be inscribed.” Tycho Brahe would have said the same of his Astronomy, and Des Cartes of his Physics; — but these baseless columns have long passed away, and the Plan of paying debt with borrowed money well deserves to follow them. The delusion, indeed, of which this Fund was made the instrument, during the war with France, is now pretty generally acknowledged; and the only question is, whether Mr. Pitt was so much the dupe of his own juggle, as to persuade himself that thus playing with a debt, from one hand to the other, was paying it — or whether, aware of the inefficacy of his Plan for any other purpose than that of keeping up a blind confidence in the money-market, he yet gravely went on, as a sort of High Priest of Finance, profiting by a miracle in which he did not himself believe, and, in addition to the responsibility of the uses to which he applied the money, incurring that of the fiscal imposture by which he raised it.
Though, from the prosperous state of the revenue at the time of the institution of this Fund, the absurdity was not yet committed of borrowing money to maintain it, we may perceive by the following acute pleasantry of Mr. Sheridan, (who denied the existence of the alleged surplus of income,) that he already had a keen insight into the fallacy of that Plan of Redemption afterwards followed:— “At present,” he said, “it was clear there was no surplus; and the only means which suggested themselves to him were, a loan of a million for the especial purpose — for the Right Honorable gentleman might say, with the person in the comedy, ‘If you won’t lend me the money, how can I pay you?’”
CHAPTER X.
CHARGES AGAINST MR. HASTINGS. — COMMERCIAL TREATY WITH FRANCE. — DEBTS OF THE PRINCE OF WALES.
The calm security into which Mr. Pitt’s administration had settled, after the victory which the Tory alliance of King and people had gained for him, left but little to excite the activity of party spirit, or to call forth those grand explosions of eloquence, which a more electric state of the political world produces. The orators of Opposition might soon have been reduced, like Philoetetes wasting his arrows upon geese at Lemnos, [Footnote: “Pinnigero, non armigero in corpore tela exerceantur.” — Accius, ap. Ciceron. lib. vii. e.] to expend the armory of their wit upon the Grahams and Rolles of the Treasury bench. But a subject now presented itself — the Impeachment of Warren Hastings — which, by embodying the cause of a whole country in one individual, and thus combining the extent and grandeur of a national question, with the direct aim and singleness of a personal attack, opened as wide a field for display as the most versatile talents could require, and to Mr. Sheridan, in particular, afforded one of those precious opportunities, of which, if Fortune but rarely offers them to genius, it is genius alone that can fully and triumphantly avail itself.
The history of the rise and progress of British power in India — of that strange and rapid vicissitude, by which the ancient Empire of the Moguls was transferred into the hands of a Company of Merchants in Leadenhall Street — furnishes matter perhaps more than any other that could be mentioned, for those strong contrasts and startling associations, to which eloquence and wit often owe their most striking effects. The descendants of a Throne, once the loftiest in the world, reduced to stipulate with the servants of traders for subsistence — the dethronement of Princes converted into a commercial transaction, and a ledger-account kept of the profits of Revolutions — the sanctity of Zenanus violated by search-warrants, and the chicaneries of English Law transplanted, in their most mischievous luxuriance, into the holy and peaceful shades of the Bramins, — such events as these, in which the poetry and the prose of life, its pompous illusions and mean realities, are mingled up so sadly and fantastically together, were of a nature, particularly when recent, to lay hold of the imagination as well as the feelings, and to furnish eloquence with those strong lights and shadows, of which her most animated pictures are composed.
It is not wonderful, therefore, that the warm fancy of Mr. Burke should have been early and strongly excited by the scenes of which India was the theatre, or that they should have (to use his own words) “constantly preyed upon his peace, and by night and day dwelt on his imagination.” His imagination, indeed, — as will naturally happen, where this faculty is restrained by a sense of truth — was always most livelily called into play by events of which he had not himself been a witness; and, accordingly, the sufferings of India and the horrors of revolutionary France were the two subjects upon which it has most unrestrainedly indulged itself. In the year 1780 he had been a member of the Select Committee, which was appointed by the House of Commons to take the affairs of India into consideration, and through some of whose luminous Reports we trace that powerful intellect, which “stamped an image of itself” on every subject that it embraced. Though the reign of Clive had been sufficiently fertile in enormities, and the treachery practised towards Ornichund seemed hardly to admit of any parallel, yet the loftier and more prominent iniquities of Mr. Hastings’s government were supposed to have thrown even these into shadow. Against him, therefore, — now rendered a still nobler object of attack by the haughty spirit with which he defied his accusers, — the whole studies and energies of Mr. Burke’s mind were directed.
It has already been remarked that to the impetuous zeal, with which Burke at this period rushed into Indian politics, and to that ascendancy over his party by which he so often compelled them to “swell with their tributary urns his flood,” the ill-fated Eas
t India Bill of Mr. Fox in a considerable degree owed its origin. In truth, the disposition and talents of this extraordinary man made him at least as dangerous as useful to any party with which he connected himself. Liable as he was to be hurried into unsafe extremes, impatient of contradiction, and with a sort of feudal turn of mind, which exacted the unconditional service of his followers, it required, even at that time, but little penetration to foresee the violent schism that ensued some years after, or to pronounce that, whenever he should be unable to command his party, he would desert it.
The materials which he had been collecting on the subject of India, and the indignation with which these details of delinquency had filled him, at length burst forth (like that mighty cloud, described by himself as “pouring its whole contents over the plains of the Carnatic”) in his wonderful speech on the Nabob of Arcot’s debts [Footnote: Isocrates, in his Encomium upon Helen, dwells much on the advantage to an orator of speaking upon subjects from which but little eloquence is expected — [Greek: pezi ton phaulon chai tapeinon]. There is little doubt, indeed, that surprise must have considerable share in the pleasure, which we derive from eloquence on such unpromising topics as have inspired three of the most masterly speeches that can be selected from modern oratory — that of Burke on the Nabob of Arcot’s debts — of Grattan on Tithes, and of Mr. Fox on the Westminster Scrutiny.] — a speech, whose only rivals perhaps in all the records of oratory, are to be found among three or four others of his own, which, like those poems of Petrarch called Sorelle from their kindred excellence, may be regarded as sisters in beauty, and equalled only by each other.
Delphi Complete Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan Page 125
