[89]
thank you for your attachment to the military; you are now a soldier, then a financier, and at another time a commissary. Sometimes for the army, sometimes for the public, and sometimes for neither. Your Lordship is Wondrously enamoured of the old ministry. In January you called the American war the mod occurred this country ever waged; in November you say 'the late ministers deserved well of the public for the great and unparalleled attention with which they supported the American war.' You follow this with a comment which Lord Germaine might well have dictated, and the passage is concluded with a compliment to the Admiralty, as warm as my Lord Mulgrave himself could have expressed it. The wonder is, my Lord, how all this can come from you. I understand, you seldom approved the political proceedings of the corporation of Edinburgh, and yet your paragraph, in favour of that ministry whom you execrated in January, is almost literally in the shape of one of the resolutions of that Edinburgh meeting, which would not return thanks to the King for changing the ministry.
But you make amends for all by your opinion upon the subject of the peace. You laid last January, that 'no peace short of absolute
