So far the thing showed talent: however, I
must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at
the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when
the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with
still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some
amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace
gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff
which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up
of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork
and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when
that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of
the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed
again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the
high flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale.
Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes,
and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.
I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age
to the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and
his Grace the **** of *******. I am not so great a leveller as to put
these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of
letters; but "the field of glory is a field for all.
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