and
commonplaces. It was a piece of bad taste to select Brougham (who
had nothing to do with Dover) for the performance of this office,
which would have been more appropriately discharged by the local
authority in the chair, although he might not have been able to
make such a flourish as the practised orator favoured the company
with. The Duke himself hates to be thus bepraised, and it is
painful to see Brougham and him in any way connected, though for
so ephemeral a purpose. The Duke's health might be proposed in
three lines of Ovid, which express the position he fills more,
and probably better, than the most studied oration could do:--

Si titulos, annosque tuos numerare velimus,
Facta premant annos. Pro te, fortissime, vota
Publica suscipimus, Bacchi tibi sumimus haustus.

It turned out a complete _Tory_ celebration. There was an almost
unmixed array of Tory names at the banquet, and one Whig lord
(Poltimore), who happened to be at Dover declined attending.

[1] [A great entertainment was given to the Duke of
Wellington as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports on the
30th August. Lord Brougham attended it, and delivered
an oration of the most hyperbolical panegyric.]

September 5th, 1839 {p.238}

Among other bad signs of these times, one is the decay of
_loyalty_ in the Tory party; the Tory principle is completely
destroyed by party rage. No Opposition was ever more rabid than
this is, no people ever treated or spoke of the Sovereign with
such marked disrespect. They seem not to care one straw for the
Crown, its dignity, or its authority, because the head on which
it is placed does not nod with benignity to them. An example of
this took place the other day, when at a dinner at Shrewsbury the
company refused to drink the health of the new Lord Lieutenant,
the Duke of Sutherland (a man not personally obnoxious), because
the Duchess of Sutherland is at the head of the Queen's female
household. This reproach does not apply to the leaders of the
party, who are too wise and too decorous to hold such language or
to approve of such conduct;[2] but is the _animus_ which
distinguishes the tail and the body, and they take no pains to
conceal it.

[2] This was before the Bradshaw and Roby exhibitions.

September 7th, 1839 {p.238}

The result of the Cambridge and Manchester elections proves (if
any proof was wanting), how utterly the cause of Governmen