Oh! rat thee, GEORGE, rat thee, Oh! rat thee, I pray; Oh! rat thee, GEORGE, rat thee, Oh! rat now you may. Oh! rat thee, my Nephew; Oh! rat thee, GEORGE, rat thee, Oh! rat thee, I pray, Oh! rat thee, GEORGE, rat thee, Oh! rat now you may. SIR, BRITISH BAZAAR. May 18, 1816. UNDERSTANDING that the British Gallery, now called the British Bazaar, is again to be open ed for the reception of Pictures of the ancient Masters, contributed by individuals anxious to give the rising Artists of the present day every opportunity of profiting by an easy access to the acknowledged models of the Art, I request you will correct some mistakes which occurred in the last catalogue with regard to the owners of many valuable Paintings. The following amended list will be found more MR. CANNING. No. I. It is impossible to observe this Gentleman's recent proceedings, both at Lisbon and Bordeaux, without reflecting upon the endless merriment which they must have occasioned in the Antijacobin, had that lively Journal been in existence. The standing jest in 1798, among Mr. Canning and his friends, against the Whigs, used to be their frequenting public meetings; and every kind of weapon, from laboured invective down to epigram and squib, was used to expose this practice. It is somewhat singular that Mr. C. should turn out to be the public man who has carried the plan of speechifying the furthest. Mr. Horne Tooke was a joke to him. He exceeds by many degrees the late Mr. Paull. Indeed, these Gentlemen were respectable regular dealers in the article; they were stationary; they kept their known places of trade, and never condescended to go hawking their wares about the country. Mr. Hunt, of Bristol, in this respect, comes somewhat nearer our great States " man; but still he is far behind him. Like him, "the Bristol man is of an itinerant nature, and will get him up on any stage, either in town or country, and give the multitude half an hour of it. Like him, too, our Hunt is attended by one or two bottle-holders, or merry andrews (we know not which to call them); and he has been known, at a moment's warning, to enter a place, and have his speech over, and address voted, in half an hour, and before any one in the town, beside the dozen or two who stood near him, were aware that a meeting was held. These are exquisite feats of oratorial agility, and we are far from undervaluing them. But candour requires us to add, that they fall infinitely short of the Diplomatic Dandy (as he is termed): for, not to mention his numberless speeches of all sorts and sizes at the Liverpool Election, beginning, "Ladies and Gentlemen," when did "the Hunt" ever get up at a private dinner, and treat his fellow-guests, to the number of ten, with a bit of elóquence, upon the worthy host's suggestion that there were soine Ladies behind the door who were anxious to hear him? Did "he of Bristol" ever descend into the bowels of the earth to make the caverns ring with his tongue? Every one knows that his Excellency of Lisbon, during his first oratorial tour, while speaking his way up to town, having turned aside at divers places above ground to hold forth in various companies, finding himself in the neighbourhood of saltmines, proceeded forthwith to enlighten these lower regions, and afford a new specimen of the true bathos-that species of oratory peculiar to our age, and, indeed, to our Ambassador himself, the subterraneous. This feat of roaring in a salt-pit, so far exceeding the skill of those who only "fulmined over Greece," must also be allowed to place its author greatly above the "common Hunt" above alluded to. But if But if any doubt we have it happily remained as to the preference, removed by the recent accounts from Lisbon and Bordeaux. An Ambassador speechifying at all is a novelty; the mystery of his calling has generally been supposed to lie in other arts and qualifications. But that he should drop a speech wherever he goes, is truly original. Whether he arrives at a place, or leaves it; whether the place be the seat of his mission, or only a port at which he touches on his way home; whether his audi |