You wrong another, know
yourself to have acted basely, and are enraged, not against
yourself--for no one hates himself--but against the innocent cause
of your baseness; reasoning very plausibly, "But for that fellow, I
should never have been base; for had he not existed I could not
have been so, at any rate against him;" and this hatred is all the
more bitter, when you reflect that you have been needlessly base.
Whilst the Tories are in power the writer's friend, of his own
accord, raves against the Tories because they do not give the
writer a certain appointment, and makes, or says he makes,
desperate exertions to make them do so; but no sooner are the
Tories out, with whom he has no influence, and the Whigs in, with
whom he, or rather his party, has influence, than he gets the place
for himself, though, according to his own expressed opinion--an
opinion with which the writer does not, and never did, concur--the
writer was the only person competent to hold it. Now had he,
without saying a word to the writer, or about the writer with
respect to the employment, got the place for himself when he had an
opportunity, knowing, as he very well knew, himself to be utterly
unqualified for it, the transaction, though a piece of jobbery,
would not have merited the title of a base transaction; as the
matter stands, however, who can avoid calling the whole affair not
only a piece of--come, come, out with the word--scoundrelism on the
part of the writer's friend, but a most curious piece of uncalled-
for scoundrelism? and who, with any knowledge of fallen human
nature, can wonder at the writer's friend entertaining towards him
a considerable portion of gall and malignity?
This feeling on the part of the writer's friend was wonderfully
increased by the appearance of Lavengro, many passages of which the
Radical in his foreign appointment applied to himself and family--
one or two of his children having gone over to Popery, the rest
become members of Mr.
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