ABSTRACT
A blow-for-blow exchange with the Morning Chronicle. In Augustan couplets, this is an old-fashioned bout conducted much along the lines, say, of Dryden swapping punches with Shadwell. Dryden’s invective was memorably deft: ‘His Brows thick fogs, instead of glories grace, / And lambent dullness played about his face’. 1 Here, again the contest is unequal; visibly so, because Canning prints the initial assault below his own response. While his opponent plods along underneath, Canning floats and stings overhead. The Morning Chronicle’s contributor was a young William Lamb. At the time, aged nineteen and an extreme Whig, Lamb admired Bonaparte even more than Fox. Mellowing later, he became a protegé of Canning, then Viscount Melbourne and twice Prime Minister. Lamb had a talent for nailing quirks – ‘Croker,’ he said, ‘would dispute with the Recording Angel about the number of his sins’ 2 – but the gift is scarcely visible in this early poem.
