ABSTRACT
Robert Adair is returned to sight here, for further mockery, as the putative author of A Bit of an Ode to Mr. Fox’. The poem is attributed to Ellis by a reliable source, to Frere by one less trustworthy. It has the grace of Frere’s Whistlecraft verse. The pretext is Adair’s visit to the Continent in 1791, investigating the reception of the Revolution in Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg. It was widely believed that Adair was dispatched to frustrate Pitt’s foreign policy by underhand means. Fox ‘sent Mr. Adair as his own private Agent, to Petersburg; an act, for which many persons thought that he deserved Impeachment’ wrote Wraxall. 1
