_Landor_.--I do not stand at trifles of congruity. Canning is the very man who has taken especial care that no strong box among us shall be without a chink at the bottom; the very man who asked and received a gratuity (you remember the Lisbon job) [90] from the colleague he had betrayed, belied, and thrown a stone at, for having proved him in the great market-place a betrayer and a liar. Epicurus describes Canning as a fugitive slave, a writer of epigrams on walls, and of songs on the grease of platters, who attempted to cut the throat of a fellow in the same household, [91] who was soon afterward more successful in doing it himself. [Footnote 90: Vol. iv. p. 194.] [Footnote 91: Vol. iv. p. 194.] _North_.--Horrible, most horrible mockery! But even that is not new. It is but Byron's brutal scoff repeated--"Carotid-artery-cutting Castlereagh." _Landor_.--You Tories affect to be so squeamish. Epicurus goes on to show Canning's ignorance of English. _North_.--Epicurus! Why not William Cobbett? _Landor_.--The Athenian philosopher introduces the trial of George the Fourth's wife, and describes her as a drunken old woman, the companion of soldiers and sailors, and lower and viler men. One whose eyes, as much as can be seen of them, are streaky fat floating in semi-liquid rheum. _North_.--And this is the language of Epicurus to his female pupils! He was ever such a beast. _Landor_.--You are delicate. He goes on to allude to Canning's having called her the _pride, the life, the ornament of society_, (you know he did so call her in the House of Commons, according to the newspaper reports; it is true he was speaking of what she had been many years previously; before her departure from England.) [92] Epicurus says triumphantly that the words, if used at all, should have been placed thus--_the ornament, pride, and life_; for hardly a Boeotian bullock-driver would have wedged in _life_ between _pride_ and _ornament_. [Footnote 92: Vol. iv. p. 194, 195.--Pericles and Sophocles also prattle about Queen Caroline! vol. 2, p. 106, 107.--In another place the judgment and style of Johnson being under sentence, the Doctor's judgment is "alike in all things," that is, "unsound and incorrect;" and as to style, "a sentence of Johnson is like a pair of breeches, an article of dress, divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind." The _contour_ of Mr. Landor's figure can hardly be so graceful as that of the Pythian Apollo, if his dress-breeches are made in this fashion, and "his Florentine tailor never fails to fit him."--See vol. i. p. 296, and p. 185, note.]