While still William Lamb he had hated what he called the creeping palsy of misgiving, tried hard to resist it, and developed into one of those not afraid to advance with the age. He had no “extreme faith in religion, politics, or love.” Accordingly, to him patriotism and wisdom were not confined to the Whigs alone. The oh-oh’s and ironical cheers from what he knew to be a powerful majority moved him not; he was as easy, comfortable, good-humoured, as ever. Quaintness, originality of a manner fitful, abrupt, full of irony, at times of a tenderness almost feminine, distinguished him, together with an insuperable aversion to “platitudes, palaverings,”--and bishops. In an age when swearing was as common in drawing-rooms as in the field, England’s Prime Minister was an acknowledged past-master in the art, and by inflections gave a dozen changes to the small familiar four-lettered British adjective in most common use. In ordinary transactions he loved a chirpy oath; but in his dealings with the bishops was forced to coin a “superdamnable.” The Order of the Garter was a great favourite with him, “because there was no damned merit about it.” Utilitarian levelling like Bentham’s he regarded as nonsense; state parsimony like Hume’s, a “pettifogging blunder;” radicalism after the manner of Cobbett and others he called mere ragamuffinism; but he told his peers plainly that the time had gone by when any set of men could put themselves up as a check against national opinion, that antique usages could not prevail against reason and argument--truths spoken with the voice of the Commons in that place where such a voice was almost unknown, seldom heard. Yet rancour was foreign to his nature: “The great fault of the present time (1835) is that men hate each other so damnably; for my part, I love them all.” And all with the air of a good-tempered, jovial gentleman. “If something of his amiable spirit could be caught by others,” said a friend, “and grafted on Lord Wellesley’s counsel to ‘_demolish these people_,’ matters would not be difficult.” Called upon frantically by friend and foe at a time of crisis “_to do_ something,” the responsibility of the times thrown on him, he sat tight and calmly answered, “Whenever you are in doubt what should be done--do nothing.” This all sounds like the man for the Canadas. Nine hundred or so of his peers gnashed their teeth at him,--if peers ever so use their molars; and in Canada they wrote of “the prolific source of political evil, the profligate course of imbecile rulers.”