George O'Callaghan, the Duke of Devonshire,
Mr. Dominick Browne, Mr. Henry Pearce, Mr. Kinnaird, Lord
Tavistock, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Byron, and myself. I was
not, as Lord Byron says in the song, the founder of this Club;
[Footnote:
"But when we at Cambridge were
My boy Hobbie O!
If my memory do not err,
You founded a Whig Clubbie O!"
]
on the contrary, thinking myself of mighty importance
in those days, I recollect very well that some difficulty attended my
consenting to belong to the club, and I have by me a letter from
Lord Tavistock, in which the distinction between being a Whig
_party_ man and a Revolution Whig is strongly insisted upon.
I have troubled you with this detail in consequence of Lord Byron's
charge, which he, who despises and defies, and has lampooned the Whigs
all round, only invented out of wantonness, and for the sake of annoying
me--and he has certainly succeeded, thanks to your circulating this
filthy ballad. As for his Lordship's vulgar notions about the _mob_,
they are very fit for the Poet of the _Morning Post_, and for nobody
else. Nothing in the ballad annoyed me but the charge about the
Cambridge club, because nothing else had the semblance of truth; and I
own it has hurt me very much to find Lord Byron playing into the hands
of the Holland House sycophants, for whom he has himself the most
sovereign contempt, and whom in other days I myself have tried to induce
him to tolerate.
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