"I have just heard your friend Croker, and you could not wish him or any favourite of yours to have made a stronger or more favourable impression upon the House. His speech was one which was calculated to conciliate at this side of the Channel and to gratify at the other. It was replete with ingenuity and yet free from fanciful refinement. It was characterised by an acuteness of legal deduction, and yet exempt from sophistry or the pedantry of profession. It treated a worn-out subject so as to make it appear a new one. But its principal merit in my eyes lay in its frankness, warmth, and sincerity. It redeemed the pledge and fulfilled the promise of his ‘Historical Sketch.’ It showed him to be an honest Irishman no less than an able statesman. It showed him at this moment to be disinterested, and ready to quit the road of fortune under the auspices of his personal friend Peel, if the latter was only to be conciliated by what Oxonians term orthodoxy, and we Cantabs consider as intolerance."
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomFellows of the Royal SocietyAnglicans from the United KingdomPoliticians from IrelandAuthors from Ireland
Original Language: English
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Sources
Thomas Spring Rice to Mr. Carey (3 May 1819), quoted in The Croker Papers. The Correspondence and Diaries of the Late Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S., Secretary to the Admiralty from 1809 to 1830, Vol. I, ed. Louis J. Jennings (1884), pp. 120-121
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Wilson_Croker
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John Wilson Croker
John Wilson Croker (20 December 178010 August 1857) was an Anglo-Irish statesman and author.
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