Page:A Tour Through the Batavian Republic.djvu/281

Rh parties in England: but they confidently attribute to the king a vice so well known to be contrary to his disposition and habits, that calumny only could have invented, and the most virulent animosity received, the accusation. They maintain that his majesty indulges so freely in the pleasures of the bottle, as frequently to be incapable of attending to public affairs; and the acts of the British government which they most loudly condemn, they suppose to originate from this pernicious propensity in the chief magistrate of the empire. The only caricature print which I saw in Holland, respecting British personages (except an obsolete one relative to Lord Malmsbury's fruitless journies to Paris and Lisle, and the rout of the English and Russian troops in North Holland), represented the king asleep, apparently in the last stage of intoxication, with bottles and glasses before him, and at a distance Mr. Pitt, the Emperor of Germany, and other potentates and princes, in hostile array against Bonaparte. Mr. Pitt is made to encourage the confederates, by faying, "Fight on: —