Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/287

 him, and in regard to these Bent was victorious. In the course of the correspondence he took the opportunity in a letter to the Governor's Secretary of thus contrasting his own and Macquarie's tempers.

"I regret," he wrote, "that I have now before me but too many convincing proofs under Governor Macquarie's hand, that in respect to acrimony of language, I have been more sinned against than sinning; I heartily agree that difference of opinion need not excite a spirit of hostility, and if his Excellency Governor Macquarie had felt the force of his own observation, he would never have authorised the latter paragraph of your communication, a paragraph which might be returned with double force upon himself, and which it would have been more becoming to have omitted. Our local rank places but a shade of distinction between us, and I have yet to learn what decorum of language ought to be adopted by me in correspondence with any Governor of New South Wales which I am not (even as a private individual) entitled to have observed towards me in return, and I will further add that whatever may be my irritability of temper it has never led me into acts either of illegality or oppression."