Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/347

1808. without appearing to deprecate it as a measure of hostility, he would gladly have facilitated its removal as a measure of inconvenient restriction upon the American people."

Earl Grey, although he approved of rejecting the American offer, wrote to Brougham that in this note Canning had outdone himself. No doubt his irony betrayed too much of the cleverness which had been so greatly admired by Eton schoolboys; but it served the true purpose of satire,—it stung to the quick, and goaded Americans into life-long hatred of England. Pinkney, whose British sympathies had offered long resistance to maltreatment, fairly lost his temper over this note. "Insulting and insidious," he called it in his private correspondence with Madison. He was the more annoyed because Canning wrote him an explanatory letter of the same date which gave a personal sting to the public insult. "I feel that it is not such a letter as I could have persuaded myself to write in similar circumstances," he complained.

Pinkney's abilities were great. In the skirmish of words in which Canning delighted, Pinkney excelled; and in his later career at the bar, of which VOL. IV.—22