As a _littérateur_ Erskine met with meagre success; but some of his squibs and epigrams are greatly above the ordinary level of '_vers de société_.' For instance this is his:--
"I may not do right, though I ne'er can do wrong; I never can die, though I can not live long; My jowl it is purple, my hand it is fat-- Come, riddle my riddle. What is it? _What? What?_"
The liveliest illustrations of Erskine's proverbial egotism are the squibs of political caricaturists; and from their humorous exaggerations it is difficult to make a correct estimate of the lengths of absurdity to which his intellectual vanity and self-consciousness sometimes carried him. From what is known of his disposition it seems probable that the sarcasms aimed by public writers at his infirmity inclined him to justify their attacks rather than to disprove them by his subsequent demeanor, and that some of his most extravagant outbursts of self-assertion were designed in a spirit of bravado and reckless good-nature to increase the laughter which satirists had raised against him. However this may be, his conduct drew upon him blows that would have ruffled the composure of any less self-complacent or less amiable man. The Tory prints habitually spoke of him as Counsellor Ego whilst he was at the bar; and when it was known that he had accepted the seals, the opposition journals announced that he would enter the house as "Baron Ego, of Eye, in the county of Suffolk." Another of his nicknames was _Lord Clackmannan_; and Cobbett published the following notice of an harangue made by the fluent advocate in the House of Commons:--"Mr. Erskine delivered a most animated speech in the House of Commons on the causes and consequences of the late war, which lasted thirteen hours, eighteen minutes, and a second, by Mr. John Nichol's stop-watch. Mr. Erskine closed his speech with a dignified climax: 'I was born free, and, by G-d, I'll remain so!'--[A loud cry of '_Hear! hear_' in the gallery, in which were citizens Tallien and Barrère.] On Monday three weeks we shall have the extreme satisfaction of laying before the public a brief analysis of the above speech, our letter-founder having entered into an engagement to furnish a fresh font of I's."[32]