his hopes, and proud of the storm which | exaggerated, about Lord Carteret ; he had conjured up on the Continent, how, in the height of his greatness, he would brook neither superior nor equal. fell in love at first sight on a birthday "His rants," says Horace Walpole, with Lady Sophia Fermor, the handare amazing; so are his parts and some daughter of Lord Pomfret; how his spirits." He encountered the op- he plagued the Cabinet every day with position of his colleagues, not with the reading to them her ladyship's letters; fierce haughtiness of the first Pitt, or how strangely he brought home his the cold unbending arrogance of the bride; what fine jewels he gave her; second, but with a gay vehemence, a how he fondled her at Ranelagh; and good-humoured imperiousness, that what queen-like state she kept in bore everything down before it. The Arlington Street. Horace Walpole has period of his ascendency was known spoken less bitterly of Carteret than of by the name of the "Drunken Admi- any public man of that time, Fox, nistration;" and the expression was perhaps, excepted; and this is the not altogether figurative. His habits more remarkable, because Carteret was were extremely convivial; and cham- one of the most inveterate enemies of pagne probably lent its aid to keep Sir Robert. In the Memoirs, Horace him in that state of joyous excitement Walpole, after passing in review all in which his life was passed. the great men whom England had proThat a rash and impetuous man of duced within his memory, concludes genius like Carteret should not have by saying, that in genius none of them been able to maintain his ground in equalled Lord Granville. Smollett, in Parliament against the crafty and sel- Humphrey Clinker, pronounces a simifish Pelhams is not strange. But it is lar judgment in coarser language. less easy to understand why he should" Since Granville was turned out, there have been generally unpopular through- has been no minister in this nation out the country. His brilliant talents, worth the meal that whitened his his bold and open temper, ought, it periwig." should seem, to have made him a favourite with the public. But the people had been bitterly disappointed; and he had to face the first burst of their rage. His close connection with Pulteney, now the most detested man in the nation, was an unfortunate circumstance. He had, indeed, only three partisans, Pulteney, the King, and the Prince of Wales, a most singular assemblage. He was driven from his office. He shortly after made a bold, indeed a desperate, attempt to recover power. The attempt failed. From that time he relinquished all ambitious hopes, and retired laughing to his books and his bottle. No statesman ever enjoyed success with so exquisite a relish, or submitted to defeat with so genuine and unforced a cheerfulness. Ill as he had been used, he did not seem, says Horace Walpole, to have any resentment, or indeed any feeling except thirst. These letters contain many good stories, some of them no doubt grossly The first person Carteret fell; and the reign of the Pelhams commenced. It was Carteret's misfortune to be raised to power when the public mind was still smarting from recent disappointment. The nation had been duped, and was eager for revenge. A victim was necessary, and on such occasions the victims of popular rage are selected like the victim of Jephthah. who comes in the way is made the sacrifice. The wrath of the people had now spent itself; and the unnatural excitement was succeeded by an unnatural calm. To an irrational eagerness for something new, succeeded an equally irrational disposition to acquiesce in every thing established. A few months back the people had been disposed to impute every crime to men in power, and to lend a ready ear to the high professions of men in opposition. They were now disposed to surrender themselves implicitly to the management of Ministers, and to look with suspicion and contempt on all who pretended to public spirit. The in the Government durst wag a finger against him. Almost all the opposition which Pelham had to encounter was from members of the Government of which he was the head. His own paymaster spoke against his estimates. His own secretary-at-war spoke against his Regency Bill. In one day Walpole turned Lord Chesterfield, Lord Burlington, and Lord Clinton out of name of patriot had become a by-word of derision. Horace Walpole scarcely exaggerated when he said that, in those times, the most popular declaration which a candidate could make on the hustings was that he had never been and never would be a patriot. At this conjuncture took place the rebellion of the Highland clans. The alarm produced by that event quieted the strife of internal factions. The the royal household, dismissed the suppression of the insurrection crushed highest dignitaries of Scotland from for ever the spirit of the Jacobite their posts, and took away the regiparty. Room was made in the Govern- ments of the Duke of Bolton and Lord ment for a few Tories. Peace was Cobham, because he suspected them patched up with France and Spain. of having encouraged the resistance to Death removed the Prince of Wales, his Excise Bill. He would far rather who had contrived to keep together a have contended with the strongest small portion of that formidable oppo- minority, under the ablest leaders, sition of which he had been the leader than have tolerated mutiny in his own in the time of Sir Robert Walpole. party. It would have gone hard with Almost every man of weight in the any of his colleagues, who had venHouse of Commons was officially con- tured, on a Government question, to nected with the Government. The divide the House of Commons against even tenor of the session of Parliament him. Pelham, on the other hand, was was ruffled only by an occasional disposed to bear anything rather than harangue from Lord Egmont on the drive from office any man round whom army estimates. For the first time a new opposition could form. He since the accession of the Stuarts there therefore endured with fretful patience was no opposition. This singular good the insubordination of Pitt and Fox. fortune, denied to the ablest states- He thought it far better to connive at men, to Salisbury, to Strafford, to their occasional infractions of disciClarendon, to Somers, to Walpole, had pline than to hear them, night after been reserved for the Pelhams. night, thundering against corruption and wicked ministers from the other side of the House. Henry Pelham, it is true, was by no means a contemptible person. His understanding was that of Walpole on a somewhat smaller scale. Though not a brilliant orator, he was, like his master, a good debater, a good parliamentary tactician, a good man of business. Like his master, he distinguished himself by the neatness and clearness of his financial expositions. Here the resemblance ceased. Their characters were altogether dissimilar. Walpole was good-humoured, but would have his way: his spirits were high, and his manners frank even to coarseness. The temper of Pelham was yielding, but peevish: his habits were regular, and his deportment strictly decorous. Walpole was constitutionally fearless, Pelham constitutionally timid. Walpole had to face a strong opposition; but no man We wonder that Sir Walter Scott never tried his hand on the Duke of Newcastle. An interview between his Grace and Jeanie Deans would have been delightful, and by no means unnatural. There is scarcely any public man in our history of whose manners and conversation so many particulars have been preserved. Single stories may be unfounded or exaggerated. But all the stories about him, whether told by people who were perpetually seeing him in Parliament and attending his levee in Lincoln's Inn Fields, or by Grub Street writers who never had more than a glimpse of his star through the windows of his gilded coach, are of the same character. Horace Walpole and Smollett differed in their tastes and opinions as much as two human beings could differ. They and authority resembled the avarice kept quite different society. Walpole of the old usurer in the Fortunes of played at cards with countesses, and Nigel. It was so intense a passion corresponded with ambassadors. that it supplied the place of talents, that Smollett passed his life surrounded by it inspired even fatuity with cunning. printers' devils and famished scribblers."Have no money dealings with my Yet Walpole's Duke and Smollett's father," says Marth to Lord GlenDuke are as like as if they were both varloch; "for, dotard as he is, he will from one hand. Smollett's Newcastle make an ass of you." It was as danruns out of his dressing-room, with his gerous to have any political connection face covered with soap-suds, to em- with Newcastle as to buy and sell with brace the Moorish envoy. Walpole's old Trapbois. He was gree y after Newcastle pushes his way into the power with a greediness all his own. Duke of Grafton's sick room to kiss He was jealous of all his colleagues, the old nobleman's plasters. No man and even of his own brother. Under was so unmercifully satirised. But in the disguise of levity he was false betruth he was himself a satire ready yond all example of political falsehood. made. All that the art of the satirist All the able men of his time ridiculed does for other men, nature had done him as a dunce, a driveller, a child for him. Whatever was absurd about who never knew his own mind for an him stood out with grotesque pro- hour together; and he overreached minence from the rest of the character. them all round. He was a living, moving, talking "Oh And this man was, during near thirty years, Secretary of State, and, during near ten years, First Lord of the Treasury! His large fortune, his strong hereditary connection, his great parliamentary interest, will not alone explain this extraordinary fact. His success is a signal instance of what may be effected by a man who devotes his whole heart and soul without reserve to one object. He was eaten up; by ambition. His love of influence If the country had remained at peace, it is not impossible that this man would have continued at the head of affairs without admitting any other person to a share of his authority until the throne was filled by a new Prince, who brought with him new maxims of government, new favourites, and a strong will. But the inauspicious commencement of the Seven Years' War brought on a crisis to which Newcastle was altogether unequal. After a calm of fifteen years the spirit of the nation was again stirred to its inmost depths. In a few days the whole aspect of the political world was changed. But that change is too remarkable an event to be discussed at the end of an article already more than sufficiently long. It is probable that we may, at no remote time, resume the subject. THOUGH Several years have elapsed since the publication of this work, it is still, we believe, a new publication to most of our readers. Nor are we surprised at this. The book is large, and the style heavy. The information which Mr. Thackeray has obtained from the State Paper Office is new; but much of it is very uninteresting. The rest of his narrative is very little better than Gifford's or Tomline's Life of the second Pitt, and tells us little or nothing that may not be found quite as well told in the Parliamentary History, the Annual Register, and other works equally common. Almost every mechanical employment, it is said, has a tendency to injure some one or other of the bodily organs of the artisan. Grinders of cutlery die of consumption; weavers are stunted in their growth; smiths become blear-eyed. In the same manner almost every intellectual employment has a tendency to produce some intellectual malady. Biographers, translators, editors, all, in short, who employ themselves in illustrating the lives or the writings of others, are peculiarly exposed to the Lues Boswelliana, or disease of admiration. But we scarcely remember ever to have seen a patient so far gone in this distemper as Mr. Thackeray. He is not satisfied with forcing us to confess that Pitt was a great orator, a vigorous minister, an honourable and high-spirited gentleman. He will have it that all virtues and all accomplishments met in his hero. In spite of Gods, men, and columns, Pitt must be a poet, a poet capable of producing a heroic poem of the first order; and we are assured that we ought to find many charms in such lines as these: "Midst all the tumults of the warring sphere, My light-charged bark may haply glide; Some gale may waft, some conscious thought shall cheer, And the small freight unanxious glide.” * Pitt was in the army for a few Mr months in time of peace. Thackeray accordingly insists on our confessing that, if the young cornet had remained in the service, he would have been one of the ablest commanders that ever lived. But this is not all. Pitt, it seems, was not merely a great poet in esse, and a great general in posse, but a finished example of moral excellence, the just man made perfect. He was in the right when he attempted to establish an inquisition, and to give bounties for perjury, in order to get Walpole's head. He was in the right when he declared Walpole to have been an excellent minister. He was in the right when, being in opposition, he maintained that no peace ought to be made with Spain, till she should formally renounce the right of search. He was in the right when, being in office, he silently acquiesced in a treaty by which Spain did not renounce the right of search. When he left the Duke of Newcastle, when he coalesced with the Duke of Newcastle, when he thundered against subsidies, when he lavished subsidies with unexampled profusion, when he execrated the Hanoverian connection, when he declared that Hanover ought to be as dear to us as Hampshire, he was still invariably speaking the language of a virtuous and enlightened statesman. The truth is that there scarcely ever lived a person who had so little claim to this sort of praise as Pitt. He was undoubtedly a great man. But his was not a complete and well-proportioned greatness. The public life of Hampden or of Somers resembles a regular drama, which can be criticized as a whole, and every scene of The quotation is faithfully made from Mr. Thackeray. Perhaps Pitt wrote guide in the fourth line. thing short of direct embezzlement of the public money was considered as quite fair in public men, he showed the most scrupulous disinterestedness; that, at a time when it seemed to be generally taken for granted that Government could be upheld only by the basest and most immoral arts, he appealed to the better and nobler parts of human nature; that he made a brave and splendid attempt to do, by means of public opinion, what no other statesman of his day thought it possible to do, except by means of corruption; that he looked for support, not, like the Pelhams, to a strong which is to be viewed in connection | man who might perhaps, under some with the main action. The public life strong excitement, have been tempted of Pitt, on the other hand, is a rude to ruin his country, but who never though striking piece, a piece abound- would have stooped to pilfer from her, ing in incongruities, a piece without a man whose errors arose, not from a any unity of plan, but redeemed by sordid desire of gain, but from a fierce some noble passages, the effect of thirst for power, for glory, and for which is increased by the tameness or vengeance. History owes to him this extravagance of what precedes and of attestation, that at a time when any what follows. His opinions were unfixed. His conduct at some of the most important conjunctures of his life was evidently determined by pride and resentment. He had one fault, which of all human faults is most rarely found in company with true greatness. He was extremely affected. He was an almost solitary instance of a man of real genius, and of a brave, lofty, and commanding spirit, without simplicity of character. He was an actor in the Closet, an actor at Council, an actor in Parliament; and even in private society he could not lay aside his theatrical tones and attitudes. We know that one of the most dis- aristocratical connection, not, like tinguished of his partisans often complained that he could never obtain admittance to Lord Chatham's room till every thing was ready for the representation, till the dresses and properties were all correctly disposed, till the light was thrown with Rembrandt-like effect on the head of the illustrious performer, till the flannels had been arranged with the air of a Grecian drapery, and the crutch placed as gracefully as that of Belisarius or Lear. Yet, with all his faults and affectations, Pitt had, in a very extraordinary degree, many of the elements of greatness. He had genius, strong passions, quick sensibility, and vehement enthusiasm for the grand and the beautiful. There was something about him which ennobled tergiversation itself. He often went wrong, very wrong. But, to quote the language of Wordsworth, Bute, to the personal favour of the sovereign, but to the middle class of Englishmen; that he inspired that class with a firm confidence in his integrity and ability; that, backed by them, he forced an unwilling court and an unwilling oligarchy to admit him to an ample share of power; and that he used his power in such a manner as clearly proved him to have sought it, not for the sake of profit or patronage, but from a wish to establish for himself a great and durable reputation by means of eminent services rendered to the State. The family of Pitt was wealthy and respectable. His grandfather was Governor of Madras, and brought back from India that celebrated diamond which the Regent Orleans, by the advice of Saint Simon, purchased for upwards of two millions of livres, and which is still considered as the most precious of the crown jewels of France. Governor Pitt bought estates and rotten boroughs, and sat in the House of Commons for Old Sarum. His son Robert was at one time member for Old Sarum, and at another for "He still retained, 'Mid such abasement, what he had received From nature, an intense and glowing mind." In an age of low and dirty prostitution, in the age of Dodington and Sandys, it was something to have a Oakhampton. Robert had two sons |