Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 362, December 1845

While o'er their eyes soft memories seem to play,
That paint a friend or father far away.
A richer charm her ripen'd form displays,
A halo round her shines with holier rays;
And if at times, a shade of pensive grace
Pass like a cloud across her earnest face,
Yet faithful tokens the glad truth impart,
That deeper happiness pervades her heart.
Jove latest spoke: "One boon remains," he said,
And bent serenely his ambrosial head;
"The last, best boon, which I alone bestow;"
Then bade the waters of Affliction flow.
The golden dream was dimm'd; a darken'd room
Scarce show'd where dire disease had shed its gloom.
A little child in death extended lay,
Still round her linger'd the departing ray.
Another pallid face appear'd, where Life
With its fell foe maintain'd a doubtful strife.
Long was the contest; changeful hopes and fears
Now sunk the Mother's soul, now dried her tears.
At last a steady line of dawning light
Show'd that her son was saved, and banish'd night.
Though sad her heart, of one fair pledge bereft,
She sees and owns the bounties Heaven hath left.
In natural drops her anguish finds relief,
And leaves the Matron beautified by grief;
While consolation, beaming from above,
Fills her with new-felt gratitude and love.
O happy He! before whose waking eyes,
So bright a vision may resplendent rise —
The New Pandora, by the Gods designed,
Not now the bane, but blessing of Mankind!

REIGN OF GEORGE THE THIRD.[33 - Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third, by Horace Walpole. From the MSS. Edited, with Notes, by Sir D. La Marchant, Bart. London: Bentley.]

It is scarcely theoretical to say, that every century has a character of its own. The human mind is essentially progressive in Europe. The accumulations of past knowledge, experience, and impulse, are perpetually preparing changes on the face of society; and we may fairly regard every hundred years as the period maturing those changes into visible form. Thus, the fifteenth century was the age of discovery in the arts, in the powers of nature, and in the great provinces of the globe: the sixteenth exhibited the general mind under the impressions of religion – the Reformation, the German wars for liberty and faith, and the struggles of Protestantism in France. The seventeenth was the brilliant period of scientific advance, of continental literature, and of courtly pomp and power. The eighteenth was the period of politics; every court of Europe was engaged in the game of political rivalry; the European balance became the test, the labour, and the triumph of statesmanship. The negotiator was then the great instrument of public action. Diplomacy assumed a shape, and Europe was governed by despatches. The genius of Frederick the Second restored war to its early rank among the elements of national life; but brilliant as his wars were, they were subservient to the leading feature of the age. They were fought, not, like the battles of the old conquerors, for fame, but for influence – not to leave the king without an enemy, but to leave his ambassadors without an opponent – less to gain triumphs, than to ensure treaties: they all began and ended in diplomacy!

It is remarkable, that this process was exhibited in Europe alone. In the East, comprehending two-thirds of human kind, no change was made since the conquests of Mahomet. That vast convulsion, in which the nervousness of frenzy had given the effeminate spirit of the Oriental the strength of the soldier and the ambition of universal conqueror, had no sooner wrought its purpose than it passed away, leaving the general mind still more exhausted than before. The Saracen warrior sank into the peasant, and the Arab was again lost in his sands; the Turk alone survived, exhibiting splendour without wealth, and pride without power – a decaying image of Despotism, which nothing but the jealousy of the European saved from falling under the first assault. Such is the repressive strength of evil government; progress, the most salient principle of our nature, dies before it. And man, of all beings the most eager for acquirement, and the most restless under all monotony of time, place, and position, becomes like the dog or the mule, and generation after generation lives and dies with no more consciousness of the capacities of his existence, than the root which the animal devours, or the tree under which it was born.

In England, the eighteenth century was wholly political. It was a continual struggle through all the difficulties belonging to a free constitution, exposed to the full discussion of an intellectual people. Without adopting the offensive prejudice, which places the individual ability of the Englishmen in the first rank; or without doubting that nature has distributed nearly an equal share of personal ability among all European nations; we may, not unjustly, place the national mind of England in the very highest rank of general capacity – if that is the most intellectual nation, by which the public intellect is most constantly employed, in which all the great questions of society are most habitually referred to the decision of the intellect, and in which that decision is the most irresistible in its effects, no nation of Europe can stand upon equal ground with the English. For, in what other nation is the public intellect in such unwearied exercise, in such continual demand, and in such unanswerable power?

In what other nation of the world (excepting, within those few years, France; and that most imperfectly) has public opinion ever been appealed to? But, in England, to what else is there any appeal? Or, does not the foreign mind bear some resemblance to the foreign landscape – exhibiting barren though noble elevations, spots of singular though obscure beauty among its recesses, and even in its wildest scenes a capacity of culture? – while, in the mind of England, like its landscape, that culture has already laid its hand upon the soil; has crowned the hill with verdure, and clothed the vale with fertility; has run its ploughshare along the mountain side, and led the stream from its brow; has sought out every finer secret of the scene, and given the last richness of cultivation to the whole.

From the beginning of the reign of Anne, all was a contest of leading statesmen at the head of parties. Those contests exhibit great mental power, singular system, and extraordinary knowledge of the art of making vast bodies of men minister to the personal objects of avarice and ambition. But they do no honour to the moral dignity of England. All revolutions are hazardous to principle. A succession of revolutions have always extinguished even the pretence to principle. The French Revolution is not the only one which made a race of girouettes. The political life of England, from the death of Anne to the reign of George the Third, was a perpetual turning of the weathercock. Whig and Tory were the names of distinction. But their subordinates were of as many varieties of feature as the cargo of a slave-ship; the hue might be the same, but the jargon was that of Babel. It was perhaps fortunate for the imperial power of England, that while she was thus humiliating the national morality, which is the life-blood of nations; her reckless and perpetual enemy beyond the Channel had lost all means of being her antagonist. The French sceptre had fallen into the hands of a prince, who had come to the throne a debauchee; and to whom the throne seemed only a scene for the larger display of his vices. The profligacy of Louis-Quatorze had been palliated by his passion for splendour, among a dissolute people who loved splendour much, and hated profligacy little. But the vices of Louis the Fifteenth were marked by a grossness which degraded them in the eye even of popular indulgence, and prepared the nation for the overthrow of the monarchy. In this period, religion, the great purifier of national council, maintained but a struggling existence. The Puritanism of the preceding century had crushed the Church of England; and the restoration of the monarchy had given the people a saturnalia. Religion had been confounded with hypocrisy, until the people had equally confounded freedom with infidelity. The heads of the church, chosen by freethinking administrations, were chosen more for the suppleness than for the strength of their principles; and while the people were thus taught to regard churchmen as tools, and the ministers to use them as dependents, the cause of truth sank between both. The Scriptures are the life of religion. It can no more subsist in health without them, than the human frame can subsist without food; it may have the dreams of the enthusiast, or the frenzy of the monk; but, for all the substantial and safe purposes of the human heart, its life is gone for ever. It has been justly remarked, that the theological works of that day, including the sermons, might, in general, have been written if Christianity had never existed. The sermons were chiefly essays, of the dreariest kind on the most commonplace topics of morals. The habit of reading these discourses from the pulpit, a habit so fatal to all impression, speedily rendered the preachers as indifferent as their auditory; and if we were to name the period when religion had most fallen into decay in the public mind, we should pronounce it the half century which preceded the reign of George the Third.

On the subject of pulpit eloquence there are some remarks in one of the reviews of the late Sydney Smith, expressed with all the shrewdness, divested of the levity of that writer, who had keenly observed the popular sources of failure.

"The great object of modern sermons is, to hazard nothing. Their characteristic is decent debility; which alike guards their authors from ludicrous errors, and precludes them from striking beauties. Yet it is curious to consider, how a body of men so well educated as the English clergy, can distinguish themselves so little in a species of composition, to which it is their peculiar duty, as well as their ordinary habit, to attend. To solve this difficulty, it should be remembered that the eloquence of the bar and of the senate force themselves into notice, power, and wealth." He then slightly guards against the conception, that eloquence should be the sole source of preferment; or even "a common cause of preferment." But he strongly, and with great appearance of truth, attributes the want of public effect to the want of those means by which that effect is secured in every other instance.

"Pulpit discourses have insensibly dwindled from speaking into reading; a practice of itself sufficient to stifle every germ of eloquence. It is only by the fresh feelings of the heart that mankind can be very powerfully affected. What can be more unfortunate, than an orator delivering stale indignation, and fervour of a week old; turning over whole pages of violent passions, written out in German text; reading the tropes and metaphors into which he is hurried by the ardour of his mind; and so affected, at a preconcerted line and page, that he is unable to proceed any further?"

This criticism was perfectly true of sermons forty years ago, when it was written. Times are changed since, and changed for the better. The pulpit is no longer ashamed of the doctrines of Christianity, as too harsh for the ears of a classic audience, or too familiar for the ears of the people. Still there are no rewards in the Church, for that great faculty, or rather that great combination of faculties, which commands all the honours of the senate and the bar. A clerical Demosthenes might find his triumph in the shillings of a charity sermon, but he must never hope for a Stall.

We now revert to the curious, inquisitive, and gossiping historian of the time. Walpole, fond of French manners, delighting in the easy sarcasm, and almost saucy levity, of French "Memoirs," and adopting, in all its extent, the confession, (then so fashionable on the Continent,) that the perfection of writing was to be formed in their lively persiflage, evidently modelled his "History" on the style of the Sevignés and St Simons. But he was altogether their superior. If he had been a chamberlain in the court of Louis XV., he might have been as frivolously witty, and as laughingly sarcastic, as any Frenchman who ever sat at the feet of a court mistress, or whoever looked for fame among the sallies of a petit souper. But England was an atmosphere which compelled him to a manlier course. The storms of party were not to be stemmed by a wing of gossamer. The writer had bold facts, strong principles, and the struggles of powerful minds to deal with, and their study gave him a strength not his own.

Walpole was fond of having a hero. In private life, George Selwyn was his Admirable Crichton; in public, Charles Townshend. Charles was unquestionably a man of wit. Yet his wit rather consisted in dexterity of language than in brilliancy of conception. He was also eloquent in Parliament; though his charm evidently consisted more in happiness of phrase, than in richness, variety, or vigour, of thought. On the whole, he seems to have been made to amuse rather than to impress, and to give a high conception of his general faculties than to produce either conviction by his argument, or respect by the solid qualities of his genius. Still, he must have been an extraordinary man. Walpole describes his conduct and powers, as exhibited on one of those days of sharp debate which preceded the tremendous discussions of the American war. The subject was a bill for regulating the dividends of the East India Company – the topic was extremely trite, and apparently trifling. But any perch will answer for the flight of such bird. "It was on that day," says Walpole, "and on that occasion, that Charles Townshend displayed, in a latitude beyond belief, the amazing powers of his capacity, and the no less amazing incongruities of his character." Early in the day he had opened the business, by taking on himself the examination of the Company's conduct, had made a calm speech on the subject, and even went so far as to say, "that he hoped he had atoned for the inconsiderateness of his past life, by the care which he had taken of that business." He then went home to dinner. In his absence a motion was made, which Conway, the secretary of state, not choosing to support alone, it being virtually Townshend's own measure besides, sent to hurry him back to the House. "He returned about eight in the evening, half drunk with champagne," as Walpole says, (which, however, was subsequently denied,) and more intoxicated with spirits. He then instantly rose to speak, without giving himself time to learn any thing, except that the motion had given alarm. He began by vowing that he had not been consulted on the motion – a declaration which astonished every body, there being twelve persons round him at the moment, who had been in consultation with him that very morning, and with his assistance had drawn up the motion on his own table, and who were petrified at his unparalleled effrontery. But before he sat down, he had poured forth, as Walpole says, "a torrent of wit, humour, knowledge, absurdity, vanity, and fiction, heightened by all the graces of comedy, the happiness of quotation, and the buffoonery of farce. To the purpose of the question he said not a syllable. It was a descant on the times, a picture of parties, of their leaders, their hopes, and effects. It was an encomium and a satire on himself; and when he painted the pretensions of birth, riches, connexions, favours, titles, while he effected to praise Lord Rockingham and that faction, he yet insinuated that nothing but parts like his own were qualified to preside. And while he less covertly arraigned the wild incapacity of Lord Chatham, he excited such murmurs of wonder, admiration, applause, laughter, pity, and scorn, that nothing was so true as the sentence with which he concluded – when, speaking of government, he said, that it had become what he himself had often been called – the weathercock."

Walpole exceeds even his usual measure of admiration, in speaking of this masterly piece of extravagance. "Such was the wit, abundance, and impropriety of this speech," says he, "that for some days men could talk or enquire of nothing else. 'Did you hear Charles Townshend's champagne speech,' was the universal question. The bacchanalian enthusiasm of Pindar flowed in torrents less rapid and less eloquent, and inspired less delight, than Townshend's imagery, which conveyed meaning in every sentence. It was Garrick acting extempore scenes of Congreve." He went to supper with Walpole at Conway's afterwards, where, the flood of his gaiety not being exhausted, he kept the table in a roar till two in the morning. A part of this entertainment, however, must have found his auditory in a condition as unfit for criticism as himself. Claret till "two in the morning," might easily disqualify a convivial circle from the exercise of too delicate a perception. And a part of Townshend's facetiousness on that occasion consisted in mimicking his own wife, and a woman of rank with whom he fancied himself in love. He at last gave up from mere bodily lassitude. Walpole happily enough illustrates those talents and their abuse by an allusion to those eastern tales, in which a benevolent genius endows a being with supernatural excellence on some points, while a malignant genius counteracts the gift by some qualification which perpetually baffles and perverts it. The story, however, of Charles Townshend's tipsiness is thus contradicted by a graver authority, Sir George Colebrook, in his Memoirs.

"Mr Townshend loved good living, but had not a strong stomach. He committed therefore frequent excesses, considering his constitution; which would not have been intemperance in another. He was supposed, for instance, to have made a speech in the heat of wine, when that was really not the case. It was a speech in which he treated with great levity, but with wonderful art, the characters of the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne, whom, though his colleagues in office, he entertained a sovereign contempt for, and heartily wished to get rid of. He had a black riband over one of his eyes that day, having tumbled out of bed, probably in a fit of epilepsy; and this added to the impression made on his auditors that he was tipsy. Whereas, it was a speech he had meditated a great while upon, and it was only by accident that it found utterance that day. I write with certainty, because Sir George Yonge and I were the only persons who dined with him, and we had but one bottle of champagne after dinner; General Conway having repeatedly sent messengers to press his return to the House."

This brings the miracle down to the human standard, yet that standard was high, and the man who could excite this admiration, in a House which contained so great a number of eminent speakers, and which could charm the caustic spirit of Walpole into the acknowledgment that his speech "was the most singular pleasure of the kind he had ever tasted," must have been an extraordinary performance, even if his instrument was not of the highest tone of oratory. A note from the Duke of Grafton's manuscript memoirs also contradicts, on Townshend's own authority, his opinion of the "wild incapacity of Lord Chatham." The note says: —

"On the night preceding Lord Chatham's first journey to Bath, Mr Charles Townshend was for the first time summoned to the Cabinet. The business was on a general view and statement of the actual situation and interests of the various powers in Europe. Lord Chatham had taken the lead in this consideration in so masterly a manner, as to raise the admiration and desire of us all to co-operate with him in forwarding his views. Mr Townshend was particularly astonished, and owned to me, as I was carrying him in my carriage home, that Lord Chatham had just shown to us what inferior animals we were, and that as much as he had seen of him before, he did not conceive till that night his superiority to be so transcendant."

Walpole writes with habitual bitterness of the great Lord Chatham. The recollection of his early opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, seems to have made him an unfaithful historian, wherever this extraordinary man's name comes within his page; but at the period of those discussions, it seems not improbable that the vigour of Chatham's understanding had in some degree given way to the tortures of his disease. He had suffered from gout at an early period of life; and as this is a disease remarkably affected by the mind, the perpetual disturbances of a public life seem to have given it a mastery over the whole frame of the great minister. Walpole talks in unjustifiable language of his "haughty sterility of talents." But there seems to be more truth in his account of the caprices of this powerful understanding in his retirement. Walpole calls it the "reality of Lord Chatham's madness." Still, we cannot see much in those instances, beyond the temper naturally resulting from an agonizing disease. When the Pynsent estate fell to him, he removed to it, and sold his house and grounds at Hayes – "a place on which he had wasted prodigious sums, and which yet retained small traces of expense, great part having been consumed in purchasing contiguous tenements, to free himself from all neighbourhood. Much had gone in doing and undoing, and not a little in planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and impatient habits could brook no delay. Nor were those the sole circumstances which marked his caprice. His children he could not bear under the same roof, nor communications from room to room, nor whatever he thought promoted noise. A winding passage between his house and children was built with the same view. When, at the beginning of his second administration, he fixed at North End by Hampstead, he took four or five houses successively, as fast as Mr Dingley his landlord went into them, still, as he said, to ward off the houses of the neighbourhood."

Walpole relates another anecdote equally inconclusive. At Pynsent, a bleak hill bounded his view. He ordered his gardener to have it planted with evergreens. The man asked "with what sorts." He replied, "With cedars and cypresses." "Bless me, my lord," replied the gardener, "all the nurseries in this county would not furnish a hundredth part." "No matter, send for them from London: and they were brought by land carriage." Certainly, there was not much in this beyond the natural desire of every improver to shut out a disagreeable object, by putting an agreeable one in its place. His general object was the natural one of preventing all noise – a point of importance with every sufferer under a wakeful and miserable disease. His appetite was delicate and fanciful, and a succession of chickens were kept boiling and roasting at every hour, to be ready whenever he should call. He at length grew weary of his residence and, after selling Hayes, took a longing to return there. After considerable negotiation with Mr Thomas Walpole the purchaser, he obtained it again, and we hear no more of his madness.

The session was one of continual intrigues, constant exhibitions of subtlety amongst the leaders of the party, which at this distance of time are only ridiculous, and intricate discussions, which are now among the lumber of debate. Townshend, if he gained nothing else, gained the freedom of the city for his conduct on the East India and Dividend bills, for which, as Walpole says, "he deserved nothing but censure." A contemptuous epigram appeared on the occasion by "somebody a little more sagacious" – that "somebody" probably being Walpole himself:

"The joke of Townshend's box is little known,
Great judgment in the thing the cits have shown;
The compliment was an expedient clever,
To rid them of the like expense for ever.
Of so burlesque a choice the example sure
For city boxes must all longing cure,
The honor'd Ostracism at Athens fell,
Soon as Hyperbolus had got the shell."

It is scarcely possible to think that an epigram of this heavy order could have been praised by Walpole, if his criticism had not been tempered by the tenderness of paternity.

We then have a character of a man embalmed in the contempt poured upon him by Junius – the Duke of Grafton. Though less bitter, it is equally scornful. "Hitherto," says Walpole, "he had passed for a man of much obstinacy and firmness, of strict honour, devoid of ambition, and, though reserved, more diffident than designing. He retained so much of this character, as to justify those who had mistaken the rest. If he precipitated himself into the most sudden and inextricable contradictions, at least he pursued the object of the moment with inflexible ardour. If he abandoned himself to total negligence of business, in pursuit of his sports and pleasures, the love of power never quitted him; and, when his will was disputed, no man was more imperiously arbitrary. If his designs were not deeply laid, at least they were conducted in profound silence. He rarely pardoned those who did not guess his inclination. It was necessary to guess, so rare was any instance of his unbosoming himself to either friends or confidants. Why his honour had been so highly rated I can less account, except that he had advertised it, and that obstinate young men are apt to have high notions, before they have practised the world, and essayed their own virtue."

At length, after a vast variety of intrigues, which threw the public life of those days into the most contemptible point of view, the King being made virtually a cipher, while the families of the Hertfords, Buckinghams, and Rockinghams trafficked the high offices of state as children would barter toys; an administration was tardily formed. Walpole, who seemed to take a sort of dilettante pleasure in constructing those intrigues, and making himself wretched at their failure, while nobody suffered him to take advantage of their success; now gave himself a holiday, and went to relax in Paris for six weeks – his relaxation consisting of gossip amongst the literary ladies of the capital. During his absence an event happened which, though it did not break up the ministry, yet must have had considerable effect in its influence on the House of Commons. This was the death of the celebrated Charles Townshend, on the 4th of September 1767, in the forty-second year of his age. The cause of his death was a neglected fever; if even this did not arise from his carelessness of health, and those habits which, if not amounting to intemperance, were certainly trespasses on his constitution. Walpole speaks of him with continual admiration of his genius, and continual contempt of his principles. He also thinks, that he had arrived at his highest fame, or, in his peculiar phrase, "that his genius could have received no accession of brightness, while his faults only promised multiplication." Walpole, with no pretence to rival, probably envied this singular personage; for, whenever he begins by panegyric, he uniformly ends with a sting. One of the Notes gives an extract on Sir George Colebrook's Memoirs, which perhaps places his faculties in a more favourable point of view than the high-coloured eulogium of Burke, or the polished insinuations of Walpole. Sir George tells us, that Townshend's object was to be prime minister, and that he would doubtless have attained that object had he lived to see the Duke of Grafton's resignation. Lord North succeeded him as chancellor of the exchequer, and Townshend would evidently have preceded him as prime minister. "As a private man, his friends were used to say, that they should not see his like again. Though they were often the butts of his wit, they always returned to his company with fresh delight, which they would not have done had there been either malice or rancour in what he said. He loved society, and in his choice of friends preferred those over whom he had a decided superiority of talent. He was satisfied when he had put the table in a roar, and he did not like to see it done by another. When Garrick and Foote were present, he took the lead, and hardly allowed them an opportunity of showing their talents for mimicry, because he could excel them in their own art. He shone particularly in taking off the principal members of the House of Commons. Among the few whom he feared was Mr Selwyn, and at a dinner at Lord Gower's they had a trial of skill, in which Mr Selwyn prevailed. When the company broke up, Mr Townshend, to show that he had no animosity, carried him in his carriage to White's; and, as they parted, Selwyn could not help saying – 'Remember, this is the first set-down you have given me to-day.'"

As Townshend lived at a considerable expense, and had little paternal fortune, he speculated occasionally in both the French and English funds. One of the incidents related by Sir George, and without a syllable of censure too, throws on him an imputation of trickery which, in our later day, would utterly destroy any public man. "When he was chancellor of the exchequer, he came in his nightgown to a dinner given by the Duke of Grafton to several of the principal men of the city to settle the loan. After dinner, when the terms were settled, and every body present wished to introduce some friend on the list of subscribers, he pretended to cast up the sums already admitted, said the loan was full, huddled up his papers, got into a chair, and returned home, reserving to himself by this manœuvre a large share of the loan." An act of this kind exhibits the honesty of the last age in a very equivocal point of view. If proud of nothing else, we may be proud of the public sense of responsibility; in our day, it may be presumed that such an act would be impossible, for it would inevitably involve the ruin of the perpetrator, followed by the ruin of any ministry which would dare to defend him.

At this period died a brother of the king, Edward Duke of York, a man devoted to pleasure, headstrong in his temper, and ignorant in his conceptions. "Immoderate travelling, followed by immoderate balls and entertainments," had long kept his blood in a peculiar state of accessibility to disease. He died of a putrid fever. Walpole makes a panegyric on the Duke of Gloucester, his brother; of which a part may be supposed due to the Duke's marriage with Lady Waldegrave, a marriage which provoked the indignation of the King, and which once threatened political evils of a formidable nature. Henry, the Duke of Cumberland, was also an unfortunate specimen of the blood royal. He is described as having the babbling loquacity of the Duke of York, without his talents; as at once arrogant and low; presuming on his rank as a prince, and degrading himself by an association with low company. Still, we are to remember Walpole's propensity to sarcasm, the enjoyment which he seems to have felt in shooting his brilliant missiles at all ranks superior to his own; and his especial hostility to George the Third, one of the honestest monarchs that ever sat upon a throne.

In those days the composition of ministries depended altogether upon the high families. – The peerage settled every thing amongst themselves. A few of their dependents were occasionally taken into office; but all the great places were distributed among a little clique, who thus constituted themselves the real masters of the empire. Walpole's work has its value, in letting us into the secrets of a conclave, which at once shows us the singular emptiness of its constituent parts, and the equally singular authority with which they seem to have disposed of both the king and the people. We give a scene from the Historian, which would make an admirable fragment of the Rehearsal, and which wanted only the genius of Sheridan to be an admirable pendant to Mr Puff's play in the Critic. "On the 20th a meeting was held at the Duke of Newcastle's, of Lord Rockingham, the Duke of Richmond, and of Dowdeswell, with Newcastle himself on one part, and of the Duke of Bedford, Lord Weymouth, and Rigby on the other. The Duke of Bedford had powers from Grenville to act for him; but did not seem to like Lord Buckingham's taking on himself to name to places. On the latter's asking what friends they wished to prefer, Rigby said, with his cavalier bluntness – Take the Court Calendar and give them one, two, three thousand pounds a-year! Bedford observed – They had said nothing on measures. Mr Grenville would insist on the sovereignty of this country over America being asserted. Lord Rockingham replied – He would never allow it to be a question whether he had given up this country – he never had. The Duke insisted on a declaration. The Duke of Richmond said – We may as well demand one from you, that you will never disturb that country again. Neither would yield. However, though they could not agree on measures; as the distribution of place was more the object of their thoughts and of their meeting, they reverted to that topic. Lord Rockingham named Mr Conway. Bedford started; said he had no notion of Conway; had thought he was to return to the military line. The Duke of Richmond said it was true, Mr Conway did not desire a civil place; did not know whether he would be persuaded to accept one; but they were so bound to him for his resignation, and thought him so able, they must insist. The Duke of Bedford said – Conway was an officer sans tache, but not a minister sans tache. Rigby said – Not one of the present cabinet should be saved. Dowdeswell asked – 'What! not one?' 'No.' 'What! not Charles Townshend.' 'Oh!' said Rigby, 'that is different. Besides, he has been in opposition.' 'So has Conway,' said Dowdeswell. 'He has voted twice against the court, Townshend but once.' 'But,' said Rigby, 'Conway is Bute's man.' 'Pray,' said Dowdeswell, 'is not Charles Townshend Bute's?' 'Ah! but Conway is governed by his brother Hertford, who is Bute's.' 'But Lady Ailesbury is a Scotchwoman.' 'So is Lady Dalkeith.' Those ladies had been widows and were now married, (the former to Conway, the latter to Townshend.) From this dialogue the assembly fell to wrangling, and broke up quarrelling. So high did the heats go, that the Conways ran about the town publishing the issue of the conference, and taxing the Bedfords with treachery."

Notwithstanding this collision, at once so significant, and so trifling – at once a burlesque on the gravity of public affairs, and a satire on the selfishness of public men – on the same evening, the Duke of Bedford sent to desire another interview, to which Lord Rockingham yielded, but the Duke of Bedford refused to be present. So much, however, were the minds on both sides ulcerated by former and recent disputes, and so incompatible were their views, that the second meeting broke up in a final quarrel, and Lord Rockingham released the other party from all their engagements. The Duke of Bedford desired they might still continue friends, or at least to agree to oppose together. Lord Rockingham said no, "they were broken for ever."

It was at this meeting that the Duke of Newcastle appeared for the last time in a political light. Age and feebleness had at length worn out that busy passion for intrigue, which power had not been able to satiate, nor disgrace correct. He languished above a year longer, but was heard of no more on the scene of affairs. (He died in November 1768.)

A remarkable circumstance in all those arrangements is, that we hear nothing of either the king or the people. The king is of course applied to to sign and seal, but simply as a head clerk. The people are occasionally mentioned at the end of every seven years; but in the interim all was settled in the parlours of the peerage! The scene which we have just given was absolutely puerile, if it were not scandalous; and, without laying ourselves open to the charge of superstition on such subjects, we might almost regard the preservation of the empire as directly miraculous, while power was in the hands of such men as the Butes and Newcastles, the Bedfords and Rockinghams, of the last century. It is not even difficult to trace to this intolerable system, alike the foreign calamities and the internal convulsions during this period. Whether America could, by any possibility of arrangement, have continued a British colony up to the present time, may be rationally doubted. A vast country, rapidly increasing in wealth and population, would have been an incumbrance, rather than an addition, to the power of England. If the patronage of her offices continued in the hands of ministers, it must have supplied them with the means of buying up every man who was to be bought in England. It would have been the largest fund of corruption ever known in the world. Or, if the connexion continued, with the population of America doubling in every five-and-twenty years, the question must in time have arisen, whether England or America ought to be the true seat of government. The probable consequence, however, would have been separation; and as this could scarcely be effected by amicable means, the result might have been a war of a much more extensive, wasteful, and formidable nature, than that which divided the two countries sixty-five years ago.

But all the blunders of the American war, nay the war itself, may be still almost directly traceable to the arrogance of the oligarchy. Too much accustomed to regard government as a natural appendage to their birth, they utterly forgot the true element of national power – the force of public opinion. Inflated with a sense of their personal superiority, they looked with easy indifference or studied contempt on every thing that was said or done by men whose genealogy was not registered in the red book. Of America – a nation of Englishmen – and of its proceedings, they talked, as a Russian lord might talk of his serfs. Some of them thought, that a Stamp act would frighten the sturdy free-holders of the Western World into submission! others talked of reducing them to obedience by laying a tax on their tea! others prescribed a regimen of writs and constables! evidently regarding the American farmers as they regarded the poachers and paupers on their own demesnes. All this arose from stupendous ignorance; but it was ignorance engendered by pride, by exclusiveness of rank, and by the arrogance of caste. So excessive was this exclusiveness, that Burke, though the most extraordinary man of his time, and one of the most memorable of any time, could never obtain a seat in the cabinet; where such triflers as Newcastle, such figures of patrician pedantry as Buckingham, such shallow intriguers as the Bedfords, and such notorious characters as the Sandwiches, played with power, like children with the cups and balls of their nursery. Lord North, with all his wit, his industry, and his eloquence, owed his admission into the cabinet, to his being the son of the Earl of Guilford. Charles Fox, though marked by nature, from his first entrance into public life, for the highest eminence of the senate, would never have been received into the government class, but for his casual connexion with the House of Richmond. Thus, they knew nothing of the real powers of that infinite multitude, which, however below the peerage, forms the country. They thought that a few frowns from Downing Street could extinguish the resistance of millions, three thousand miles off, with muskets in their hands, inflamed by a sense of wrong, whether fancied or true, and insensible to the gatherings of a brow however coroneted and antique.