1815-1821

N.B.—This book contains notes for Memoirs from the summer of 1815 [to the autumn of 1821].

It was not begun till 1830, and _many_ of the facts are from memory, unassisted by notes taken at the time, though refreshed generally by reference to some correspondence or document.—V.H.

When I transcribed my notes for Memoirs in 1825, I meant that they should end at the close of the year 1814. I proposed to confine all my future labours of the kind to the completion of two supplementary chapters already begun, one of which related to foreign characters and events, and is now brought down to the year 1815,[203] and the other,[204] still in hand, relates to such as having fallen within my observation either in England or elsewhere before 1815, seem to me, albeit unconnected with politics, not destitute of interest.

It is not necessary to account, much less to apologise, for having at one time abandoned a task which I had voluntarily imposed upon myself. It may with more reason be expected that I should explain my motives in resuming it now. The truth is, that the third expulsion of the Bourbons from France in July, 1830, has in some little degree revived in my breast the spirits and hopes which animated me at an earlier period of life:

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammæ.

Moreover, the accession of King William, to whom my son[205] is attached both by connection and gratitude, makes it possible that I may be privy to the secret causes of public and party transactions, although neither my age, position, nor inclinations render it likely that I either can or shall take a more active part in them than I have done for fifteen years past.[206] Of the events of these fifteen years my report must be rapid and imperfect. I have taken little share in party councils during that period, and have preserved few memorials of the events, especially of the first five.

I returned to England in the summer of 1815—the day, I believe, that the Emperor Napoleon was brought to our shores in a British man-of-war, and after the second restoration of the Bourbons had been virtually effected. To both those restorations it is strange but true that the personal character and predilections of George IV. had mainly contributed. On the first occasion, without the knowledge of Lord Castlereagh and the Ministers, he connived at, if he did not contrive, the arrival of the Bourbon Princes at Bordeaux and other places in France, and during the negotiations at Chatillon he resorted to many underhand manœuvres to prevent any termination of them which did not include the restoration of the pretended legitimate dynasty.

To the presence, intrigues, and misrepresentations of the almost forgotten faction of the Bourbons, as well as to a variety of mistakes and accidents elsewhere recounted,[207] the result of the Emperor of Russia’s arrival at Paris in 1814 is mainly to be attributed. Austria was averse, Russia was indifferent to, the restoration of the Bourbons, and Prussia was exclusively bent on vengeance and aggrandisement; and the Regent of England was almost the only man in his own councils, as well as the only Prince in the Confederacy, really desirous of accomplishing that object. It is not perhaps equally known, but it is equally true, that there was, in 1815, equal and greater indifference in the Allied Powers, amounting to an unwillingness to confer on Louis XVIII. all the advantages which the prodigious efforts of Europe had wrested from his antagonist. The experiences of one year have given them an insight into the personal character of the restored Princes, and still more of the ungrateful and unreasonable faction which accompanied them. This would have led Austria, Russia, and Prussia to acquiesce in any arrangement cheerfully which afforded a prospect of preserving peace, even though it had altered what is miscalled the legitimate succession of the Monarchy.

The Prince Regent and Duke of Wellington exploded all such notions. They treated the restoration of Louis XVIII. as an indispensable part of the arrangement. The Duke of Wellington asked Louis if he preferred being placed on his throne by Frenchmen or by foreigners. He answered, “Decidedly by Frenchmen.” “Then,” replied Wellington, “there is but one method and one man: you must employ Fouché.”[208] Reluctantly, and with a bad grace, Louis consented. Fouché became Minister. But ere long Fouché and the base, runaway emigrants whom he restored affected to be so national that they treated the foreigners, and even the Duke of Wellington himself, with indignity. The courtiers and the King himself turned their backs upon him in so marked a way that the Duke resented it, and did not return to the Tuileries till Monsieur (Charles X.) conveyed an apology to him.[209] He wrote an account of this transaction home. The letter was among those confided to and printed by Gurwood (from whom I had the relation), but suppressed in the publication.

During my absence from England in 1815, many changes had occurred in the aspect of the party with whom I had uniformly acted. Mr. Whitbread, who had for many years much influence, good and bad, on its fortunes, had recently put a violent termination to his ever-active but useful existence.[210] That lamentable event, as well as many of his defects, might be traced to a restless impatience of contradiction, which, resulting perhaps from physical causes, was unaccountably blended in his very singular character with the earnest affection for individuals and the most unquestionable benevolence towards mankind. Too honourable and too conscientious to do what he thought wrong, he had, nevertheless, such an appetite for applause, and had been so pampered with it by dependants and sycophants, that when he foresaw it was about to cease or to be converted by many who had administered it into censure and resistance, he mistook their discontent with him for self-reproach, and he could not endure it.

Such was the real history of his suicide. He had extraordinary readiness and indefatigable application in business, a warm heart, great decision of character, and a good understanding. Though not without some imagination, he was lamentably deficient in taste; yet by dint of earnestness, assiduity, and practice he had made himself little less than an orator and certainly a very able speaker in Parliament. Vanity often made him impracticable. Flatterers and dependants engrossed his society, and not unfrequently perverted his manners and judgment. His death, though a great loss to the public, and yet more to his neighbourhood and country, was more likely to heal than exasperate any dissension in Opposition, for he loved to mark distinctions favourable to his own popularity, and was, moreover, personally obnoxious to the Grenvilles.

But there were other alterations in the state of the party. Our leaders had espoused very opposite principles on one great branch of commercial policy which was brought into agitation in 1814 and 1815. Lauderdale had been the secret instigator, and was the open champion, of the restrictive Corn Law[211] which Ministers had adopted. Grey’s real opinion, fortified and perhaps inculcated by Lauderdale, leant towards any measure that kept up the price of that article, and prevented any sudden reduction of rents. Lord Grenville and Mr. Horner were decidedly friends to a free trade; and the authority and sound philosophy of such men, coinciding with the natural prejudices of the populace and the mischievous clamour of some seditious writers, constituted a formidable opposition to a very questionable, as well as unpopular, policy. Lord Grey, after hesitating between his own and Lauderdale’s opinion on one side, and a desire of harassing the Ministry under the sanction of Lord Grenville on the other, pressed for a postponement of the question, and steered a course deeply resented by Lauderdale, not quite agreeable to either party, nor perhaps entirely creditable to himself.[212] He and Lord Grenville had differed yet more openly on the war, the latter reverting to his anti-Jacobin prejudices, and Grey maintaining nobly and ably the wisdom and justice of not interfering. But the war was terminated by the victory of Waterloo, the occupation of Paris, the forced restoration of Louis XVIII., and the mass of treaties negotiated by the Prince Regent, Duke of Wellington, and Lord Castlereagh, and vainly denominated by them the final settlement of Europe. That immediate cause of difference was therefore extinct. Yet there remained, in truth, between the Foxite and Grenville branches of Whigs no real bond of union but a concurrence of opinion on the subject of Roman Catholics and Ireland, and the recollection of mutual kindnesses and services during a political connection of ten years.

The latter feeling was, I believe, strong in Lord Grenville’s honourable mind, notwithstanding some tenacity of opinion for which his family has always been remarkable, and from which he is not entirely exempt. It could not be stronger in his mind than it was in mine, but I am aware that many Whigs, and among them persons of importance who differed with him less, felt very soon afterwards much more inclination to separate from him than myself.

Lord Grey did not come up to the meeting of Parliament in 1816. The treaties[213] were discussed in his absence; but Lord Grenville was so little disposed to court the Government that he arraigned without scruple or reserve every fault of omission or commission he could find in the treaty, and proposed an amendment which, while it lamented the power and territory left to France, dwelt yet more emphatically on the impolicy and danger of keeping a foreign force in that kingdom, and deprecated the necessity created by that measure of maintaining vast standing armies during peace. For that amendment, which he had accommodated as far as he could to my views, I voted. I signed, in common with eleven peers, a dissentient to its rejection. I moved no amendment of my own, but having said _not content_ without directing the House to the original address, I embodied in a short protest of my own the main objections to the treaty, namely, that it imposed the Bourbons on France, and sanctioned the principle of guaranteeing hereditary monarchies against the people, for whom and from whom they should alone derive their authority.

Many of the transactions at Paris, as well as the ungenerous treatment of Napoleon, were objectionable on principle and disgusting to the feelings of all who had a nature capable of justice or humanity to a fallen foe. Substantially, if not technically, the merit or guilt of such acts rests with the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington. If the removal of the works of art,[214] the demolition of sundry monuments, and other severe retributions of the kind were after the capitulation irregular and questionable; if the judicial murders of Labedoyère and Marshal Ney were direct violations of the articles of that capitulation; and if the detention and transportation of a dethroned and abdicated monarch by a foreign Power be a breach of the Law of Nations, as well as an unusual and harsh exercise of power, they will all be more or less stains on the character of the great General of the Confederacy, as well as on the Governments who sanctioned and the Ministerial agents who counselled or perpetrated such acts of violence or bad faith.

The Duke of Wellington did not, indeed, instigate, possibly he did not approve of, these public crimes, nor was he the official instrument in committing them.[215] Nothing perhaps but a weak reluctance to give advice unpleasant to Royalty restrained him from remonstrating against some of those acts. He must even then have been aware that they would tarnish the lustre of his achievements. He had, indeed, the bad taste on that and many subsequent occasions to speak loudly in disparagement of Frenchmen,[216] but bigotry or fanaticism in a cause he is much too sensible to feel, and personal resentment to Ney or Napoleon he could have none. He is said to have censured in private the appointment of Sir Hudson Lowe to St. Helena, foreseeing from his knowledge of the character of that gaoler that his usage of the illustrious prisoner would be neither humane nor decorous.[217] Such regret, if expressed, was never conveyed to the quarters where it might have rectified the mistake and alleviated the sufferings of the prisoner. Wellington preferred the odium of abetting the oppression of a great man to the hazard of losing Royal favour or incurring the resentment of official pride, by an act of humanity and generosity. He must abide by the consequences. History, if she does not brand him as an accessory in the guilt, will describe him in this instance as deficient in that magnanimity which is incapable of it, and which has been so justly extolled in our Black Prince. That great General, in circumstances not totally dissimilar, respected, soothed, and interceded for a fallen competitor or dethroned usurper,[218] whom the chances of war had placed at his disposal. With whom the cruel expedient of exiling Napoleon originated I do not know. I have reasons to believe that such a destination for him had been contemplated before he left the Isle of Elba.[219] When I, in private, upbraided Lord Liverpool with an act of harshness, so little of a piece with his general character and policy, he defended himself by the extreme difficulty of knowing what to do with such a prisoner.

The Prince Regent subsequently showed himself so full of rancour to the very memory of a man who had eclipsed the glory and assumed, with some of the vices, all the functions of Royalty, without having been born or bred to any such pernicious office, that the suspicion of posterity will fall chiefly upon him. Yet his first feeling, or at least his first exclamation, on receiving the famous letter, by no means bespoke the hatred he afterwards displayed to the writer! He is reported to have said, after glancing his eye over its contents, “Upon my word, a very proper letter: much more so, I must say, than any I ever received from Louis XVIII.” This commendation was extorted neither by the strange singularity of Napoleon’s fate, by the striking and pathetic selection of the topics, the apt allusion to Themistocles, or the short and emphatic style of the epistle, but by the title “Altesse” with which it commenced, and which for some reason or another, to me unknown, our Regent considered as more respectful and more appropriate to the station he then held than “Monseigneur.” But though struck with such profound display of knowledge in etiquette, as none, he deemed, but _porphyrogeniti_ and Germans could possess, it did not soften him, or, if it did, the compassion it excited was very transient indeed. He grudged even the asylum our laws afforded to the persecuted adherents of the fallen Emperor. He was cross at the attentions shown by fashionable society in London to Flahault[220] and other young men of the late Imperial Court, and he was bitterly incensed against me because the Duke of Sussex signed a dissentient to the bill for the detention of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The importance he attached to that incident, and the soreness expressed about it many years afterwards, are proofs, among many, of the very trifling, contracted, and personal view he took of all transactions, as well [as] of the inaccuracy of the reports with which his appetite for gossip was generally supplied. He imagined, or at least asserted, that both Lady Holland and myself had used very earnest persuasions to prevail on his brother Augustus to sign his name, whereas it so happened that from some little personal motives of vanity, and chiefly at the request of Lady Holland, I had taken considerable pains to conceal my entering the protest till it was too late for him or any other peer to add his name. He, however, availed himself, contrary to my wishes,[221] of the third reading to annex by reference his adherence to the opinion I had recorded.

The necessity of any bill implied the irregularity of the whole proceeding. It passed, however, with little debate in the Session of 1816. Our politicians had a feverish dread of incurring odium by a fruitless expression of sympathy for a man, so long the theme of popular execration in the country. Mr. Brougham most unnecessarily expressed some qualified approbation of the measure. I felt on that, as on some other occasions, the full value of our privilege of protesting. One has the consolation of recording one’s principles, without inviting observation to the shades of difference subsisting between one’s self and one’s friends. I was, indeed, told that the step I was taking would be peculiarly offensive to the English public. To the Court it was so, no doubt: to the people, I believe, far the contrary. The dispassionate portion of the community would have been better pleased if a less distant exile and a milder fate had been reserved for their fallen enemy. Our people, on this, as on many other occasions, displayed more delicacy and generosity of sentiment than their representatives either gave them credit for or had the courage to exemplify in their own conduct.

The trial and execution of Marshal Ney and the papers relating to it, though laid before the House of Lords, on the motion of Lord St. John, attracted little notice and no debate in Parliament. It was apprehended by those who reprobated the proceeding, that an unsuccessful attempt to stigmatise it as a crime comparable to that of infamous memory which brought Jerome of Prague to the stake, might invite a vote of actual approbation and stamp permanently on the national character a stain which, as it is, only tarnishes the fame of a few individuals.[222] The thirst for revenge which manifestly actuated Louis XVIII. might perhaps be palliated, and at least was reasonably accounted for by a reference either to the Marshal’s private professions to him and his subsequent violation of them, or to the King’s habitual and unfeeling cruelty. But it is remarkable that the very letters of Lord Bathurst and the Duke of Wellington of July 7 and 15, 1815,[223] which were produced to justify the construction put upon the 12th article of the Capitulation by the victors, distinctly admit and show that a doubt of the meaning of that article had occurred to the Prince Regent himself before he ratified the Convention.

It is equally clear from those letters that such doubt was removed from his mind by the explanation of the Duke of Wellington—that is, by the interpretation put upon it by one of the signing parties without any fresh communication with the other. It results from this simple statement of facts that, by the admission and almost in the judgment of that power to which an appeal was afterwards made to give the milder construction to the 12th article, the said article was ambiguous and susceptible of two interpretations. But another article of the same treaty, namely, the 15th, contains the following words: “If difficulties arise in the execution of _any one_ of the articles of the present Convention, the interpretation of it shall be made in favour of the French Army and of the City of Paris.” Difficulties did arise in the execution of the 12th article. The construction which the ratifying party apprehended was put upon it by one of the weaker party, and the benefit of the doubt under the 15th article was claimed by that party. Yet “the interpretation was not made in favour” of, but to the injury and murder of a Marshal of the Army, and an inhabitant of Paris!

I was, I own, deeply affected by the merits of this case at the time, not only from compassion for the sufferers, but from a sincere dread of the disgrace which would attach to the English General and to the English name, if so just a claim for our intercession were resisted. I ventured to write to Lord Kinnaird,[224] then living in intimacy with the Duke of Wellington, on the subject; and in the persuasion that my letter would arrive long before the irrevocable moment of his execution, I urged him to communicate my reasons and feelings to his powerful friend. The letter is as follows:

MIDDLETON, _Dec. 5, 1816_.

DEAR KINNAIRD,

What is passing at Paris annoys me more than I can well describe. For La Valette,[225] on the score of private acquaintance, though slight, I am much concerned; but, from the regard to the character of our country and to that of the Duke of Wellington (in whom, after the great things he has done, even as decided an opponent of the war as myself must feel some national interest), I have conceived more horror at the trials and executions going on in the teeth of our Capitulation than mere humanity could create.

How can such a man as Wellington assert that the impunity for political conduct extends only to impunity from the Allies for offences committed against them? When ships strike, when garrisons surrender, do the captains or commanders stipulate that the foreign conqueror shall not molest them for their political exertions? With or without such stipulations, what shadow of right has a foreign enemy to punish individuals for opinions held or conduct pursued in their own country? It is clear the impunity promised was impunity for crimes, real or supposed, against a French Government. If the French Government was a party to that promise, by that promise it must abide; if not, the other Allies are bound in honour not to deliver over a town taken in virtue of it without exacting the same terms from those to whom they deliver it. Such perhaps is the formal, technical way of putting the argument. Practically and substantially the case, if not more striking, is yet more conclusive to men of justice and honour. The Allies have virtually (I might say formally too) been masters of Paris, while the persons who delivered it to them, on the faith of impunity for political offences,[226] have for political offences been imprisoned, tried, condemned, and executed!

Wellington has himself precluded all doubt on the question. He maintains in his letter to Lord Castlereagh that there is no article in the Capitulation securing to the town of Paris the pictures and statues, and thereupon he argues; and he acts upon his argument that the Allies may seize the pictures, etc., etc., and seize them without any fresh or formal cession from Louis XVIII. Up to that time, then, the Allies, according to him, were in military possession of Paris; and up to that time therefore, even upon his own view of the subject, the inhabitants were entitled to claim impunity for all political opinions and conduct. Those who had the right and the power of taking forcibly from Paris property not specified or disposed of in the Capitulation, notwithstanding the nominal Government of Louis XVIII., must surely have a right to enforce on any such nominal and dependent Government the observance of promises on the faith of which the inhabitants had surrendered the town. Technical arguments may possibly be urged on both sides; and though they appear to me all in favour of Ney’s claim, it is _not_ on them I lay the stress, but on the obvious and practical aspect of the transaction as it must strike impartial men and posterity. The plain relation of the events in history will be this. A promise of security was held out to the inhabitants of Paris: they surrendered the town; and while Wellington and the Allies were still really in possession of it, Labedoyère was executed, and Ney was tried for political opinion and conduct. Even of subsequent executions, and I fear there will be many, it will be said, “The Allies delivered over their authority in Paris to a French Government, without exacting an observance of the stipulations on which they had originally acquired it.”

Had we taken Martinique in ’93 or ’94 on a promise of not molesting individuals for political opinions or conduct, should we have been at liberty to cede it, had Louis XVIII. been then restored, without insisting on the impunity of all political offences, or, at the very least, on the right of leaving the country for such as might have so offended? In Egypt the French stipulated that no natives should be molested for their conduct or opinions during the war. We took military possession of the country on those terms, and then delivered it over to the political authority of the Ottoman Porte. When, however, the Captain Pacha, acting under that authority, began murdering the Beys and proceeding against the adherents of the French, we not only remonstrated and threatened, but actually protected the persecuted men within our lines. Yet by reference to the history of those times, you will find that many blamed Lord Hutchinson,[227] for not having recourse to yet more violent methods to enforce on the “legitimate political authority” the observance of engagements entered into by our military power on taking military possession of the country. Lord Nelson’s conduct at Naples was indeed different: but what is the impression left of those transactions? Will Wellington condescend to accept the only palliation ever offered for Nelson, though a man in all other respects so justly beloved, _viz._, blind, bigoted zeal and a very narrow capacity on every subject not connected with his own profession. What would Wellington himself have said, if the British troops had surrendered any town in Spain to the French with a similar stipulation, and if on the flimsy and hypocritical subterfuge of a distinction between Joseph’s Spanish Government and the French military authorities, all the Spaniards who had assisted us during the siege had been prosecuted for treason against Joseph? Yet where is the distinction?

The worst is, that as nothing but Wellington’s name could carry down so foul a transaction, so the whole odium of the breach of faith will fall on him and him only. He signed, he interpreted the Capitulation; _and when a construction of a doubtful passage might have saved one of the first officers of the age, he gave it the meaning least favourable to the conquered party, and left a man with whom he had once coped in the field of honourable war to be taken off by the hands of the executioner._

The want of principle and consistency and the disgusting changes of the Marshals have, I know, steeled men’s minds to their sufferings. This is natural enough. But when the violence of the times is gone by, and, above all, when the tomb has closed on their offences, the transaction will be judged with reference to the character of Wellington and to the nature of his promise, not to the conduct or misconduct of the sufferers.

Si ego digna in quam faceres, tu tamen indignus qui feceris, Pamphile.

Nor is this all. If we judge by former instances, even the crime itself will be regarded with more indulgence by posterity than any irregular mode of punishing it. Allowance for individuals is made in all great changes. It is difficult in sudden emergencies and great convulsions of State, especially for professional men whose lives have been passed in camps, to weigh maturely all the considerations by which their conduct should, in the strict line of duty, be regulated. Unforeseen cases occur, and men even of good principles and understanding are hurried into acts of inconsistency and political immorality. History is full of such instances, and in our own the name of one, with whom Wellington himself cannot dislike being associated, brings them to our recollection. Marlborough abandoned, in his King, a benefactor and protector, betrayed the person who placed great confidence in him, and did so when the opinions of his friends and party were, to say the least, divided, and not unanimous in favour of the step he took.

These men deserted a standard to which they were recently, reluctantly, and barely reconciled; under which they were regarded with suspicion by their Government, with hatred and reproach by their fellow soldiers, and they went over to their ancient companion in arms and victory—to one from whom they had derived rank, property, character, and importance. They did so, too, when all the military feeling of their country was decidedly in unison with the cause they espoused. A stoic, a philosopher, a man whose public principles are stronger than his private affections, gratitude, or vanity, might perhaps have acted otherwise, and from strict regard to his honour, once given, have sacrificed his fortunes, his favour, and popularity with those to whom he was obliged, to support a cause in which he found himself engaged against his interests and inclinations. I own, however (you will perhaps reckon me lax for thinking so), that any military man who was to lay his hand on his heart and say that he would have done so, would give me a much higher opinion of his present prudence than of his self-knowledge and candour.

In this latter view of the subject, I know I am somewhat singular. Few at present make such allowances for the political tergiversations of the Marshals, and many, more indulgent than I am in their judgment of political apostasy in England, are quite outrageous with Frenchmen for not acting with inflexible principle in the most trying and difficult circumstances. Some, however, among the most indignant at their crimes, yet doubt the justice, policy, and safety of punishing them; and more, especially among the moderate of all parties, think the claim of the Capitulation conclusive, or if not quite so, of a nature questionable enough to induce Wellington, for the preservation of his own and the national character, to give it the construction most favourable to the weaker party. My opinion is of no importance, but it is so strong that I could not resist expressing it to you, who have access to those whose character is most interested in forming a sound one upon this very important subject. I have not spoken of La Valette. All my arguments apply in his favour as strongly as in Ney’s, and surely he is not, as the other may be, any object of a bystander’s indignation. He seems an honourable man throughout.

Yours ever truly,

VASSALL HOLLAND.

The above letter arrived too late. Marshal Ney had perished the day before. Lord Kinnaird somewhat injudiciously showed the Duke of Wellington the letter. The truths contained in it were probably by that time, and have been since, very unpleasant to him. He affected to take umbrage at a passage,[228] which he erroneously supposed was intended to convey an imputation upon him as jealous or fearful of the military superiority of Marshal Ney. When I met him two years afterwards at Paris, he would not speak to me. This sort of distance continued, till our common friend, General Alava,[229] persuaded us to renew the slight intercourse which had formerly subsisted between us. We exchanged visits; he dined with me, and subsequent differences in politics have not interrupted the interchange of civility between us.

I remember him, though he is older than myself, at Eton. He was in no way distinguished there. Soon afterwards, both in his regiment and in Ireland, he was, perhaps from contrast with his elder brother, reckoned below mediocrity. In Dublin Castle his companions treated him as a good-humoured, insignificant youth; and in India he was thought to require all Lord Wellesley’s affection and interest to screen him even from disgrace.[230] It is said that the compliance or good nature of Sir John Harris, on one occasion, procured him the peerage, which he certainly owed exclusively to Lord Wellesley’s recommendation. That warning, however, if it was as serious as it is represented, roused the faculties of Arthur Wellesley. From that period he devoted himself to business and his profession. He rose rapidly through the gradations of a good officer and useful man of business to much consideration both in the State and the Army. He showed great discretion, temper, and judgment in defence of his brother against an impeachment in 1806, and in the following year he was designated by Lord Grenville to command a large expedition to Mexico. He soon afterwards began his career in Portugal.

My opinion of him was formed very early. He is not only a very capable and useful, but he is a great, fortunate, and extraordinary man, both in politics and in war. No one ever possessed greater dexterity in adapting his means to his ends. His want of any remarkable exterior accomplishments only renders this faculty more wonderful. It is possible that his wisdom may not be of the most enlarged and comprehensive, and certainly not of the most refined and delicate kind; but it is so unerring on all great occasions that it partakes at least of the character of genius. Then his apprehension is quick, his sagacity marvellous, his application indefatigable, and his decision and courage unfailing. Even his defects turn to account. A certain insensibility, real or assumed, gives his judgment uninterrupted scope for its exertion; and habitual carelessness and inaccuracy in language, disarming criticism in public, has often procured him advantages in his private intercourse with politicians, which are seldom supposed to be attainable but by qualities of a more exceptionable character. It is, indeed, rare for a man of sense, education, and spirit to be more destitute of taste, wit, grace, or imagination. But he affects none of them, and is often humble or adroit enough to profit by the allowance made for their absence. He loves to display a knowledge of details, even when he possesses it very imperfectly; but, in general, his conversation and manners have the ineffable charm of unassuming simplicity. Though he is very close and his designs quite impenetrable, he speaks of past transactions with great readiness and ease, and has all the air of being frank and communicative. He has not quick or delicate feelings, and generosity is not the chief ingredient in his composition.

On the other hand, he has few bad passions, and can subdue them effectually when his interests, or even his convenience, require it. Good-humoured, however, as he seems in social life, he is said to be often indifferent and even harsh to inferiors,[231] which, if true, is a trait not rendered less unamiable by the proof which his demeanour with equals affords, that he can control his dislikes, conceal his chagrin, stifle his resentments, and command his temper when he chooses. His vanity, I have sometimes thought, exceeds his ambition; for he has occasionally seemed to prefer the appearance to the reality of doing whatever he likes. Opinions and principles may possibly sit rather loosely upon a soldier. Like his own warhorse, he may care little what troops he leads or what cause he serves, so that _He_, richly caparisoned in the front, be the chief pageant of the show and reap the benefit of the victory and the grace of the triumph.

It must be also admitted that all public men who have an appetite for power occasionally cede some portion of consistency and opinion, and some predilections and connections, to expediency and success; but where others have made one sacrifice of the sort, the Duke of Wellington seemed at one time to lead whole hecatombs to the shrine. The cheerfulness with which he went through that unpleasant ceremony created a malicious inference that he did not value the State more, but political principles and friendships somewhat less, than his predecessors and contemporaries. His character was so interpreted during one period of his life, and especially in 1828 and 1829, by many of his contemporaries. But the subsequent publication of his correspondence, as well as his temperate and measured conduct both in and out of office, have since proved that he can sacrifice all selfish views and even his vanity and predilections to public principles, and that although generosity is not supreme she is yet not excluded from the mind where justice and prudence predominate.

He was not, at the time of which I am now treating, connected with the purest or most stoical of public men. Lord Castlereagh perhaps never entirely lost sight of certain good objects he had been taught to value in his Whig or reforming days,[232] but he was at the best but a temporising politician, and the unusual honours he had recently received at Courts and in Congresses had almost turned his head. It required, to use a metaphor of Mr. Frere, the strong currycomb of the House of Commons to scrape off the lacquer with which he had been varnished at Vienna; and there is reason to think that the rough discipline he experienced, on his return, irritated and wounded him so much that he never recovered his natural serenity of temper and that coolness of judgment which had hitherto constituted the chief merit of his character. On his first arrival from abroad the year before, incense such as he was accustomed to in foreign Courts seemed reserved for him here. He was greeted by a long and unusual cheer as he entered the House of Commons. But short lived were such triumphs. The dread of the Property Tax[233] produced innumerable petitions, and the indefatigable genius of Mr. Brougham, who, through the influence of Lord Grey and Lord Thanet, had returned to Parliament, allowed scarce one to be presented without an exposure of the policy and a derision of the capacity of the Minister. House and country were thus enflamed against that great act of confiscation, as it was hyperbolically called in the publications of the day. The Bill was rejected. The Minister, lowered as he was by his inferiority as an orator and the defeat of his great financial measure, yet determined to maintain his post.

Thus a Cabinet was continued, divided in sentiment on the great domestic question of Catholic Emancipation and defeated by a House of Commons on their favourite scheme of finance. Such a surrender of the functions of a Ministry to a Court, combined with such an acknowledgment of their want of authority in Parliament, effected practically a more violent change in the nature of our Government than many measures which lawyers and historians stigmatise as innovations. Whether the result will be beneficial or injurious to the Commonwealth, time alone can show. It would require no great ingenuity to trace many phenomena which have since perplexed, and some which do still perplex, our political system, to that original. But mine is a narrative and not a dissertation.

The fruits of that victory over Ministers, which had been gained in a great measure by the exertions of Mr. Brougham, were thrown away by the imprudence of that same powerful but unmanageable member of Opposition. On some trivial occasion he launched out into an unseasonable invective against the habits, expenses, and personal qualities of the Prince Regent. This diatribe, deserved or undeserved, would, at all times, have been too coarse for the taste of the assembly in which it was delivered; and at that particular period it had the effect of estranging many members, who had been recently softened towards the Whigs by voting with them against the Property Tax. Mr. Ponsonby was grieved, Mr. Tierney appalled, at the fresh instance of indiscretion. It was the more unaccountable because Brougham had during that Session evinced more disposition to concert with the party than he had affected for some years. He had even resumed his habits with me, after an absence from my house of six years, upon an understanding that he should be received as if we had parted in the morning.[234] His jealousy of Mr. Horner had somewhat abated. I should be loth to suspect that he had even then detected the seeds of a disease which were to bring that excellent man shortly to the grave, and that foreseeing the untimely removal of his rival, he was willing to conciliate those whom he had avoided from jealousy of an early friend.

Whatever were his secret motives or public extravagances, he, and still more Sir Samuel Romilly, rose greatly in estimation as Parliamentary speakers in the course of 1816. Lord Castlereagh, who had felt the want of support, was not averse to secure it even in the person of one whom he hated—Mr. Canning. That gentleman had submitted to be employed by him at Lisbon in 1814, tempted, it was said, by large emoluments, and impelled by the vexations which a discontented and precarious set of adherents out of office created him at home.[235] He accepted, on his return, the Board of Control. The selection of that place seemed to indicate that neither he nor his employers thought constant or familiar intercourse any very binding cement to their new connection. The Prince Regent also, in all probability, preferred at that time an arrangement which required no personal interviews between him and the new member of the Cabinet. Mr. Canning had, indeed, advised the Princess of Wales to absent herself, and that absence was agreeable enough to the Prince Regent; but the circumstances which gave any advice from him to the Princess great weight could not be equally so. I have myself heard the Prince Regent more than insinuate causes for such ascendancy, which would not have led him to anticipate much comfort or ease in any frequent intercourse with her adviser.

No man was so well qualified as Mr. Canning to cope in debate with the established as well as rising orators in Opposition. It was prudent, therefore, in Lord Liverpool to suggest, and equally so in Lord Castlereagh to acquiesce in, a junction which placed so brilliant a speaker in the front of their battle; nor was it less so in Mr. Canning to accept of a post on their side, without stickling for what is calling the “lead” in the House of Commons. His talents were sure ere long to overshadow those of his nominal chief but real rival. There was no party of followers who could feel their honour wounded at his taking a station comparatively subordinate, and he had, moreover, already descended from his vantage-ground by the more hazardous acceptance of his Lisbon mission from and under Lord Castlereagh. It is not, however, to be denied that his condescension on those two occasions lowered him for a time in public estimation. It required several fortunate incidents, as well as the resources of application and genius which he had at command, to regain that station to which his abilities and character fairly entitled him.

About the time that he resumed a seat in Council and Parliament, the person whose example and precepts had in earlier days enflamed his ambition and improved his talents, Mr. Sheridan, was closing a career more fit,

To point a moral and adorn a tale,

than to exercise the pen of those who, like myself, have shared some portion of his friendship, enjoyed his society, and retain regard for his memory. Nothing but a sense of justice to others could induce me to inflict any on him. Mr. Canning had the gratification of offering some pecuniary assistance, and what was, in truth, more real service, as well as more agreeable to him, of paying some attention to his early friend in his last sickness and adversity. The want of such attentions from some great names, and from the Prince Regent in particular, no doubt cut him to the quick. It was perhaps a theme on which his biographer was fairly entitled to moralise. But when Mr. Moore censures the opulent and titled companions of Mr. Sheridan’s happier days for not relieving him from his pecuniary embarrassments, I, whom he almost as inaccurately excepts from his censure, am bound to say that it is unjust. To my knowledge, some aid of that nature was offered, and more was possibly accepted than his biographer relates or than his benefactors ever wished to have recorded.

That the real amount of his debts was small is, I believe, correctly true; but that it was so is not less strange than true. The inference that therefore an advance of a sum equal to the debts would have relieved him from his distresses may seem plausible; but a little reflection on the real state of the case and on the character of Mr. Sheridan will show it to be erroneous. His debts, though reported to be enormous, might be of inconsiderable amount,[236] but they were of a most complicated nature, and known only to himself. Without his assistance it would have been impossible, with it not easy, to ascertain their extent. He would never have assisted any inquiry, or complied with any limitation or arrangement to secure the application of the money so raised exclusively to his creditors. Had he even consented to co-operate (which, if my memory does not mislead me, he above once refused to do), his inveterate habits of subterfuges and mis-statement were such that little truth could have been ascertained, and none without affronting and mortifying him.

In such circumstances, to impute want of generosity or dereliction of friendship to those who hesitated to afford him pecuniary aid, and much more to such as merely omitted to come forward for the purpose of incurring expense in a thankless and impracticable undertaking, is manifest and gross injustice. The same man who would cheerfully sacrifice a thousand pounds to save a friend from permanent distress might very consistently withhold a hundred which would merely postpone his arrest for a week. But Sheridan’s mind was so perversely constituted that he would have received without scruple the latter boon from a common acquaintance, but would never have pardoned a brother for conferring the former, if he had exacted any co-operation or any unpleasant acknowledgments as the condition of it.

It is exceedingly painful to chronicle the infirmities of Sheridan’s character and the faults of Mr. Moore’s book. But that lively, popular, and warm-hearted writer, in his zeal to exalt his countryman, takes facts for granted, and then draws hasty conclusions, not only unfair to our aristocracy (in whose defence I am nowise interested), but injurious to that association of public men to whom Mr. Sheridan, as well as myself, professed himself attached, and of whom I have, in a manner, constituted myself the historian. The injustice of those inferences can only be exposed by recording the failings that really disqualified Mr. Sheridan for a station to which his intellectual powers, as well as many other endowments, would have entitled him among his contemporaries.

It was neither Irish birth nor low extraction (as Mr. Moore not very covertly insinuates) that excluded Mr. Burke or Mr. Sheridan from a pre-eminence attained by Lord North, Mr. Fox, and Mr. Pitt, in their respective parties. Mr. Burke, albeit abounding in knowledge, zeal, and genius, and of far less questionable honour and integrity, had yet so little judgment in debate and so little command of his temper in council or in society, that it was at all times a problem whether he did more harm or good to the side which he espoused. Had he been placed at the head of a party, he would have been left without followers in the course of a year. Such is, at least, a fair inference from his mismanagement of the impeachment of Hastings and his conduct during the absence of Mr. Fox, in the King’s illness, in 1788. On the latter occasion, in less than six weeks he had ceased to be on speaking terms with any man of consequence in the party. His intemperate language, more than any other circumstance, enabled Mr. Pitt to rivet his popularity by an unconstitutional restriction on the prerogatives and a personal stigma on the Heir-Apparent of the Crown.

Mr. Sheridan, although far more disposed to covet and better qualified to acquire popularity, was yet less likely to attain the permanent confidence of a body of independent English gentlemen. I do not speak merely of his dissipation and intemperate habits, though towards the close of his life amounting almost to disqualifications; but there were others of a graver nature, such as not even his fascinating manners and exquisite wit (for the attainment of special and immediate purposes almost irresistible) could, in any protracted commerce or relationship with him, counterbalance. Those who enjoyed his society most and knew him best, even while they retained affection for him, were compelled to acknowledge that jealousy of disposition, delight in artifice and contrivance, and a proneness to gratify his own vanity with disregard to the feelings and reputation of other men, and, above all, an occasional indifference to truth, rendered any habitual reliance on his conduct preposterous in the extreme. The irregularities and mortifications of his early life and education may, in a great degree, palliate such defects in his moral character; but there is no denying them, and the injudicious endeavour to ascribe all their consequences to the injustice of others has compelled me to record them. His father,[237] a famous actor, was a harsh, unjust, and needy man, generally negligent and at times vexatious to his children. He seems to have been jealous of his son’s talents. None of them, if we except the power of bitter sarcasm, were inherited from him. That unamiable faculty he must, indeed, have possessed, if it be true that, on its being remarked how wonderful was the delineation of opposite characters in the _School for Scandal_, he replied: “Richard had only to dip his pen in his own heart, and he had both Joseph and Charles.” His mother,[238] the authoress of _Sidney Bidulph_, was a gentle, virtuous, clever, and unhappy woman. She died abroad of a consumption; and her sufferings were aggravated by hard usage from her husband and anxiety about her absent and neglected children.

The salary for Richard Brinsley’s education at Harrow, where he had been left, was irregularly paid. He was slighted by the masters and tormented by the boys, as a poor player’s son. I have heard him relate, with tears in his eyes,[239] that he never met with kindness at school but from Dr. Parr.[240] He was soon afterwards removed to Bath. His father had a project of establishing a school of rhetoric there, and destined his son to be one of his ushers. The scheme failed, and the intended usher commenced a man of wit and gallantry.

The adventures of that part of his life are, I believe, correctly recounted by Moore. He used to relate a scene with his father, about this period, somewhat less romantic than ludicrous. The retired actor was in the habit of haranguing his two sons after supper on the consequences of drunkenness and the motives which had induced him to renounce that vice and avoid all excess in wine. To enforce his precepts he denied them all access to his bottle, but he filled and emptied his own glass so frequently in the earnestness of discourse, that ere the lecture on sobriety was finished the two disciples were compelled to convey the professor of that virtue drunk to bed.

His long confinement from illness in Soho Square was the only period of his life in which he devoted himself to reading or study. He had no great appetite for general knowledge. Endowed as he was with the powers of memory and observation, he had less learning than the common run of well-educated men in society. He was conscious of his deficiency; yet he sought to make it appear greater than it really was, and concealed the information he had, with the hopes of giving to his wit and eloquence (often very elaborate) the air of genius and inspiration. He managed this so well that his pleasantry and replies appeared to common acquaintance sudden sallies excited by the occasion, and even to those who suspected them to be studied, tinctured with a sort of archness and complacency at the opportunity of introducing them, which lent them fresh relish, and added to their effect in society.

He was almost as wonderful in his physical constitution as in his intellectual powers. He seemed built for longevity; and no man was better made to bear fatigue, labour, or debauch. Even in hearing and seeing he had the advantage of other people. Vain as he was, he, in words and manner and sometimes in actions, acknowledged the superiority of Mr. Fox,[241] and even liked his society as much as he could that of any man who had advantages over him. He was, in short, less jealous of him than he would have been of another in the same situation. The unaffected admiration which he knew Mr. Fox entertained and professed for his wit, eloquence, and writings, in some measure disarmed his malignity.

The truth is, that although vindictive where his vanity had been wounded, he was not an ill-natured man. He could pardon an injury more readily than a slight, and either, I fear I must add, more easily than a great obligation. To inferiors he was not merely civil and serviceable, but he was kind and considerate. Where his own self-love was no wise concerned, he was disposed to soothe that of others, and that, too, in cases where he could have no view of courting popularity. Even on his death-bed, the old woman put into the house by his creditors was so won by his anxiety lest she should lose her dinner by waiting on him, that she contracted an attachment for him as strong as if she had attended him from his childhood.

I saw him at that period. Enough transpired, even in those moments of distress, to show that any attempt to relieve him from his embarrassments would have been fruitless, all concert with him for such a purpose impracticable, and any reliance on his assertions hazardous in the extreme. Mrs. Sheridan assured me that in his last illness he professed much contrition for his sins, and Dr. Howley, Bishop of London,[242] unquestionably attended and read prayers to him, while he folded his hands, being unable to speak. Mrs. Sheridan, indeed, related other circumstances in proof of the sincerity of his repentance and earnestness for forgiveness; but the Archbishop’s recollection by no means confirmed them, and her anxious wishes or general knowledge of Mr. Sheridan’s opinion might lead her somewhat hastily to believe them. It is true, however, that he always affected a sense of religion, and if some traits of superstition are proofs of such feeling, he was not exempt from them. The pious love to infer the truth of religion from the compunction of persons of irregular habits on their death-beds. Where the case occurs, religion has a right to such argument as it supplies. It would be unjust to withhold any credible testimony to the fact, when it occurs. I believe Mr. Sheridan died with strong religious apprehensions on his mind; but what does that prove? That a sense of religion may exist, where the moral virtues it inculcates are habitually neglected.

Of the brilliancy of wit and fascination of manner, which made one forget in his society so many and such grievous faults, I have spoken more than once in the preceding chapters and elsewhere. My pen has been reluctantly employed here in tracing the darker shades of his portrait, from an apprehension that the false glitter thrown over them might injure the truth of the more general picture of public men, which I have endeavoured faithfully to delineate.

But let me not close so painful a judgment on a man whose genius has often delighted me, without reminding my readers that no Englishman since the time of Edmund Waller has so indisputably attained excellence in the three branches of conversation, composition, and oratory, as the person whose defects I have been thus compelled to recall. His best speeches recalled in fame and effect those of Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, Lord North, or Mr. Canning. If they had not the characteristic excellencies of Mr. Burke, Mr. Windham, or Mr. Grattan, they far surpassed in effect, though not in genius, the happiest efforts of those three eccentric men. Many years after the Begum speech in the House of Commons, Mr. Fox pronounced it to be the best ever delivered within the walls of Parliament, and Mr. Pitt is reported to have been of the same opinion.[243] Indeed, he implied as much, by unexpectedly assenting to the motion with which it concluded. Other speakers of his age have shone in written composition; but what modern orator but Sheridan ever produced a masterpiece in any literature? Burke’s best work holds not the same relation to common political pamphlets or ordinary metaphysical disputations, as the _School for Scandal_ bears to the comedies on our stage. If the conversation of Fox, Windham, or Grattan abounded more with philosophy and knowledge, and if it was occasionally as varied and delightful as Mr. Sheridan’s, yet it was not so well adapted to the taste of all classes, nor so remarkable for playful satire and vivacity, for quick discernment and well-bred exposure of individual character. FitzPatrick, Hare, Lord John Townshend, and others more nearly his rivals in that respect, never aspired to the fame of leading orators or classical authors. It was reserved for Sheridan to be brilliant alike in the club, the theatre, and the senate. If we must acknowledge in some features of Pope’s inimitable portrait of Wharton a resemblance to the prominent blemishes of Sheridan, we may yet with confidence aver that the poet, in recording the genius and versatility of the “wonder of the age,” falls far short of the splendour and variety which dazzled and delighted the theatre, the Parliament, and the public in our own contemporary—Mr. Sheridan.

In this same year of 1816 died another friend, whom I had found in the ranks of Opposition, if not in the party of the Whigs, thirty years before—Charles, third Earl Stanhope. I have spoken of him at length in the first Book of these notes.[244] The House of Lords, in spite of his eccentricities, and I, perhaps in consequence of them, regretted his loss, and missed the originality with which he seldom failed to enliven our debates. It fell to my lot as his legatee and executor to compose the inscription on his monument in Chevening, and I have the satisfaction of thinking that I have there recorded the peculiarity for which he would most like to be distinguished, without wounding the feelings of his family who had some reason to be hurt both at his conduct and his will.[245] The present Lord told me very handsomely that he always read it with pleasure, for there was not a word in it that was not true.

The forwardness in person, character, and understanding of the Princess Charlotte of Wales, and the dread lest her mother might contrive for her or she devise for herself an alliance or something worse, induced the Court to look out for a marriage for her, soon after the proposal of the Prince of Orange had been rejected. The alleged motives of that rejection led to the reasonable preference of a Prince unfettered with any duties which would call him away from England. The Duke and Duchess of York and Lord Anglesey suggested, as I believe, the Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg; and some pardonable contrivances, powerfully aided by the very handsome person of the Prince himself, secured the full acquiescence of the young lady. Much of the curiosity which the story of his courtship might have excited is destroyed by the death of his Royal consort next year, an event which produced a sensation more flattering to the memory of the young Princess than to her surviving relations, and more illustrative of the strength of the passion of hope than of loyalty.

_J. Opie, R.A. Pinx._

_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._]

Among the marriages of the Royal Family which followed was one between the Duke of Kent and the widowed sister of Prince Leopold. That alliance may in its results revive the importance of Prince Leopold, to all appearance suddenly extinguished in this country in 1817. On his marriage in 1816, an enormous annuity of £50,000 per annum was granted him. He was also given, by an Act of Parliament, all the rights, except that of succession to the throne, which attach to a descendant of the Princess Sophia. He, with over-caution, declined a peerage: George IV. was afterwards little disposed to renew the offer. Personal beauty and circumspection were at that time Leopold’s most vaunted qualifications. The vulgar thought him, in his capacity of needy German Prince, and without much further proof, sordid and rapacious. The visible improvement of his Royal bride, in the course of the few months she was destined to live, gained him the credit of acquiring, by discretion and sagacity, great ascendancy over her mind. Whether his instructions or further experience would ever have enabled her to fulfil the somewhat extravagant expectations entertained by the people may be left to a chapter in that science termed _media scientia_, which the schoolmen describe as inscrutable to the Deity himself.

The great virtues of Princes and Princesses who die young have frequently been the object of pleasantry, and it cannot be denied that the sudden extinction of an existence full of hope, in the person of a young and pretty bride, was well calculated to mislead the best feelings of the country into such an illusion. Yet, in the judgment of sobriety, little had appeared in this young lady to justify the inordinate grief at her death. She was pretty and she was gay; nor had she betrayed any propensities to remind men of her mother. But, on the other hand, she had shown even in the nursery, and still more in the months preceding her marriage, that she inherited, together with the Prince Regent’s quickness of apprehension and feeling, some of his greatest defects, _viz._, a love of exaggeration, if not a disregard of truth, in professions and complaints, a passion for tale-bearers and favourites, and all those petty failings and practices which lead to what the French call _tracasseries_ and which rendered the private Court of her father, whether Heir-Apparent, Prince Regent, or King, the abode of uneasy heartburnings and jealousies and the scene of squabbles and scrapes, embarrassing, indeed, to the progress of State affairs, but almost below the notice of politicians, and quite unworthy of the province of history.

I have thus adverted prematurely to the untimely death of the Princess Charlotte, and to what little I knew from report of her character, when the course of my narrative had only brought me to her marriage. To prevent repetition, I will here mention that on my return to England in November, 1817, three days after her death, everybody I met between London and Dover, including post-boys and turnpike men, bore signs of mourning on their persons. Yet so little was this national affection extended to other parts of the family, that calumnies, representing the Regent and Queen Charlotte as rejoiced at the catastrophe, and even guilty of accelerating it, were very generally credited by the vulgar, and not repelled even in better educated circles with that scorn and contempt which justice and truth required.

The extraordinary sensation produced by her death was, indeed, a stronger indication of the unpopularity of the Prince Regent and his brothers than of the childish affection for Royalty, which the people of England so frequently display. The events which had intervened between her marriage and her death, and the tone assumed by the Prince Regent’s Government thereupon, had soured the lower classes of the community, and sensibly lessened the small stock of popularity which the Prince Regent had ever possessed. Although the Alien Bill had been most unnecessarily renewed in 1816, that Session of Parliament closed without any appearance of disaffection in the country or any symptom of ill-humour in Parliament. A bad harvest ensued; the people were distressed. Lord Sidmouth, who held the Seals of the Home Department, listened with inauspicious complacency to every tale which officious magistrates and designing spies brought of conspiracies and impending tumults. The faction of Levellers, Jacobins, or Radicals, which is never formidable, yet never wholly extinct in England or Scotland, resumed their practice of disseminating seditious and blasphemous handbills. They availed themselves of the elaborate blunders of Major Cartwright,[246] the able mischief of William Cobbett,[247] and the brawling eloquence (_loquentia potius quam eloquentia_) of Hunt,[248] to promote the cry for universal suffrage and annual Parliaments, among a class whose sufferings give to the prospect of change, whatever name it may assume, the pleasing colours of improvement.

The Prince Regent, apt enough to suspect danger, was yet more pleased at encountering it, whether real or imaginary, with arbitrary authority or coercion. Lord Sidmouth, either from sheer credulity or from subserviency, was busy in collecting foolish stories of plots,[249] and earnest in recommending measures of precaution and severity.

On January 28 Parliament met for the dispatch of business. I went down about four o’clock with an intention of reading the King’s Speech (a copy of which is usually lying on the table or the woolsacks, in the interval between its delivery and the resumption of the House) before business began. There were no Lords: there was some difficulty in procuring a copy of the Speech from the Chancellor. He was said to be at dinner, but he was closeted in his own room with Lord Sidmouth. The clerks seemed disconcerted, and everything, if not out of place and in dismay, at a stand and in suspense.

At length the mystery was cleared up. The Duke of Sussex, who arrived before five, told me the Prince Regent had not only been hissed but pelted in his way to and from the House, and he whispered to me significantly, “He himself _pretends_ he was shot at.” Accordingly, on the resumption of the House, before the Select Vestry Bill was moved or the Chancellor had read the Speech from the woolsack, up rose my Lord Sidmouth, and with more than his usual solemnity (sufficient though it be to that or almost any other occasion) stated that the Prince, on his return through the Park, had been grossly insulted and assailed.

The Duke of Montrose (Master of the Horse) then related, in a manner somewhat indistinct and confused, that a stroke had been _propelled_ against the carriage in which he was accompanying the Prince Regent _by a force stronger than a man’s arm_. Two holes, he added, were made in the glass, and he described their appearance. Lord James Murray, who was in Waiting, was then called to the bar. His evidence led to the inference that a shot had been aimed from one of the trees in the Park, and he conjectured that an air pistol, for he probably perceived that the concealment of an air gun was somewhat difficult, had been the instrument. Lord Grey cross-examined him, which Lord Grenville whispered to me was injudicious. He, Lord Grenville, soon afterwards spoke, as did Lords Eldon and Sidmouth, with becoming horror of such an outrage; but he did not affect, as the others did, great agitation and alarm at the event, which, in spite of his propriety and decorum, he must have deemed questionable. Lord Sidmouth, to vent his feelings of indignation and alarm with an equal attention to pathos and precedent, had the journals of 1795, when a similar event had occurred, spread out before him; and bade the clerk, when one question was disposed of, _look out what was to be done next_. He was disconcerted at finding that the absence of the Masters-in-Chancery would compel us to convey our horror to the Commons by an inferior servant of the House.

A conference took place. The Houses, as indeed it would appear the conspirators had been also, were strictly regulated by precedent of 1795: the expression of our indignation and the assurances of our loyalty were couched verbatim in the words of the resolution and address of that year, and though the House of Commons did not, as formerly, adjourn the debate on the address, we did. The Prince said, and perhaps thought, it was _a shot_; so said, and so thought, his father in 1795. But when Lord Onslow stooped in the carriage to look for the stone or bullet which had broken the window, George III. reminded him, saying: “Sit up, my Lord; they will say we are afraid.” In this rehearsal of a stale and insipid comedy the only little incident that marked dignity or presence of mind was omitted. On neither occasion was a shot fired. Lord Eldon assured me that he had in his possession the stone which had broken the window in 1795, and which was found at the bottom of the State carriage. He preserved it, with the dagger produced in the Commons by Mr. Burke,[250] as memorials of those strange times, surely not as marks of the sagacity or honesty of those he affects to admire!

The device this time did not greatly assist Ministers. It made little sensation either way. Government, however, in spite of a good but heavy speech from Lord Grey, with which he was more dissatisfied than his [——], and a spirited one from Lord Wellesley, met with ample support from the House and more countenance from Lord Grenville than was of good omen for the preservation of our party. Some approximation between Burdett and Grey was produced by the recurrence of coercive measures. Cobbett and Hunt took occasion, in letters to Lord Grey and interviews with me, to adhere to a declaration of Lord Cochrane,[251] that the endeavours of the people should be directed to the removal of the Ministry and the elevation of the Whigs to power. It has happened more than once in the course of my life that the party called Jacobins, Levellers, or Radical Reformers, after reviling the Whigs and strengthening the High-Church Party by lowering their opponents, have sought in the hour of danger to shelter themselves under the party they have so traduced. The Whigs, and let it [be] spoken with pride, have on such occasions, though smarting from the recent ingratitude of their suppliants, been ever ready from principle and generosity to stretch their protecting hands to persons calumniated or persecuted by power.

I saw Cobbett twice. His upright figure indicated the drill of a soldier, his ruddy complexion and homely accent the subsequent character of a farmer as well as his original condition. Neither countenance nor conversation (at least at this time) were at all of a piece with the sprightliness of his style, the shrewdness of his remarks, or the closeness of his reasoning in written compositions. His objects were, the co-operation of the Whigs in public meetings for a change of Ministry, and their protection and countenance if he wrote in their favour. In such objects I told him Whigs could not but concur, but I avoided all appearance of any closer connection. He was alarmed at the threatened suspension of the Habeas Corpus.[252] He very unaffectedly acknowledged his distrust of his own nerves, and a dread of behaving meanly and basely if arrested; he, therefore, hinted at an intention, which he afterwards executed, of retiring to America. He earnestly asseverated that he never had, and never would, belong to any political Opposition whatever.

No concert, much less union, with this extreme branch of Radicals ensued. Lord Grey, with the full consent of a large meeting of his Parliamentary friends (called February 24, 1817), engaged on an opposition to the suspension of the Habeas Corpus and to sundry coercive measures resorted to by Government, and in which Lord Grenville and his immediate friends, though disclaiming all rupture with the Whigs and professing undiminished regard, openly acquiesced. Burdett soon and rapidly resumed his old personal habits with many Whigs. Good will and communication between the Whigs and him, as leader of reformers, remained uninterrupted, till his deep but often shaded tinge of Toryism,[253] at last, separated him from all the parties and persons with whom he had ever acted in public. Parliamentary Reform, however, was not yet adopted as an indispensable article in the Whig creed; nor did the Burdettites pledge themselves to act as a party in bringing Whigs into power.

Lord Fitzwilliam,[254] from old affections for many and from recent disgust at the system of espionage so unnecessary and so revolting to a generous and honourable mind, sided without hesitation with us. From this period, he and his large connection became active and important members of the popular division of the Whig party. With little talent and less acquirements, he was, throughout life, one of the most considerable men in the country and a striking instance of that most agreeable truth—that courage and honesty in great situations more than supply the place of policy or talent. It was not his relationship to Lord Rockingham, though no doubt an advantage, nor his princely fortune, though a yet greater, which conferred the sort of importance he enjoyed for half a century in this country. He derived it more directly and more certainly from his goodness and generosity, and from the combination of gentleness and courage which distinguished his amiable and unpretending character. Such unblemished purity and such unobtrusive intrepidity, such generosity of feeling, firmness of purpose, and tenderness of heart, meeting in one of high station and princely fortune, commanded the affection and confidence of the public; and Lord Fitzwilliam enjoyed them, beyond even those of his own class who united much greater reach of understanding and more assiduity of business to superior personal accomplishments and advantages.

He had been named of the Committee,[255] but he fearlessly and publicly condemned the evidence which had there been admitted. The suspension of the Habeas Corpus was, nevertheless, carried in the face of Lord Wellesley’s and Lord Grey’s opposition. Cobbett fled to America, and returned, when the Suspension Act had expired, with the bones of Tom Paine and a stronger disposition than ever to indulge in scurrilous language and factious practices. The Radical party had manifestly decreased in numbers, and the unprovoked measures of 1817 seemed invented for the purpose of reviving its malignity and recruiting its force by persecution. They had in my judgment that effect.

The country this year sustained the loss of Francis Horner, a man whose sobriety of judgment and patient application of considerable powers to the best and wisest purposes of a public life would have placed him ere long at the head of the rational friends of liberty (including Whigs and reformers) in the House of Commons. His constitution was weak, and by neglect of it he had brought on symptoms of atrophy. He repaired, by the advice of physicians and at the earnest entreaty of friends, to a milder climate: but it was too late. He died at Pisa on [February 8], 1817.[256] Could anything connected with such a misfortune (which was to me, personally as well as politically, a very great one) be termed gratifying or satisfactory, the expression of regret at his loss in private, in Parliament, and in public, would deserve those epithets. Lord Morpeth, in moving the writ for St. Mawes, paid a feeling and judicious tribute to his solid virtues and rising merit; he was applauded and supported by many of the most respectable members of both sides of the House, including Mr. Manners Sutton and Sir Samuel Romilly, the last too soon, alas! destined to follow the pupil he so feelingly lamented.

That great lawyer and philosopher was himself improving rapidly in Parliamentary oratory, and yet more rapidly advancing in the estimation and confidence of the people. During the Sessions of 1817 and 1818 he mitigated many parts of the coercive bills. His arguments against capital punishment made slow but deep impression on the public, and, though still a lawyer in the greatest practice, he was at that period more nearly the leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons than any other member. Brougham, who, I fear, from motives of jealousy had much derided the tribute paid to the memory of Horner, yet avowed and felt some deference for Romilly.

It was, I think, in 1817 that I moved an inquiry into the treatment of Napoleon at St. Helena. Information derived from Count Montholon and from the Bonaparte family fully justified my statement; but the injudicious and exaggerated reports printed by a _valet-de-chambre_[257] enabled Lord Bathurst,[258] by refuting what I did _not say_ and quoting the publication instead of my speech, to assume the appearance of contradicting what I _did_ say. I did not divide, though Lord Darnley, never deficient in natural generosity, showed some disposition to urge it on the House.

In general, my political friends both in the Lords and the Commons,[259] with the exception of Lord Ebrington[260] and Mr. Abercromby[261] (for I do not reckon such a restless busybody as Sir Robert Wilson), were shy of meddling with a subject which they ignorantly deemed unpopular in the public and positively knew to be offensive at Court. I had and have the satisfaction of believing that my motion, ill-supported as it was, had an effect in alleviating the ill-treatment of a great man: but, having recorded all I know of him in another chapter of this work, I pass to other subjects in this.

I spent the summer and autumn of 1817 in Holland and at Paris. It was remarked to me by Mr. A. Baring,[262] and the remark was confirmed by M. Pozzo di Borgo,[263] that the intense application of the Duke of Wellington to the financial parts of the treaty, combined with his known sagacity in adapting his means to his ends, indicated that his views on returning to England would be directed to the Treasury. He did, in truth, devote his mind most earnestly to the financial Committee, and studied most intensely the questions of currency, resumption of cash payments, taxation, expenditure, and exchanges.

During the recess Lord Sidmouth attempted to justify his silly alarms of revolution by yet more silly prosecutions against writings termed seditious and blasphemous. Hone was indicted for an innocent parody.[264] It was hypocritically represented as intended to bring the Scriptures into ridicule, and the Prince Regent affected much sanctimonious resentment at those who abetted blasphemy and profaneness by charitably subscribing to alleviate the sufferings of a persecuted bookseller. Many of them, and the Duke of Bedford particularly, were distinguished in their stations for their attachment and reverence for religion; but it was pretended that disapprobation of so indecorous an act as the relief of a blasphemer was the motive for preferring Lord Grantham,[265] with neither residence nor property and only an expectancy in Bedfordshire, to the Duke, who had the largest property, and Woburn Abbey, in that county. The Duke was more nettled than became him at being so passed over. He wrote the Prince Regent a letter, which, like most from his pen, was well composed. It met with general applause. Yet to me it seemed, in judgment, defective and, in principle, almost indefensible. Not so thought the public. Truth is, the English people love high spirit combined with high rank. Whenever in assertions, even of unreasonable pretensions, a strong feeling of independence is expressed by a man of station and family, not only the multitude and his own party, but the whole community, are ready to applaud, and even his antagonists to respect and admire him.

The vacancy of [the] Lieutenancy in Bedfordshire in February, 1818, was occasioned by the death of my maternal uncle, John, second Earl of Upper Ossory, a man of taste and philosophy, to whom during childhood and youth I was beholden for tenderness and advice almost paternal, and who left me the estate and mansion of Ampthill[266]—a bequest munificent in itself, and to me beyond all value, from the recollection of those who had inhabited it and of the happy hours, days, months, and years I had spent in their society.

Lord Ossory had not that force of mind which public life demands or creates, nor the habits of intense application to any object of ambition or vanity. He had too much respect, not to say awe, of the opinion of the world to make any strong or lasting impression; but he was far from being a common man. In all branches of taste his perceptions were quick and just, and on every question, private and public, his judgment was sound and his expression of it distinct and sincere. No less a person than David Hume predicted of him, when a young man at Paris, that he would distinguish himself as much as Charles Fox. Perhaps the very qualities which captivated that great philosopher, _viz._, an unusual calmness of judgment, blended with some distrust of anything approaching to vehemence or enthusiasm, extinguished all ambition in Lord Ossory, and taught him to seek refuge in a tame and inglorious, but not unlettered or irrational, life in the country. He was, though not _ingenti perculsus amore_, a genuine worshipper of the Muses, and far from insensible to the charms of literature or unskilled in the pursuit of many branches of natural philosophy. Not many days before his death, he, to my great satisfaction, expressed, with a warmth unusual in him, his approbation of the tone of indignation and scorn in which I had spoken in the Lords of the hypocrisy of the prosecution against Hone. Such testimony, from a person little disposed to palliate the excesses of the press or to sympathise in the exaggerations of a party, was a proof that Government had assumed the attitude of hostility to the current of popular feeling. To that obvious error much subsequent discontent, as well as many difficulties we had to encounter for years afterwards, were mainly attributable.

During the Session of 1818, and especially on the Indemnity Bill,[267] I acquired by practice more fluency in public speaking than I had hitherto possessed, and got the ear of the House to a degree that placed me higher in the rank of speakers than I had hitherto aspired to be or perhaps could ever really deserve.

That Session commenced in January, 1818. The Ministers, questioned by me, announced an intention of repealing the Suspension Act[268] before the address was moved; and, on the motion of it, Lord Stanhope,[269] the very opposite of his father in political principle and greatly inferior in talent and knowledge, but, like him, suspicious and eccentric, delivered a speech, good in language but strange in conception, in which he lamented that the first sentence in Cæsar had not been made the leading article of the treaty of Peace (_Gallia omnis divisa est in partes tres_), and much of a like tendency and taste.

Lord Liverpool boggled at the epithet he should use in alluding to his oration, and after some hesitation designated it, as “certainly a remarkable speech.” As Stanhope had called France “a conquered, abject, and despicable country,” it made more sensation in Paris than London. It is said the French Ambassador remonstrated with Lord Liverpool for calling Lord Stanhope his “Noble friend.” It hurried Lady Stanhope from France, where she was then residing, and it required, according to rumour, the good office of friends, as well as some discreet compliances on the part of Lord Stanhope to which his nature had no particular repugnance, to protect him from all personal indignity from French bravos who would be patriots.

The earnest and repeated debates on the Indemnity Bill had some effect on the country, none whatever within the walls of Parliament. The divisions were bad, the Whig party dispirited and disunited. At the close of the Session some little spirit was raised on the renewal of that odious measure, the Alien Act. A method of evading its provisions, by purchasing stock in the Scotch Bank, under an Act of George I., was, at the instigation of Lord Lauderdale (the last expedient, I fear, his ingenuity ever exerted in favour of popular rights) resorted to by General Flahault.[270] A more factious attempt to defeat this manœuvre by an _ex post facto_ clause, moved by Lord Melville, was baffled by myself and others prolonging the debate on the third reading in [the] Lords till the House of Commons was up. There was no time for getting through the formalities of agreement on our amendments without deferring the Commission and the Prorogation, and in the choice of disasters the Government submitted to the dreadful one of having a French officer a naturalised subject of the kingdom in which his wife was a native and a peeress. On this Alien Bill Sir Samuel Romilly had taken a very prominent part, and on the ensuing dissolution he was chosen, against a virulent opposition both of Tories and Radicals, for Westminster: thus commencing to all appearance a career in politics as brilliant as that he had run in his profession. But all these expectations terminated in a scene of distress and horror, such as may, indeed, [have] been found in the theatre or in romance, but rarely in the tragedies of real life. His wife had died after much bodily suffering in the Isle of Wight, and he, being brought up with great difficulty to London in a state of deep melancholy, put an end to his existence two or three days after his arrival in Russell Square.

_J. Hoppner, R.A. Pinx_

_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._]

Mr. Dumont,[271] who accompanied him on his journey, and who endeavoured to relieve him by exciting his tears, told me that on being reminded in passing Holland House that his children were there, he betrayed some symptom of emotion, but rapidly relapsed into the deep depression of spirits which betokened his despair and should have admonished his friend of the consequences of it. It is singular, but true, that an epitaph recording the sudden death[272] (probably the suicide) of an uncle of the same name following that of his wife, was discovered on a tombstone in one of the churches of London.

Romilly was a man of strong sensibility and as strong opinions, indulgent even to tenderness to those he loved. He had neither vanity nor guile; but he was not perhaps entirely exempt from that gall which intense pursuit of an object engenders in a proud and ardent but pure and affectionate mind. His powers of reflection and reasoning were of the very highest order, and he was capable of unbounded devotion to a cause. There have been seasons and countries, in which the elements of which his head and heart were composed would have fermented into zeal and fanaticism. His early admiration of Rousseau, though afterwards checked by the practice of a subtle, discriminating, and distrustful profession on one hand, and counteracted by the more grovelling and selfish maxims of his friend Bentham on the other, had wellnigh moulded his genuine philanthropy into something of that shape and appearance, but did, in fact, leave nothing but the traces of gentle, refined, and over-nice sensibility and extensive philanthropy, more engaging and exemplary perhaps than practicable. Yet no advocate was more apt to persuade himself that his client’s cause was the best in the world, and none certainly was more eager and earnest in enforcing that opinion. In spite of his great legal aptitude of understanding, he formed a striking and honourable exception to the pliability of principle so often and so justly objected [to] in our legal politicians. Far from being too temporising or too accommodating, he was more fixed and invariable in his private and public principles, on both great and small occasions, than is either common or convenient or perhaps desirable in a practical public man.

He has left memoirs of himself; I was permitted to read them in 1835.[273] The portrait, drawn by his own pen, of a mind struggling with adversity and panting not so much for distinction or celebrity as for the reward of self-applause from an approving conscience, forms a valuable and curious piece of biography. Over-scrupulous tenderness for his memory induced his family for a time to withhold it from the public, a production which must raise his moral character and intellectual powers in the estimation of the good and thinking part of mankind. It was the project of Mr. Brougham and others to place him at the head of the party on the meeting of Parliament. It was defeated by the stroke of death. The inconvenience of a mixed and undisciplined band without any positive commander in the Commons was obvious; and our active friends in the House and the busybodies at Brookes’ concerted an offer of the lead to Mr. Tierney.[274] Of this step Lord Sefton[275] and Lord Althorp[276] were, I think, the chief promoters, the members of the House of Cavendish the most earnest, and those of the House of Russell very willing and active supporters.

After some hesitation (for it was hardly in his nature to take any step without some previous hesitation or some subsequent misgivings) he accepted it. His oratory, though of no elevated, commanding, or even brilliant kind, was perhaps the most popular and the most agreeable, and certainly by far the most original, then left in Parliament. His long experience of the House, his conciliatory temper, and above all his shrewdness, sagacity, and diligence seemed to fit him admirably for the station he thus assumed. It was, however, obvious that the general deference to his judgment and the confidence in his principles bore a very unequal proportion to the affection, good will, and delight, with which his conversation and speeches were regarded. Those who loved him best foresaw too clearly that in the essential qualifications of decision and judgment he might prove deficient, and those less aware than his intimate friends of his inflexible integrity not unnaturally attributed the low standard, at which he too frequently rated the public virtue of other politicians, to some crying defect in his own, although the real cause was the inordinate fear he felt of being outwitted and, above all, laughed at for presumption or simplicity.[277]

In truth, his irresolution was fed, if not engendered, by that very sense of humour which enabled him to discern so keenly and to expose so admirably whatever was ridiculous in other public men. His pleasantry and easy manners shed a charm over all intercourse with him, even on the driest matters of business and detail. He meant to be, and he was, courteous to all, and friendly and serviceable to his followers and partisans. He had, moreover, other qualities, or rather an exemption from other qualities, which seemed peculiarly adapted to win the affections of independent men. Though not destitute of spirit, and though his physical courage was redundant rather than deficient, he had perhaps less pride and certainly far less vanity than any man of equal talents and acquirements whom I ever had an opportunity of observing. I must own, however, that in his capacity of leader of a party he was sometimes too readily offended at insignificant deviations, and disproportionately alarmed at the indiscretion of individuals. He was, in truth, always striving to be more circumspect in conducting other men than is compatible with preserving any authority over them at all; and yet by a contradiction not uncommon in the caution which has its source in timidity, he was occasionally so enamoured of some crotchet or refinement of his own that he was hurried into courses hazardous and even rash.

Little incidents and shades of differences at meetings held during 1819 at Burlington House,[278] and attended by most of the Whigs, but not by Mr. Lambton[279] (who had some private quarrel with Lord G. Cavendish), disconcerted Mr. Tierney exceedingly. He was much keener in discerning the existence and foreboding the consequences of accidental dissensions, unavoidable in large bodies of men, than expert in concealing and healing them; and the character of some members of his party, especially Mr. Brougham, was sure to bring these disqualifications into action and notice. They were, however, hardly perceptible to the public during the first part of the Session of 1819.

Several brilliant debates, in which he and Sir James Mackintosh shone greatly, and which were followed by successful divisions, though on matters of small importance, seemed fully to justify the choice which had fallen upon him and promised his leadership no little _éclat_. But debates under his guidance were too much trials of strength, and too little a manifestation of the conflicting principles of the parties engaged. He always laboured more to obtain wavering votes than to enforce the views or particular course of action recommended by his party. So enamoured was he of such a line of policy that, in an evil hour, he determined to bring the relative strength of Government and Ministry to a direct issue, and on May 18, 1819, he moved a Committee on the state of the nation—a motion equivalent to one for the dismissal of Ministry, and in the then state of parties justly remarked by Lord Castlereagh to convey two distinct propositions: the first, that the Ministry in office had _not_, and the second, that the gentlemen in Opposition _had_ the confidence of the House. To neither of these propositions was the House, though far from satisfied with the state of public affairs, prepared to assent; and when convinced that the last was virtually involved in the first, did not hesitate to reject the motion by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Tierney was much disconcerted at this result, and it was not, I think, long ere he renounced the leadership which he had assumed.

The guidance of the party thus devolved to the guidance of three or four men of weight (such as Lords Althorp and Tavistock) and others stimulated by Brougham, or to that of chance itself. Parliament was prorogued in July, 1819. During the recess which followed frequent meetings were held in London and other populous towns. The avowed object was to petition against grievances and for Parliamentary Reform, and the representations of magistrates induced Lord Sidmouth, ever on the alert to flatter that consequential class of personages, to press for a sudden meeting of Parliament. His colleagues declined to adopt that inconvenient course. He redoubled his activity in communicating with the busy magistracy and in impressing on their minds the importance of vigilance against riot and sedition. Hence, some from party spirit, and more from that pompous bustle in which provincial authority delights to revel, fed him with idle tales of plots and insurrections, and courted that official applause which he seldom failed to administer.

Atkins, the Lord Mayor, a foolish and violent man, at the risk of provoking a real riot, arrested a brawling parson of the name of Harrison in the very act of talking nonsense to a multitude.[280] This silly zeal was magnified as a feat of prodigious vigour and decision. Many a justice of the quorum waxed emulous of the fame of a Lord Mayor, who, according to his own version of the matter, modestly reported that he had defeated a conspiracy “to burn the Metropolis and to murder the inhabitants.”

At Manchester the magistrates, instigated by one of the name of Fletcher, resolved to eclipse the triumph of Smithfield and arrest Mr. Hunt himself, the demagogue of the day, even before he had uttered a word. He substituted for constables a body of Yeoman Cavalry. They were suddenly let loose on a defenceless multitude of 4,000 men, women, and children to execute the warrant.[281] The crowd, unarmed, had collected in a square near St. Peter’s Church. They were hemmed in by the soldiery, and on the slightest appearance of tumult would have been at the mercy of a military, but irregular and somewhat exasperated, force. As it was, excesses were committed and blood was shed, though more might well have been apprehended. The carnage was probably exaggerated, and could perhaps hardly warrant the designation, given of it to this day by the people, of the “Massacre of Peterloo.” But it was an act of violence, odious, illegal, revolting, unprovoked, and unnecessary. This may be collected from a narrative in my possession, written by Mr. Stanley,[282] afterwards Bishop of Norwich, who surveyed the whole scene from the roof of the houses, and is much too conscientious a man to set down aught in malice, though less willing than many of his cloth to extenuate the excesses of authority. The intemperate eagerness, or, to use Lord Grosvenor’s phrase, the breathless haste of the Home Office in thanking the magistrates for shedding the blood of the people before it had ascertained whether it was in observance or in breach of the law and the nature of the force employed, riveted the recollection of this outrage in the minds of the Manchester public. It rankled for many years. The consequences were very sensibly felt at the time of the Reform Bill; and the name of the “Massacre of Peterloo,” together with those of the persons who were most forward in it, are not forgotten to this day.

The Parliament, however, as then constituted, had no sympathy with the sufferers; and when convened in November passed several angry and restrictive laws without repugnance and even without the formality of inquiry. The Whigs in the Lords resisted these unconstitutional laws in speeches and protests (several of which I wrote); but Lord Wellesley, who on recent occasions had taken a popular view of all such questions, somewhat abruptly reverted to his old anti-Jacobin courses, and Lord Grenville vindicated the exercise of authority against democratic and tumultuous agitation with an earnestness and gravity which too plainly indicated an entire separation from the party with whom he had acted for fifteen years. His speech was elaborate and able—one of his best: and among the last he ever delivered. He touched with feeling on the differences subsisting between him and the reforming Whigs, and rescued himself with great spirit and close logic from all imputation of inconsistency, acknowledging and lamenting that he foresaw that practices would be resorted to and defended by the eager friends of liberty, to which he could never reconcile himself as compatible either with the institutions of the country or the preservation of necessary authority. It was, in short, clear that there subsisted a fundamental difference of principle between the Fox and Grenville schools of politics, and the course of events had brought into action these conflicting opinions.

This was virtually the close of Lord Grenville’s public life, though he lived many years. It was painful that so honourable a career should end by a separation from many connected with and attached to him. The termination, however, like the course of it, was manly and direct. There was nothing sordid, nothing personal, nothing even inconsistent in it on either side. I, for one, feel that among the rare gratifications of a public life the reflection of having known and acted with such a man as Lord Grenville is not the least. Soon after a reluctant attendance on Queen Caroline’s Bill and a speech upon it that added little to his reputation as an orator, logician, or judge, his health declined; he lived chiefly in the country, and devoted himself almost exclusively to literature, philosophy, and gardening. I had the satisfaction of occasional correspondence with him on these topics, and also of giving his proxy for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts in 1828. He died in 1833.[283]

Non potui ejus mortem non dolere. Hominem enim, castum, integrum, et gravem cognovi.

Mr. Fox gave me his true character in one word, in 1805, when he said, “I like Lord Grenville very much indeed. He is a _direct_ man.”

The object of the early meeting being accomplished by the enactment of the Restrictive Laws, the Parliament was adjourned over the month of January, 1820. On the 23rd of that month died Edward, Duke of Kent. He, as well as his brothers, had been married on the suggestion of Government in the year 1818, with the view of securing the succession. The pregnancy of his Duchess, who was a Princess of Saxe-Coburg and widow of Duke of Leiningen, was announced early in 1819, when he and she were in Germany. They were desirous, for obvious reasons, that their child should be born in England; but the Prince Regent had no inclination to facilitate that object by offering any pecuniary assistance. They had not enough for their journey, and a generous loan of several thousands from Lord Fitzwilliam (not repaid, I believe, till Victoria’s accession) extricated them from their dilemma. To that circumstance the present Queen and her subjects are indebted for the satisfaction of maintaining a native, as well as parliamentary and constitutional, sovereignty. The Regent, not content with the above gratification of malice rather than stinginess, perversely objected to the child, when born, receiving the name of Charlotte. The Emperor Alexander was to be godfather. But the Regent discovered some rule of etiquette which forbade the combination of his mother’s name with that of a foreign Crowned Prince. He wished the name to be Alexandrina, only from a spiteful hope that it might be unpopular; but such a design was successfully frustrated by that of Victoria being also adopted.

Living as we are, while I am writing this, under the Princess of that name, there may be some increased curiosity concerning the character her father bore among his contemporaries. I can furnish little to satisfy it, from such slight communication as I had personally with him, and I fear such report of his peculiarities as I can conscientiously repeat from others, will not augment any regret at an untimely death, which bequeathed to others the duty of forming the character of his far more illustrious daughter. His exercise of authority both in Canada and Gibraltar was liable to no exception on the score of negligence, but it was deemed so harsh and vexatious that it rendered his removal from both desirable.[284] His domestic life, though far from being dissolute or indecorous, was not exemplary nor abounding in any very amiable traits of disposition.

The state of the Royal Family at the period of Princess Charlotte’s death had been singular enough. We had a King and Queen greatly advanced in years, and with no less than seven sons and five daughters alive, and all beyond forty years of age; and yet from the want of grandchildren there was no small prospect of the succession devolving on some foreign Prince. While the means of supplying this defect by marrying the King’s sons was in contemplation, it was, no doubt, remarked in every company throughout the kingdom that the robust frame and abstemious diet of the Duke of Kent marked him out as the survivor of all his Royal relatives then living. Yet he died before them all, leaving an infant daughter, destined to succeed to the Crown, in the cradle. He was, indeed, if such terms can agree, regular to excess in all his habits. Household and family were more strictly disciplined than a regiment or a convent, and the duties, the occupations, and the amusements of every branch of his establishment recorded, docketed, and preserved, with a minuteness I hardly venture to recount. His life was clockwork, and some ludicrous instances which his brother, George IV., loved to relate were such as might have rescued Sterne in his delineation of Mr. Shandy from all charge of extreme improbability. This observance of form and details, and above [all] this restless love of business which it caused, produced other results less creditable to his memory and far more vexatious to those connected or acquainted with him. It involved him in correspondence with many low characters of doubtful repute, and he was suspected (I fear with too much reason) of having indirectly countenanced and disseminated the calumnies, and even fomented the plots, against the Duke of York in the memorable business of Mrs. Clarke.

He certainly kept up a mysterious intercourse with almost every discontented officer in the army, and he is much belied if he did not secretly remunerate clerks in public offices, and inmates and servants in private families, for what he deemed curious information. It is to be hoped that he never earned, but he certainly obtained from his brothers, the nickname of Joseph Surface: and the practices I have mentioned, combined with assiduous attendance at public dinners, a specious talent of speaking there, a plausible manner in society, and a formal and dignified demeanour everywhere, gave some colour to uncharitable imputations of very mischievous designs. Some certainly have thought it fortunate that he did not live long enough to dabble in the troubled waters, and prosecute the mysterious cabals which shortly after his death harassed and degraded the Royal family, and went nigh to disturb the peace of the country.

Of course, I do not allude to the horrid plot for murdering the Ministry, which was about this time conceived and nearly perpetrated by a ferocious enthusiast and resolute assassin of the name of Thistlewood.[285] That was detected and punished in the ensuing month, but had no countenance nor connection with any man of rank or indeed of public character whatever. But there were certain consequences resulting from the death of his father, in which the Duke of Kent, had he been alive, might have acted, if not a conspicuous, a very important part.

George III. expired on January 30,[286] the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., to whom he had been so often compared. It might have been expected that after a King had reached the age of eighty-one, and had been secluded for near ten years both from affairs and society, nothing but a mere change of titles and names would have marked his descent to the grave. But his son who was actually possessed, as well as successor, of his prerogatives was so childishly averse to admitting of some formal consequences of the demise of the Crown that he involved himself, his Ministry, Parliament, and country in perplexity; which diverted all attention from the real interests of the nation, threatened much internal disturbance and calamity, and ripened, if it did not sow, seeds of what fortunately became wholesome reforms, but might well have been confusion, vengeance, and disorder. The reports of all that led to, and all that occurred on, what is called the _Queen’s Trial_ are so voluminous and for the most part so correct, and the subject is altogether so revolting to good taste and so discreditable to the Government and the nation, that I may be spared the mortification and disgust of doing more than touching on such effects as it had on the state of political parties, and on a circumstance here or there relating [to] the individuals, which escaped the scrutinising curiosity awakened by that scandalous scene.

The Prince Regent had all along dreaded lest, on his Accession, the wife whom he detested would return to England, claim her dignity and station, and expose him to mortification and embarrassment. Long before his father’s death he would willingly have instituted proceedings for separation and divorce. He was constantly nibbling at that bait, but he found no man of influence in his councils or in Parliament bold enough to engage in so hazardous an undertaking.

It was thought, indeed, by several that the Princess might be persuaded, cajoled, bribed, or intimidated into some deed of separation and a promise never to return. This would, it was thought, spare the Prince her presence on his Accession, and his Ministers many embarrassing questions on which it would be difficult for _them_ to steer a course, neither discreditable to their consistency and shocking to the sense of justice and decorum, nor, on the other hand, offensive to the King and fatal to their ascendancy at Court. Brougham was not at all unwilling to lend himself to such a scheme. With his usual confidence in his own dexterity, and with more than his usual effrontery, he obtruded some such suggestion on the Prince Regent and his Ministry, implying and much exaggerating his influence with the Princess. The basis of the arrangement was to secure to her an ample income and a recognition of rank and title on the demise of the Crown,[287] and to the successor to it the certainty and comfort of her perpetual absence.

Of these proposals he had consented, if not offered, to be the bearer. When reminded of it in the House of Commons, he did not simply deny it, but by vehement declamation and argumentative contradiction of collateral points endeavoured to involve all that had passed between him, his client, or the Government, in obscurity.[288]

How far he was authorised by her, how far invited or accepted by Prince Regent or Ministers to take the steps, it would perhaps be difficult for the parties themselves to explain, and is certainly so for the historian to ascertain. It all came to nothing. Some accused Brougham of a plot to betray his client and ingratiate himself with her enemies, others, of a wish to inveigle the latter into concessions and offers which would enable him to expose them afterwards and to place himself at the head of a popular party. Perhaps each side suspected him of such designs upon them respectively. Certain it is that though he repelled those charges with great ability and force, and some parts of them with obvious truth, yet there remained a strong suspicion on the minds of many that the entire failure of all agreement was mainly owing to the want of confidence, on both sides, in the honesty and judgment of the proposed agent (termed, by a bad joke, rather an offic_ious_ than offic_ial_ adviser), and not from any reluctance on his part to make himself subservient to the views of either. Whatever was the effect of his interposition, nothing had been settled at the Accession of George IV.; and the Queen seemed retrospectively to approve of all Brougham’s proceedings by appointing him without loss of time her Attorney-General.[289]

One of the first public acts which the King in the ordinary course of things was called upon to perform, was to sign an order for the omission of the names of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and for the insertion of himself as reigning King, and Queen Caroline as his Consort, in the Liturgy. This he positively refused to do, and thereby astounded his Ministers. An altercation ensued, which had wellnigh ended in the dissolution of the Ministry. How exactly the matter was settled I do not recollect; but the Royal Family including the Queen, and not naming her, appeared in the _Gazette_, and the King, as the price of submitting to such a compromise, exacted from his Ministers a promise that unless the Queen were prevailed upon to remain abroad they would institute proceedings against her immediately on her arrival in England. It was, no doubt, foreseen by the King and by everybody else, the Ministers excepted, that the Queen would consider the omission of her name and title as an indignity, and hurry home to resent it. Even at this early period some vague and indistinct communications were conveyed from the King to leading individuals in Opposition. They betrayed the uneasy footing on which he stood with his Cabinet, and must have shown him the firm adherence of the Whig party to the public principles which they professed; but they did no more.

The King was proclaimed on a very cold day at Carlton House, by the same person (Sir Isaac Heard)[290] who had officiated at his father’s proclamation _sixty_ years before. The new Sovereign was so affected by the weather that he was near giving old Sir Isaac an opportunity of proclaiming a third King. His life, however, was saved by the bold practice of Sir Matthew Tierney, who resorted, without hesitation, to profuse bleeding.

The Parliament was dissolved on February 28, and the atrocious plot of Thistlewood and his accomplices was adroitly alluded to in the Speech as substantiating the grounds on which the Coercive Acts had been passed. Yet surely they rather confirmed the adverse remark, that penal laws and precautionary measures of severity against sedition tend to provoke schemes of assassination and to substitute the secret dagger for the open tumult or riot. There was nothing in the character or conduct of the criminals on this occasion to raise either sympathy or curiosity; nor could the fate of men meditating such atrocities excite the slightest commiseration. Yet the spectacle of the barbarous parts of the execution was unsuited to the times; and the Government and Parliament felt that they were more likely to disgust than to intimidate the public, and to promote than to deter disaffection and conspiracy. They were soon after silently abrogated by Act of Parliament in cases of high treason as well as felony, although the yet more iniquitous consequence of that sentence, the corruption of blood, was left unaltered.

Fortunately for the Ministry, the returns of the new Parliament were completed before the ulterior proceedings regarding the Queen were announced or the intentions respecting her had transpired or been clearly understood. Her resentment at the omission of her name was not positively known till Parliament met, and with equal good fortune the Civil List was voted before she arrived in the country, and before the discussions arising upon it had perplexed the House of Commons and inflamed their constituents. The dissolution had given the Government a majority adequate to ordinary purposes. The Civil List, having been settled as recently as 1816, and being in some degree exonerated by the death of Queen Charlotte as well as the King, passed rapidly and smoothly through Parliament. Had the temper of the House been as much ruffled as it was six weeks afterwards, its passage would probably have been much rougher and much of its valuable cargo have been thrown overboard to lighten the vessel before it reached its destination.

The address also passed unanimously on April 17. There seemed, indeed, sufficient in foreign and domestic events to occupy the Parliament and the public during the Session. In Spain, insurrectionary movements and military mutinies had compelled the ever base and cowardly Ferdinand to proclaim that Constitution of 1812, which his treachery and ingratitude had subverted.[291] This revolution produced a mighty sensation throughout the Continent, and it was obvious either the infection of liberty would spread or an endeavour be made to crush it by the Holy Alliance and the restored Bourbons of France.

At home the great oracles on currency and bullion—such as that consistent and philosophical observer, Lord King—pronounced some legislative measures and some further approach to perfect liberty of trade and currency necessary to avert impending embarrassments, and to establish a wholesome condition of things. The trials of Mr. Hunt and Sir Francis Burdett, the first, for sedition and riot at Manchester,[292] the latter, for a seditious libel upon it, involved many questions on which the public, at any other time, would have been apt to take fire and some of a nice nature on the construction of Statute and the principles of Common Law. The Irish Roman Catholics, too, often over sanguine, began to speculate on the consequences of the Accession, and of a King who, though lately estranged from their cause, had been long supposed to be a friend, and might, as they fondly imagined, revert to his early predilections. Mr. Grattan, though in a feeble state of health, was hurrying over at their earnest instigation, and in fervent hope of closing his glorious career by a striking, if not successful, effort of expressing eloquence on behalf of his countrymen. But he breathed his last the day after he reached London, almost at the moment when the Queen’s triumphant arrival extinguished for a time all interest about that great question more effectually than the death of its ablest advocate, overwhelmed the Government with consternation, adjourned all incipient reform on the business of Grampound,[293] and obliterated the consideration of all topics of public concern; thereby furnishing a beautiful comment on the institution of monarchy, which can render the personal and disgusting squabbles between a man and his wife, neither remarkable for their talents nor respectable for their virtues, a much keener object of solicitude to an enlightened people than the fate of surrounding nations or the improvement and welfare of their own!

Lord Grey did not attend the early part of the Session. He intrusted to me a petition from a parson of the name of Pike Jones,[294] a man of coarse manners, but not deficient in learning or understanding, whom the Bishop of Exeter, Dr. Pelham, the weakest sycophant on the Bench, had refused to induct to a living. The pretext was that he had spoken irreverently of the Articles and the Athanasian Creed at a public meeting; the real motive was to pay his court to George IV., by persecuting a clergyman who had at that meeting manfully and charitably maintained the principles of universal toleration.

My case was strong. I endeavoured, not without success, I believe, to demonstrate that were the Church of England to be judged, as the Anti-Catholics among them judge of the Papist, by such maxims and professions as she is unwilling to renounce but does not practically act up to, she might, through her Articles, Homilies, and Creeds, be convicted of bigotry, if not perhaps so extensive, full as inveterate and odious as that of the Roman Catholic Church. The Bishop, however callous to reproach, was scared at the severity with which several grave and church-going peers, especially Lord Carnarvon and Lord Lansdowne, stigmatised the transaction; and though the Bishop of Durham,[295] the highest Churchman on the Bench, censured the language both of Mr. Jones and Lord Carnarvon, it was obvious enough that he, as well as Ministers and the other Spiritual Lords, if compelled to pronounce a verdict on the subject, would have condemned his conduct as intemperate and illegal.

The Queen, with an intrepidity defying legal advice as well as King, Cabinet, and Parliament, made a strange and triumphant entry into London, with Alderman Wood[296] at her side and her ladies opposite, on June [7], 1820. The Ministers redeemed their pledge to the King, and on the 6th brought down a message to Parliament, accompanied by papers in a green bag relating “to the conduct of the Queen since her departure.” The negotiations preceding her determination to come to London were all brought in great detail before the public.

I have already stated my reasons for not recounting or commenting on them, or upon those, with a like failure, which were instituted by the Commons to induce Her Majesty to acquiesce in some arrangement which would avert the necessity of any public investigation. In some of the preliminary steps to the inquiry I took a part, with a view that the whole proceeding might be quashed in the earliest stages, and stifled without casting blame on either party. I was even induced, by an idle hope of abrogating an unjust and unnatural law (from which I apprehended future mischief to monarchy), to propose the Repeal of the Royal Marriage Act, which passed in the year 1772 to gratify the malice and feed the pride of George III.[297] I had no view, retrospective or immediate, to the squabble, then existing in the Royal Family and disturbing at once business of Parliament and the peace of the country; but I vainly imagined that a sense of those inconveniences, arising from the constraints under which Royal marriages are contracted, might dispose men’s minds to relax or remove such constraints in future. Friend and foe scouted the proposition, and seemed to suspect it to be a manœuvre to answer some immediate but concealed purpose. The fact is, all minds were intent on giving a triumph to one of the contending parties on the matter before them, and reckless of everything else. I, of course, let my bill drop after the first reading.

Lord Liverpool asked me in private if I would sit on the second Committee about to be appointed for an examination of the papers; I declined, but I did so, as I told him, on private rather than public grounds, thinking my name by no means an advantageous one to be selected for judicial inquiry on a matter connected with divorce. Lansdowne consented to be named, but he afterwards publicly withdrew; and as in the _interim_ the Commons had shown their distaste and the public their resentment of the proceeding, his change of conduct, though judicious, natural, and prudent, was for that very reason, by the promoters of the measure, stigmatised as irresolute and unhandsome. Most of our party, and all who had been of Cabinet in 1806, were, in truth, at first very unwilling to espouse the cause of the Queen. We had no great confidence in its merit and none whatever in her character; and we thought such a line of conduct would expose us to the charge of faction or revenge. On the other hand, we were as little disposed, after the treatment we had received, to identify ourselves a second time with the King, and to brave unpopularity by encouraging him in an ungenerous and unnecessary vexation of a half-crazy woman.

Several, however, of our friends, Lords Donoughmore and Hutchinson, Sir John Leach,[298] Lord Lauderdale, and perhaps the whole Cavendish connection, either felt disgusted with the Queen or deemed it in their hearts a good opportunity for recovering Court favour, and possibly for outbidding those who were in possession of office. But some few in the Lords, very many in the Commons, and nearly all out of doors, wrought upon by Brougham and either sincerely biassed by indignation at what they deemed persecution or stimulated by faction and revenge, were panting for the exposure of the King and ready to exalt the Queen as their heroine and to inflict mortification and defeat upon him.

We were not the only party perplexed at the position we had assumed. Mr. Canning was in a yet more awkward predicament. He had been intimate, scandal said, too intimate, with the Queen. The rumour was countenanced by the King’s marked aversion to him; and the notoriety of her consultations with him, before she quitted, had served to confirm the suspicion. Yet he had acquiesced in the exclusion of her name from the Liturgy. He did not appear either in Council or in Parliament to have made any very strenuous exertions to screen her from prosecution or aspersion. But when that provocation was determined and announced, he lamented it loudly, spoke in warm terms of his obligations and of the charms of her society. He asked an audience of the King, and stated to him the impossibility of taking any part in the proceedings against her. The King commanded him to remain in his service, but permitted him to state that he did so exclusively in consequence of that command, and allowed him to adhere to his resolution of taking no part. This he considered as a postponement of his resignation, which was tendered and accepted in the winter of 1820.[299]

Surely this was a strange course. It afforded her no assistance or protection. It must have grievously offended his colleagues and the King, and so far from rescuing her character from reproach, it seemed to imply some secret and mysterious reason that disqualified him for a judge or an accuser....

In the meanwhile, the negotiations of the Commons with the Queen (though much to the mortification of Mr. Wilberforce and other grave members who conducted them, they ended in nothing) gave strong colour to the apprehension that, even if a bill of Pains and Penalties should pass the Lords, it would, by direct vote or by delay, be inevitably lost in the Commons. The thought of this animated and inflamed the public. Reports, perhaps unfounded, of murmurs among the soldiery were afloat.[300] They were said to confound the authority of a Queen with that of a King, and, conceiving them to be co-equal and co-ordinate, to imagine it left to their option which to obey. Certain it is that the lowest orders of the community and the fanatic sects of the middle ranks were both, for different and even opposite reasons, stirring partizans of the Queen.

The clergy incurred great odium by their ready and over-zealous acquiescence in the views of a Court which was neither moral nor decorous. They could not disobey the injunctions of their superiors about the Liturgy; but their industry in disseminating the filthiest tales about the Queen and their haughty displeasure at every popular movement on her behalf, disgusted and irritated their flocks exceedingly. Never since the period of Charles I. were the English people so estranged from the Established clergy as on this occasion. Many useful reforms effected since, as well as many less sensible but not less certain symptoms of the declining influence of the hierarchy, may be traced to that epoch. They have been slowly and indirectly, but not unjustly, mulcted and reduced for abetting the petty malice, and conniving at the ill-assumed hypocrisy, of an unprincipled and revengeful Prince.

The report of the Committee of the House of Lords recommending a bill of Pains and Penalties was read on July 4, and Lord Liverpool presented the bill on the next day. It had been settled by an understanding, not, I believe, by a vote of the House, that Her Majesty’s legal advisers, even though members of the other House, should be allowed to be heard and to conduct her defence at the bar; although members of the House of Commons are not usually admitted as counsel for or against any legislative proceeding. However, the whole proceeding was anomalous, and the counsel on both sides were members of Parliament. The proceedings on the bill were to be resumed, or as in common parlance it was described, the Queen’s trial was to begin, on August 17, and on that day Parliament Street was lined by a crowd whose aspect was far more formidable than their numbers. Unlike English multitudes, their countenances seemed to indicate design, determination, and revenge. They hissed some and applauded other peers as they passed; but they performed both those tasks with such marked indifference that it was difficult not to suspect that they had some more serious undertaking in view. One man quitted his companions, and, placing himself at the head of the Duke of Wellington’s horse (as he was riding down to the House), clenched his fist, and repeated the word _Ney_ three times with great emphasis and anger—an exclamation which surprised the bystanders exceedingly, and is said to have disconcerted the Duke himself not a little. Soon afterwards the railing which barricaded the street was broken down by mere pressure, and advantage was taken of this incident to augment both the military and the police. Owing to such precautions or to other accidents, the appearance of the people in the streets, though in numbers always considerable, gradually improved in character, and they became, as English mobs generally are, as manageable and good-humoured as at an election or a fair.

As I had taken some part in the preliminary discussions, chiefly to mark my disapprobation of so unusual, hazardous, and unnecessary a proceeding, so I voted for the Duke of Leinster’s motion to rescind the whole and reject the bill without any inquiry at the bar. But during the inquiry itself, I was for the most part employed in writing nonsensical puns and epigrams on the various indecencies which occurred, and tossing them across the table to the Chancellor for his diversion, and I believe I was the only Lord practised in public speaking who asked not a single question during the inquiry. Once or twice, before the Order of the Day was read, I endeavoured, but in vain, to rouse the attention of the House to the grave events passing in Europe. I also spoke on occasions which seemed to me opportune for dismissing the subject altogether, and I occasionally expressed my opinion on matters of form which arose in the course of it. Upon these latter points I acquired, chiefly during that period, a very undeserved reputation for a knowledge of the rules and orders of the House, which I do not possess. I have, however, frequently, though not perhaps without laughing or at least smiling in my sleeve, taken some credit for it, and availed myself of the delusion to facilitate public business or possibly to give a friendly party a lift. Form is so necessary in an assembly as large as the House of Lords is become, that perhaps where there is neither code nor individual vested with authority, it is pardonable to counterfeit more wisdom than one possesses and lay down some law in an authoritative tone. Lords of order, like yet greater beings, may be worshipped because some worship is convenient, rather than because their oracles are infallible.

Expedit esse Deos et, ut expedit, esse putemus.

Lord Grey earnestly wished to give to this bill all the outward dignity of an impeachment, and asked, on his legs, if there were not a more solemn way of voting than is usually practised on a division. I stated to him and the House that the regular and orderly, though generally neglected, method of taking votes on bills and motions much more nearly resembled that of taking individual judgments on a trial than from the common practice might be supposed. On a question being put, every Lord should in strict form be called, and should stand up in his place and say _Content_ or _Not Content_, in the same manner as he answers _Guilty_ or _Not Guilty_ in Westminster Hall on an impeachment. What was called a division of the House, by the _Contents_ going below and the _Not Contents_ staying within the bar, was a convenient device for ascertaining the number of votes _that had been given on each side_, but does not strictly or technically constitute the act of voting; which was presumed to have been done in obedience to the injunction from the Woolsack, “Those who are for the motion will say _Content_, and those who are against it will say _Not Content_.” The strict form was accordingly, on this solitary occasion, observed. We stood up and voted _seriatim_. We then divided, and were told, as usual, to ascertain the number who had said _Content_ or _Not Content_. This proceeding, from the long disuse of it, was imposing enough; and I not improbably owe the character and the authority of a profound Lord of order chiefly to the accident of having suggested it.

The questions on the various stages after the examination of witnesses were preceded by long debates. In the course of them I shortly stated my reasons against the form, expediency, or necessity of such a bill, but studiously avoided giving the character of a verdict of _Not Guilty_ to that opinion. Others were not so cautious. Many on both sides displayed great subtleness and eloquence. But yet there was a certain lack of earnestness, sincerity, and truth in all that was said, and, in my judgment, individuals and parties, as well as our monarchy and institutions, appeared to sad disadvantage throughout the performance. It was a farce, and a sorry, disgusting, and dangerous one. The manner in which Lord Liverpool dropped the curtain after the third reading is well known. His pretext was that slender majority of nine, which voted for that last reading, did not exceed the number of Cabinet Ministers who had already given a previous and extra-judicial opinion by advising the bill; but his real motive was a conviction that, if he persisted, the bill would be lost in the Commons, or, passing, produce some convulsion in the country.

The relinquishment of the bill was hailed almost instantaneously in the purlieus and adjoining streets with loud shouts of triumph. Within the walls there were, no doubt, many much mortified at so lame and impotent a conclusion; but, though some few protested, the Duke of Montrose alone ventured to raise his voice against an ignominious withdrawal of so grave and, as he thought, so well substantiated a charge. He acted honestly, no doubt. But as he had been by no means a pattern of purity in his youth, he could gain no credit for virtuous abhorrence of female frailty; and having been celebrated in verse and prose as a specimen of that brood which cackles around the Capitol, he must have hissed at the sorry catastrophe of the drama, more from aristocratical disdain of the low character of the paramour than from puritanical horror at the heinousness of the offence. However gloomy and even awful had been the commencement of the business, the fulness of the town at an unusual and agreeable season of the year, the entire close of business after four o’clock in the day, and perhaps some circumstances connected with the nature of the inquiry, rendered the period of its progress singularly festive and gay. Its permanent effect on the House was not so fortunate. It, in some degree, verified Lord Egremont’s prediction that the habit of putting questions to witnesses would familiarise every blockhead to hearing his own voice in public, and he would hereafter weary the House with his silly remarks on various occasions. The Lords, if not more unmanageable, became from this period a more loquacious assembly than heretofore.

The King must have been sorely nettled at the result. He taxed his Ministers with pusillanimity, and sometimes affected to suspect them of treachery. He authorised various persons, such as Lord Donoughmore, Lord Hutchinson, Sir John Leach,[301] and others, to make half-confidences to Lord Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Tierney, and myself. If there was really any further design in such communication than to feel our pulse and alarm his Ministers at the possibility of a change, that design proved quite abortive. Lord Grey justly remarked in a letter, November 21, 1820, that it was impossible for the King and his Ministers to separate, however much they might hate one another.

The Queen’s advisers and partizans, miscalling the cessation of all proceedings an acquittal, were busily endeavouring to set up her Court in rivalry to that of her husband. She gave dinners and had parties; but she had neither a case, a character, nor friends, to enable her to play that game with success; and some ladies of rank and character wrote their names at her door, or even on invitation dined at Brandenburg House, but none took office in her household. It was manifest that her station in fashionable society could never be made either brilliant or comfortable to herself or her visitors.

Whatever might be her failure in London society the agitation in the country continued. Numberless meetings were held, which passed petitions for the introduction of her name in the Liturgy, and pointed more or less directly to the removal of Ministers who advised the prosecution. If I may judge from the two which I was prevailed upon to attend—those of Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire—the enthusiasm in her cause had not abated in the country for several months after the failure of the bill. Yet perhaps in the course of the winter, and yet more manifestly during the early part of the ensuing year, the tide of popularity was on the turn. Her exhibition at St. Paul’s and the King’s re-appearance at the public theatres had very opposite effects. The first weakened the interest engaged in her cause, and the latter softened in some degree the displeasure felt against him. She, on November 29, proceeded to St. Paul’s to return thanks and take the Sacrament. She thereby scandalised many religious persons, who deemed it a profanation of a holy rite, and she disgusted the indifferent, who regarded it as a piece of needless hypocrisy. The King, three months afterwards, mustered courage to show himself in public, and his reception at the theatres in February, though neither brilliant nor striking, indicated plainly enough that the popular frenzy was subsiding.[302]

All this preceded and accounted for the comparative flatness with which her subsequent endeavours to revive popular feeling at the Coronation, and even her death and funeral, with all their exciting circumstances, were received in the course of a short year from the period of her prosecution. The King’s asperity was not so speedily mitigated as the people’s disrelish of it; for when in the ensuing year the intelligence of the death of Napoleon, which arrived before the Queen was taken ill, was announced to him in the ambiguous terms—“I have, Sir, to congratulate you: your greatest enemy is dead,” he unguardedly exclaimed, “Is _she_, by God?” thus betraying the gradation in which personal spite ranged above political enmity in his narrow and pitiful mind.

In 1820 died Sir Arthur Pigott,[303] a high-minded man and sound lawyer, who combined real philosophy with considerable eloquence, acuteness, and learning; and who, although in all exigencies, public and private, singularly serviceable to his friends and party, was too unobtrusive to acquire the celebrity to which his rare attainments and elevated mind certainly entitled him. His appearance was indeed uncouth; and both in figure and his face it was said that anatomists could trace affinity to the African race.[304] If so, he afforded practical proof that the narrow theory which denies capacity to that affectionate people is as erroneous as it is uncharitable. I have heard that, at an early period of his professional life, he had been a solitary instance of a contemporary or rival at the Bar unfairly treated by Lord Erskine. He was certainly among the many whom that extraordinary advocate, by bursting out into a sudden blaze, eclipsed and for a while seemed to extinguish.

About the time of his death, Lord Erskine, who had involved himself in many embarrassments, pecuniary and domestic, was making the last exhibition in public worthy of his former fame. He moved on July 24, on the eve of the examination relating to the Queen, that a list of the witnesses should be forthwith delivered to the Queen to enable her to prepare her defence; but in his subsequent attempt to sum up the evidence he was interrupted in his speech by a loss of recollection, the consequence, as he thought, of sudden and severe illness. He recovered, however, to all appearance. The two or three years he survived added little to his happiness and less to his reputation.

Here then in 1820 closed his singular career, and here a friendly chronicler may feel pleasure in retracing the lines of his character. Few lives have been more useful to the laws of his country, and none more serviceable to his contemporaries, and, indeed, to the liberties of mankind, than Lord Erskine’s. His wonderful exertions in the trials of 1794[305] stemmed the torrent of political violence, which was rapidly rising. In my conscience I believe, that had Horne Tooke and his associates fallen victims to a charge of constructive treason, it would not have been long ere the first men in the country, and among them perhaps the very individuals who instituted the proceedings, would have followed their fate; for a system of political vengeance and persecution as merciless, though in an opposite direction from Robespierre’s, would have been inevitably established. From such scenes I believe we were protected chiefly by the successful genius of Erskine. His character was as extraordinary as his career. Who ever attained so suddenly such celebrity at the Bar? Who ever held it longer? Who owed it more undeniably to brilliant talents and amiable virtues? Who, above all, ever exercised in that profession such superiority, with such uniform amenity of manners, such magnanimity to young and old, to inferiors and followers, to equals and rivals—in short, to all who approached him?

In a career whose very essence is contention, it is marvellous how little angry passion of any kind he either betrayed or provoked. His triumphs (and who had more?) wounded nobody. His disappointments (and he had his share) never fretted and hardly ruffled him. It is said he has left memoirs of his early and professional life. If they relate exclusively to passages in his professional career (to which I earnestly exhorted him to confine himself), they will be not only curious but invaluable. If they embrace politics and private life, they must, I fear, disappoint the world; and they will certainly surprise and divert rather than instruct or enlighten his readers. Yet he was a clear and pleasant writer, when the subject he treated of was such as suited his powers. Even in politics, in which he was anything but sedate or wise, what was miscalled his failure in Parliament should not have occasioned a neglect of his printed speeches. They were often very finished performances; but those delivered at the bar, and afterwards edited by himself, are absolute models of forensic eloquence. They abound in beauties. They have pathos, vehemence, wit, and fancy, and, above all, an originality of mind which they who knew him little and late could hardly imagine to have been in him. Truth is, he was a phenomenon throughout. Well might Mr. Robert Smith say that he knew not why God Almighty should have been at the pains of making a _nisi prius_ lawyer, but he certainly had been and succeeded, when Erskine was formed. Vain even to a proverb, he seldom, very seldom, mortified the vanity, and he _never_ grudged or envied the success, of any other man.

Destitute of all classical education, and consequently debarred from all familiarity with the great models of poetry and oratory, he was yet remarkable in public and private for the taste and purity of his diction. After serving in two active professions, the Navy and the Army, and speaking broad Scotch at the age of 22, he, in the course of five years from that time, was scarcely more distinguished for any other branch of oratory than the grace of his delivery and the beauty and correctness of his elocution. His sagacity and discretion _in a cause_ were unrivalled, but they scarcely exceeded his levity and impudence _out of it_. His judgment and dexterity in other men’s affairs equalled, but it could not surpass, his simplicity and childishness, not to say silliness, in the management of his own. No one gave him credit for much sensibility or very strong affections. Yet the zeal, the earnestness, the energy, with which he espoused the interests of a client, the light-hearted playfulness with which he enlivened the gravest deliberations, his sweetness of temper and gracefulness of manner, made him a welcome associate in all companies and the intimate friend of some of the wisest and best of his contemporaries. His public principles were unquestionably of no very inflexible kind. They had, perhaps, never been very deeply considered, and yet honour or accident, the recollections of early life, and an unaffected deference for the more comprehensive genius of Mr. Fox, which, vain as he was, he never disputed or regretted, rendered him one of the most consistent party men of our days, at least, among those who from lawyers have become politicians.

In short, in drawing his character one might go on with one endless antithesis; and it is not the least remarkable circumstance about him that, in spite of apparent contradictions in his composition, there scarcely ever was a man on the great theatre of the world about whose qualities, moral and intellectual, all persons and parties were more generally agreed. I have chosen to close his character here, for there was nothing in the last years of his life on which a friend could dwell with any satisfaction, though there was nothing on which a biographer or historian could be called upon to dilate. He died in very embarrassed, not to say indigent, circumstances in 1823.

Though the Session of 1820, of which I am now speaking, was engrossed with the Queen’s business, time was found by the Ministers to pass an Act for continuing that odious and unconstitutional law called the Alien Bill. I did my best, but in vain, to rouse some feeling against it. I was left in a minority of seven. On the other hand, a just and necessary amendment of the Marriage [Act] was, after some discussion, lost in the Lords,[306] though the earnestness and home truths of Lord Westmorland and the eloquence of Lord Ellenborough in its favour made an impression which ensured some success in that work of mercy and justice on a future occasion.

But though the legislation of this country was torpid during 1820, the Continent of Europe was not so inert. The Spanish Constitution of 1812 ran like wildfire through the south of Europe.[307] It was proclaimed at Naples, where no copy of it was to be found, and within a month it was adopted in Portugal likewise. The Emperor of Russia and the other members of the Holy Alliance were not unmindful of these events. They signified their apprehension of such revolutionary movements, and, obliquely threatening some efforts to suppress them, called on their Allies to meet at Laybach to take the state of affairs in Italy into serious consideration. Accordingly, at the commencement of 1821, and on the opening of Parliament in January, the Government and the two Houses seemed once more occupied with questions affecting the interests of Europe. They were, indeed, diversified by the county meetings praying for the restoration of the Queen’s name to the Liturgy, to which I have already adverted.

The Duke of Wellington began to take a greater part in debate than hitherto, and, I suspect, in Council, too, after Mr. Canning had withdrawn. In a speech in the House of Lords he ventured on a paradox which shocked the friends of freedom exceedingly. He maintained that open public meetings were an absolute farce, and pretended that resolutions and addresses got up in private, which had been pretty generally resorted to with a view to counteract the impression of those voted in public, and which were much branded as hole-and-corner petitions, were more deserving the attention of Parliament.

Mr. Canning, who had absented himself while the Queen’s Bill was pending, actually resigned in December. He had received the King’s permission to do so. It may be said to have been matter of agreement with him and the King, as appears from a letter written by him to one of his constituents.[308] But the publication of that letter was not agreed to or permitted, and gave His Majesty much umbrage. So much so, that Mr. Canning was obliged to explain and to accuse the poet Campbell, in whose magazine it first appeared,[309] of a breach of confidence or, at least, of discourtesy for printing it without his authority. It is possible that Mr. Canning’s retirement from the Cabinet at that critical moment in some degree facilitated the measures of the Holy Alliance, who then or shortly afterwards determined to trample on the rising liberties of Italy, and succeeded in their iniquitous projects through the pusillanimous treachery of the King of Naples and the irresolute, if not insidious, connivance of the French and English Cabinets.[310] It is true, however, that Lord Liverpool and Lord Castlereagh, both in speeches and public papers, unequivocally disclaimed all participation in the proceedings against Naples, and all sanction or approbation of the principles of the Congress of Laybach.

Their efforts, however, to prevent the interference they thus affected to lament were very faint indeed, and their distribution of naval force, far from impeding, seemed to assist the views of the Holy Alliance. It was, however, confidently asserted by some well-informed persons that it was the real wish of the Duke of Wellington, and yet more of Lord Castlereagh, even at that time to discountenance all armed interference with the revolutions of countries nominally independent. Some even maintain that had the negotiations remained in the hands of Lord Stewart, the present Lord Londonderry,[311] the aggressive measures against Naples would never have been resorted to. Accident or personal caprice occasioned Lord Stewart’s absence at the time; and the conduct of the affairs devolved on Robert Gordon,[312] who, deeply imbued with his brother Lord Aberdeen’s predilection for the Austrians, was easily cajoled by their arts to depart from the spirit of his instructions.

George IV. no doubt rejoiced in secret at the failure of any endeavours to check the anti-revolutionary intervention of Austria; and is it uncharitable to surmise that a Cabinet, weakened in numbers, talents, and popularity by the secession of Mr. Canning and by the unsatisfactory results of the proceedings against the Queen, were disposed to pacify the King by injurious compliances with his passions, or at least by the faintness of their resistance to his ruling prejudices and prepossessions?

In February and March there were many animated debates on these topics. In the course of them I took an active and, as some thought, an intemperate and imprudent part. In one of them, when called to order by Lord Harrowby, I disdained to have the appearance of qualifying by finishing my sentence as I had intended; and, so interrupted, it seemed to charge the Emperor Alexander with a participation or at least connivance at the murder of his father, whereas my meaning was to utter a much less disputable, as well as less offensive, allegation, namely, that it ill became him to charge those who derived their power from insurrection or mutiny with being necessarily accessories after the fact to the perpetration of a crime, for he was himself sitting on the throne reeking with the blood of his own father, and would consequently, by a parity of reasoning, be exposed to the unfounded or, at least, questionable imputation of being cognisant of and responsible for the murder. The diplomatic agents of Russia felt or affected great indignation. Up to the period of Alexander’s death they pointedly avoided my society. It was whispered that Count Lieven,[313] a very gentlemanlike man, had some thoughts of making it a personal quarrel; and my old friend Pozzo di Borgo soon after, at Paris, though not unwilling to meet me, conveyed his regret that he could neither exchange visits nor invite me to his house.

I was in France for five or six months in the summer of 1821; but before I set out, I had the satisfaction of getting an act through Parliament, which in turbulent times may have the beneficial effect of saving the lives of many persecuted and obnoxious men. Availing myself of an admission of Lord Eldon that the laws relating to treason should be alike in all parts of the United Kingdom, I pointed out to him the fact that the just and benevolent statute which requires two witnesses to an overt act of treason was not in force in Ireland; and that men there, in our own time, had been convicted and executed on the testimony of one only. He promised not to oppose a bill to amend this defect; and when I introduced it, [it] glided almost imperceptibly through both Houses of Parliament, to my great satisfaction. Is it vanity to say that when one has succeeded in enacting such an improvement one feels that one has not lived in vain, and that one has done something to rescue from reproach that anomaly which confers for birth alone an undue share in making laws for the community to which one belongs? The bill for the relief of Roman Catholics, having passed the House of Commons, was thrown out in the Lords.

I soon after went to France. Such English intelligence as reached me there may be better found in Parliamentary Reports, _Annual Registers_, and other printed works. To them I refer my reader. He will, no doubt, remark in the debates [on] the Grampound Enfranchisement Bill the gradual but sure tokens of a rising statesman and philosopher in Lord Russell, and in the measure itself the progress of the principle of Reform in the public, as well as some indication of the effects likely to be produced on that question by the shortsighted resistance of the High Tory party to every improvement, however small.

The death of Napoleon was one of the events of this year. The manner it reached me, and many other particulars relating to that extraordinary man, are recorded in a separate book of this work, and require no repetition here.[314]

The Queen’s attempt to force herself into the presence at the Coronation was unsuccessful and undignified. It outraged the feelings of the country, and was deprecated by a large portion of her friends and advisers. Even Sir Robert Wilson, not the least zealous or rash of her counsellors, vehemently protested against it, and absented himself purposely on the occasion. The imputations cast upon him afterwards of planning a mutiny and insurrection were utterly groundless. He was at Paris when news of her death and the projected procession arrived, and he consulted me on the propriety of attending it, after having so recently parted with Her Majesty on a difference respecting her attempt to appear at the Coronation. That gorgeous ceremony, though far less gratifying to the people than those which have subsequently occurred, was lavishly expensive and splendid; but it was very pernicious in its effects both on the Royal and the public mind. George IV. acted the farce of deriving his authority from Heaven with so much complacency that he almost persuaded himself that it was true, and the people, though hardly the dupes of such mummery, surrendered their better judgment and more reasonable feelings of distrust to the glitter of pageantry and show. To disseminate this disposition for parade the King exhibited himself shortly afterwards in Ireland, and even in that nation, whose wrongs he was so intent upon perpetuating, found a gentry and a populace base enough to greet his arrival with shouts and adulation. So predominant is a childish love of Princes in all parts of the British dominions.

It was during his absence on that excursion that Queen Caroline died. The death of this luckless Princess, the consequence of an accidental obstruction in her bowels, was rather a relief than loss to all parties in the State. The King was overjoyed, the Ministers pleased, and perhaps those hitherto politically and professionally connected with her were, on reflection, not sorry at the event. Few could have adhered to her Court without either discredit or disadvantage, and yet none could have held entirely aloof without incurring the imputation of base servility to the King and great want of generosity and feeling. To none was the release greater than to Mr. Canning. It did not entirely efface the resentment of the King against those who had espoused her cause, or those, including the Ministers, whom he thought had by mismanagement given her a triumph; but it removed the object which perpetually reminded him of his mortification, as well as all occasions which might revive his wrath.

END OF THE MEMOIR

MISCELLANEOUS RECOLLECTIONS

A SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BEGUN IN 1826

In one supplementary chapter to my Memoirs I have endeavoured to preserve the recollection of such foreign anecdotes and personages as accident, credible report, or personal observation have brought within my knowledge. In this, I propose to set down whatever I have learnt worth commemorating concerning those persons who, whether Englishmen or foreigners, have during my time, without immediate connection with politics, acquired or deserved celebrity for genius or talent, learning or wit, in science, in art, in poetry, in literature, or in conversation. With some such I have been intimate, with many others familiarly acquainted. All have, no doubt, had directly or indirectly more or less influence on the taste, temper, and opinions of society. The indistinct manner in which it was exerted would not, indeed, justify the introduction of their names in my narrative of party contentions and political events; but some traits of their characters and lives may not be misplaced on the distant ground of the picture I have attempted to trace. I do not, however, pretend to much accuracy of research, nor do I aspire to the office of biographer of my contemporaries; still less am I qualified to become the historian of literature, arts, or sciences. Mine are notes and reminiscences of an idle, and in some senses ignorant, spectator. They are rambling, desultory, and imperfect, and often more calculated to raise than to satisfy curiosity. But they are true; they relate also to subjects which, having afforded amusement and instruction to the writer in the course of his life, may possibly prove neither unpleasing nor uninstructive to some reader of similar habits and taste after its close.

Though from my family connections I was during my childhood and early education in the habit of seeing many of the leading characters in fashionable and political life, yet I remember meeting but few men of literary celebrity. The truth is, that at that period they were less blended in society with men of business and pleasure than they have been of late years. There was perhaps as much reading, but there was less conversation about books. If equal homage was paid to authors of genius, the intercourse between that class of men and fashionable company was infinitely less than has since been established, to the credit, and I should hope to the advantage, of both. Of course there were exceptions. Some few, like Horace Walpole, Gibbon, Soame Jenyns, Sheridan, and Tickell, had at different epochs of their lives partaken of the character of both. Some others, who from birth and early habits might be deemed to belong to one class, from taste or choice studiously devoted themselves to the other. I had from the earliest youth great curiosity about men remarkable for their literary attainments. My vanity and taste were always gratified by any intercourse with them,

Quotque aderant vates rebar adesse Deos.

Hence I was flattered by occasionally visiting Horace Walpole in London and at Strawberry Hill, at one or two letters I received from him, and at the notice he took of me when I met him in houses which he habitually frequented. His conversation, like his written compositions, displayed a sprightly mind and a memory stored with anecdotes, historical and literary, the result of much antiquarian research and the fruit of a long life spent in the company of statesmen, authors, artists, and wits. In his person he was slender and prim, in his manners extremely artificial, in his temper somewhat susceptible about trifles. His conversation, though much enlivened by fancy and epigram, had great marks of preparation and study, and even effort. These circumstances made Lord Ossory observe in some MS. notes that, “Walpole fell far short of his friend, George Selwyn,” who, let me add, was a friend somewhat unmerciful on the taste and appearance of Horace Walpole, describing Strawberry Hill to me as a catacomb, or at best a museum, rather than a habitation, and the master of it [as] one of the most carefully finished miniatures and best preserved mummies in the whole collection.

But whatever were his peculiarities, Walpole’s published and unpublished works are mines which abound in brilliant, and do not fail in solid, materials for history and biography. No one employed as I have been in editing and, as I now am, in imitating his labours,[315] can seriously wish to disparage one whom he shows himself willing and perhaps unequal to copy and to emulate. The scandalous chronicle reported him to be son of a Lord Hervey.[316] In affected humour, laborious application to trifles, occasional and unprovoked malignity, and whimsical ingenuity of understanding, he certainly bore some resemblance to that family. He felt, or pretended to feel, great disgust at the practice adopted by the bookmaking admirers of Johnson, who scrupled not to commit to print whatever they heard in private conversation. Hence he would suddenly purse up his mouth in a pointed but ludicrous manner whenever Boswell came into the room, and sit as mute as a fish till that angler for anecdote and repartee had left it. It is more than probable that he dreaded and disliked Dr. Johnson himself. Whig principles, Republican affectations, and loose notions of religion, were all likely to invite an attack; and I much suspect that Walpole practised some artifice or resorted to some meanness to elude the notice or disarm the hostility of that formidable enemy of fashionable philosophy. In conversation and private correspondence, as well as in his posthumous works, he was by no means sparing of sneers and sarcasms on the priesthood and the Church. I well remember that, on the publication of _The Microcosm_,[317] Lady Ossory enclosed to me a letter she had received from Horace Walpole, in which he humorously but earnestly exploded a prevalent notion that the juvenile authors were assisted by the masters. Walpole urged the incapacity, ignorance, and sycophancy of the tutors and parsons in terms highly offensive to clerical ears. I, in truth, did not understand the force of many of his allusions; but, vain of possessing the handwriting of an eminent wit, ran to communicate the panegyric of my schoolfellows to my tutor, Dr. Langford. He, though “Etonian to the backbone,” was far from relishing such a compliment to the scholars, but, nettled at the irreverence or truth of the remarks, made me feel that I had not risen in his favour by becoming the depositary of so heterodox a document.

Walpole’s conjectures were not, however, unfounded, nor his sarcasms unmerited. The fellows, masters, and tutors were in my time, a period of nearly ten years, singularly deficient in common sense and experience, and by no means distinguished even in that narrow path of learning which they are expected most earnestly to pursue. Dr. Goodall[318] was perhaps an exception to the last clause of this censure. He was a showy scholar and quick man, but with as little usage of the world or solidity of judgment as his colleagues. I was diverted, when I met him at our Ambassador’s many years afterwards, at the good-humoured simplicity with which he acknowledged what had delighted him most in Parisian society. It was, forsooth, the precedence given to the Nuncio, the red stockings, imposing dress, and dignified carriage of an ecclesiastic, who from perhaps a pedagogue like himself had risen to be a diplomat and a Cardinal, and walked before nobles, generals, and Princes. Dr. Roberts,[319] the Provost, who for a short time had been tutor to Mr. Fox, was something more of a literary character. He had published a volume of verses, and was supposed to have assisted Dr. Glynn[320] (an abler man than himself) in his Seatonian Prize on the Day of Judgment, which is a poetical composition of unquestionable merit and full of happy imitations both of Milton and of Virgil. I suspect, however, that Dr. Roberts is now better remembered in “Colleges and Halls” for a speech to the King, highly characteristic of his profession, than for the truth or taste of his poetry. In thanking His Majesty for his Provostship, he added, “And I am the more sensible of the favour conferred, Sir, as it is tenable with any other preferment.”

Among the fellows was a Dr. Barford,[321] who passed for a great scholar. I could never discover on what his reputation was founded, except a Greek translation of Gray’s _Elegy_. The boys affirmed that he could read a newspaper off-hand into classical Greek, a common hyperbole to express a scholar’s familiarity with that language. George Selwyn used the same to me of his Master, Dr. George: he added that he knew the Greek for every English word except _Mutton cabobbed_, that he had taught his wife also many words, but that he reproved her for using them ungrammatically, as, when in playing whist she said, “I lead ὁ βασιλέυς,” he would turn up his eyes and earnestly exclaim, “τὸν βασιλέα, τὸν βασιλέα, my dear.”[322] I know not why I repeat so silly a story, especially as I cannot vouch for its truth. I might, however, have asked the lady herself, for I remember seeing her at Mrs. Hewitt’s (who was, I think, her granddaughter) at the age of one hundred and one—the oldest person I ever met in company. Of this same Dr. George, it is related, that on hearing the King of Prussia, then a young military hero, extolled for his abilities, he observed, “I should like to have him up in my school to a verb in μί.”

Similar notions of excellence might be brought home to the pedants and masters of my own time. My schoolfellows, however, aspired even during their education to a better kind of literary fame, and not without success. _The Microcosm_ was published while I was at Eton. I was myself too young, idle, and ignorant to contribute to the work. The four chief conductors were John or Joseph Smith, usually called by a nickname Easley; Robert Percy Smith, yet more generally designated by his nickname Bobus—both collegers, but unconnected by blood—and George Canning and John Hookham Frere—Oppidans. Among the occasional contributors were Lord Henry Spencer,[323] who, notwithstanding his constitutional shyness and reserve, would have distinguished himself by his wit and ingenuity, but died at the early age of twenty-four when employed on a mission to Berlin; and Mr. Mellish, who passed an adventurous life chiefly abroad, and translated many German works for the booksellers in London.

The elder Smith, surnamed Easley, was nephew of Sir Nathaniel Grove, the Puisne Judge, and, through the interest of his uncle or of Mr. Canning, obtained some places in the Courts of Justice and the Colonies, in which he silently enjoyed the profits, without offence, but without rising or aspiring to any eminence in his profession or in literature.[324] His numbers, in which there was rather an ostentatious display of learning and a dash of unintelligible metaphysics, were great favourites with the schoolboys. They passed with us for prodigies of learning and profound speculation. Boys generally form a very correct prognostic of the temper, disposition, and courage, and a very erroneous one of the prudence, sense, and abilities of their schoolfellows.

Of Robert Percy Smith,[325] elder brother of Sydney; married to my aunt, Miss Vernon; first, Advocate-General of Calcutta, and afterwards, representative for Lincoln in two successive Parliaments, I shall probably speak more than once in the course of these pages: but, having mentioned him as an Eton boy, I cannot withhold my testimony to his early proficiency and extraordinary promise. He was clearly the soundest scholar of his day; he had not only by his own unaided exertions mastered the Italian language and literature, but had already read and reflected on as many and as profound works, both ancient and modern, on ethics, politics, and divinity, as would have enabled an ordinary student in either of our Universities to set up for an accomplished metaphysician. Yet nature had done more for him than study. He was a descendant of a sister of Sir Isaac Newton, and his powers of application and reasoning, though never directed to science, seemed to claim and justify the relationship. He had, too, a wonderful command of language. If he seldom displayed his pleasantry and imagination, enough escaped him to satisfy even a superficial observer that he had in store, though he perhaps disdained to use it, as much of both of those commodities as glittered in the conversation of his brother and attracted the applause of fashionable society in London. Perhaps the strict discipline to which Robert Smith had inured his mind even at Eton perverted rather than directed, encumbered rather than enriched it. Notions not very friendly to our species and crudely adopted from books when a boy, though quite foreign from his natural character, which was sanguine and gay as well as ambitious, checked him in the career of his profession, aggravated many little unavoidable but not insuperable disappointments, dimmed the brilliancy of his spirits, and though they could not extinguish the native warmth of his heart, confined its influence to too small a circle, and gave up, not to party, but to the parlour and the fireside, what was meant and admirably formed for mankind.

The early inclinations of George Canning destined him to another career than that of letters. His success in it renders it superfluous to say much of him as a writer or companion, though in both those capacities he rose far beyond mediocrity. In all, his quick sense of ridicule, his readiness and exuberance, both in fancy and in expression, were conspicuous. Perhaps his characteristic excellence when a boy, viz., prodigious facility of composition, is more necessary in this country to the success of an orator or a Minister than depth and originality of thought. He was, indeed, when compared with some of his fellow labourers in _The Microcosm_, more showy than solid, but it does not follow from thence that he was for that early age in any degree superficial. His papers in that work were the most lively, and his verses more easy and sonorous than those of his associates. His Latin exercises and English effusions excelled in splendour of diction and brilliancy of wit, rather than in the expression of passion or truth of poetical feeling.

_Sir M. A. Shee Pinx._

_Emery Walker Ph. Sc._]

Considering the station[326] he now occupies and the events that are passing, it is curious to reflect that his first copy of English verses (written, as he assured me, before he came to Eton, and consequently ere he was twelve years of age) was on the Slavery of Greece, and contains a fervent exhortation and prayer for the liberation of its inhabitants. It is to be found in the 5th number of _The Microcosm_.

The least successful in that juvenile work was John Hookham Frere; yet he had a genius better adapted to letters than any of his coadjutors. Although indistinct or, at least, inconsistent in his reasoning, he excelled them all in originality of thought, humour, and expression. His merits (to use a happy phrase of his own) were of a manufacture less suited to foreign export than to home consumption. It was therefore mistaken friendship in Mr. Canning to engage him in diplomacy. His artless temper, his ill-directed suspicions, his absence, occasional rudeness, and habitual indolence and singularity, all obviously disqualified him for that line. Had he been employed in England, his devotion to his friends, the ardour of his mind, and the stores of his memory, but, above all, the originality of his humour, would doubtless have made him a first-rate political writer. Had he yet more fortunately confined himself to literature, his genius might have raised him to the character of an original critic and moralist, and perhaps have placed him on the same form with those poets who have furnished the best models of excellence in our language. As it was, the very habits which disqualified him for serious business added a zest to his conversation and gave a relish to all private intercourse with him in society. You laughed with him when he was facetious, you smiled at him when he was odd. He had warm and generous affections, but it was shrewdly observed of him that his attachments, like those of a cat, were stronger to places than to persons.

He was the only man ever so enamoured of quarantine, as to linger beyond his time in a _Lazaretto_, and quit it with reluctance and almost by compulsion. I have known him detained in a house for more than a fortnight, by a secret plot with his servant to neglect his orders and not to drive round the carriage, pack up his things, or announce the hour of his departure. He has been in his carriage on the eve of a long journey, and suddenly induced to get out of it in search of a book left behind in the room, where, finding and beginning to read it, he has thrown himself into a chair, and insensibly allowed the day to pass, and almost as imperceptibly postponed his intended departure for a week. The peculiar character of his humour is not easily described. His repartees or sayings, when deliberately recounted, do not preserve it. There was a playful archness in his sarcasms, keen but not offensive. There was a felicity in his phraseology (though he was not fluent) which, without exceeding the tone of familiar conversation, displayed a reach of fancy and strength of feeling delightful and unusual. He was a superstitious admirer of past times. He loved to sneer at the self-complacency with which our generation contemplates its real or supposed improvements in philosophy and the arts of life. When the unproductive state of the Peninsula was objected to his exaggerated praises of Spain and Portugal, he replied that “he loved a country where God Almighty kept large portions of land in his own hands.”

He had read little or nothing systematically, but he devoured every book that fell within his reach, and remembered all he met with in such desultory studies with an accuracy almost miraculous. Such facility of emotion, combined with a strong propensity to exercise his faculties on every subject presented to his mind, made him a very indulgent critic. He not only saw much more in a book than the author ever intended to convey, but he frequently built systems on foundations created by his own imagination and in no degree warranted by the work in which he fancied that he had discovered them.

What Montesquieu said of Voltaire is true of him, “Tous les livres qu’il lit, il les fait; après quoi il approuve ou critique ce qu’il a fait.” Hence he delighted in authors who deal in obscure allusions, whimsical images, and fanciful theories. Rabelais and Aristophanes were among his favourites. He was not only capable of tasting the satire, poetry, and wit of the latter, but he lent most of those qualities to every indifferent passage of his plays, discerning in every word more than struck the ear, and ascribing to the whole composition a systematic and patriotic design which was certainly never professed, and probably never harboured, by the writer. According to Frere, it was not gaiety, vanity, or malignity, which induced the great Athenian comic poet to libel the best man of his country and expose the first tragedian of his time to the ridicule of the rabble; it was, forsooth, a due sense of the pernicious effects of a mistaken theory of morals, and a deliberate apprehension of the consequences of an enervated and effeminate taste in composition. His scurrility and buffoonery were patriotic endeavours to rescue his countrymen from the persuasive philosophy of Socrates and the seductive poetry of Euripides.

In the interval between school and college I made a tour in Scotland, but I missed, on that and some subsequent occasions, the advantage of making acquaintance with the Principal, Robertson, the historian,[327] to whom I had letters of introduction. In truth, I heard very little conversation on literature in that northern land of letters, except strictures on the spirit and criticisms on the details of Dr. Johnson’s _Tour to the Hebrides_. That work and the poems of Ossian were then comparatively recent publications. They had not ceased to excite, in a different manner though nearly to an equal degree, the passions of the _literati_ in Scotland, where society, though divided on other topics, is and ever will be singularly tenacious on such as in any way affect their national character or reputation. Boswell was accused of having sacrificed his country to his authorship, of having led the English philosopher into the least attractive regions and least polished society he could find, with the view of provoking epigrams and extorting sarcasms wherewith to season his narrative and give a zest to tales otherwise insipid and uninteresting. It was Henry Erskine,[328] afterwards Lord Advocate, who termed Boswell “the Bear Leader,” and pretended that on being introduced to Dr. Johnson in the streets of Edinburgh, he had simply bowed to the stranger, but turned round to his countryman and slipped half-a-crown into his hand with thanks for the show.

In no town in which I ever resided did I see less of men distinguished for learning and literature than in Oxford during the two years I spent in that University. Tom Warton[329] was dead before I was entered, and his place in Trinity College was ill supplied by a gentleman of the name of Kett,[330] as an epigram very current in those days attests, _viz._,

The glorious sun of Trinity is set, And naught shines now but farthing candle Kett.

Mr. Crowe,[331] the public orator, a fellow of New College, had more merit. As a Latin scholar he was without a rival, as a poet he was not despicable. Mr. Rogers has so unfeigned an admiration for his works that he seldom travels without a copy of them, as well as of Gray, in his chaise pocket. His verses on the installation of the Duke of Portland[332] contain an invective against war worthy of Milton himself. But his Whig, not to say Republican, propensities, which peep forth in that very poem, were so offensive in Oxford that blemishes in his moral character were remembered, and perhaps invented, to justify the neglect he experienced from successive Governments and the little store set by the University on his productions and lectures. His manners, it must be acknowledged, as well as his habits, were somewhat coarse and unsocial.

Dr. Sibthorp,[333] who, I believe, succeeded his father in the Botanical Chair, and who travelled and died in Greece, had acquired some celebrity in his humble walk of science. An awkward circumstance was said to have occurred on his application for the professorship. To qualify, the candidate must be furnished with testimonials not only of having studied, but of having actually practised, physic. Dr. Sibthorp had, indeed, attended the sick, but then there were none alive to attest it; so that in adducing proof of his having exercised his profession, he was compelled to raise a strong presumption of his unfitness for it, and to divulge the mortifying fact that not one of his few patients had survived his prescriptions.

Dr. Cyril Jackson,[334] Dean of Christ Church, enjoyed and deserved great reputation as the head of a college. He had some general knowledge, was a good scholar, and by some little artifices of manner, as well as by many real acts of benevolence, contrived to excite in the young men much respect for the institutions of the University and great notions of his dignity, abilities, and virtues. He was, in truth, a very honourable, disinterested, and warm-hearted man. He taught, however, and, I believe, felt, so indiscriminate a veneration for all received opinions because they were received, that he became, without meanness, a worshipper of rank, and, although not destitute of sagacity and utterly exempt from the mean passions of envy or jealousy, a favourer of mediocrity. The effect, though not intention, of his system, could it have prevailed, would have been to leave all prejudices unmolested, and thereby to slacken exertion and discourage improvement, to inculcate caution on his pupils till he had damped their genius, and to reduce all political and literary merit to deference for authority and prudent admiration of acknowledged excellence. He had been employed under Markham, Archbishop of York, in the education of the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Duke of York. That circumstance gave him access to both those Princes throughout his life: and he affected more than he actually enjoyed, recounting to his listeners at Oxford, at one time, the blunt reproofs, at others, the friendly advice he had given to his Royal pupils. From compliance with George III.’s partiality, or from a genuine preference of manly character over quickness of parts, he always professed more attachment to the Duke of York than the Prince of Wales. The latter, aware of his predilections and nettled at them, took an odd method of revenging himself by retaliation. In all companies he launched forth in commendation of William Jackson, younger brother of the Dean.[335] He would extol his merits as a companion, friend, and scholar, though he well knew him to be a dull, selfish, and ordinary man; and he studiously represented him as superior to his brother, though he owed to the celebrity and friendship of that brother what little credit or reputation he enjoyed at college, as well as all the preferment, including the Bishopric of Oxford, that he obtained in the Church.

Dr. Beddoes[336] had not closed his lectures when I first went to college, but I never attended them; nor did I become acquainted with the lecturer till he had retired from the University in consequence of some disgust arising either from his opinions in politics and religion, or from the peculiarities of his temper, which was neither conciliatory nor tractable.[337] He was a man of science and of genius, but by no means successful as a lecturer. His figure and delivery were ungraceful, his language inflated and ambitious, and he was so singularly awkward in the mechanical part of his experiments that they generally failed, and he was then compelled to proceed in his discourse on the hypothesis that the result had been the reverse of that which the eyes of his audience would have led them to believe. He contributed, however, to the advancement both of chemistry and medicine, and had the merit of discovering the talents and directing the labours and studies of an indigent youth who afterwards became Sir Humphry Davy. All his writings, whether on politics or science, are eloquent and original, but they betray great want of taste, judgment, and prudence. He was rash and paradoxical in the extreme. He above once announced discoveries which he was obliged to retract; and Dr. Ingenhousz[338] (who somewhat enjoyed his discomfiture) blamed him more for his ignominious candour in abandoning, than his hasty presumption in publishing, such crude and erroneous conjectures. As an instance of his bad taste in language and conversation, I remember that when asked by Lord Lansdown[339] how an election at Bristol was likely to go, he began his reply with these words, “My Lord, when the floodgates of the human mind are once opened....” I believe Lord Lansdown and his audience were not much disposed to await the torrent of eloquence and metaphysical reasoning which was to ensue. In proof of the wildness of his theories, suffice it to mention that he seriously maintained the non-existence of bodily pain. It was the mere effect of education: and a child properly trained for that purpose would find it a pleasurable sensation, and what we consider as pleasurable sensations might, by an opposite system of discipline from that usually practised, be rendered odious and disagreeable and abhorrent to our desires. He afterwards undertook the tuition of young men; and the acquirements of his pupils (of whom Mr. Lambton was one), as well as their attachment to the memory of their preceptor, do much credit to his head and heart.

The same commendation may be bestowed on the person next presented to my recollection, Dr. Parr.[340] Though a Cambridge man, he frequently visited Oxford, where he lodged at the house of his friend Dr. Routh,[341] Principal of Magdalen, a quiet, learned, and benevolent man, a Tory in his principles and a recluse in his habits. Dr. Parr’s reputation for scholarship and his zeal for Whig politics, together with the singularity of his countenance, dress, habits, and manners, rendered him an object of much curiosity and some little dread, both to the tutors and undergraduates. His visits formed a sort of era in Oxford. His sayings were repeated, his appearance, his monstrous wig, his velvet coat, his lisping speech and penetrating eye, his love of smoking, and affected laugh with his shoulders, were the topics of conversation in all the Common rooms and wine parties in the University.

This was precisely what he sought for. It was the sort of celebrity that delighted him. He panted, indeed, for opportunities of conflict with the High Churchmen of the place, with the hope of astonishing the undergraduates by the boldness of his paradoxes, the variety of his quotations, and the wit of his retorts. But the heads of Houses and professors were by no means disposed to indulge him in such intellectual gymnastics. They are seldom inclined to court notoriety, and they seemed somewhat afraid of Dr. Parr. At Christ Church, our superiors refrained from courting him with any ostentation of civility, but they were wonderfully cautious not to offend by any remarks on his maxims in scholarship, politics, and divinity, though printed in sermons and pamphlets and circulated very freely in conversation by his admirers in the University. A distant sneer or an arch inquiry was the utmost symptom of hostility ever hazarded against this active champion of every cause they disapproved.[342]

Among the professors at Oxford there was indeed one who had good cause for fear, and yet more for resentment, against Dr. Parr, had he had the ability to gratify it. This was Dr. White,[343] the Arabic Professor. He had signalised himself a few years before by the publication of his Bampton lectures, which were hailed by the orthodox as a triumph for Christianity over Islamism achieved by a member of the Church of England, and by the Oxonians as a proof of the success with which the Oriental languages were studied in their University.

But short-lived was their exaltation. It was soon discovered that a Nonconformist minister, of the name of Badcock, had, for a stipulated sum (which, I think, the professor in an evil hour disputed with his executors), furnished much of the reasoning and of the Arabic of that vaunted publication. Upon that detection, Dr. Parr, with more eagerness and less generosity than was usual in him, exclaimed, “I, too, could pluck a feather from the crest of that Oxford Phœnix”; and he accordingly made good his claim to several Greek quotations and other admired passages in the lectures. Thus were the hopes of orthodoxy and Oxford suddenly blighted, or rather, the harvest they expected to reap cruelly wrested from them and divided between Nonconformity and Cambridge. Poor Dr. White, stripped of his borrowed plumes, was hooted at and reviled by all the satirists and witlings of the day.

Cui color _albus_ erat, nunc est contrarius _albo_.

The obvious punning quotation of George Selwyn was repeated by every schoolboy, and the professor, though he had raised himself from a low condition in life by learning only, and was, in truth, a good Arabic scholar, a studious, simple,[344] and inoffensive man, could never re-establish his credit or advance his fortune. He edited, in vain, some Oriental works; he acquired no fame and obtained little preferment.[345]

To return to Dr. Parr, I was introduced to him by Mr. Canning, who had made his acquaintance at Mr. Sheridan’s or at Crewe Hall. I do not enlarge on his moral, intellectual, or political virtues, all which were very great, because the publications devoted to his memory will be full of them. My task is only to preserve some diverting but harmless foibles in his manners and conversation, which the dignity of graver biographers will very probably suppress.

I should, however, be sorry, were my reader to imagine that I was really insensible to Dr. Parr’s many excellent qualities of head and heart, his learning, his eloquence, his political consistency and integrity, his warm affections, disinterestedness, and generosity. Of the latter virtue especially, I have known many instances in his conduct to his pupils. None, however, but such as have seen him in a society of undergraduates, surrounded by old pupils and young admirers over whom he exercised unlimited jurisdiction in all matters of taste and learning, can believe the liberties he took or the absurdities into which his vanity betrayed him. So little was any interchange of ideas necessary to gratify him that he launched forth in praise of the extraordinary _erudition_ of his neighbour at a public dinner on a Gaudy day, who turned out to be neither more nor less than the beadle of the college, admitted by old usage to a seat at the table on such solemn occasions, but aspiring to no further academical attainments than the sweeping[346] the quadrangles, or, at the utmost, writing down the name of the students for whom the gates were opened after sunset. He had, however, no doubt earned the panegyric bestowed upon him, by listening with profound silence and veneration to the Latin and Greek which Dr. Parr had poured into his ears. The Doctor enlarged with great complacency on the effect, as well as Latinity, of his preface to Bellendenus.[347] He had introduced into that work some severe strictures on the character of Mr. Pitt’s eloquence, and he observed that his friend Mr. Horner thought it would “turn that Minister out”; but then he would add, with an appearance of overstrained humility, “But Horner is a sanguine man.”

He told us, I well remember, that he suspected Pitt of a settled design of subverting the idiom of the language, as well as overturning the constitution. “The dog talks grammar,” he said, “but it is an insidious masked battery under which he may better assail our idiom.” Then he would relate how he had sat in the gallery of the House of Commons and thrown his “whole grammatical mind” upon the orator, a process which he acted with most significant gestures, and then added, “The dog caught my eye, and chastised his faulty phraseology.”

There was a report at that time that our late fellow-collegian, Mr. Jenkinson (afterwards Lord Liverpool and Prime Minister), had been entrusted with a mission to the French Princes, who had taken refuge and were then meditating war against their country at Coblentz. Dr. Parr inveighed against such an appointment, but we were all somewhat startled upon discovering that it was not the mission but the choice of the envoy alone which scandalised him. So young a man, he observed, could not be equal to it; and although he would himself never serve Billy (for so he contemptuously termed Mr. Pitt), that Premier would do well to look out for a clergyman of such habits, sagacity, and scholarship as himself, to ascertain the views and fathom the designs of those revolted Princes on the Rhine.

In speaking of living scholars, metaphysicians, and writers, he would frequently name those whom he thought the first and the third in each department of excellence; but he always omitted the second, manifestly reserving that place for himself, and as manifestly pluming himself on his modesty in not asserting his right to the first, which he hoped his auditors would in their hearts assign him. In this scale of excellence he always placed Mr. Porson[348] at the head of our Greek scholars. It was just and prudent to do so. The concurrent testimony of all his contemporaries would have granted to that gentleman the same pre-eminence that Dr. Parr, perhaps rather reluctantly, assigned him.

Porson was in scholarship _facile princeps_; in memory he was a prodigy; in wit and understanding a much more extraordinary man than such prodigies usually are. Persons intimate with him have assured me that he not only knew most of the ancient poets and all the Greek tragedians by heart, but would repeat nearly _verbatim_ the notes of the most approved editions. He usually did so when any passage was quoted in his presence, specifying the page, the column, and the place of the respective editions, where the passage itself and the notes he had repeated were to be found. His recollection of words was certainly not confined to poetry or eloquence. He could, and did often, recite long and dull comments in Greek, Latin, and English, _verbatim_. He knew all the notes of Gibbon by heart; and when sentences of the text of that historian or of any of his favourite works (among which Foote’s Farces must be reckoned) were read or alluded to, he usually finished the paragraph or scene without omitting a word. He was not, like Napoleon, a great proficient in mathematics; but he had, like him, a memory as retentive of numbers as of everything else. He occasionally took an unaccountable pleasure in repeating large sums, and had a tiresome trick of counting them aloud, especially after he had drunk much wine, and was disposed by such a test to prove to himself that his faculties were not sensibly impaired thereby.

Such peculiarities did not add to his charms as a companion. I never saw him but twice, and on both occasions in a club, where he was a visitor and not a member,[349] and where he had little opportunity of display, except indeed by long quotations from Hickes’ _Thesaurus_ and other singular rather than agreeable proofs of the extent and accuracy of his memory. When I asked him to my house he peremptorily declined coming; on my repeating my invitation, he sent me word that he had “broken his leg and could not come,” though he was frequently met about the same time walking in the streets. Perhaps he was affronted at my sending the invitation by a common friend, instead of calling myself, or perhaps he was on that, as on other occasions, extremely jealous of being invited as a show. Such, at least, was the interpretation frequently put by him on the marks of homage which slight acquaintances, and even strangers, were naturally disposed to pay to his extraordinary talents and celebrity.

In recording such misplaced pride and false notions of independence, it is just to add that in the more important concerns of life his sense of honour was to the full as susceptible and his spirit as inflexible. He sacrificed without ostentation great advantages of station and prospects of fortune to conscience. Having eluded the manœuvres and rejected the solicitations of those who urged him to qualify for a clerical fellowship in his college, as well as subsequent preferment by taking holy orders, he, from the same scruple and dislike of the Thirty-nine Articles, was willing to forego the favourite object of his ambition, the Greek Professorship at Cambridge. His sarcastic letter to Dr. Postlethwaite,[350] on that occasion, establishes beyond dispute both his disapprobation of those Articles and his conscientious adherence to truth at the expense of interest and advancement. When one reflects that he had no private fortune, no rich connections,[351] no expectations whatever, such inflexibility of principle and self-respect must extort one’s admiration and applause. His conduct is the more praiseworthy, as it was dictated neither by the vanity of fanaticism nor the zeal of making proselytes. What his particular opinions on religion were is not known; at least, he never took much pains to promulgate them. He speaks of himself as not a “sound believer” in the Church sense of that word. Whether he confined his objections to the peculiar creed of the Church of England, or denied revelation altogether, I have never ascertained.

While resident at the University, although avowedly not orthodox, he abstained himself [from], and discountenanced in others, all scoffs at Christianity. His subsequent habits and intimacies must have familiarised him with great freedom of conversation on such topics; and it was generally supposed that he was a sceptic or freethinker. As a scholar and critic, in which capacities his authority will ever be greatest, his testimony was manifestly unfavourable to the Trinitarian interpretation of Scripture. His masterly letters to Archdeacon Travis finally exploded the verse of St. John—the only text approaching to a direct assertion of three persons in the Godhead.[352] His conviction that the New Testament never predicates in positive terms, nor implies by fair inference from language the existence of the Trinity, seems almost acknowledged in his writings. It was not, I apprehend, concealed, much less denied, by him in conversation. The Trinitarians, who are disposed to stigmatise their Arian and Unitarian adversaries as dishonest and ignorant, must be prepared to maintain some strong paradoxes with respect to celebrated men. They must question the sincerity of Lardner, and deny the learning of Milton, Clarke, Porson, and Wakefield.[353]

Porson had more particles of pride than vanity, and more principle than affection, in his composition. But had it not been for the vice of drunkenness in which he indulged in a manner that degraded him, he would have been a respectable man in character as well as abilities and acquirements. He could never have been an amiable one. Yet was he a friend to liberty, and by no means indifferent to the improvement of mankind. In that respect he was the reverse of Swift, whom in other points he resembled and in some little degree rivalled. Swift said he could love Jack or Jem, but hated and despised the human race. Porson, on the contrary, had some benevolence for the species, but seemed incapable of loving Jack, Jem, or any individual. His English verses (fragments rather than poems) seem, from their extreme exactness in rhyme, rhythm, and expression, to have cost as much pains as those of Swift himself. They are to the full as biting and malignant.

In the two most successful efforts of his muse, _viz._, his verses on the fellows of Trinity College, and his address to Cambridge on the admission of the young Duke of Gloucester, there is so much indecency blended with the satire that, although among the best lampoons in our language, I shall not venture to insert them....

Specimens of his repartees are more common and have more merit; but I am afraid of repeating things elsewhere preserved and generally known. When some enthusiastic admirer of the knot of writers called “Lake Poets,” in extolling Wordsworth, Southey, and the rest _qui pauperes esse volunt et pauperes sunt_, emphatically predicted that they would be read when Virgil, Milton, Dryden, and Pope were forgotten, “I agree with you, and _not till then_,” was the dry and contemptuous answer of Porson. When pressed, after a tiresome metaphysical disquisition by Dr. Parr, to give his opinion on the origin of moral and physical evil: “Why, I think,” said he, “Doctor, we should have done very well without them.”

There was a project for sending him with Lord Elgin’s[354] Embassy to Constantinople, in the hope that he might discover, decipher, and elucidate manuscripts, inscriptions, documents, and other remains of antiquity. Whether the objections to such an appointment originated with himself or Lord Elgin, I know not. The latter has been reproached with it. But it is just to remark that Porson, scholar and wit as he was, would, from the intemperance of his habits and the perverse susceptibility of his temper, have been rather a troublesome inmate, especially in a residence where during the war there was no resource for society but within the walls of the Embassy. His place was supplied by Mr. Carlyle[355] and Dr. Hunt. The former translated and published some very pretty specimens of Arabic poetry; the latter, who was afterwards chaplain to the Duke of Bedford in Ireland, became a very useful magistrate in Bedfordshire, without neglecting the studies of antiquity and _virtu_ in which he had made great proficiency in Greece and Asia Minor.

To return to the worthies of Oxford during my residence there. I knew few of the professors, nor did many of them give the undergraduates opportunity or inclination to cultivate their acquaintance by the frequency or excellence of their lectures. Mr. Wooddeson,[356] who filled the Vinerian Chair, had ceased to deliver the lectures (which he published) before my time. They have merit and learning, and though not so complete nor so eloquent as those of his predecessor, Blackstone,[357] they are certainly less tinged with the peculiar tenets of the place in which they were delivered than the commentaries of that perspicuous writer and learned but somewhat obsequious judge.

Dr. Wenman,[358] the professor of Civil Law, both from his connections and his subject, was likely to maintain tenets more congenial to the Metropolis of Toryism. But his lectures attracted so little notice and made so faint an impression on his auditors that I have forgotten their character, and believe that I never heard their merits even discussed.

The Professor of Mathematics was Mr. Robison or Mr. Robinson,[359] a Scotchman. He had taken his degree, or at least had acquired his science, at Glasgow; and Mr. Windham, before his hostility to the French Revolution had weaned him from the practice of irreverent jokes and excited in him some hopes of representing the University in Parliament, used to make himself merry at the expense of his Alma Mater, who, finding such a dearth of science among her own sons, had been compelled to send to a northern and Presbyterian nursery for a mathematician capable of filling her own chair.[360] The duties required, however, by the office were either very light or the northern luminary very scandalously neglected them. I never heard of his lectures, his pupils, or his examinations, and I shrewdly suspect he had none.

Dr. Hornsby,[361] Professor of Astronomy, did give lectures, and they were not ill-attended. Yet they were such as many a lad in a Scotch or foreign University, and many an itinerant teacher unmatriculated in any, could have easily supplied. Those on divinity by Dr. Randolph[362] were probably distinguished by more talent, and certainly possessed learning seldom found and perhaps not often sought for out of the walls of a college. Yet they were no favourites with the public, nor even with those young men who were destined to Holy Orders. This was owing to the slovenly delivery, awkward and obscure phraseology, and rude, unpolished manners of the lecturer. Under that exterior, however, the ungraceful and ungracious priest, narrow-minded Tory as he was, concealed a kind heart and a disinterested, compassionate, and generous disposition. He became first Bishop of Oxford, and afterwards of London, where he died soon after his elevation to the see.

In the Medical or Anatomical Chairs there was no professor of superior, or even equal, eminence. Grosvenor,[363] a very able surgeon, resident in Oxford, was not, I believe, a member of the University, and certainly filled no office in it. Sir Christopher, then _Doctor_ Pegge,[364] is chiefly remarkable for having been the successful competitor of Dr. Vaughan, afterwards Sir Henry Halford.[365] That more distinguished and fortunate man thus owed to defeat the advantage of settling in the only place where practice as extensive as that which he exercised for more than thirty years could have been obtained. If he did not derive from his academical studies that physical activity and cheerfulness and those qualities of sagacity and attractions of manner which were the real causes of his success in London and at Windsor, he at least brought from Oxford that taste for pure Latinity and classical composition, which he loved to display with some degree of self-complacency in the College of Physicians.

In the meanwhile the protection of the Dean and tutors of Christ Church, which had raised Pegge to the Chair, could never render his anatomical school famous beyond the walls of the University or popular with the young men within them.[366] There was a whisper among them that his science was superficial; and even in judging of his diction and delivery, which I am assured were above mediocrity, they unfairly persisted in contrasting them with those of his predecessor, Dr. Thompson, a man who had been expelled the University, but the memory of whose ready eloquence and extraordinary perspicuity survived the ruin of his moral character and his consequent retirement in Italy. He died after a residence of a few years in that country, where his medical attainments so far expiated his religious and other heresies that the Pope condescended to consult him, and, if I mistake not, to appoint him Physician-in-Ordinary. He was a great mineralogist, and left a valuable collection of specimens, which he directed by his will to be, in the first instance, offered to Christ Church, and if refused by that college to be transferred to the University of Glasgow. Christ Church, as he foresaw, declined the bequest. They could not do otherwise. They could not question by implication the justice of that expulsion inflicted by the University, to which their representatives in the _Caput_ had been a party. Glasgow had no reason and probably no inclination to be so scrupulous. She accepted cheerfully a donation from a stranger whose conduct had never either directly or indirectly come under her cognizance.

Respect or gratitude to John Hunter, who came from the neighbourhood of Glasgow, may have induced Dr. Thompson to confer such a favour on that Northern University.[367] Hunter,[368] possibly from reliance on some partial representation or from the prepossessions of friendship, but more probably from a zeal for science, which deemed the protection of its interests and of those capable of promoting it paramount to all other considerations, had loudly arraigned the justice of the proceedings against Thompson at Oxford, had strongly dissuaded and lamented his precipitate retreat, and was, even after that event, hardly prevailed upon to suppress a pamphlet he had written in his vindication. This proceeded from that same ardour or intrepidity of mind, which was the mainspring of John Hunter’s actions throughout life, and the real cause of his inquiries, discoveries, and celebrity; but which nevertheless betrayed him occasionally into acts of imprudence and passion, and subjected him, even in his professional practice, to the imputation of sacrificing his patients to his theory. His enemies, who were many and virulent, no doubt took some pains to blacken him; but there is no denying that his judgment was occasionally clouded by an irascible and tenacious temper.

Even on subjects unconnected with his pursuits, and where he had no right to assume authority, he was apt to be positive, dogmatical, and angry. If such instances of intemperate behaviour had been confined to those which arose from his horror, real or affected, of revolutionary principles, I should not have alluded to them, even though they led him to exclude well-qualified persons from professional advantages and scientific Societies where their merits entitled them to admission. Such prejudices were not only common, but almost universal, during the unhappy epoch of the French Revolution, with all persons who had attained a certain station in society. They were the vices of the time, not of the individual. Every man, especially if not a professed politician, was a tyrant or an incendiary at his heart, either disposed from feverish alarm for his property to restrain, imprison, and persecute his neighbour, or eager from envy, curiosity, or enthusiasm to subvert all established order and to realise the visionary theory of perfect equality among men. If any one had a grain of candour or moderation, it became his interest to conceal it. Consequently those who, like John Hunter, were not opposed to the Government of the day, appeared zealots and partizans in its favour, and from real contagion or selfish compliance exhibited all the symptoms of earnestness and injustice belonging to that character. But such and other defects in John Hunter were deducible from causes not connected with the violence of the times.

Perhaps in his dogmatical spirit, and certainly both in the obscurity of his style and in his unbounded self-applause and vanity, he betrayed the infirmities which are often described as the invariable concomitants of a late education, followed by a sudden elevation to eminence and distinction. He told me once in so many words that he thought himself a greater man than Isaac Newton. The superiority he had acquired in his own branch demanded, he said, a more extraordinary union of qualities than any proficiency in mathematics or astronomy; and discoveries leading to a perfect knowledge of the human frame were infinitely more useful to mankind than any observation of the heavenly bodies could be.

A childish love of paradox, or an obstinate adherence to an opinion hastily enounced, made him deny the efficacy of mineral springs. He contended that an artificial mixture of the same ingredients, or even the pure element alone heated to the same degree of temperature, would produce the same effects as Bath waters taken at the spot. Whenever they failed to do so, it was, he maintained, the fault of imagination. He assured me, in proof of this opinion, that to one patient in London (I think his own wife) he had prescribed common hot water, allowing it to be so, without any success; but that when he had filled Bath bottles with the same water and pretended that they were received by the coach, she, after boiling them, derived all the benefit from them that she had expected from a course of the real waters drunk fresh at the Pump Room.

He had always a large belief in the influence of the mind over the body, and recounted many singular instances within his own observation where physical phenomena were to be traced exclusively to mental weakness or mental exertion. I know not whether he considered the following incident, which I had from his own lips, as any confirmation of his theory in his own person. While engaged in inquiries in Natural History, he kept a tiger or lion (I forget which) chained to a cage or kennel at the bottom of the yard. As he was sitting one hot day, as was his custom, slipshod in his back parlour, with the window door half open before him, he perceived the fierce animal disencumber his neck of his collar, and, finding himself unrestrained, prepared to spring over the wall of the adjoining yard. John Hunter, alarmed at the mischief which might ensue, and without any consideration of what he was doing, issued from the room, seized the beast by his neck or mane, and quietly reconducted him to his place of confinement, where the animal permitted him to refix the chain without the least symptom of resistance. When this feat was thus fortunately accomplished, John Hunter returned to the house; but he had scarcely passed the threshold when the recollection of the danger he had voluntarily encountered and miraculously escaped suddenly rushed on his mind, and overpowered him with such terror and amazement that he fell senseless on the floor, and did not recover for some minutes. He laboured under a disease particularly alarming to a person subject to such violent emotions, _viz._, an affection of the heart, which he told me and others would one day kill him going upstairs or in a passion. The prediction was, it is said, verified in the latter shape; he expired in the act of repelling a contradiction which had provoked him.[369]

Whatever were his foibles and imperfections as a man, a surgeon, and a writer, his inventive genius and unremitting zeal in the investigation of anatomical truths rendered his life highly useful to the world, and promoted the science which tends more directly than any other to mitigate the sufferings incident to our species. He left several MSS. Many think that they should have been conveyed to Surgeons’ Hall, together with the Museum, and were in equity, at least, included in the purchase. The fact that they have been destroyed has excited some disappointment and more indignation among men of science, some of whom, however, have insinuated that the benefit of any discoveries they may have contained has not been lost to the world, but may be found in the papers and publications of his brother-in-law and executor, who destroyed them in their original shape without any acknowledgment to the inventor.

John Hunter was neither polished in his manner nor refined in his expression, but from originality of thought and earnestness of mind he was extremely agreeable in conversation; at least, to me, in whom he somewhat hastily and very erroneously inferred a turn for studies congenial to his own, from the very unfeigned homage he perceived me to pay to his talents and celebrity. His countenance was indeed full of genius. The observation of Lavater on the engraving from the admirable portrait of him by Sir Joshua Reynolds, “That man thinks for himself,” must have occurred to less professed physiognomists in every casual intercourse with the original.

I visited Lavater himself[370] in 1791 in Switzerland. He then enjoyed great celebrity throughout Europe. His fanciful theories, though never admitted by men of reflection, were yet the subject of some study and more curiosity, especially among artists. If it was a rash attempt in him to reduce physiognomy to a science, he had himself some good personal reasons for inculcating a faith in the impressions produced by the countenance and figure of a man. His own bespoke no little intelligence and yet greater benevolence. He was, I believe, an enthusiast in religion, and probably, in his pretended science, the sincere dupe of his own ingenuity. However, like other professors of similar sciences, he delighted in delineating the characters of those whose qualities had been reported to him by common fame or were actually known to him by familiar intercourse, rather than of those to whose peculiarities he had no guide but such as their features furnished him with. He gave, for instance, a sketch of Mr. Fox, whom he had seen at Berne in 1788; but of Mr. Windham, who was with him at that time, and who was remarkable for a characteristic countenance and appearance, he made no delineation. The fame of Mr. Fox’s eloquence and abilities had reached Lavater, but Mr. Windham’s celebrity as an orator was, at that time, confined to England, and the philosopher thought it indiscreet to trust to his visionary prognostics of disposition and talents, when he had no previous clue from public notoriety or private information to guide him in his researches.

There was, indeed, one celebrated Englishman then resident in the same country, whose appearance would have baffled him—Mr. Gibbon, the historian. His friends, with more zeal to gratify public curiosity than kindness to him, have been at great pains to preserve drawings and descriptions of his disgusting figure and revolting features. They are not caricatures. His countenance expressed neither quickness nor reflection. No man could have surmised from his inanimate yet hideous face that he possessed such powers of application and such faculties of wit and reasoning as his works unquestionably display, and as observant persons might have discovered, though in much fainter lines, in his conversation. His devotion to letters was the most estimable part of his character. It gives great interest to his memoirs, which are entertaining and instructive. As to affections, he seems to have had none. He was more like what he admired and produced, a large book, than a living member of society.

He was affected in his manner and sometimes ludicrously vain. I have been told that he imagined himself handsome. When somebody, presuming on that foible, ventured to try the extent of his conceit by telling him he was like Mr. Fox, whose face, full of kindness and intelligence, had nothing in common with his but a sallow complexion and dark eyebrows, Gibbon pettishly replied, “that any likeness to Mr. Fox in understanding or disposition he should deem an honour, but he could not be flattered with a supposed, and he hoped a mistaken, resemblance to his person.” Even in the latter period of his life he occasionally hinted at his amorous propensities, and invited his friends to banter him on supposed but impossible debaucheries. More human senses than one must have been suspended in his favour, to render his enormous and disgusting complaint imperceptible to his friends and acquaintance.

His want of principle in politics was obvious enough from the incidents of his life, but it was an odd act of friendship in Lord Sheffield[371] to furnish the public with so many proofs of it from his correspondence. There is an anecdote respecting his acceptance of a seat at the Board of Trade, which, though rather of a political than literary cast, I will relate here. Mr. Fox wrote in a presentation copy of the first volume of the _Roman History_ words to this effect: “This gentleman told me on the Monday that no good would be done till the heads of Lord North and his colleagues were laid on the table of the House of Commons, and on the Saturday the same gentleman accepted a place under Lord North.” Some years afterwards an execution took place in Mr. Fox’s house. He had consigned his books to another person; but the creditors contended the books were his, and the question was tried in the Common Pleas, where Lord Loughborough, a particular friend of Mr. Gibbon, presided. The counsel for the creditors argued that the books really belonged to Mr. Fox, from notes in his handwriting being found in the blank leaves. Some question arose on the admissibility of the notes as evidence; the Court seemed inclined to admit them. But when, in the course of the argument, the book had been handed up to Lord Loughborough, the friend prevailed over the judge, and he earnestly, if not peremptorily, prevented the public perusal of them.

The song on Gibbon’s acceptance of office,[372] which begins:

King George in a fright Lest Gibbon should write The story of Britain’s disgrace, etc.

was erroneously ascribed by common report to Mr. Fox. It was, I believe, one among the many effusions of General FitzPatrick, who, if he fell at all short in bitter, sarcastic humour, equalled in wit and excelled in taste and refinement, as well as in harmony, the political poet of the preceding generation, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams.

Gibbon had lived in some familiarity with the society that surrounded Mr. Fox, although they were neither sparing of their censures on his political tergiversation nor very indulgent to his affectations in writing and conversation. It was he who first introduced Mr. Sheridan to Mr. Fox, after the former had written _The Rivals_.[373]

During the two days I had the advantage of passing with Mr. Gibbon at Lausanne, he dwelt with much complacency on a variety of anecdotes and _bon mots_ of persons with whom I had been familiar from my childhood. Many of them I had heard before from others, and most, if not all of them, I should judge by his studied manner of relating them, adjusting, as he did most carefully, the rap of his snuff-box and the twist of his finger and thumb to the point of the jest, he had been in the habit of frequently repeating. They were, however, diverting, instructive, and well told. I remember that among them he recited some verses of Mr. Hare. Full of vivacity, humour, and fancy as was that most ready and brilliant of all fashionable wits, he seldom committed any specimen of his talents to paper, either in verse or prose.

From the variety, therefore, if not the merit, of such a performance, the rhymes which Gibbon recollected and I afterwards ascertained to be authentic, may be acceptable to my reader. Mr. Hare, from the want of a better office, had been destined by his friend and early schoolfellow, Mr. Fox, during one of his short Ministries, to the mission to Warsaw; and he thereupon vented his sense of the necessity but disagreeableness of the appointment, almost extempore, in the following lines:

Having been born to no land, ’Tis thought that I must go to Poland; So having long exhausted all tick, I soon, alas! must cross the Baltic. Of all the towns I read of or saw, I least expected seeing Warsaw: And now _’tisn’t ten to one_[374] I a’nt sick Before I ever get to Dantzic.

With the exception of some very trifling _jeux d’esprit_, the above are, I believe, the only verses Mr. Hare ever wrote, or at least acknowledged, after he had left school, where, if I mistake not, he distinguished himself by an English exercise.

Having thus incidentally mentioned Mr. Hare, I will endeavour to give some notion of him here, for his wit and _bon mots_, exquisite and delightful as they were, were not of a kind that bear repetition, nor such as the recollection of the events of the day or the state of parties brings back naturally to one’s mind. He was, indeed, all fire and fancy. His starting eyes and eager countenance seemed animated, and his slender frame emaciated, by the vivacity of his genius [and] his keen sense of ridicule; and the felicity of his language was inspired by the earnestness with which he felt what he expressed. His knowledge was confined to scholarship and _belles lettres_; his judgment, except in matters of taste and language, was not very remarkable; and his temper was always impetuous, and occasionally fretful. It rarely disfigured his manners, but it not unfrequently gave such an edge of severity to his wit, as raised more sympathy for his victim and perhaps more terror than delight and admiration in his audience. In short, he was occasionally unmerciful. His vanity, disciplined and chastised by good breeding and good taste, never exposed him to ridicule; but when mortified it inflicted, I suspect, some bitter sufferings in private and revenged itself on some subsequent occasion by pitiless retaliation on those who had offended him.

Of his birth and family I knew little. His father, who was, I believe, an apothecary at Bristol,[375] died insolvent before, or soon after, his son had left Eton. He consequently entered life almost without property. He had no connections but such as his merits procured him at school, at college, and in the world. If, as Horace affirms, the favour and friendship of distinguished men constitute no slight commendation, no person in English society ever earned a larger portion of that reward in a manner more honourable to himself than Mr. Hare. He married, indeed, early in life, a lady (Miss Hume) with some money but no beauty, and he was soon separated from her, but on terms which, I believe, even her friends acknowledged to be handsome and liberal on his part. Indeed, in all _pecuniary_ transactions he conducted himself, even in the narrowest circumstances, with great honour and disinterestedness. His figure, without deformity, was neither robust nor elegant. His face, though full of animation and exempt from any bad expression, was not prepossessing. Yet to the honour of female judgment in wit and conversation, more, I fear, than to the happiness of those to whom he devoted his attentions, few men were more successful in gallantry with no external advantages. He dazzled and captivated women of beauty, talent, and condition, by the brilliancy of his wit, the vivacity of his imagination, and a natural, unaffected earnestness of manner, in which there was not the slightest tinge of vulgarity or ill-breeding. But as, with due preservation of the forms of society, he could be unmerciful to men who had offended him, so I am afraid that, without departing from the rules of good company, he was occasionally sarcastic, cutting, and even cruel, to those of the other sex who had had the imprudence of pleasing him too much. He was, in truth, from over refinement, too exquisitely sensitive and fastidious not to tease himself and others with unnecessary reproaches.

In politics he was a follower and almost a worshipper of Mr. Fox.[376] He had himself never thought seriously on matters of State or principles of government, but affection and gratitude attached him to any opinion or party that his friend adopted. He measured all men’s political merits and even talents by the degree of devotion they paid to Mr. Fox. He never attempted to speak in Parliament but once. It was on a point of order, in which his friend had been attacked. Rage almost choked his utterance, and, as he used to relate, Mr. Fox, on his sitting down, greeted him with a remark, more frank and natural than encouraging, “What a fine, passionate fellow you are!”[377]

Nevertheless, the part he took in politics was very far from being indifferent or unuseful to the cause he espoused or the friend he adhered to. He devoted his wit and conversation to their service. The keenness with which he, in private, exposed the fallacies and disparaged the abilities of the adversary, came wonderfully in aid of the public and more serious exertions of the leader, to inspire his followers with zeal for his person and with indignation and even contempt for his most formidable opponents. If many were convinced by Mr. Fox in the House of Commons that the logic of the Minister was inconclusive and the measures of Government pernicious, not a few, especially of the young members of his party, were equally wrought upon at supper at Brookes’, where several of his early friends, and Mr. Hare in particular, were wont to descant on the incidents of the debate, to extol their supporters, and run down their adversaries. How often, heated with the enthusiasm which conviviality, wit, and a common cause inspire, have we left the room half persuaded that Mr. Pitt was an empty declaimer, and his speech of that night beneath criticism or even contempt!

I record these practices, whether laudable or blameworthy, merely to mark the difference which a change in the habits of society has insensibly wrought in political parties. Private dinners, tavern suppers, convivial meetings, perhaps intemperance itself, constituted a large portion of the ways and means of public men some thirty or forty years ago. But our usages have been altered. Social intercourse is no longer confined to those _qui idem sentiunt de republicâ_. The comparative disuse of men dinners, improving no doubt the intercourse of private life, has nevertheless very sensibly impaired the strength and union of party zeal and connection.

To return to Gibbon. He was naturally a great object of veneration in the small town of Lausanne, in which he resided: and he enjoyed the superiority his celebrity gave him. If he did not positively exact, he very complacently accepted, from all classes, such homage as is rarely offered but to Royalty or power. No amusement commenced where he was expected until he had made his appearance. Poets impatient to read their works, ladies equally so to display their musical talents, and all convened to partake of the Swiss collations called _thés_ or _goûtées_, generally suspended the indulgence of their respective wishes till the presence and sanction of the great historian allowed them to begin. I have been assured that if the practice was ever departed from, the oracles and responses of the idol never failed to betray, although with becoming gentleness, that he had remarked the omission. Such a life was more suited to his taste, as well as to his bodily powers, than either Parliament or the Militia. He dwells, however, with some complacency on the latter in his memoirs. He manifestly entertained some pompous notions of the military knowledge he had acquired in the country quarters of the Hampshire. Indeed, in the MS., chiefly written in French, he betrayed, according to Lord Sheffield, who showed me the passage, the same predilection for his warlike achievements. On his first acquaintance with Lord Sheffield, then Mr. Holroyd, he writes: “Holroyd est un homme d’esprit, mais un peu suffisant. Il a tous les préjuges de son état (he was a Dragoon officer) _contre la Milice_.” Some less partial persons might perhaps have thought that the unfavourable clause of the judgment, thus pronounced, was perfectly intelligible without further explanation, but Lord Sheffield himself accounted for it thus. He was fresh from England when he met Gibbon at Paris. The _Mayor of Garralt_ had just come out on the London theatre. Lord Sheffield was full of it. He described Foote in Major Sturgeon, mimicked him in parts of the character, and repeated all the jokes against train bands and Militia, with which the dialogue abounds. Gibbon, still in the Hampshire, grew half angry, inveighed against the licentiousness of the stage, and seriously maintained that such satires on the national force of a free country should not be endured.

It would be hardly just to myself and to my sense of literary merit to close my true though flippant account of Gibbon’s person, manners, and character, without bearing the tribute of my admiration, insignificant as it is, to his immortal work. I have lately (1835) read it for the third time, with some attention; and, in my judgment, his unwearied search for historical truth, and his yet more rare and discriminating impartiality in discerning it, place him in the very first rank of historians. He is one of the chief ornaments of his age and country. To whatever strictures his speculative opinions and somewhat indulgent morality may expose him from the religious and the austere, none can doubt his humanity, question his sincerity, or deny the justness of his views, without betraying their own want [of] candour, sincerity, or judgment.

It is curious that, in the same corps with that great writer and at the same time, another learned, though less eminent, historian was serving as a subaltern. This was Mr. Mitford,[378] elder brother of Lord Redesdale, and author of the _History of Greece_. He, like Gibbon, was somewhat fatigued with his regimental duties, and consulted him how to dispel his _ennui_ by any rational pursuit. Gibbon advised him to read, study, and _write_ history; I believe he suggested Greece as the subject. The first volume, in point of labour, ingenuity, and critical acumen, does credit to the advice, and may vie with the works of the adviser himself. But before the second was published the French Revolution had intervened. Mitford, though a retired man, was virulent in his politics. His detestation of the Republicans and reformers of his own day, combining with a propensity to paradox inherent in his nature, induced him to extol the tyrants whom the orators and historians of Greece have consigned to the execration of mankind, and to detract from the acts of heroism and models of oratory which the world has been taught for ages to regard as the most signal triumphs of patriotism and genius.

Among the literary anecdotes related to us at Lausanne by Gibbon, there were several that proved the superficial information of modern travellers generally, and of Coxe, of King’s,[379] afterwards known by the nickname of “Quarto” Coxe, in particular. He had been travelling tutor to Lord Pembroke, Mr. Whitbread, and others. The exorbitance of his salaries for such services was a common subject of ridicule in the University of Cambridge. So much so, that in a puppetshow Punch was introduced complaining or bragging of the high price he paid for a fashionable bear-leader. When questioned who he was, he replied, “Who but Cocksh, of King’s!”—a piece of buffoonery which the reverend object of it was so ill-advised as to resent, and he solicited the Vice-Chancellor to put it down by authority. Whatever were his gains as tutor, he was not satisfied with them. He strove to draw from every journey he made fresh profit, by transferring each item of information he picked up, from whatever source derived, into a book of travels. He had as little discrimination and delicacy in collecting as in retailing his intelligence. An anecdote which suited his book was as welcome on the authority of a _laquais de place_, as from that of a Minister of State: and on the other hand he questioned the latter character, if admitted to his company, with as little scruple as the former.

Gibbon was full of stories of his impudence and of proofs of his inaccuracy. His sins, however, he said, had been visited by a species of retributive justice, which had injured the sale of his books. No sooner had his travels in Russia appeared than they had been abridged and corrected by an abler pen, whose production superseded the original publication; and his book upon Switzerland had been followed by a French translation, with the notes of a well-informed Swiss, which was more convenient to the traveller and more instructive to the student than the English volumes of Coxe. He lived to an advanced age, and continued to the last to load our shelves with compositions or compilations of history and biography; for, being a thoughtless and hospitable man, as well as an intrepid writer, he was compelled, notwithstanding his Archdeaconry and some good Church preferment, to adhere to his trade of bookmaking. In default of judgment he had great experience, some sort of felicity in the choice of his subject, great industry, or rather importunity, in procuring materials, though with an utter want of discrimination in selecting, and yet greater in using or reasoning upon, such facts as he collected. Of his rapidity in determining on laborious works without any previous knowledge of the subjects whatever, and of his activity in begging and purloining documents for his new undertaking, many ludicrous stories are related; of his slender capacity of using them every reader must be aware, and the posthumous production which lies on my table, as I write this in 1829, proves that his judgment did not improve with his years.[380]

That his selection from papers and correspondence was as injudicious as his comment, may be inferred from one fact, that Sir James Mackintosh, who followed him in his researches through many private correspondences, seldom found that Coxe and himself marked the same paper or passage in common for transcription. Yet his labours were not altogether unuseful. His assiduity in discovering hidden or unheeded papers, and his indelicacy in applying for the loan or perusal of them, dragged some valuable documents into light; and the easy access he found to them directed subsequent and better historians to the sources of intelligence yet extant in private and family collections. He never lived with literary men of much note, and his society during his latter years was for the most part within [the] close of Salisbury, of which cathedral he was a Prebendary.

He had seen, however, during his residence, two Bishops, who in different ways were eminent for their scholarship. I mean Dr. Douglas[381] and Dr. Burgess.[382] The last is a mere bookworm; but though a bad critic, he is a laborious and learned man. He is more active in, what they call at college, sporting paradoxes than ingenious in maintaining them. But though singularly tenacious of his opinions, he formed them himself. Narrow as they are, they are his own, and adopted without any suggestion of others, or, I believe, any view of power or profit. He is chiefly remarkable, although little remarked, for publishing a larger number of dull polemical pamphlets in favour of exploded opinions in criticism, politics, and religion than any person of his cloth, and certainly than any or all the Bishops of the Bench. It is fair to add that, if not candid, he is temperate in argument and quite exempt from that irritability which such controversies usually either denote or create.

Dr. Douglas, who was not his immediate predecessor, was a very different and very superior man. He had been private secretary to Pulteney, Lord Bath. His detection of Lauder’s forgeries against Milton is well known. I speak from my own experience when I mention him as liberal in his dealings, and from particular as well as general report when I represent him as amiable, agreeable, and simple, though somewhat irascible in his disposition. His learning was considerable, and he combined with it the taste of a poet and the acumen of a critic. Though in principle and connection rather a Tory than a Whig, he obtained the good opinion of Mr. Fox, who felt for his judgment in literary matters something nearly approaching to admiration. Indeed, his estimation in the club where Mr. Fox occasionally met him, in the company of Dr. Johnson, Mr. Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir William Scott,[383] would raise a fair presumption that he was no ordinary man, even if the direct testimony of his writings and of his son (a person himself of strong understanding) did not abundantly justify my favourable report.

Before I became a member of that celebrated club, he, as well as the yet greater luminaries of it, were no more.[384] But as I had two uncles Mr. Fox and Lord Ossory, who generally attended, and as I was well acquainted in my childhood with Sir Joshua Reynolds, who never missed a meeting, I was familiar with the style and character of the society which composed it from the earliest period of my life. The origin of the institution may be collected from Boswell; Johnson was its founder, object, and oracle. Even now, though dignified by some with a more aspiring title, the members less ostentatiously and more correctly term it “Johnson’s Club.” He attended long as the living idol, and when he was no more it continued to be the favourite shrine at which his worshippers offered, in the shape of anecdotes and quotations, their incense to his memory. In such rites Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Windham, and Sir William Scott successively officiated as High Priests, and the conversation of the two last, in addition to other attractions, derived no little lustre in that place from the knowledge of their early study and admiration of him. Sir Joshua, equally a worshipper, had been long distinguished in one branch of excellence peculiarly and exclusively his own. Being, too, one of the earliest, if not of the original, members of the club, he seemed to depend less on the respect cherished for Johnson than on his own merits as an artist and philosopher.

He was surely the greatest painter England ever produced. Even in his blemishes there was thought, grace, and genius. His pictures, if duly studied, elucidate the great truth which his conversation and writings so earnestly and pleasantly inculcated, namely, that, to attain excellence in the arts of imitation, intellect and fancy as well as observation and diligence, are requisite. Though neither fluent nor grammatically correct in his familiar language, he had acquired a habit from his intimacy with Johnson and Burke that reminded one of the reported conversations of those two extraordinary men, and proved that he was one of their school. This consisted in a perpetual and often successful endeavour to draw some general inference from casual facts or remarks mentioned in conversation. He would account for them by some moral maxim or make them subservient to the proof of some principle. He had not only caught this manner of philosophising, but had studiously imitated it, partly for his instruction and partly for his diversion.

I remember he repeated to me and my sister, in a journey we made with him from Bedfordshire to London, a composition of his own in a supposed dialogue between Johnson and Boswell. The affected simplicity and deference and the real sycophancy of the disciple, as well as the ponderous humour, contemptuous tone, and sterling good sense of the Master, mingled with playful rudeness, were throughout very happily preserved. The topic was the intellectual powers of Garrick. Johnson was made, according to his custom, to disparage them, and yet more those of his injudicious admirer, Boswell, most unmercifully. It ended, I think, nearly thus:

_B._ “Surely, Sir, he is a great man?”

_J._ “No, Sir. He is _not_ a great man. Garrick, a great man indeed! Let us have no more of such stuff.”

_B._ “You will allow him, at least, to be great in one line—a great actor?”

_J._ “Aye, Sir, but what of that? There are many things great. There are great merchants, great sportsmen, great brewers, great grocers, great actors, and great fools; Davy Garrick for aught I know or care is the last but one, and you, Bozzy (laughing immoderately), may be the last if you like it.”

This propensity in Johnson to detract from the merits of Garrick, to deride and scoff at his profession, and to expose without mercy the infirmities of his character, was well known, and has often been adduced as proofs of his envy, malignity, and ingratitude, by the friends of that lively man and inimitable actor. For Johnson, as they urged, was Garrick’s hero.

Judge, O ye Gods, how dearly Garrick loved him;

and thence they drew an inference that Johnson was a brute to stab him with such merciless severity. John Kemble, however, who never loved Garrick, and suspected him, on very slight grounds, of having been jealous of Mrs. Siddons, pretended that he had frequently insulted his old master and friend by a studious and pompous display of his wealth.

As an instance of this purse-proud insolence and assumed superiority, he related that when Johnson complimented Garrick upon his tea, and owned that he envied his success in nothing more sensibly than in being able to purchase so exquisite a beverage, Garrick not only smiled complacently, but added that the tea so admired was by no means the best he had; he possessed some far more refined, but he reserved it for his fashionable guests (naming Sir John this or Lord that). This affectation of superiority Johnson resented so highly, that he wrote the two hundredth Number of the _Rambler_ the very next day, and he stigmatised therein the folly and insolence of men suddenly enriched, under the character of Prospero, with signal severity, introducing the anecdote of the tea to make the popular player feel that the portrait was intended for him.

Sir Joshua’s _Dialogue_ seems to preserve the recollection without recording the excuse for such a practice in Johnson. It was printed somewhere about the year 1801 by Lady Thomond.[385] It was always the fashion to say that the _Discourses_ of Sir Joshua had been corrected and retouched by Johnson. That great writer died, and the continued beauty of the _Discourses_ confuted the supposition. But the public, ever grudging fame in two lines of excellence at a time, hardily maintained that Burke assisted Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, to borrow a metaphor from art, draped the figures of the artist’s rhetoric.

It is, however, my firm belief that he was less assisted in his writings than in his pictures. In the mechanical and inferior parts of the latter he certainly employed very largely Northcote, Marchi, and other scholars by no means incapable of extending their labours to the more finished portions of the piece—a fact I would not invidiously record, if it were not, I fear, equally true that munificence or even friendliness to such assistants formed no part of his otherwise amiable character. My opinion that his writings are his own is chiefly founded on his conversation. That uniformly bespoke an ingenious and sprightly mind, unwearied in exercising itself in the principles and philosophy of art, and consequently well stored with the materials of which his _Discourses_ are composed. It is true that he did not disdain in talk to give a paradoxical turn to his sound opinions on such subjects. I remember, when fresh from school, I heard with astonishment this great judge, proficient in the “beautiful,” declare that Vanbrugh was, in a painter’s eye, the best of architects, and that Holland, with its dykes and canals, was the most picturesque country in Europe. This way of enforcing just principles by phrases seemingly paradoxical was, no doubt, devised to give point and relish to his conversation, and to invite discussion on his favourite topics. It answered its purpose. The practice taught him an arch, playful, and delicate manner of insinuating philosophical tasks.

When one of his vulgar employers objected to the price of a portrait, saying, “Seventy guineas is a large sum, Sir Joshua, for three or four hours’ labour, and you have not spent five on this picture.” “Not five hours?” (exclaimed he). “Why, I have been nearly all my life about it!”[386] Even in parrying just criticism on his defects, he would contrive to inculcate some maxim generally applicable to his art. I saw his great picture of _The Death of Cardinal Beaufort_[387] on his easel, and some friends of his availed themselves of the presence of a schoolboy to convey their criticism, by setting me on to ask why he had not shown us King Henry VI.’s face, which is covered by his arm raised to bless the expiring Prelate. He perceived the drift of the question, which I who put it was not aware of, and archly replied, “Aye, now, I’m glad you asked that question, for I shall teach something about art. That very omission which surprises you, the want of the King’s face, is a great part of my skill. Had it been there, you would have looked at him instead of the Cardinal, to whom it was my business to direct your eye. The contrivance how to hide Henry’s face cost me, I can tell you, more trouble and thought than half the picture besides and than the painting twenty such kings would have done.” My prompters were probably not quite satisfied that indolence had no share in the determination, but they laughed at the promptitude with which he detected and answered the censure, and they must have felt the truth of the general principle involved in his ingenious defence.

In that picture is a figure on which Mr. Fox loved to descant whenever he praised Sir Joshua. “None,” he said, “but a man of genius could have conceived, and none but one of consummate skill could have executed, such a design.” It is an inferior attendant looking through the door, whose countenance, on observing the agonies of the Cardinal, expresses forcibly, but almost ludicrously, his persuasion that all is not as it should be, and that, if the truth were known, it is a very bad piece of business. What more natural? What better contrived to tell the story? If the sentiment is somewhat more comic than one should expect on so terrible an occasion, the inferior character, as well as position, of the person expressing it prevents its impairing in the slightest degree the horror and sublimity of the remorse in the principal figure.

The prosperity and cheerfulness of Sir Joshua Reynolds have often been remarked. He was familiar with the great, though no favourite at Court, for the King[388] was too insensible to genius to admire his works, and too deficient in knowledge or philosophy to enjoy his society. But though royal taste patronised other artists, Sir Joshua was honoured by the multitude and intimate with the men of his day most eminent for judgment or acquirements in science, literature, politics, law, or divinity. It was not, therefore, a mere hyperbolical flourish in Mr. Burke, when eulogising him after the funeral at St. Paul’s, to style him the pattern of human happiness in temper, profession, fortune, and fame. It was, on the contrary, natural in the orator, at such an era of political dissension, to contrast the career of an artist, soothed with the breath of flattery and wafted along by rank, fortune, fashion, and talent to prosperity and fame, even to the close of the scene, with the less enviable life of a statesman, too often shattered in its long and lingering decay by the loss of its branches, and exposed with declining strength to the assaults of enmity and detraction.

But such a panegyric, like a good portrait, had on that occasion the merit of particular resemblance as well as of general truth. Reynolds was prosperous in his life and cheerful in his temper. It is possible that he might not be, at all seasons, quite exempt from that jealousy to which artists are so particularly liable. In mitigation, however, if not in contradiction, to such insinuations against him, I can myself bear testimony to his speaking frequently of Gainsborough in terms of kindness and admiration; of Wilson, whom he is supposed to have disliked personally, with high commendation; and even of Romney, whom a set of minor wits were industrious in extolling at his expense, with full acknowledgment of his peculiar merits, and with ample praise of his talents as a draughtsman. It is somewhat strange that neither he nor the connoisseurs of that day, though earnest even to affectation in extolling the genius of Hogarth, ever spoke of that extraordinary man as a great colourist.

It was reserved for the exhibition in Pall Mall about the year 1820[389] to procure him a reputation, which his arrogant pretensions as a critic and his unsuccessful attempt at a yet higher order of excellence in _Sigismonda_[390] lost him for near fifty years. He was for a long time, though very preposterously, considered as a mere caricaturist, the first, indeed, and father of that line in England, but of the same race as Bunbury, or even Sayer and Gillray, who devoted their skill in that diverting but not difficult branch of art, and furnished our print shops with political caricatures. Neither they nor Bunbury aspired to the character of painters.

The only artist of my time, who could aspire to anything like a competition with Hogarth, was Goya[391] in Spain. There is spirit and even genius in his designs, but they are generally extravagant and sometimes unintelligible. He lacks that inimitable knowledge of human nature and character, which made Horace Walpole class Hogarth with great writers of comedy. Goya’s portraits on canvas are said to be extremely good. In 1809 there existed one at Jadrague, of Don Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos,[392] who, in addition to his other attainments, was a connoisseur in painting, and has inserted many articles in _La Biblioteca de las bellas artes_ full of interest to the lovers of art or biography.

I first made acquaintance with that remarkable man, in 1793, at Gijon. To that town, his native place, he had been sent with some commission, to an honourable exile, soon after the death of Campomanes. That Minister, himself an Asturian, had not failed to distinguish the rising genius of Jovellanos. Both were proficients in political economy, but it was not in such useful and severe studies alone that Jovellanos acquired a reputation. Works of criticism, a drama of great merit (the _Delinquente Honrado_), and a satire entitled _Pan y Toros_, generally ascribed to him, proved the versatility of his talents, the correctness of his taste, and the purity of his style. His conversation was equally delightful—clear, perspicuous, and natural, and though not divested of playfulness and pleasantry, elevated and instructive. There was too much benevolence both of countenance and manner to impose any unpleasant restraint on the company, and yet an unaffected simplicity and a certain dignity and purity, both in language and sentiment, manifestly the offspring of an unblemished character and a philosophical mind, gave a tone of earnestness and propriety to conversation, such as is rarely preserved in the unrestricted dialogue of a southern society.

He was, I think, the only person eminent in literature, with whom I became acquainted in my first journey through Spain in 1793. I might, indeed, except the Abbé Cavanilles,[393] a botanist and topographical writer of some fame, who was a _protégé_ of the House of Infantado, a man of prepossessing manners, and a native of the Kingdom of Valencia, of which he published a description.

Lord St. Helens,[394] then Ambassador of Madrid, though of more refined taste and cultivated mind than was common at that time in the ranks of English diplomacy, never had his curiosity awakened to Spanish literature, nor was at the pains to open his house to such writers, scholars, or artists, as the country would have afforded. In Italy, however, where I spent the two next years, I frequented many societies where connoisseurs, scholars, and antiquaries abounded, who

Sui memores alios fecere merendo;

and however unpropitious that season of stormy politics was to the growth or cultivation of letters, I found many in different provinces of art, science, and literature.

In art, indeed, there were but few natives of Italy, and, if I except Canova,[395] not one who had either then or has since that time attained great celebrity. He was a man of simple, engaging manners, with all that gentleness which characterises Venetians, and with enough of the enthusiasm of an artist to give animation to his countenance and conversation. It would be tedious to enumerate artists, not Italians, though subsequent success may have implied merit in many of them. The list would be long. With the exception, however, of Fabre[396]—a successful pupil of David, but as furious an anti-revolutionary, as his master was a revolutionary politician, and better known as the lover, some say the third husband, of Madame D’Albany,[397] than as a painter—those I was acquainted with were chiefly English students.

Flaxman,[398] indeed, visited Italy while I was there. I am afraid I was more struck with the deformity of his person, the sanctity of his primitive manners, and the visionary turn of his opinions, than with his works or conversation; but the Italians had more sagacity than his countrymen, and discerned early the grand originality of his conceptions, his just ideas of beauty, and the real simplicity of his character. His sketches and models were studied as works of established excellence even then at Rome. He was, in truth, as Lord Egremont comically designated him, a prodigy of deformity and genius. If unequal, from bodily infirmity, to complete any great _chef d’œuvre_ in sculpture, he contrived to enlighten his contemporaries and followers, and did more by his example and his drawings to improve art than any Englishman, Sir Joshua, in the sister branch, always excepted.

Natural philosophy, however, was the passion of the day, and geology, chemistry, and electricity the fashionable topics of conversation. I was myself far too ignorant to judge of the professors or proficients in such studies: I never saw Spallanzani,[399] nor was I acquainted with Galvani,[400] whom I have met at Bologna. But of Fontana,[401] whose contemporary reputation was greater than the works he has left will maintain, I can speak from personal intercourse amounting almost to intimacy.

He was as remarkable for the boldness of his opinions as for the energy, eloquence, and ingenuity, with which he defended them. There had long existed in Tuscany a school of very free, not to say irreligious, philosophy. Cocchi was, if not the founder, a leading disciple in it. He had co-operated with the Grand Duke Leopold in suppressing both Jesuits and Inquisition, and in reducing the number, power, and wealth of the monastic institutions. Fontana, who, when young, had frequented Baron Holbach’s society in Paris, was a professed materialist after the system of Helvetius. He naturally assumed the ascendancy among the free-thinkers of Florence, and, no doubt, more covertly favoured the political principles which Condorcet and other Frenchmen of the _Encyclopédie_ had adopted. He was positive, vehement, and dogmatic, but far from unpleasant, in conversation; more remarkable, I suspect, for the natural vigour of his understanding than for the extent or accuracy of his knowledge in science or literature, over the whole range of which he somewhat presumptuously was wont to assert his dominion. He was well with the Grand Duke and his Minister, Manfredini. It was generally whispered in Florence, always the _città maldicente_ that Dante describes, that he made an ungenerous use of his influence, that he checked rather than promoted the reward of others, and that he did not scruple to appropriate to himself their labours and discoveries.

Thus the anatomical man, composed of many thousand pieces of wood accurately representing parts of the human body in wood, was said to be the work of Fabroni,[402] the Sub-Director; although Fontana, the Director, was in the habit of exhibiting, explaining, and extolling it as his own. He had patronised Fabroni when very young, and introduced him into the institution from the stage, where he was, if not actually a dancer, connected with the ballet. But when the proficiency of the disciple attracted notice, the master was suspected of repressing him, from jealousy of attainments which were more than equal to his own; though in natural understanding, as well as Court favour, Fontana unquestionably maintained his superiority.

Fabroni was a Tuscan; Fontana, a native of Reveredo. Manfredini, who came from the latter place, also might have some prepossession in favour of Fontana; but his Tuscan origin could not fail to give his rising rival corresponding advantages in a society so narrowly national as that of Florence. Fontana had a brother, a monk and a professor at Pavia, where I saw him. He had the appearance as well as name of a man of genius; but, suspected of republican principles, he was compelled to remove the aspersion by publications in the opposite extreme, and to consign his character to posterity as the strenuous and even acrimonious advocate of systems religious, moral, and political, which he loathed and abhorred. Hard is the lot of genius under arbitrary governments. Accordingly, the faculties best suited to the improvement of mankind are more desirous, on such soils, to withdraw than to force themselves into notice.

Parini,[403] the first poet and one of the most amiable men of that period, I never met. Monti[404] had not yet acquired such celebrity as was likely to attract a young traveller. The only literary man, within the Austrian dominions, whom I visited in 1795, was the Spanish ex-Jesuit Andrès,[405] more distinguished for laborious and impartial compilation than for critical acumen or original thought. He lived unmolested, but little known, in Mantua, and preferred publishing his works in Italian, though the subjects of which they treat and the good taste they inculcate would have been more useful and more novel to Spanish readers than to those who were familiar with Tiraboschi.[406]

There were, no doubt, many more men of letters in Venice and its dependencies, but I had not the advantage of knowing any but Cesarotti.[407] He was in appearance a grave, heavy, old-fashioned professor, and his large tye wig resembled that which, in ridicule of his translation of Homer, a caricaturist had placed on the bust of that poet. Cesarotti had, indeed, the audacity to paraphrase and alter the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_! There was less presumption and more success in bestowing some Italian graces on the _Ossian_ of Macpherson. He reconciled many southern readers, and among them Napoleon Bonaparte himself, to the equivocal bard of the north.

It was in 1796 that the English public, saturated with political disquisition and party invectives, were recalled to a sense of the sweets of literature and poetry, and especially to a taste for the Italian writers, by the publication of a book, whose merit, after all, is scarcely equal to its success, and whose success is mainly to be attributed to the fortunate period of its appearance. This was _The Life [of] Lorenzo of Medici_, by Mr. Roscoe,[408] an attorney and afterwards merchant and banker at Liverpool. After the horrors and wars, _plus quam civilia_, which revolutionary fanaticism in France, and the real or affected dread of it elsewhere, had diffused pretty generally throughout Europe, a languor succeeded; a strong desire for such enjoyments, as the calmer pursuits of poetry and criticism afford, bespoke a favourable reception for Mr. Roscoe’s book, which was more easy and spirited in those parts which related to the revival of arts and literature, than in such as professed but failed to explain the changes and institutions of Florence under the Medici.

There was something _piquant_ (to use a French term) in the appearance of a history of Florence written at Liverpool. Mr. Roscoe was a man of no great scope of genius. Yet when the nature and extent of his attainments is contrasted with his slender means of acquiring them, he becomes a sort of prodigy. He was the lad or waiter at a coffee house, and even that humble occupation had been a step from his original condition, for when a boy he was accustomed to bring potatoes with his father to market. His assiduity, cleanliness, and honesty recommended him, and some of the guests articled him as a clerk to a thriving solicitor. His passion for letters was inextinguishable and his application unwearied. It was accidentally directed to Italian; and a friend (the Rev. Dr. Clarke, I think) being settled for some years in Tuscany, he collected through him various materials and dedicated himself to the composition of a work which immediately placed him on the line of the most successful authors of the day.

Lord Orford,[409] who had hailed Robertson and Gibbon, but not, I think, Hume, on the first appearance of their works, lived to offer similar incense in particles of epigrammatic antithesis to the biographer of Lorenzo de Medici. Mr. Fox, overlooking a style which he could not approve, through his delight at passages of Italian poetry not inelegantly rendered in the course of the work, greeted the publication and the author with encouragement. To the praise of Mr. Roscoe be it said, that neither this burst into sudden blaze nor his subsequent success in public life ever turned his head or disfigured the simplicity of his manners. He spoke in Parliament with judgment and effect, but in a short time, upon elections and other occurrences, there appeared some unequivocal symptoms of that indecision which disqualifies a man from public life more irretrievably than vulgarity or affectation or even than ignorance and incapacity. He confined himself afterwards to his literary pursuits, and to establishing a taste for arts in his native town not unworthy of his celebrated Florence; and Liverpool bids fair to give to its architecture, public works, amusements, and society, a refinement not usual in communities so rapidly enriched by commercial enterprise alone.

In this task Dr. Currie,[410] the physician and the biographer of Burns, was his most active coadjutor. He had a stronger understanding, but less correct taste, than his friend. In his own profession he was distinguished for a new, bold, and successful application of cold water in certain stages of fever; and on matters of politics, science, and philosophy he had acquired great provincial authority. Some popular letters on the effect of the war upon trade, printed with the name of Jaspar Wilson, were with justice attributed to him, and added not a little to his reputation.

Roscoe, after shrinking from a contested election at Liverpool during the No-Popery cry, engaged in trade and was unfortunate. A body of his literary friends, led by Dr. Shepherd,[411] handsomely relieved him from many of the consequences, and alleviated the chagrin at his failure. Mr. Coke, of Norfolk, with much delicacy and generosity, employed him in classing his MSS. at Holkham, of which the curious library of Justus Lipsius forms a part. Roscoe, broken by misfortunes and somewhat impaired by age, did not show all the discernment expected from him; but he had the merit of being the first guest at Holkham who drew the attention of his host and directed his own to those philological treasures. Many men of learning and taste had been in the habit of visiting Mr. Coke; but all (according to Mr. Roger Wilbraham’s malicious remark), including Dr. Parr, most delicately and politely caught the spirit of the place, and preferred the pleasures of the field and of the table to the intellectual labours of classical research. Roscoe and the literary society in Liverpool were not singular in their profession of liberal principles in politics and religion; almost all provincial _literati_ at the close of the seventeenth century (Whitaker and some clergymen excepted) were averse to the war and the system with which it was studiously interwoven. They were, accordingly, more or less stigmatised as visionary speculatists or disaffected Jacobins. The rebound from this contumely and repression was sensibly felt afterwards. It contributed with other causes to the successive and alternate reforms which have ensued.

Perhaps the insensibility to all intellectual merit which pervaded the Court of George III., and the yet more unaccountable indifference to the progress of literature of a man so capable of relishing and judging of genius as Mr. Pitt, estranged the whole republic of letters from their politics. Possibly the selection of “_savans_” in France for the direction of human affairs (no very successful experiment, it must be acknowledged) engaged the ardent spirits of the time in the cause of democracy. In aid of such propensities, a passion, or at least a curiosity, for German literature suddenly seized the reading part of the community. Young authors educated in Germany gratified this appetite for foreign novelties by plays, novels, and poems, translated from the German originals. Whatever might be their motives, they were practically labourers in the same vineyard. The fruits of their studies had all a tang or smack of philosophy very opposite to that which it was the endeavour of our Government, as well [as] of our Church, to disseminate.

Among these, my college friend, Mr. M. G. Lewis,[412] commonly known by the name of his first novel, _The Monk_, deserves to be recorded; for, though a Member of Parliament, he supported the Minister and the French war. He inculcated in his writings opinions which led to a directly opposite conclusion. He had a clear and even a strong understanding, imagination amounting almost to genius, and indefatigable industry. As a poet he was endowed with an excellent ear and a command of elegant language. But his mind was vitiated with a mystical, though irreligious, philosophy; his taste in reading, writing, and thinking, corrupted by paradox; and his conversation disfigured by captious perverseness in controversy or sickly affectation in sentiment. His efforts at pleasantry, which were continual, were very unsuccessful. He had no talent for humour. He was sincere, affectionate, and generous; but his vanity was inordinate and more troublesome than diverting.

As he advanced in life he grew exceedingly tedious, especially upon all that related to himself; so that contrary to the usual course of things, the peculiarities and egotism which had been in some degree pardoned to his genius and youth, _when poor_ became quite intolerable, and were, in fact, not tolerated in society when he succeeded to a large property in Jamaica. He went thither, and was nearly as prolix in his exhortations to his negroes as in his reports of their condition and treatment. It is but just to add he very earnestly endeavoured to the best of his judgment to improve the latter. He died on board ship in his return from his second visit to Jamaica. His obstinacy and paradox may be said to have brought him to that untimely end; for he persisted, against the prohibition of the only medical man in the vessel, to take emetics for sea sickness, and, weakened as he had been by a previous fever on shore, actually died of inanition and exhaustion.

The poetry, plays, and essays of a herd of male and female followers, of whom Dr. Darwin[413] was the chief, though in character and taste very different from Lewis’, had a similar tendency to reconcile men’s minds to approaching changes and to shake the received manner of thinking on religion and politics. Darwin himself, though a versifier rather than a poet, was a remarkable man. His medical practice, singular and startling, was not unsuccessful. His fame in Derbyshire and the adjacent counties was extensive, and not confined to the ignorant or the credulous. With an unwieldy person, uncouth manner, and large tongue, his appearance and conversation captivated strangers, and his more solid qualities attached a numerous body of friends. He was surrounded by admiring disciples. They imbibed, together with a taste for minute and curious observation in physical philosophy, great intrepidity in the search of truth, and not less zeal in diffusing it.

In London there had started up, soon after the French Revolution, a yet more fearless sect, who, mingling the dogmas of materialism with certain visionary notions of the perfectibility of the human species, assailed without disguise all the received opinions upon which the duties of individuals or the institutions of the State had been hitherto founded or defended. These doctrines were not confined to metaphysical works; they were purposely and studiously insinuated in novels, plays, and productions of imagination.

Mr. Godwin[414] was in some sense the father of that school. If known at all to posterity, it will in all probability be as the writer of _Caleb Williams_, not as the author of _Political Justice_, which is already nearly forgotten. He was himself a strange compound of simplicity and of design, of talent and of folly. He plotted against the whole frame of society, but was the easy dupe of his own affections or the professions of his pupils. After a short season of equivocal celebrity, he sank into a hacking writer and concealed partner of the booksellers. The good little books in which our masters and misses were taught the rudiments of profane and sacred history, under the name of Baldwin, were really the composition of Godwin, branded as an atheist by those who unwittingly purchased, recommended, and taught his elementary lessons. Lord Grey (I write in 1834) has recently, by an act of good-nature, relieved this man of genius from penury and drudgery, and bestowed on him some small place under Government.

The strange and disgusting story of his marriage with Mrs. Wollstonecraft, together with the adventures and death of that wild but extraordinary woman, is in print and accessible to all the world. Soon after her death Godwin consulted Curran[415] about marrying again, and Curran warned him against making youth and beauty the chief object, and earnestly exhorted him to select a “_woman with something_.” Curran, on his return from Ireland some years afterwards, visited his friend, and found that he had married a widow. “Well, and has she anything?” was his first question. “Aye, indeed has she!” replied Godwin. “She has eight children!”

Holcroft,[416] one of his least successful disciples, though cursed with the vice of mediocrity which, even in his plays, novels, or travels, a love of paradox could not animate, has left one book which is a great exception to such a censure, and of a nature to render all further notice of him unnecessary. This is his own life—the most curious picture of self-education in an authentic shape which our language possesses. It affords abundant proof of the enjoyment which an access of knowledge can afford to the humblest orders of society, and is a practical exposure of the error as well as selfishness of that philosophy which would confine it to the opulent. This Holcroft was one of the reformers singled out for prosecution and punishment by the proceedings of 1794. He married, I believe, the widow of Mercier, author of the _Tableau de Paris_, and their daughter married Mr. Kenney,[417] an author of some interesting melodramas and lively farces.

There was at the period of which I am now speaking another knot of yet younger enthusiasts. They were soon afterwards generally designated by the name of “the Lake Poets,” because several of them settled in the romantic districts of Cumberland and Westmoreland. They were, at their outset, scarcely less extravagant in their principles, and much more so in their projects, than the materialists of Godwin’s school, though they had the good-fortune to escape all legal persecution. Southey, the destined champion of the Church and Poet Laureate of three successive Sovereigns; Wordsworth, in time the _protégé_ and supporter of Toryism in the North and the pattern, in the judgment of many, of purity both in language and thought; Coleridge, the hireling of every illiberal publication in its turn—were one and all, together with a host of young comrades and admirers, smitten with visionary notions of impracticable liberty, busy in translating or imitating the mystic philosophy and poetry of the Germans, and actually preparing to colonise on the Back Settlements of America for the purpose of establishing an entire exemption from all religious restraints or ceremonies, an equal division of property, and a community of wives. The press, in the meanwhile, teemed with their productions, all inculcating the wildest maxims of German metaphysics, and all combating the principles upon which the institutions of property, as well as the distribution of political power, are founded in society. They escaped, as I have observed, the Crown Lawyer’s prosecutions, but they fell under the more appropriate lash of the ridicule of _The Anti-Jacobin_.[418] The Sapphics of Southey were parodied in a poem entitled _The Needy Knife-grinder_, and Mr. Frere and his coadjutors in their happiest vein exposed the sickly sentimentality and real immorality of the whole school, in a supposed German play, which combined nearly all their absurdities.

Mr. Southey[419] was the nephew of Mr. Hill, long chaplain to the factory at Lisbon, and afterwards rector of Streatham. In one of his visits to England he found his nephew, scarce twenty years of age, on the eve of marrying a girl without a halfpenny. To rescue him from such imprudence his uncle offered to take him through Spain to Portugal for a year, in the hopes that absence might cool his passion. Southey accepted the proposal; but, to defeat the real object of it, he secretly married the very day before he set off on his travels. The tour was not only gratis, but lucrative to him, for the sale of his lively and flippant account of it replenished his purse, and he embarked on a career of authorship and politics which, though desultory and tortuous, has always been directed to some profitable haven or another. His habits were those of an author by trade. Stated hours set apart for his various studies. Poetry and prose, divinity and wit, had each their distinct periods of each day allotted to them. His handwriting was wonderfully neat, minute, and legible, and he told me that he saved no inconsiderable sum each year by this accomplishment, so numerous were his writings.

His vanity was inoffensive and diverting, and his enthusiasm, real or affected, about his literary pursuits pleasant and amiable. His confidence in his own powers was, indeed, preposterous, and his appetite for flattery, of which his family and friends served him with a constant and plentiful supply, was inordinate; yet, in spite of research and ardour, a sprightly imagination, and great raciness and accuracy in his English, he was not only a credulous and almost silly historian, but a weak reasoner and tiresome poet, and neither in prose nor in verse captivated or warmed his reader, though he might occasionally divert and surprise him. His egotism was excessive. He would fain have been arrogant; but his scorn and indignation, in spite of himself, assumed the character of flippancy and impertinence rather than of insolence or pride.

He was a schoolfellow and friend of Mr. Charles W. Wynne, and that gentleman procured him some small favour or pension in 1806. The touch of Treasury gold seems to have entirely altered the character of the man. From that time forth all his predilections have been for power, and, in its most odious form, exclusion and monopoly; and, what was yet more strange, most of his associates have accompanied him in this sudden and violent apostasy from his early principles. Possibly some little resentment, mingled with self-interest, deepened the tinge which he and the other Lake poets received soon after Mr. Perceval’s accession to power. _The Edinburgh Review_ had censured the peculiarities of Southey’s and Wordsworth’s school. The sentence of that popular but stern tribunal of literature was sensibly felt in the sale of the works. Southey openly lamented that a man like Jeffrey,[420] who, in his self-complacency, he said, “in physical stature did not reach his shoulder, nor in intellectual dimensions his ankle,” should yet have it in his power to kick away the harvest due to his industry and genius. _The Edinburgh Review_ had, during the first years of its publication, acted up to the stern maxim adopted for its motto,

Cum nocens absolvitur judex damnatur.

But surely it may be doubted whether the mortification and exposure of sundry pretenders to literary merit does as much service to the republic of letters as the lavish use of ridicule and invective does mischief, by deterring many modest but ingenious men from encountering their strictures.[421]

That formidable journal first appeared in 1802. The notion of it was suggested, in a small lodging or flat up four pair of stairs, by Sydney Smith to Mr. Jeffrey, Lord Webb Seymour, Mr. Horner, Mr. T. Thomson, and, I think, Mr. John Murray. Sydney proposed, with allusion to the diet of the country, to assume for their motto,

Musam meditamur avena,[422]

“We study the Muses on oatmeal”: a suggestion which he says his Northern coadjutors vociferously rejected, though no bad specimen of the playful humour with which he enlivened some one article of every number for several years. Brougham was not one of the original projectors; Sydney Smith objected to his admission. His contributions, he said, would be too long, too many, and too political. Those of Sydney himself, often devoted to the exposure and ridicule of bad sermons and theological works, were ignorantly cited by parsons in England as singular proofs of the acrimony which still distinguished the Kirk of Scotland, and led them to satirise the writers of an Episcopal Church. Brougham, when admitted, verified one portion of Sydney’s prediction. He overwhelmed the review with politics; but few of his fellow-labourers were by that time disposed to lament such an innovation, and the increasing sale produced by the introduction of such topics might have reconciled them to the change, had they retained more scruples about it.

An article upon Cobbett and the public journals, undertaken some eight or ten years after the commencement of the _Review_, and against the better judgment of Mr. Horner, by Mr. Jeffrey, at the suggestion of Brougham, stamped its character as a political publication irrevocably. Till then several persons quite unconnected with politics, and some absolutely adverse to the Whigs, had occasionally contributed papers—Wilberforce, Walter Scott, Richard Payne Knight,[423] Mr. Bartholomew Frere,[424] and many others. The number of the contributors, the facility with which contributions were admitted, and the secrecy often enjoined and generally observed, led to many false conjectures, and those conjectures to consequences, literary and political, that had influence on the opinions and conduct of individuals.

Cobbett exhibited a proof that demagogues, like Princes, when they act on bare suspicion, lose their sagacity. He was nettled at the unexpected exposure of his shameless tergiversation on the article above alluded to; he accordingly directed all his resentment against Mr. Horner, who was the only reviewer that had earnestly protested against it.[425]

Lord Strangford imagined that a severe stricture on his poetry,[426] written, in truth, by a fellow diplomat of anti-Jacobin and Tory propensities, was composed or instigated by me; and though assiduous enough in his correspondence with me while the Grenville Administration lasted, he scarcely concealed his resentment to me—and to all Whigs, soon afterwards. A more important personage, Lord Byron himself, was swayed in his conduct for some time from a misconception that the flippant review of his first poems, written, in truth, by Mr. Brougham, was the composition of George Lamb[427] at my instigation, whereas I never saw the poems, nor did I know of the existence of the author (for I thought the title extinct) till I read the review and expressed to some of the reviewers my surprise and regret at the unmerited and bitter severity of the article.[428]

Lord Strangford had not been less severely handled, but he had deserved it by the personal conceit of his egotism and the great infidelity of his translations. Invention, however, is more pardonable in a poem, and even a translation, than in an official letter. His verses from the Portuguese are creditable to his taste and ear, though they represent Camoëns as unfaithfully as his dispatches the events on the Tagus or the communications of the Sublime Porte. He has not, perhaps, met with the success he had reason to expect as an author or an orator. His facility in composing verse and prose is considerable, and his inferiority as a speaker, though undeniable, proceeds from no deficiency in utterance, language, or logic.

In London his acquaintance has never been much courted, either in literary or fashionable society, nor his conversation, though not wanting in knowledge, vivacity, or good breeding, much relished. His father had been expelled, by a very unusual Act of Parliament, from the Irish House of Lords, for a corrupt vote in a judicial proceeding. At his entrance in life, moreover, the disadvantage of that recollection was aggravated by extreme poverty, and there was nothing to counterbalance it but distant relationship with the Percies and Lord Egremont. To the latter, I believe, he was chiefly indebted for his first employment under Government, and to both, for the education which rendered him capable of discharging it. Success in his diplomatic career entitles him to a niche in the political rather than literary monuments of the day; but as he will not appear in any of my raising in that department to much advantage, it is fair to observe here that he dedicated the gains of the profession he embraced, in the first instance, to his mother and sisters, and showed in that particular a kindness of heart and a liberality of conduct which I much fear will not easily be inferred from other passages of his life.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX A

(See p. 10)

Lord Strangford,[429] in some _Observations_ on a note in Colonel Napier’s book, has this year (1828) given a very different version of the whole story. From a dispassionate consideration of the documents he produces in his defence, and the account he gives of the whole transaction, I am inclined to believe that some _unimportant_ particulars in my relation of them are incorrect. It is clear that his dispatch was _not_ written in Reddish’s Hotel, but in Bruton Street. It is possible, and indeed probable, that it was written at Mr. Canning’s request, and that Mr. Canning urged as a reason, _though in all likelihood_ not as the only reason, for writing it, that “he preferred the form of one unbroken dispatch, and that the publication of the whole of Lord Strangford’s letters as they stood was impossible”;[430] and it is true that the dispatch so written does not _directly_ assert, as I had imagined that it did, that Lord Strangford had an audience of the Prince Regent immediately before his embarkation, and had persuaded him to embark. Lord Strangford, in his publication of this year, directly and repeatedly acknowledges that the embarkation of the Prince Regent was not the result _of his brief visit to Lisbon on the night of November 28, when the Royal Family were already embarked_.[431]

Thus far the real state of the facts may be more favourable to Lord Strangford than my representation of them in the text and the account I collected of them from the testimony of those whom I have quoted in the preceding note; but the main point of the charge against Lord Strangford’s veracity and the authenticity of the dispatch remains unrefuted. The dispatch was written in London and on December 19, not, as the date indicates, on board the _Hibernia_ off the Tagus, November 29; and that false date, as well as the promise “to detail further particulars in a future dispatch,” and the apology for haste at the end, prove the intention of the writer to deceive the public reader as to the time and place of the composition. The reasons for writing such a dispatch and the allegation of those reasons by Mr. Canning may be correctly noted by Lord Strangford in his _Observations_, but they do not disprove the facts which I have stated in my text and which I believe, namely, that Lord Strangford had arrived in London and written the dispatch afterwards printed in the _Gazette_, before the official intelligence contained in a dispatch really written on board the _Hibernia_ by him had come to hand; secondly, that the original dispatch varied in many points with that written and printed in London; and thirdly, that Mr. Canning was thunderstruck at discovering such variations. It is, I think, undeniable that the printed dispatch, without positively propounding as a fact that Lord Strangford had prevailed on the Prince Regent to embark, is calculated and apparently intended to convey that impression to the reader, and it somewhat broadly implies that it was “in interesting communications with the Court of Lisbon” after November 27, that he prevailed on His Royal Highness to embark, or at least confirmed him in his previous intentions to that effect. In the dispatch Lord Strangford says that “on proceeding to Lisbon on the 27th, he had immediately most interesting communications with the Court of Lisbon,” for the particulars of which he refers to some future dispatch: but adds, “It suffices to mention in this place that the Prince Regent wisely directed all his apprehensions to a French army, and all his hopes to an English fleet; that he received the most explicit assurances from me, etc., etc.; and that I promised, etc., etc.” Nobody would doubt in reading the above passage that the interesting communications were immediately after Lord Strangford had proceeded to Lisbon on the 27th, that the particulars referred to a future dispatch had occurred either on or after the 27th, and that the expression of the Prince Regent’s hopes and fears, as well as the explicit assurances of Lord Strangford and his promises to the Prince Regent, were all made in an audience with the Prince Regent, or at least with his Ministers, after Lord Strangford had proceeded to Lisbon, and before the Prince Regent had embarked. The fact is now acknowledged by Lord Strangford himself that the Royal Family were already embarked during his brief visit to Lisbon, and that he saw M. D’Aranjo and the Prince Regent for the first time after his proceeding thither on board ship.

APPENDIX B

THE PRINCE REGENT’S VIEWS ON THE ROMAN CATHOLIC QUESTION

(See p. 113)

(_Account of a conversation between Lord Wellesley and Lord Holland on January 14, 1828._)

I had a conversation with Lord Wellesley. In the course of it, after discussing many topics with his usual vivacity and ability, he was led to speak of the King’s (George IV.) opinions on the Catholic question. He expressed not only regret but surprise at his recently avowed hostility to any further concessions to the Roman Catholics. He maintained that such language and opinion were in direct contradiction to declarations formerly made, and at variance with the principles he had repeatedly and _solemnly_ professed to him. In support of this assertion he alleged the following facts.

When he was Secretary of State in 1811 or 1812, and Lord Fitzwilliam had given notice of a motion on the state of Ireland, he concurred with his colleagues on the propriety of resisting the motion, but thought it incumbent on him in doing so to disclaim all opposition to the measure generally called “Catholic Emancipation,” and even to avow that he was favourably disposed to a removal of the remaining disabilities. Conceiving, however, that it would not become him to express an opinion so much at variance with those professed by his colleagues, without apprising the Prince Regent of his intentions, he waited on His Royal Highness, and stated at length his view of the obligation imposed upon him of avowing his own sentiments on that important question. He even explained at some length the reasons on which they were grounded, and the view he had taken of the whole subject. The Prince Regent distinctly, and even earnestly, approved of his intention; first, as he said, because it was right for him to deliver his sentiments on such a subject, and secondly, because he, the Prince Regent, _concurred in the opinion he intended to express_.

I interrupted Lord Wellesley, to ask him if he was confident that he had not confounded an approbation of the manliness of expressing his opinion with an approbation of the opinion intended to be so expressed. “Certainly not,” was his Lordship’s reply; “the expression was distinct—‘_he concurred in my opinion_.’ And he did not stop there; he called in Lord Liverpool and Mr. Perceval, and repeated to them the substance of my communication and his approbation, saying that I did right to state my opinion without reserve, for he thought I was called upon to do so, and that, moreover, in that opinion he entirely concurred.”

Lord Wellesley then proceeded to relate a much stranger circumstance. When, after Lord Wellesley’s retirement from office, Lord Donoughmore moved to refer the Catholic petitions to a Committee, Lord Wellesley had again a communication from the Prince Regent. I forget if it was in writing or by a message, but it was not merely an approbation of his avowing his opinions, and of the opinions he intended to avow, but a request, in the shape of a command, to express these opinions, and to state to the House and the country at large that he was expressing those of the Prince Regent as well as his own, and _that he had His Royal commands to inform the House that he, the Regent, concurred in all he said on the subject_. “These commands,” added Lord Wellesley, “I took upon me, as I have frequently observed to His Majesty since, _most implicitly to disobey_”: and he then appealed to me on the propriety of his own conduct in doing so, on the obvious objections in a constitutional point of view there would have been in such a declaration, and on the injurious effects it must have had (considering all that has since occurred) on the temper of the people of Ireland and His Majesty’s personal character and honour.

He had, he said, subsequent to that period remarked some ill-humour to the Catholics and their supporters, some wavering and tergiversation, and some inconsistency in the language of his Royal Master on such topics, but never any decided avowal of hostility to the measure on principle; and he must, he added, moreover, remark that His Majesty’s manner, language, and conduct when in Ireland was, even by the admission of Lord Sidmouth and others opposed to the Catholic claims, most injudicious and injurious to his honour and his Government, if he was really determined to resist on principle and in all circumstances any further concession to his Roman Catholic subjects. He assured me that the Irish Roman Catholics would not yet believe he had deserted them, that the postponement of the measure was generally attributed by them to some faction or intrigue in Court or in Parliament, and not to any hostility in the King’s mind; that he was, in truth, still popular with that class of his subjects, from a persuasion that he was secretly friendly to their admission, and that, on the other hand, he was far from enjoying the confidence of their enemies, and was, in truth, an object of suspicion, if not of enmity, with all the high Orange party and self-constituted Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.

This distinct evidence of the Prince Regent’s avowed support of the Catholic claims, I have thought it right to record, upon the almost irrefragable authority from which I received it. My testimony would certainly lead to a directly opposite conclusion, _viz._, that he was often willing to leave an impression on those with whom he conversed that he was friendly to the admission of Roman Catholics to Parliament, but that he was studiously cautious of saying in distinct terms that he deemed that measure either practicable or expedient. The Duke of Orleans (Louis Philippe) told me that in the year 1814 or 1815, I forget which, he distinctly avowed his hostility to all concession whatever; and explained the nature of his repugnance to it and of his scruples, by saying that if Catholics could be lawfully admitted to political power they could not be lawfully excluded from the Crown, and the title of his family would in that case cease to be legitimate. This remark, however, was made at a period and in a conversation where it was evidently the object of the English Prince to impress on the Duke of Orleans the duty of implicit obedience to what he considered the “legitimate” heir to the Bourbon throne, and to imply that it was religious, not political, considerations which had justified the English in departing from the regular line of succession.

APPENDIX C

LORD HOLLAND TO LORD GREY

(See p. 293)

(_Containing his report of a conversation with Sir John Leach._)

_12th June, 1820._

DEAR GREY,

I am hoarse, lame, gouty, nervous, and annoyed, but must write you a letter—not about my motion. I daresay that, at your distance, you disapprove it; but I am right, and were you here you would think so. However, I leave that to be explained by my speech, if I can deliver it, by time, and by conversation, if I am ever to get any of that commodity with you again. But there is a business more embarrassing. I shall not mention names by letter; you will probably guess, and perhaps your judgment on things will not be less impartial and good if you do not.

Since Saturday’s post I have had two conversations not of my seeking. I was told Ministers expected, possibly meant, to be beaten to-night in the House of Commons on the question of adjournment, and then meant to resign to-morrow, leaving the King at issue with his Commons and without a Government. An answer was to be made last night by Liverpool to a remonstrance sent to him by the King against Canning’s speech, which would, no doubt, maintain Canning stoutly (it did so), and thereby furnish an opportunity for dismissing the whole Ministry before their defeat in the Commons. My informant stated _himself_ to be at a loss what to advise, because it depended on the practicability of forming a new Ministry. He therefore consulted me, _as his friend_, what he ought to do for his own honour and character and for the King’s service; his notion, he added, had been to advise the King to dismiss the present men directly (that was last night), to fetter any new Government he should appoint with _no_ conditions whatever, and to send for me, Lansdowne and _Grenville!_ to-day. In the course of our conversation when your name occurred, he always dwelt on the great pressure of time, and said with concern that you were in Northumberland.

The substance of what I said was that while an ostensible Ministry was in existence it was impossible for me, with any regard to my own character, feelings, or principles, to convey through him or any one else any opinion on the propriety or the impropriety of dismissing that Ministry; on the way in which such dismissal could be accomplished; or, indeed, on the practicability of forming any other Government. I was, therefore, compelled to decline saying one word on those topics or giving him any advice how to act.

I told him, however, as my private friend, what was, and long had been, my situation in political connection. From my long experience of your public conduct, confidence in your abilities, and private affection and friendship for you, I had transferred to you that political attachment I had felt for my uncle when alive. There might be, from there being less disparity in years and possibly in understanding between us, some slight difference in the degree, but none in the nature, of that political attachment. That, unless so improbable an event as a difference between us on some great question affecting the general policy of the country should ever occur, I not only could never be of any service to the King in office _without_ you, but could only be of service to him by being brought there _by and under_ you. The King, I supposed, must infer this from his knowledge of my general party principles. I was sure I could not be five minutes in his closet on matters connected with the formation of a Ministry, without his knowing it distinctly. Without reference, therefore, to present circumstances, I showed that sending for me would be quite idle, unless the intention were not only to admit you as a Minister, but to consult and to entrust you in the task of forming one; and if that were the intention, the direct method, always the best, was perhaps more emphatically so, because something like personal estrangement had either subsisted or been rumoured to subsist between you and the King. As a general, though not invariable, rule, and always without reference to the immediate subject of our interview, I hinted that a King of England did best to place his confidence in some one man or, at least, some one party, and to leave to that person’s or that party’s discretion all union and coalition with others. I did not like to object to a man I so sincerely respect as Grenville, but I contrived in the course of conversation carelessly to observe that all political connection with him had dropped.

I then bantered my friend on the little comparative importance he attached to [the] House of Commons, and to various great measures on which men entrusted with power must make up their minds. He called the House of Commons _wild_, and seemed surprised when I told him that if he thought them _wild_ he would think the public, if he knew their feelings on the same subject, quite _frantic_. He seemed to apprehend that, in spite of the public clamour and Parliamentary unwillingness to do much, the King would not be satisfied with a separation or even a divorce, unless the Queen were deprived of her title and dignity as well as of her relation to him. I could not help saying, “That in that case he was a damned unreasonable fellow.” My friend seemed to imagine there could be no important measure but the Catholic question, from which remark I collected that that point might be conceded. I told him I differed with him extremely there. There were in my mind many measures—popular measures—of more importance to the stability and character of a Ministry and to the country than any squabble between man and wife could be: that as far as I had weight with parties in power I should recommend them to be very inflexible about such measures, and much more so than about men. I purposely avoided marking too distinctly what they were, but observed that [the] more a Government was harassed with such odious and painful subjects as the domestic quarrels of [the] Royal Family, the more prudent and the more incumbent upon them it would be to insist on everything that could benefit or, consistently with safety, gratify the country. I am afraid this part of my conversation did not please, and I was sorry to perceive it did not.

I need not tell you how I felt and do feel your absence. My line is, indeed, clear, whether you are absent or not; but indeed, my dear Grey, it is hardly fair to expect that that of other persons can be so. They cannot take upon themselves to act _for_ you.

It is quite impossible for them to consult you on the emergencies that may arise at such a distance—an endeavour to do so is tantamount to not acting at all.

Yours,

VASSALL HOLLAND.

I hardly know what I have written: I am so harassed with cold and business.

Since I wrote, Lansdowne and Tierney have been here: both have had similar communications through different channels, and Lord Buckingham, I am told, has taken one of the same kind down to Dropmore. The only difference is that Lansdowne’s and Tierney’s informants (both political friends of ours) said they were authorised by [the] King to communicate and consult: my friend only asked me my advice for the regulation of his own conduct. Tierney said nothing could be done in [the] House of Commons, _and_ the King’s cause there was lost; and he suggested, not to dismiss the Ministry, but to leave them to entangle themselves and disgrace themselves more. Lansdowne is most properly afraid of putting ourselves at all at the mercy of the Court in case of a change, but seems to think that union with some of the present men, Liverpool especially, would secure you more effectually against that evil than I think it would; but I cannot enter into all the various views and speculations and shades of opinion. Lansdowne constantly and naturally urges your coming up.

Yours,

VASSALL HOLLAND.

I should add, in case Tierney forgets it, that his informant said distinctly the King had no personal objection to your being, not only a Minister, but first Minister, and his informant, I am sure, would wish to see you so.

APPENDIX D

JUNIUS LETTERS

On Tuesday, May 29, 1834, I dined at Norfolk House; and the conversation turned, after dinner, as it does too often everywhere, on the question who was the author of _Junius_. However, on this occasion I heard something new and worth remembering.

Lord Albemarle, a man of a good memory and strict veracity, said he had once been present at a conversation (after much wine had been drunk) between Mr. Dudley North and Sir Philip Francis. The former rallied the latter somewhat rudely as the author of _Junius_, said it was vain to deny it, and that everybody so considered him, and took him to task for various opinions and expressions in the work. Francis grew angry, and with more solemnity than was usual exclaimed, “Do you then mean, sir, seriously to tell me that I am a scoundrel or a liar? I have denied distinctly my being the author, and after that they who believe I am must believe me to be a liar or a scoundrel or both.”

Dudley North then changed his battery; and, disclaiming all serious suspicion of the fact, implied he was unequal to the task, with much more to vex him and put him off his guard. At last he said: “In short, it is idle to talk so much about it: we all, in truth, know how it is—Lloyd[432] wrote the letters and you corrected the press.”

Francis at these words seemed startled; he coloured and answered, as Albemarle thought, with emotions of surprise: “_You have made much worse guesses, sir, in your life than that_.”

It tallies with my impressions of Francis’s conversations, inasmuch as he always seemed to me to know or imply something about _Junius_, but to _deny_ strictly his being the author.

FOOTNOTES

[1] [The ruler of Portugal at this time was Queen Maria I., who had succeeded her father King Joseph in 1777. She married her uncle Dom Pedro, who was proclaimed King conjointly with her. After the successive death of her husband and eldest son in 1788, she became insane, and the country was governed by her son Dom John, who was officially declared Regent in 1799.]

[2] [Percy, sixth Viscount Strangford (1780-1855), Minister Plenipotentiary to the Portuguese Court.

Early in November the Prince Regent of Portugal, alarmed by the threats of Napoleon, had issued a declaration detaining British subjects and property in Lisbon. Lord Strangford, after a final remonstrance, at once went on board the English fleet, which was under the command of Sir Sidney Smith. A rigorous blockade of the Tagus was enforced, but this state of affairs only lasted a few days. Intercourse with the Court was renewed, and Lord Strangford returned to Lisbon on the 27th.]

[3] My authorities for the facts related in the text are Sir Graham Moore;* Mr. Sitaro, a Portuguese merchant who victualled our fleets from Lisbon; Mr. Chamberlayne, then agent of packets at Lisbon, subsequently Consul at Rio Janeiro; and Mr. Bell, an English merchant, whose talents and intrepidity during the French occupation of Portugal should have entitled him to the place of Consul in 1809, but were found unequal to contend with the qualifications of Mr. Jeffrey,† a member of the House of Commons distinguished for his coarse calumnies and unfounded charges against Lord St. Vincent.—V.H.

[* Admiral Sir Graham Moore (1764-1843), a younger brother of Sir John Moore. The commander of the English fleet which escorted the Portuguese Royal Family to the Brazils.]

[† M.P. for Poole. His attacks on Lord St. Vincent took place in 1805 and 1806.]

[4] [For Lord Holland’s note on Lord Strangford’s dispatch, see Appendix A.]

[5] [Domingo Antonio de Souza-Continho, Marquis de Funchal (1765-1832), Portuguese Ambassador in England.]

[6] [An expedition against Mexico. See _Memoirs of the Whig Party_, vol. ii p. 117.]

[7] [The detention of Prince Ferdinand at Bayonne, whither Charles IV. had fled, and the rapid concentration of French armies on Madrid had caused the latent fury of the Spanish people to reach boiling point. A riot took place on May 2 in Madrid, in which five hundred French and many Spaniards were slain; and this within a few days was the signal for risings in every province of the country.]

[8] [Francis Horner, Esq. (1778-1817), a leading politician on the Whig side. One of the originators of the _Edinburgh Review_.]

[9] [John, tenth Earl of Westmorland (1759-1841), Lord Privy Seal.]

[10] [Florida Blanca (1728-1808), Spanish statesman. He was head of the Government from 1777 to 1791, when he was dismissed by Charles IV. and thrown into prison.]

[11] [Don Gaspar Melchior de Jovellanos (1744-1811), Spanish statesman and author.]

[12] [William Wickham (1761-1840). His activity as British Minister in Switzerland caused the French Directory to demand his expulsion in 1798. He was a member of the Treasury Board under Lord Grenville, 1806-1807.]

[13] [See _ante_, p. 11.]

[14] [The lenient terms of the Convention were generally condemned in England, and were even referred to with disapprobation in the King’s Speech at the commencement of the following Session, (January 19, 1809).]

[15] [Sir William Napier states that Moore obtained the command owing to the goodwill of the King, and that a few months before the Ministers had attempted to drive him into private life. Their hostility was fostered by Canning, whose friend Drummond, the British envoy at Palermo, Moore had thwarted when in command of the troops in Sicily. Sir John Moore wrote at this period in his Diary, edited by Major-General Sir J. F. Maurice (vol. ii. p. 250): “I understand that several of the Cabinet have taken a personal dislike to me, though I have seldom seen them, and they can know nothing of me. They wish to hold up Sir Arthur Wellesley.... Though they were forced to approve what I had done in Sweden, yet it was against the grain, for I took no trouble to conceal the ignorance which had sent us there, when they should have known from the character of the King and the weakness of his force that it was impossible for anything to be done.”]

[16] Sir John Moore was a Scotchman.—V.H.

[17] [Sir H. E. Bunbury, in his _Narrative_, says of him: “His manner was singularly agreeable to those whom he liked, but to those whom he did not esteem his bearing was severe.”]

[18] [Right Hon. John Hookham Frere (1769-1846), diplomatist and author. Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1799-1800: Minister at Lisbon, 1800: and at Madrid, 1802. After his failure in Spain, he refused further employment, and devoted himself to literature. Frere, being an intimate friend of Canning, was not likely to regard Moore with favour or to make any great exertions on his behalf.]

[19] [Manuel de Godoy, Duke of Alcudia (1767-1851), favourite and Minister of Charles IV.]

[20] [General Sir David Baird (1757-1829), Sir John Moore’s second-in-command.]

[21] Honble. Bladen Capel, who commanded the _Endymion_. (The account in the text was given me by Captain Basil Hall, then a midshipman in that ship, and confirmed by Capel himself.—V.H.)

[Afterwards Admiral Sir Thomas Bladen Capel, K.C.B. (1776-1853), youngest son of William Anne, fourth Earl of Essex.]

[22] [This letter, dated January 13, 1809, was written to Lord Castlereagh (_Castlereagh Correspondence_, vii. 26). The passage referred to in the text is as follows: “Your lordship knows that had I followed my own opinion as a military man, I should have retired with the army from Salamanca. The Spanish armies were then beaten. I was sensible, however, that had the British been withdrawn, the loss of the cause would have been imputed to their retreat. It was for this reason that I made the march to Sagunhan. As a diversion it succeeded: I brought the whole disposable force of the French against this army, and it has been allowed to follow it without a single movement being made to favour my retreat.”]

[23] [The Austrians made no actual move against France till March, 1809, but the intelligence of their activity caused Napoleon’s departure from Spain. He must, however, probably have realised, judging from an order issued when he was about to leave the army, that the escape of Moore and his force was ultimately certain.]

[24] [General Sir Robert Wilson (1777-1849), author of the _History of the British Expedition to Egypt_. He was dismissed from the army for a supposed participation in a riot on the occasion of Queen Caroline’s funeral, but was reinstated in 1830.]

[25] [Commander-in-Chief in Portugal for a few months.]

[26] [He was created Marquis de la Union, an appellation curiously unsuited to his record in Spain.]

[27] [William Adam (1751-1839), at this time Attorney-General to the Prince of Wales and trustee to the Duke of York in certain private matters.]

[28] [Sir David Dundas (1735-1820), Commander-in-Chief, 1809-1811.]

[29] [Mr. Creevey writes in his diary, dated, November 12, 1809: “I meet Abercromby in my walk.... When I tell him Wardle is on his legs again, all he can say is, ‘Wardle is the agent of the Duke of Kent.’ Was there ever such nonsense?” (_Creevey Papers_, vol. i. p. 113). Creevey seems, however, to have been a personal friend of Colonel Wardle. “I can’t bring myself to think there is anything bad in him, and I have looked at him in all ways in order to be sure of him. I know he is in distress for money, but all men from his part of the country dine with him and speak well of him.”]

[30] [William, afterwards third Earl of Radnor (1779-1869).]

[31] [John Charles, Viscount Althorp (1782-1845), who succeeded his father as Earl Spencer in 1834; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1830-1834.]

[32] [Right Hon. George Ponsonby (1755-1817), son of John Ponsonby, Esq. He distinguished himself in the Irish Parliament, and was made Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1806. He was leader of the Whigs in the House of Commons from 1808 until his death in 1817, which resulted from a stroke of paralysis in the House.]

[33] [Sir William Napier states that the primary object of the expedition was to insure the safety of the town and Spanish fleet against any possibility of capture by the French. The negotiations finally fell through, owing to the wavering policy of the English Cabinet and the ill-judged diplomatic methods of Mr. Frere. The Supreme Junta refused to allow the British troops to enter the town, though the mob were clamouring for their admittance. After Sir George Smith’s death the command devolved on General Mackenzie, who returned with the troops to Lisbon after all hope of a satisfactory arrangement was at an end.]

[34] [Sir Sidney Smith had been sent out to command the South American Station in 1808.]

[35] [It is perhaps worthy of note that Lord Castlereagh’s biographer, Sir Archibald Alison, treats the expedition to Walcheren as one of a number of important moves against Napoleon. He considers that the War Secretary’s policy, unaltered throughout his tenure of office, was to break Napoleon’s power of meeting Great Britain on the sea, and illustrates his view by the mention of the successive expeditions aimed at the destruction or capture of fleets belonging to European Powers in subjection to France—_viz._, the bombardment of Copenhagen, the blockade of the Russian fleet in the Baltic, the expeditions to Lisbon and Cadiz, etc. Had Lord Castlereagh been able to persuade the Cabinet to undertake this expedition in 1808 instead of 1809, the destruction of the French fleet then building at Antwerp would have been assured. As it was, a daring and forward policy and a strict obedience to the original orders from home would have attained its object; but the incapacity and jealousy of the commanders gave Napoleon time to reinforce his garrisons, and doomed the British force to inactivity and disease in the swamps of the Scheldt.]

[36] [John, second Earl of Chatham (1756-1835). He held the posts of First Lord of the Admiralty, 1788-1794; Lord Privy Seal, 1794-1796; Lord President of the Council, 1796-1801; Master-General of the Ordnance, 1801-1806; Governor of Gibraltar, 1820-1835. Alison states that, “Lord Castlereagh was constrained by the highest influence to offer the command to the Earl of Chatham.”]

[37] [A monument was erected there by Lady Chatham, consisting of a marble urn, with a medallion by John Bacon. It is stated in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ that the memorial was removed to Stowe, and is now at Revesby Abbey, Lincolnshire.]

[38] [He served in Canada on Sir Guy Carleton’s staff from 1774 to March, 1776, when he was removed by his father from the army, owing to the continuance of the American War. He returned to the service two years later on the outbreak of war with France.]

[39] [Admiral Sir Home Popham (1762-1820). He had been attached to the Duke of York’s army in Flanders in 1795, and had thus gained experience and local knowledge of its seaboard. In this expedition he commanded the _Venerable_, seventy-four guns.]

[40] [The newly appointed Master-General of the Ordnance.]

[41] [Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto (1763-1820), one of Napoleon’s chief agents in the overthrow of the Directory. At this period Minister of Police and of the Interior.]

[42] The circumstances related in the text, which I committed to paper in 1817 or 1818, have been confirmed this year by the publication of Fouché’s memoirs: the agent, I learnt from those memoirs, to be no other than Ouvrard.—V.H.

[Gabriel Julien Ouvrard (1770-1846), French financier.]

[43] [A story is told in the _Memoirs of Sir Charles Napier_, on the authority of Lady Castlereagh, that Canning was willing to reinstate Castlereagh if he would give up Sir John Moore. Alison states the cause of the duel to have been the fact that Castlereagh detected, in the intrigue, a design of Canning for self-advancement and resented it accordingly.]

[44] Lord Grenville says, in a letter to me, October 17, 1809: “I really think, by dint of showing how ill he has been used, Castlereagh will begin to make himself regretted. It will be a singular conclusion of the business, if the compassion of the public should be excited in favour of the one Minister who was perhaps of them all the most unpopular.”

Such was, however, the conclusion, and Lord Grenville turned out a prophet.—V.H.

[45] [Right Hon. Charles Bragge Bathurst, cousin of Lord Bathurst. He accepted the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster from Lord Liverpool in 1812.]

[46] [Sir Benjamin Hobhouse (1757-1831), father of the first Lord Broughton. Secretary to the Board of Control under Addington in 1803, and created a baronet in 1812.]

[47] Mr. Sydney Smith said coarsely, but wittily, that the Whig canvass for Lord Grenville at Oxford was like the trustees of the Magdalen applying to place a reclaimed prostitute at a baudy house.—V.H.

[48] [Better known as Lord Wycombe. His wife was the widow of Sir Duke Gifford, of Castle Jordan, in Ireland. Lord Lansdowne was succeeded by his half-brother, Lord Henry Petty.]

[49] [Princess Liechstenstein, in her book on Holland House, alludes to this story as a fabrication. Her version, however, is that the lines were composed by Lord Holland, describing the probable nature of his own death.]

[50] [Son of William, first Marquess of Lansdown, by his second wife, Lady Louisa Fitzpatrick; born in 1780.]

[51] [Leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons.]

[52] In 1815, or early in 1816, Lady Holland and myself were asked if we would receive him without any explanation of his long estrangement. We answered, “Yes”; and he resumed the habits of familiarity and intimacy as if nothing had happened.—V.H. [See p. 234.]

[53] [Henry George, Lord Porchester, who succeeded his father as second Earl of Carnarvon in 1811. Born in 1772; died in 1833.]

[54] [James, eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839). During the greater part of his political life he was included among the ultra-Whigs, but after 1820 his views underwent a radical change, and he even became an opponent of Lord Grey’s Reform Bill.]

[55] [Right Hon. Richard Ryder (1766-1832), second son of Nathaniel, first Baron Harrowby.]

[56] [William Frederick Eden (1782-1810), eldest son of William, first Lord Auckland, and Deputy-Teller of the Exchequer. He was found drowned in the Thames.]

[57] [Right Hon. Charles Philip Yorke (1764-1834), eldest son of the Right Hon. Charles Yorke, by his second wife; Secretary for War under Mr. Addington.]

[58] [John Gale Jones, the President of a debating society known by the high-sounding name of the “British Forum.” He was by trade an apothecary.]

[59] This they technically call “cushioning” a speaker.—V.H.

[60] [Published in 1866, by Mrs. Henry Baring.]

[61] [George Ellis (1745-1815), miscellaneous writer. He contributed to the _Rolliad_ and the _Anti-Jacobin_.]

[62] The Charter’s House, I think.—V.H.

[Mr. Windham died from the effects of a severe operation for tumour, which was caused by a slight injury received about a year before, while helping to save a valuable library from a fire in the house of his friend, the Hon. Frederick North.]

[63] I have been told that some parts of the original, not extracted by Mr. Ellis, and written in very plain English but in the Greek character, are very strange, and relate to very strange subjects.—V.H.

[64] [By a clause in the Appropriation Bill this sum was to be handed over to Queen Anne’s Bounty for the relief of the poorer clergy.]

[65] [Dr. John Allen (1771-1843). He was first introduced to Lord and Lady Holland in 1801, and accompanied them to Spain as their medical adviser. After their return in 1805, he lived almost entirely at Holland House, and was treated as a member of the family. He was a constant contributor to the Whig periodicals and reviews, and also published several historical treatises.]

[66] [Lord Lauderdale’s amendment in the House of Lords was directed against the payment of compensation to Mr. Thomas Scott for the abolition of a small Government post in Edinburgh, to which he had only been appointed a short time previously. A letter from Sir Walter Scott to his brother, written a few weeks later, is quoted in Lockhart’s _Life of Sir Walter Scott_: “Lord Holland has been in Edinburgh, and we met accidentally at a public party. He made up to me, but I remembered his part in your affair, and _cut_ him with as little remorse as an old pen.” The meeting took place at a dinner of the _Friday Club_.]

[67] [Covent Garden Theatre was destroyed by fire in September, 1808, and Drury Lane in February, 1809. The former was reopened by Kemble, with _Macbeth_, in September, 1809. The rise in prices, which aroused the displeasure of the theatre-going public, was but a small one. An extra shilling was to be charged for the boxes, and sixpence for the pit. The riots continued until the middle of December, when the original prices were restored.]

[68] [Henry Clifford (1768-1813), son of Hon. Thomas Clifford, of Tixall, Staffordshire.]

[69] The old Duke of Queensberry, in theory and practice the most selfish philosopher and consistent voluptuary of our days, tremblingly alive to every appearance of danger which threatened even remotely the stability of property, took the alarm. I believe he parted with money in support of the interests of the managers, and he subscribed largely soon afterwards to the rebuilding of Drury Lane Theatre.—V.H.

[70] Such I have seen from him to his sister, the Crown Princess of Brunswick; the copy of Smollett’s edition containing the mysterious passage I never saw. His son, George IV., when Prince of Wales, told me it was in Lord Buckingham’s library or in Buckingham House library; and, strange to say, I forget which.—V.H.

[71] [The following anecdote appears in a manuscript volume containing various reminiscences and short essays written by Lord Holland, which may possibly relate to the incident mentioned in the text: “In the Coalition Administration there was a Cabinet held for granting pardons and reprieves and signing warrants of execution, etc., when a difficulty occurred that had not been foreseen, _viz._, that when sentence of death was converted into transportation there was no place to transport the felons to. Some conversation ensued between Lord North and Mr. Fox, when His Majesty, with a levity quite unusual to his character, said, ‘Gentlemen, the felons used to be sent to America. But America is now lost. It is none of my fault. It is for you, gentlemen’ (addressing Mr. Fox and Lord North) ‘to settle it between you;’ and retired half bowing and skipping out of the room. Mr. Fox, probably from having been disconcerted at so strange a sally, would never allow that there was the least pleasantry or fun in this singular trait of His Majesty; and General Conway observed on the spot that it seemed to him His Majesty was a little touched in the head.”]

[72] [Mr. Pitt resigned in 1801 on account of the King’s refusal to deal in any way with the Roman Catholic question.]

[73] Afterwards Sir Herbert.—V.H.

[He was originally Military-Secretary to the Duke of York, and first acted as Secretary to the King in 1804. It is stated on his own authority that he was the first Private Secretary employed by George III.]

[74] [Jesse, in his _Memoirs of King George III._, states that the King had at some period of his youth conceived a passionate admiration for Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke, daughter of Charles, second Duke of Marlborough. Whether this ever came to the knowledge of the lady in question is uncertain, but her beauty seems to have made a deep impression on George III.’s mind. During his illness in 1789, and again in 1810, her name was continually on his lips; and it is even reported that he thought he was married to her, and was furious at not being allowed to see her.]

[75] If His Majesty meant by “stable” monarchical, his prophecy has been happily fulfilled; but if he used the word in its true sense, the events of the ensuing forty years strangely belied his expectations. Almost every monarchy in Christendom has been convulsed by insurrections, revolutions, and changes, but the Republic of the United States has been uniformly tranquil and undisturbed in its sure progress, improvement, and prosperity.—V.H.

[76] [Edward Venables Vernon (1757-1847), youngest son of George, first Lord Vernon, and Martha, daughter of Hon. Simon Harcourt; appointed to the See of York in 1807. He took the name of Harcourt in 1831, on succeeding to the estates of that family.

Charles Manners-Sutton, grandson of the third Duke of Rutland; born in 1755; became Bishop of Norwich in 1792, and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1805; died in 1828. He was father of Charles Manners-Sutton, created Viscount Canterbury, Speaker from 1817 to 1834. Wraxall relates that Pitt was anxious to raise Dr. Tomline, Bishop of Lincoln, who was at one time his Private Secretary, to the vacancy at Canterbury. George III., however, refused to listen to the suggestion, and insisted on the appointment of Dr. Manners-Sutton.]

[77] Perhaps, when compared with his immediate predecessors, he is entitled to some little praise for promoting literature and encouraging the arts. His father had courted popularity by affecting a passion for poetry, and the real or ostentatious respect for letters entertained by Lord Bute had impressed on his mind a notion that it became a sovereign to patronise such pursuits. He accordingly founded the Royal Library, pensioned Dr. Johnson and some less celebrated writers, and collected more than one valuable library. He had, however, little or no perception of the beauties of any of those arts he thus rewarded. He had no relish for poetry, wit, or eloquence; no love of study; no discrimination in painting, sculpture, or even conversation. He had some fanciful notions about architecture, but all perverted or bad.—V.H.

[78] Beneficia, eo usque læta sunt, dum videntur exsolvi posse: ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur.—_Tacitus Ann._, lib. iv. 18.

Quidam, quo plus debent, eo magis oderunt. Leve æs alienum debitorem facit, grave inimicum.—_Seneca_, ep. 19.—V.H.

[79] It was with reference to this infirmity or talent, whichever it be, in His Royal Highness, that Mr. Fox, on being sent for by him from the country to hear an explanation of his conduct or sentiments on some public occasion, said with more peevishness, but with as much pleasantry and simplicity, as were usual in him, “Here must I leave my roses and St. Anne’s, and go to London to hear _a lie an hour long_ at Carlton House.” Nothing could more happily describe the character of the Prince’s conversation when he wished to conceal his views or opinions.—V.H.

[80] [Sir Robert Adair (1763-1855), son of Robert Adair, Surgeon to George III., and Lady Caroline Keppel, daughter of the second Earl of Albemarle.]

[81] [Lord Eldon.]

[82] [The Bill was composed of five resolutions: (1) Appointing the Prince of Wales Regent with certain restrictions: (2) Refusing him the power, for a time, of granting peerages: (3) Refusing the power of granting offices and reversions for a longer term than the royal pleasure: (4) Treating of the King’s private property: (5) Vesting the management of the King’s Household in the Queen.]

[83] [Richard, second Lord Ashburton (1782-1823). The title became extinct at his death.]

[84] [William Eden, created Lord Auckland in 1789. He died in 1814.]

[85] [Charles, third Earl Stanhope (1753-1816). He married a sister of William Pitt, whom he supported in Parliament until 1786. During that year Lord Stanhope succeeded to the title, and differences on the Sinking Fund caused him to desert his brother-in-law and ally himself to the Whigs. He was an ardent admirer of the revolutionary doctrines in France, and gave his support to any advanced schemes for reform in this country. Lord Holland gives a detailed account of his inventions and eccentric ways in the early volumes of this work. See also p. 245.]

[86] [By a majority of 3. The House adjourned at 5 o’clock in the morning.]

[87] [Gustavus IV., King of Sweden from 1792 to 1809. In the latter year he was removed from the throne by the Swedish people, who were enraged by his foreign policy. He was succeeded by his uncle.]

[88] [Lord Grenville insisted on retaining his auditorship in addition to the post of First Lord of the Treasury. The arrangement was especially indefensible, from his objection to the principle in the case of two members of the existing Government.]

[89] [Lord Holland was accustomed to take a house in London every year. Holland House was at that period completely surrounded by country. Dr. Drew writes in December, 1797: “Again, the walk from Kensington to Hyde Park Corner by day is pleasant enough, but the return by night dark and dangerous and infested by footpads....” (_Holland House MSS._)]

[90] [See Moore’s _Life of Sheridan_, vol. ii. p. 394.]

[91] [Francis Charles, Earl of Yarmouth (1777-1842), who succeeded his father as second Marquess of Hertford in 1822.]

[92] Then Dr. Vaughan.—V.H.

[George III.’s principal medical attendant.]

[93] [Charles William, Viscount Milton (1786-1857). He succeeded his father as Earl Fitzwilliam in 1833.]

[94] Lord Dartmouth, in his notes to Burnett, ascribes this repartee to some other Whig lord. No matter who said it, the saying is good, illustrates much of the private and party history of this country, and is, I think, applicable to the passage which I have been relating.—V.H.

[95] [General the Hon. Richard FitzPatrick (1748-1813), Lord Holland’s uncle.]

[96] Lords Grey and Grenville.—V.H.

[97] Cumberland.—V.H.

[98] Bedfordshire.—V.H.

[99] Vernon Smith, his nephew, then ill at Ampthill Park.—V.H.

[100] Mr. Wellesley Pole, afterwards Lord Maryborough, brother to the Duke of Wellington.—V.H.

[101] [The letter is given in the _Annual Register_ for 1811, p. 12.]

[102] [_Ex officio_ informations are those filed by the Attorney-General _in virtue of his office_, without applying to the court, where they are filed, for leave, or giving the defendant an opportunity of showing cause why they should not be filed (_Cabinet Lawyer_).]

[103] [Edward Law, first Baron Ellenborough (1750-1818). Lord Chief Justice from 1802 till the year of his death. Charles Greville, in his _Memoirs_, repeats an amusing story of his treatment of counsel in his court. “A man was opening his speech, and said, ‘My Lord, my unfortunate client,’ and then repeated the words again. ‘Go on, sir,’ said Lord Ellenborough, ‘the court is with you so far.’”]

[104] [“The general tenour of his speech (that of Mr. Horner on May 6) was to show that the paper currency of the country had undergone an actual depreciation, and that the only remedy was to provide for the resumption of cash payments at the bank as speedily as possible.”—_Annual Register_, 1811.

The report of the Parliamentary Committee on bullion, of which Mr. Horner was president and Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Peel was a member, was to the same effect, _i.e._ that paper issues were always liable to depreciation unless they were at any time convertible into gold.]

[105] [Peter, seventh Lord King (1776-1833). His eldest son, who succeeded him, was created Earl of Lovelace.]

[106] [This famous case was raised by William Berkeley, eldest son of Frederick-Augustus, fifth Earl of Berkeley, on the death of his father in 1810, claiming the titles. He was born in 1786, and though his father was not supposed to have married his mother, Mary Cole, until 1796, a secret marriage was alleged to have taken place in 1785. This was, however, proved to be untrue, and the suit was disallowed. William Berkeley was created Earl Fitzhardinge in 1841: his youngest brother, the only son born after the marriage, never took any steps to claim the title of Earl of Berkeley.]

[107] In the course of the cause a question arose whether the declaration or deposition of the late Lord Berkeley could be admitted in evidence. It was referred to the judges; and their solemn opinion was delivered that it could _not_. Never was the force of a phrase more strongly exemplified than on that occasion. Mr. Justice Laurence drew a distinction between declarations made before and after any question had been raised on the subject. In stating the distinction, he borrowed a Latin phrase from the Civil Law, and said that a declaration _post litem motam_ could not be admitted. _Lis mota_ occurred in every fourth or fifth sentence of every opinion delivered afterwards by the learned judges. The Lords looked wise, and acknowledged in whispers to each other a _lis mota_ altered the whole nature of a declaration. The declaration in question was, on this principle, rejected. Yet the phrase _lis mota_, which seemed to awaken all the recollections of the learned, was then mentioned for the first time, and had hitherto been utterly unknown to our law and our lawyers. Even the principle, though perhaps not unreasonable, had never, or at least very seldom, if ever, been recognised in our Courts.—V.H.

[108] The business was decided in Parliament, or rather compromised finally elsewhere in 1812, but it was obvious that the zeal of the Prince Regent in the cause of his friend had abated in 1811.—V.H.

[Colonel Palmer, the manager of the Bath Theatre, had, in 1784, after much difficulty, obtained a trial for his scheme of fast mail coaches. Such was its success that, in 1800, the postal revenues were more than trebled. It was at first proposed to grant him 21⁄2 per cent. on a portion of the increase, but this fell through, owing to the opposition of the authorities, and with much difficulty he finally obtained a pension of £3,000 a year and a gratuity of £50,000.]

[109] I have sometimes thought that this book, which is too long, might with due regard to method and perspicuity be divided here. As it stands, however, it embraces all the negotiations between the Prince Regent and the Whigs, and the period included in it is not more than one year and half.—V.H.

[110] When I related the substance of these conversations to Lord Grey, I could not but be diverted with his characteristic and somewhat jealous remark, “There was no use,” said he, “in mentioning A. G. Ponsonby; to such an arrangement there might be many objections. I feel some myself.”—V.H.

[111] [General the Hon. Henry Edward Fox, Lord Holland’s uncle, youngest brother of Charles James Fox. He was born in 1755, and married, in 1786, Marianne, daughter of William Clayton, Esq.]

[112] Lord Dorchester.—V.H.

[113] [Rumours were afloat in Spain at this time of a desire to place British officers in command of Spanish troops, and of the possibility of a permanent occupation by the English of certain portions of Spanish territory. A note was delivered to the Cortes by the British Minister, Mr. Wellesley, flatly contradicting these statements.]

[114] [Richard Colley, Marquess Wellesley (1760-1842), elder brother of the Duke of Wellington; Governor-General of India, 1797-1805; Ambassador at Madrid, 1809; Foreign Secretary, 1809-1812; Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, 1821-1828 and 1833-1834.]

[115] [Sir Archibald Alison claims the initiation of this policy for Lord Castlereagh. Lord Holland’s account, however, is more probably correct, for Mr. Thornton, who was in charge of the negotiations, was sent to Sweden five months before Lord Castlereagh’s return to office.]

[116] Some say he was a relation, and an Irishman. The original name of the Wellesley or Wesley family was Colley.—V.H.

[117] [His views on the Roman Catholic question also tended to his subsequent resignation. See Appendix B.]

[118] [He delivered up the Seals on February 19th.]

[119] [The letter is published in the _Annual Register_ for 1812, p. 329. After a lengthy dissertation on the state of affairs at the moment when he became Regent, the Prince discussed the danger of any sudden change of Administration in the critical state of the war, but hoped that his former friends would combine with the Ministers to form a really powerful Government. He asked the Duke of York to convey this expression of his views to Lords Grey and Grenville.]

[120] I allude particularly to Mr. Southey,* who should have found in the recollection of early kindnesses received from Mr. Charles Williams Wynn,† when he was himself accused of obnoxious and Jacobinical principles and not in affluent circumstances, some motives for suppressing or softening rather than promulgating and exaggerating any hasty or unguarded declarations which that gentleman might have made to him in the heat of argument or in the warmth and confidence of friendship. But Mr. Southey seemed about that time tired of opinions which led to no worldly advantages, and angry with all Whigs because those among them who were critics were not boundless in their admiration of all his poetical effusions.—V.H.

[* Robert Southey (1774-1843), the poet.]

[† Charles Watkin Williams Wynn (1775-1850), a nephew of Lord Grenville and Under-Secretary for the Home Department in the Ministry of “all the talents.” He settled a small allowance on Southey, which was to continue until he was able to obtain a pension for him from Government.]

[121] [See _ante_, p. 103.]

[122] [The letter appears on p. 331 of the _Annual Register_ for 1812. The reasons for their refusal to take office with the Ministers were based entirely on the advice given them by Lord Lansdowne.]

[123] [For Foreign Affairs.]

[124] “Weep, daughter of a Royal line,” etc., etc.

The stanzas are printed, and to be found in his works.—V.H.

[The incident took place at a banquet at Carlton House on February 22, 1812. According to the account printed in the _Courier_, the Prince Regent expressed his “surprise and mortification” at Lords Grey and Grenville’s unfavourable reply to the Duke of York’s letter. Lord Lauderdale thereupon made it clear, in somewhat brusque language, that the sentiments of the two Lords reflected exactly the disposition of the whole Whig party, and that he himself had given his cordial assent to their answer.]

[125] It was written by Mr. Brougham.—V.H.

[126] I have altered this passage from “hitherto has been” to “was,” for since I originally wrote it in 1821 the great poetical genius of whom it treats has terminated his short and irregular, but brilliant, career in a place and in circumstances (and perhaps at a period of life) fortunate for his literary and political fame. He was perhaps the shortest, but surely not the least, miracle of our age.—V.H.

[127] [John Milner, D.D. (1752-1826), Bishop of Castabala and Vicar-Apostolic in the West of England.]

[128] [The chief question was whether the English Government should have a right of veto on the appointment of Catholic Bishops in the United Kingdom.]

[129] [These Orders in Council were issued in 1807, in order to counteract Napoleon’s Berlin and Milan decrees against British commerce. Any ship bound for a port in the French dominions was proclaimed a lawful prize, unless she had already touched at some British harbour.

The effect of this was to entirely put an end to the carrying trade of the world; for one side confiscated ships which had come from English ports, and the other those which had not. The Americans withdrew their ships entirely from European waters, and passed a Non-Intercourse Act forbidding commercial transactions with either of the combatants.]

[130] [Created Earl Granville in 1815. (1773-1846).]

[131] [_King Richard II._, Act II., Scene i.]

[132] [Charles George, Lord Arden (1756-1840), Mr. Perceval’s eldest brother.]

[133] I wrote this in 1820 or 1821. Since that period the impression of which I speak, if not altered, has been worn away and is much forgotten. The change in men and in the condition of the country, and the unreasonable and extravagant excitement produced by recent crimes and their punishments, have, I believe, obliterated in the mind of the common people the recollection of their feelings about Bellingham.—V.H.

[134] [Mr. Perceval had, in April, sanctioned the appointment of Committees of both Houses to examine the flood of petitions which were pouring in.]

[135] [The papers and minutes relating to these negotiations are given in the _Annual Register_ for 1812, State Papers, p. 346, etc.]

[136] [This letter was dated May 18.]

[137] [James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie (1776-1845), created Baron Wharncliffe in 1826.]

[138] [Mr. Creevey’s account of these negotiations in a letter, dated May 25, is worthy of comparison with the text: “First then when Prinney sent for Wellesley, the latter began by mentioning some of the Opposition as persons to be consulted with; to which the former replied: ‘Don’t mention any names to me _now_, my Lord, but make an Administration for me!’ To which the other says: ‘In a business of such nicety I trust your Royal Highness will not press me for time.’ ‘Take your own time,’ says Prinney, ‘tho’ there is not a shilling left in the Exchequer!’” (_The Creevey Papers._)]

[139] [In a communication made to Lords Grey and Grenville at Lord Grey’s house on May 23.]

[140] [George, third Earl of Egremont (1751-1837). He took little part in politics, but is justly remembered for the encouragement he gave to every form of art.]

[141] I think the Prince Regent wished to stipulate that Lord Wellesley should be First Lord of the Treasury, but Lord Wellesley declared to the two Lords in the first communication, and had probably stated to His Royal Highness beforehand, that he wished to decline that office and to leave the new Ministry, if formed, to cast the parts among themselves.—V.H.

[142] [Sir William Grant (1752-1832), Master of the Rolls from 1801 to 1817.]

[143] This passage was written in the autumn of 1821. Within three months the remark was in some senses practically refuted, for Lord Wellesley was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, but whether at the suggestion of Lord Liverpool’s Ministry or with its reluctant and extorted consent, I cannot determine. March, 1822.—V.H.

[144] [See _ante_, p. 87.]

[145] [William Harry, third Earl of Darlington (1766-1842). He was created Duke of Cleveland in 1833.]

[146] The Duke of Norfolk, on the first offer, gladly accepted it, and returning to his house said to Mr. Stephenson, who lived with him, with some exaltation, “I am Lord Privy Seal.” He afterwards found he had no Whig, and scarcely any other, colleague; and he was off, relating on his return home the very next day to the same gentleman, with some pleasantry, “I am now not Lord Privy Seal.”—V.H.

[147] [On June 8.]

[148] [The principal members of the new Government were as follows: Earl of Liverpool, First Lord of the Treasury; Viscount Castlereagh, Foreign Secretary; Lord Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty; Earl Bathurst, Secretary for War and Colonies; Lord Sidmouth, Secretary for Home Department; Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor; Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council.]

[149] [Mr. Stuart Wortley’s motion on May 21 for an efficient Administration. See _ante_, p. 136.]

[150] [In 1813.]

[151] [William Wilberforce (1759-1833), the champion of the Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which was passed in 1807.]

[152] [See _ante_, p. 132.]

[153] Major a longinquo reverentia.—V.H.

[154] [War broke out before the news of the repeal of the Orders in Council reached the United States.]

[155] [James Stephen (1758-1832), brother-in-law and an active supporter of Wilberforce in his efforts against the slave trade. A pamphlet published by him in 1805, entitled _War in Disguise_, is supposed to have suggested the Orders in Council. He retired from Parliament in 1815, disgusted at the refusal of the Government to support a bill for the registration of slaves.]

[156] [For Lord Holland’s previous attempts to modify the law with respect to _ex officio_ informations, see _ante_, p. 99.]

[157] In 1819.—V.H.

[158] “C’etoit un de mes caprices,” said that great Prince of him at Elba. He had educated and fostered him like a son, he promoted him like a favourite, and he was basely betrayed by him at Fontainebleau in 1814. I remember Sir Lionel Copley, in 1799, defended his suspicions of General Moreau by a humorous, not to say nonsensical, coincidence: “When there are prospects of restorations by treachery,” said he, “I do not like a General whose name begins with an _M_.” What maledictions would he not have uttered when _M_ar_m_ont and _M_orillo were added to the list of _M_onk and _M_oreau!—V.H.

[Marmont, Duke of Ragusa (1774-1852) served in the artillery with Napoleon, and was his principal aide-de-camp in his Italian campaign of 1796. He reached the rank of Marshal in 1809, being promoted for his success at Wagram. He defended Paris in 1813 against the Allies while there was any hope of success, but afterwards went over to the enemy, and was among the number of those excepted by Napoleon from the amnesty on his return from Elba.]

[159] [Lord Wellington had just commenced his lunch, after a morning spent in fruitless manœuvring, when an important movement on the part of the French was announced. His practised eye at once took in Marmont’s faulty dispositions. “By God!” he exclaimed, “that’ll do!” and, hurling all his available troops at the weak spot, gained a signal victory.]

[160] [On whom the command of the French troops had devolved.]

[161] [This was the occasion of the publication of _Rejected Addresses_.]

[162] [Robert William Elliston (1774-1831), an actor of note, and a successful manager. He took the management of Drury Lane Theatre in 1819, and remained until 1826 when obliged by bankruptcy to resign the post.]

[163] [When the Committee was formed in 1810 to rebuild the theatre, it was arranged that Sheridan and his family should be bought out. It was then stipulated that he should “have no concern or connection of any kind with the new undertaking.” This Sheridan looked on as a matter of form, and was greatly enraged when Whitbread, as Chairman of the Committee, rigidly enforced the clause.]

[164] Sir Robert Wilson* was sent from the army to Alexander, to inform him that they were resolved to consider any truce or pacification that he should sign as extorted from him by force or treachery; as the act of Romanzow,† not of their Sovereign; and they authorised Sir Robert to convey his opinion to His Imperial Majesty, as that of a foreign observer, that the army would not obey any orders founded on a pacification. The result of this and other intimations of the sort was the dismissal of Romanzow and the adoption of firmer councils. The Empress Dowager, as well as the Empress, took an opportunity of assuring Sir Robert Wilson that the Emperor was now determined to abandon all notion of temporising or yielding, and that he might be depended upon.

(From conversation with Sir R. Wilson, 1825).—V.H.

[* Sir Robert Wilson had just satisfactorily concluded a mission to Constantinople and St. Petersburg dealing with the negotiations for the re-establishment of peace between Turkey and Russia. He was at that time attached to the Russian army, with instructions to communicate all information to Lord Cathcart, the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg.]

[† Count Nicholas Romanzow (1753-1826) the Russian Chancellor.]

[165] [See _ante_, p. 102.]

[166] [William Conyngham Plunket, afterwards first Lord Plunket (1764-1854), at this time member for Dublin University. Lord Castlereagh declared that Mr. Plunket’s speech on February 25 dealing with this question, “would never be forgotten.” He was appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland by Lord Grey in 1830.]

[167] [Gilbert Elliot, afterwards second Earl of Minto (1782-1859)].

[168] [Charles Abbot (1757-1829), created Lord Colchester in 1816. He held the post of Speaker of the House of Commons from 1802 until his elevation to the peerage.]

[169] [Lord Morpeth brought a motion in April, 1814, that the address of the Speaker on the occasion referred to should not be treated as a precedent; but it was defeated by a large majority. His action, however, had the desired effect, and since that time no Speaker in his address has referred to measures which have not been passed by the House of Commons.]

[170] [Hon. Richard FitzPatrick, second son of John, first Earl of Upper Ossory, and Evelyn, daughter of John, Earl Gower. He was born in 1748, and, entering the Army, rose to the rank of General.

Mr. Creevey, in mentioning his death, says of him, “I thought you might like to hear these particulars respecting the end of by far the most clever of the quiet class I have ever seen, and the most perfect judgt. of any class.”]

[171] [April to December, 1783. He accompanied the Duke of Portland to Ireland in 1782.]

[172] [It is interesting to note that Lord Grenville’s chief objection to the policy of the Government was, that they were treating the interests of the East India Company as of the highest importance, whereas he considered that those of the British Crown should have the foremost place. He maintained that a public assertion should be made of the sovereignty of the Crown in India and the power of Parliament to make laws for the general welfare of that vast country.]

[173] [See vol. ii. p. 149, in the earlier portion of Lord Holland’s Memoir. In that year, owing to a report that the Princess had been delivered of an illegitimate child, a Committee, consisting of Lords Erskine, Ellenborough, Grenville, and Spencer, with Sir S. Romilly, the Solicitor-General, as their legal adviser, was appointed to examine into her conduct. They stated in their report that there was no vestige of truth in the primary charge, but that in their opinion the levity of her behaviour on several occasions was worthy of censure. The matter again came to the front in 1813, owing to the Prince Regent’s refusal in October of the preceding year to allow the Princess to see her daughter, although she had gone specially to Windsor for that purpose. Furious at the insult, she wrote the letters referred to in the text to her husband and the Speaker of the House of Commons. A debate in that House ensued, and the letters and papers were referred to a Committee of the Privy Council, who reported that under the circumstances they considered that the intercourse between mother and daughter should be regulated and restricted.]

[174] [Whitbread.]

[175] [The Hon. Mrs. Lisle, a lady in attendance on the Princess, and a witness in the case.]

[176] Mr. Brougham related to me this and the following facts many years afterwards, and when he could have no object in deceiving me.—V.H.

[177] I have questioned persons who attended her medically. The duties and delicacies of their profession would, of course, prevent their acknowledging such facts, if ascertained by their professional attendance, even after her death; but the manner in which such a hint was received, the official tone of every answer given to my inquiries, the manifest embarrassment those inquiries occasioned, and the absence of all direct contradiction or disposition to explode the idea as absurd, confirmed me in my previous surmises. I have no doubt she was mad.—V.H.

[178] [At the battle of Navarette in 1367.]

[179] [Sir George Murray (1772-1846), second son of Sir William Murray, of Ochtertyre. He was promoted to the rank of Major-General in 1812, and, entering the House of Commons in 1823, became Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Duke of Wellington’s Administration of 1828.]

[180] Mr. Fazakerley, a man of accuracy and veracity, soon after seeing Napoleon at Elba in 1814 or 1815, related to me the following admission of that extraordinary man, and has frequently alluded to or repeated it since. He said that in all prudence he ought to have made peace immediately after the victories of Bautzen and Lutzen, and before the great battle of Leipsic. “Mais,” continued he, “je me croyois assez fort et je me suis trompé. C’etoit là assurément le moment de faire la paix, aussi l’aurois-je faite si je ne m’avois pas cru plus fort que je ne l’etois en effet.” A singular admission, especially for one not apt to be candid in acknowledging his errors.—V.H.

[181] [Lord Holland is probably mistaken as to the scene of this exploit. An incident such as is described above certainly took place at the battle of Lutzen: and the Emperor decorated Wilson with the cross of the Order of St. George, taken from his own neck, at a review some three weeks later.]

[182] [William, Prince of Orange, had fled to England in 1795, after the occupation of Amsterdam by General Pichegru. A Republican Government was then established until 1806, when Napoleon forced his brother Louis on the unwilling people as their King. In 1814 the tide turned against France (Holland had been annexed by that country in 1813), and the Dutch rose in revolt. The Prince of Orange was recalled, and was proclaimed King of Holland and Belgium under the title of William I. The Monarchy was made hereditary, and a Liberal Constitution was drawn up.]

[183] [Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838). He quarrelled with Napoleon in 1808 when Secretary for Foreign Affairs; and after that time sided secretly with the Bourbons, though he retained his office.]

[184] [Emmerich-Joseph de Worms, Duc de Dalberg (1773-1833), a friend and follower of Talleyrand.]

[185] [Lord Holland gives the same account of these intrigues in his _Foreign Reminiscences_, p. 297. He there relates that the kind of token sent to Metternich is uncertain. It was either the ring, a few words in the Duc de Dalberg’s handwriting enclosed in a button, or a note in Lord Castlereagh’s writing to the Princesse de Vaudemont, as a proof of his being confidentially connected with Talleyrand. This latter story was told him by Lord Goderich in 1833.]

[186] [Lord Holland somewhat minimises the popular desire, which, according to other accounts, was manifested in the South for a restoration of the Bourbons. The Duke of Wellington himself was certainly in favour of the movement, though in conformity with instructions from the English Government he refrained from any expression of his personal views.]

[187] I had many of the facts, more in detail than here related, directly from Mr. Gallois,* and indirectly from Dalberg himself; and they were confirmed or corroborated by the concurrence of other accounts of the less material facts from several others, and especially Pozzo di Borgo,† whose interesting relation of these transactions I had heard before I knew of Vitrolles’s intrigue, with which it was so far from being inconsistent that it tallied exactly in one main particular, the surprise of Alexander at finding no concerted plan for the Bourbons on his arrival at Paris.—V.H.

[* Jean Antoine Gallois, French politician, and friend of Lord Holland. He died in 1828.]

[† Count Pozzo di Borgo (1764-1842), diplomatist; afterwards Russian Ambassador in England.]

[188] [Richard Westmacott, R.A. (1775-1856), the eminent sculptor.]

[189] [Lord Wellington received the news of the events in Paris on the night of the 11th. The information was brought by Colonel Cooke, accompanied by a French officer, who had orders to communicate with the Marshals.]

[190] [Briefly, the situation was as follows. After the attack of the Allies on Paris of March 30, Marmont, who was in command of the French forces, capitulated; and the populace, without Napoleon to lead them, acquiesced. A provisional Government was proclaimed under the leadership of Talleyrand; the Emperor was dethroned on April 2; and Louis XVIII. was made king. In the meanwhile Napoleon himself remained at Fontainebleau. The army was on his side, but the Marshals were tired of the unequal combat, and forced him to abdicate in favour of his infant son. This proposal was refused by the Allies, and under pressure he signed an unconditional surrender on April 6.]

[191] Still a hotel in 1825 and formerly a house of Lord Monson’s. The Houses of York, Stuart, and Bourbon all adopted white as their emblems and divine hereditary right to the government of their fellow creatures as their fundamental maxim.* Even English soldiers were permitted to wear it, a circumstance which provoked the following epigram from the pen of Mr. Rogers:

Wear it awhile, against him led, With your own blood you’ll dye it red. But had your brave forefathers worn it, Great Nassau from their brows had torn it.—V.H.

[* It is a moot point whether divine right can be said to date back in practice to the Wars of the Roses; though, in theory, Sir Robert Filmer (1604-1653), a writer well known for his extreme opinions on this subject, held that the doctrine commenced with the creation of man.]

[192] Napoleon inserted this just remark afterwards in one of his proclamations, and felt perhaps a malicious pleasure in using the sarcasm of Talleyrand against that party to whom he had contributed to betray him.—V.H.

[193] [The Slave Trade was the subject of a special clause in the Treaty, which, however, did not go as far as the enthusiasts on the subject had hoped. The French King engaged himself to combine with the King of England, at a future Congress, for general abolition; and in the meanwhile consented that the trade should cease in French possessions within five years. Lord Liverpool even offered, at the Congress of Vienna, to cede the Island of Trinidad as compensation for the French colonists who believed they would be utterly ruined by an immediate cessation of the trade.]

[194] [Wilberforce and his party.]

[195] I think, on reflection, the King of Prussia only was there that day.—V.H.

[Creevey says of this, in a letter dated June 21 (_Creevey Papers_,