Part 6

"'Prince and chief of many throned powers, Who led the embattled seraphim to war.'"

Without adopting the bitter remark of the Duke de Montausier to Louis the Fourteenth, in speaking of Versailles:--'Vous avez beau faire, sire, vous n'en ferez jamais qu'un favori sans merite,' it was impossible to deny their inferiority on all the great points of public impression. A debate in that day was one of the highest intellectual treats: there was always some new and vigorous feature in the display on both sides; some striking effort of imagination or masterly reasoning, or of that fine sophistry, in which, as was said of the vices of the French noblesse, half the evil was atoned by the elegance. The ministerialists sarcastically pronounced that, in every debate, Burke said something which no one else ever said; Sheridan said something that no one else ought to say, and Fox something that no one else would dare to say. But the world, fairer in its decision, did justice to their extraordinary powers; and found in the Asiatic amplitude and splendour of Burke; in Sheridan's alternate subtlety and strength, reminding it at one time of Attic dexterity, and another of the uncalculating boldness of barbarism; and in Fox's matchless English self-possession, unaffected vigour, and overflowing sensibility, a perpetual source of admiration.

"But it was in the intercourses of social life that the superiority of Opposition was most incontestable. Pitt's life was in the senate; his true place of existence was on the benches of that ministry, which he conducted with such unparalleled ability and success: he was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a public man; and his indulgences in the few hours which he could spare from the business of office, were more like the necessary restoratives of a frame already shattered, than the easy gratifications of a man of society: and on this principle we can safely account for the common charge of Pitt's propensity to wine. He found it essential, to relieve a mind and body exhausted by the perpetual pressure of affairs: wine was his medicine: and it was drunk in total solitude, or with a few friends from whom the minister had no concealment. Over his wine the speeches for the night were often concerted; and when the dinner was done, the table council broke up only to finish the night in the house.

"But with Fox, all was the bright side of the picture. His extraordinary powers defied dissipation. No public man of England ever mingled so much personal pursuit of every thing in the form of indulgence with so much parliamentary activity. From the dinner he went to the debate, from the debate to the gaming-table, and returned to his bed by day-light, freighted with parliamentary applause, plundered of his last disposable guinea, and fevered with sleeplessness and agitation; to go through the same round within the next twenty-four hours. He kept no house; but he had the houses of all his party at his disposal, and that party were the most opulent and sumptuous of the nobility. Cato and Antony were not more unlike, than the public severity of Pitt, and the native and splendid dissoluteness of Fox.

"They were unlike in all things. Even in such slight peculiarities as their manner of walking into the house of commons, the contrast was visible. From the door Pitt's countenance was that of a man who felt that he was coming into his high place of business. 'He advanced up the floor with a quick firm step, with the head erect, and thrown back, looking to neither the right nor the left, nor favouring with a glance or a nod any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many of the highest would have been gratified by such a mark of recognition.' Fox's entrance was lounging or stately, as it might happen, but always good-humoured; he had some pleasantry to exchange with every body, and until the moment when he rose to speak, continued gaily talking with his friends."

* * * * *

"Of all the great speakers of a day fertile in oratory, Sheridan had the most conspicuous natural gifts. His figure, at his first introduction into the house, was manly and striking; his countenance singularly expressive, when excited by debate; his eye large, black, and intellectual; and his voice one of the richest, most flexible, and most sonorous, that ever came from human lips. Pitt's was powerful, but monotonous; and its measured tone often wearied the ear. Fox's was all confusion in the commencement of his speech; and it required some tension of ear throughout to catch his words. Burke's was loud and bold, but unmusical; and his contempt for order in his sentences, and the abruptness of his grand and swelling conceptions, that seemed to roll through his mind like billows before a gale, often made the defects of his delivery more striking. But Sheridan, in manner, gesture, and voice, had every quality that could give effect to eloquence.

"Pitt and Fox were listened to with profound respect, and in silence, broken only by occasional cheers; but from the moment of Sheridan's rising, there was an expectation of pleasure, which to his last days was seldom disappointed. A low murmur of eagerness ran round the house; every word was watched for, and his first pleasantry set the whole assemblage in a roar. Sheridan was aware of this; and has been heard to say, 'that if a jester would never be an orator, yet no speaker could expect to be popular in a _full house_, without a jest; and that he always made the experiment, good or bad; as a laugh gave him the country gentlemen to a man.'

"In the house he was always formidable; and though Pitt's moral or physical courage never shrank from man, yet Sheridan was the antagonist with whom he evidently least desired to come into collision, and with whom the collision, when it did occur, was of the most fretful nature. Pitt's sarcasm on him as a theatrical manager, and Sheridan's severe, yet fully justified retort, are too well known to be now repeated; but there were a thousand instances of that 'keen encounter of their wits,' in which person was more involved than party."

* * * * *

"Burke was created for parliament. His mind was born with a determination to things of grandeur and difficulty.

"'Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem.'"

Nothing in the ordinary professions, nothing in the trials or triumphs of private life, could have satisfied the noble hunger and thirst of his spirit of exertion. This quality was so predominant, that to it a large proportion of his original failures, and of his unfitness for general public business, which chiefly belongs to detail, is to be traced through life. No Hercules could wear the irresistible weapons and the lion's skin with more natural supremacy; but none could make more miserable work with the distaff. Burke's magnitude of grasp, and towering conception, were so much a part of his nature, that he could never forego their exercise, however unsuited to the occasion. Let the object be as trivial as it might, his first instinct was to turn it into all shapes of lofty speculation, and try how far it could be moulded and magnified into the semblance of greatness. If he had no large national interest to summon him, he winged his tempest against a turnpike bill; or flung away upon the petty quarrels and obscure peculations of the underlings of office, colours and forms that might have emblazoned the fall of a dynasty."

* * * * *

"Erskine, like many other characters of peculiar liveliness, had a morbid sensibility to the circumstances of the moment, which sometimes strangely enfeebled his presence of mind; any appearance of neglect in his audience, a cough, a yawn, or a whisper, even among the mixed multitude of the courts, and strong as he was there, has been known to dishearten him visibly. This trait was so notorious, that a solicitor, whose only merit was a remarkably vacant face, was said to be often planted opposite to Erskine by the adverse party, to yawn when the advocate began.

"The cause of his first failure in the house, was not unlike this curious mode of disconcerting an orator. He had been brought forward to support the falling fortunes of Fox, then struggling under the weight of the 'coalition.' The 'India Bill' had heaped the king's almost open hostility on the accumulation of public wrath and grievance which the ministers had with such luckless industry been employed during the year in raising for their own ruin. Fox looked abroad for help; and Gordon, the member for Portsmouth, was displaced from his borough, and Erskine was brought into the house, with no slight triumph of his party, and perhaps some degree of anxiety on the opposite side. On the night of his first speech, Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat with pen and paper in his hand, prepared to catch the arguments of this formidable adversary. He wrote a word or two; Erskine proceeded; but with every additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper relaxed; his look became more careless; and he obviously began to think the orator less and less worthy of his attention. At length, while every eye in the house was fixed upon him, he, with a contemptuous smile, dashed the pen through the paper, and flung them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from this expression of disdain; his voice faltered, he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame.

"But a mind of the saliency and variety of Erskine's, must have distinguished itself wherever it was determined on distinction; and it is impossible to believe, that the master of the grave, deeply-reasoned, and glowing eloquence of this great pleader, should not have been able to bring his gifts with him from Westminster-hall to the higher altar of parliament. There were times when his efforts in the house reminded it of his finest effusions at the bar. But those were rare. He obviously felt that his place was not in the legislature; that no man can wisely hope for more than one kind of eminence; and except upon some party emergency, he seldom spoke, and probably never with much expectation of public effect. His later years lowered his name; by his retirement from active life, he lost the habits forced upon him by professional and public rank; and wandered through society, to the close of his days, a pleasant idler; still the gentleman and the man of easy wit, but leaving society to wonder what had become of the great orator, in what corner of the brain of this perpetual punster and story-teller, this man of careless conduct and rambling conversation, had shrunk the glorious faculty, that in better days flashed with such force and brightness; what cloud had absorbed the lightnings that had once alike penetrated and illumined the heart of the British nation."

The following investigation of the authorship of Junius will be read with interest.

"The trial of Hastings had brought Sir Philip Francis into public notice, and his strong Foxite principles introduced him to the prince's friends. His rise is still unexplained. From a clerk in the War-office, he had been suddenly exalted into a commissioner for regulating the affairs of India, and sent to Bengal with an appointment, estimated at ten thousand pounds a-year. On his return to England he joined Opposition, declared violent hostilities against Hastings, and gave his most zealous assistance to the prosecution; though the house of commons would not suffer him to be on the committee of impeachment. Francis was an able and effective speaker; with an occasional wildness of manner and eccentricity of expression, which, if they sometimes provoked a smile, often increased the interest of his statements.

"But the usual lot of those who have identified themselves with any one public subject, rapidly overtook him. His temperament, his talents, and his knowledge, were all Indian. With the impeachment he was politically born, with it he lived, and when it withered away, his adventitious and local celebrity perished along with it. He clung to Fox for a few years after; but while the great leader of opposition found all his skill necessary to retain his party in existence, he was not likely to solicit a partisan at once so difficult to keep in order and to employ. The close of his ambitious and disappointed life was spent in ranging along the skirts of both parties, joining neither, and speaking his mind with easy, and perhaps sincere, scorn of both; reprobating the Whigs, during their brief reign, for their neglect of fancied promises; and equally reprobating the ministry, for their blindness to fancied pretensions.

"But he was still to have a momentary respite for fame. While he was going down into that oblivion which rewards the labours of so many politicians; a pamphlet, ascribing Junius's letters to Sir Phillip, arrested his descent. Its arguments were plausible; and, for a while, opinion appeared to be in favour of the conjecture, notwithstanding a denial from the presumed Junius; which, however, had much the air of his feeling no strong dislike to being suspected of this new title to celebrity. But further examination extinguished the title; and left the secret, which had perplexed so many unravellers of literary webs, to perplex the grave idlers of generations to come.

"Yet the true wonder is not the concealment; for a multitude of causes might have produced the continued necessity even after the death of the writer; but the feasibility with which the chief features of Junius may be fastened on almost every writer, of the crowd for whom claims have been laid to this dubious honour: while, in every instance, some discrepancy finally starts upon the eye, which excludes the claim.

"Burke had more than the vigour, the information, and the command of language; but he was incapable of the virulence and the disloyalty. Horne Tooke had the virulence and the disloyalty in superabundance; but he wanted the cool sarcasm and the polished elegance, even if he could have been fairly supposed to be at once the assailant and the defender. Wilkes had the information and the wit; but his style was incorrigibly vulgar, and all its metaphors were for and from the mob: in addition, he would have rejoiced to declare himself the writer: his well-known answer to an inquiry on the subject was, 'Would to Heaven I had!' _Utinam scripsissem!_ Lord George Germaine has been lately brought forward as a candidate; and the evidence fully proves that he possessed the dexterity of style, the powerful and pungent remark, and even the individual causes of bitterness and partisanship, which might be supposed to stimulate Junius: but, in the private correspondence of Junius with his printer, Woodfall, there are contemptuous allusions to Lord George's conduct in the field, which at once put an end to the question of authorship.

"Dunning possessed the style, the satire, and the partisanship; but Junius makes blunders in his law, of which Dunning must have been incapable. Gerard Hamilton (Single-speech) might have written the letters, but he never possessed the moral courage; and was, besides, so consummate a coxcomb, that his vanity must have, however involuntarily, let out the secret. The argument, that he was Junius; from his notoriously using the same peculiarities of phrase at the time when all the world was in full chase of the author, ought of itself to be decisive against him; for nothing can be clearer, than that the actual writer was determined on concealment, and that he would never have toyed with his dangerous secret so much in the manner of a school-girl, anxious to develop her accomplishments.

"It is with no wish to add to the number of the controversialists on this bluestocking subject, that a conjecture is hazarded; that Junius will be found, if ever found, among some of the humbler names of the list. If he had been a political leader, or, in any sense of the word, an independent man, it is next to impossible that he should not have left some indication of his authorship. But it is perfectly easy to conceive the case of a private secretary, or dependent of a political leader, writing, by his command, and for his temporary purpose, a series of attacks on a ministry; which, when the object was gained, it was of the highest importance to bury, so far as the connexion was concerned, in total oblivion. Junius, writing on his own behalf, would have, in all probability, retained evidence sufficient to substantiate his title, when the peril of the discovery should have passed away, which it did within a few years; for who would have thought, in 1780, of punishing even the libels on the king in 1770? Or when, if the peril remained, the writer would have felt himself borne on a tide of popular applause high above the inflictions of law.

"But, writing for another; the most natural result was, that he should have been _pledged_ to extinguish all proof of the transaction; to give up every fragment that could lead to the discovery at any future period; and to surrender the whole mystery into the hands of the superior, for whose purposes it had been constructed, and who, while he had no fame to acquire by its being made public, might be undone by its betrayal.

"The marks of _private secretaryship_ are so strong, that all the probable conjectures have pointed to writers under that relation; Lloyd, the private secretary of George Grenville; Greatrakes, Lord Shelburne's private secretary; Rosenhagen, who was so much concerned in the business of Shelburne house, that he may be considered as a second secretary; and Macauley Boyd, who was perpetually about some public man, and who was at length fixed by his friends on Lord Macartney's establishment, and went with him to take office in India.

"But, mortifying as it may be to the disputants on the subject, the discovery is now beyond rational hope; for Junius intimates his having been a spectator of parliamentary proceedings even further back than the year 1743; which, supposing him to have been twenty years old at the time, would give more than a century for his experience. In the long interval since 1772, when the letters ceased: not the slightest clue has been discovered; though doubtless the keenest inquiry was set on foot by the parties assailed. Sir William Draper died with but one wish, though a sufficiently uncharitable one, that he could have found out his castigator, before he took leave of the world. Lord North often avowed his total ignorance of the writer. The king's reported observation to Gen. Desaguiliers, in 1772, 'We know who Junius is, and he will write no more,' is unsubstantiated; and if ever made, was probably prefaced with a supposition; for no publicity ever followed; and what neither the minister of the day, nor his successors ever knew, could scarcely have come to the king's knowledge but by inspiration, nor remained locked up there but by a reserve not far short of a political error.

"But the question is not worth the trouble of discovery; for, since the personal resentment is past, its interest can arise only from pulling the mask off the visage of some individual of political eminence, and giving us the amusing contrast of his real and his assumed physiognomy; or from unearthing some great unknown genius. But the leaders have been already excluded; and the composition of the letters demanded no extraordinary powers. Their secret information has been vaunted; but Junius gives us no more than what would now be called the 'chat of the clubs;' the currency of conversation, which any man mixing in general life might collect in his half-hour's walk down St. James's Street: he gives us no insight into the _purposes_ of government; of the _counsels_ of the _cabinet_ he knows nothing. The style was undeniably excellent for the purpose, and its writer must have been a man of ability. If it had been original, he might have been a man of genius; but it was notoriously formed on Col. Titus's letter, which from its strong peculiarities, is of easy imitation. The crime and the blunder together of Junius was, that he attacked the king, a man so publicly honest and so personally virtuous, that his assailant inevitably pronounced himself a libeller. But if he had restricted his lash to the contending politicians of the day, justice would have rejoiced in his vigorous severity. Who could have regretted the keenest application of the scourge to the Duke of Grafton, the most incapable of ministers, and the most openly and offensively profligate of men; to the indomitable selfishness of Mansfield; to the avarice of Bedford, the suspicious negotiator of the scandalous treaty of 1763; or to the slippered and drivelling ambition of North, sacrificing an empire to his covetousness of power?"

Mr. Croly has recorded a quantity of the "good things" that were said by the wits of the day at the table of the Prince, who used the facilities which his rank afforded him, of collecting around him all that was most distinguished in intellect, with praiseworthy zeal. Had his companions been chosen only from among that highest class, we might have quoted with regard to him, the sentence of Cicero--"facillime et in optimam partem, cognoscuntur adolescentes, qui se ad claros et sapientes viros, bene consulentes rei publicae, contulerunt: quibuscum si frequentes sunt, opinionem afferunt populo, eorum fore se similes quos sibi ipsi delegerint ad imitandum"--but unfortunately his intimacy was habitually shared by far less worthy associates--persons whom it was contamination to approach. Many of these _jeux d'esprit_ are of respectable antiquity; we transcribe a few which are attributed to the Prince himself, as specimens of royal humour.

"The conversation turning on some new eccentricity of Lord George Gordon; his unfitness for a mob leader was instanced in his suffering the rioters of 1780 to break open the gin-shops, and, in particular, to intoxicate themselves by the plunder of Langdale's great distillery, in Holborn. 'But why did not Langdale defend his property?' was the question. 'He had not the means,' was the answer. 'Not the means of defence?' said the prince; 'ask Angelo: he, a brewer, a fellow all his life long at _carte_ and _tierce_.'"