but skilful in discerning the temper of the house, and in knowing when and how to press, or to yield.

A constant good-humour and seeming frankness made him a welcome companion in social life, and in all domestic relations he was good-natured. As he advanced in life, his ambition became subservient to his avarice. His carly profusion and dissipation had made him feel the many inconveniences of want, and, as it often happens, carried him to the contrary and worse extreme of corruption and rapine. Rem, quocunque modo rem, became his maxim, which he observed (I will not say religiously and scrupulously, but) invariably and shamefully.

He had not the least notion of, or regard for, the public good or the constitution, but despised those cares as the objects of narrow minds, or the pretences of interested ones: and he lived, as Brutus died, calling virtue only a name.

Chesterfield.

§ 142. Character of Mr. PITT.

Mr. Pitt owed his rise to the most considerable posts and power in this kingdom singly to his own abilities; in him they supplied the want of birth and for tune, which latter in others too often supply the want of the former. He was a younger brother of a very new family, and his fortune only an annuity of one hundred pounds a-year.

The army was his original destination, and a cornetcy of horse his first and only commission in it. Thus, unassisted by favour or fortune, he had no powerful pro tector to introduce him into business, and (if I may use that expression) to do the honours of his parts; but their own strength was fully sufficient.

His constitution refused him the usual pleasures, and his genius forbad him the idle dissipations of youth; for so early as at the age of sixteen, he was the martyr of an hereditary gout. He therefore employed the leisure which that tedious and painful distemper either procured or allowed him, in acquiring a great fund of premature and useful knowledge. Thus, by the unaccountable relation of causes and effects, what seemed the greatest mis. fortune of his life, was, perhaps, the prin cipal cause of its splendour.

His private life was stained by no vices nor sullied by any meanness. All his sentiments were liberal and elevated. His ruling passion was an unbounded ambi tion, which, when supported by great abilities, and crowned by great success, make what the world calls " a great man." He was haughty, imperious, impatient of contradiction, and overbearing; qualities which too often accompany, but always clog, great ones.

He had manners and address; but one, might discern through them too great a consciousness of his own superior talents. He was a most agreeable and lively com→ panion in social life; and had such a versatility of wit, that he could adapt it to all sorts of conversation. He had also a most happy turn to poetry, but he seldom indulged and seldom avowed it.

He came young into parliament, and upon that great theatre soon equalled the oldest and the ablest actors. His elo quence was of every kind, and he excelled in the argumentative as well as in the declamatory way; but his invectives were terrible, and uttered with such energy of diction, and stern dignity of action and countenance, that he intimidated those who were the most willing and the best able to encounter him*; their arms fell out of their hands, and they shrunk under the ascendant which his genius gained over theirs.

In that assembly, where the public good is so much talked of, and private interest singly pursued, he set out with acting the patriot, and performed that part so nobly, that he was adopted by the public as their chief, or rather only unsuspected, champion.

The weight of his popularity, and his universally acknowledged abilities, obtruded him upon king George II. to whom he was personally obnoxious. He was made secretary of state: in this difficult and delicate situation, which one would have thought must have reduced either the patriot or the minister to a decisive option, he managed with such ability, that while he served the king more effectually in his most unwarrant able electoral views, than any former minister, however willing, had dared to do, he still preserved all his credit and

*Hume, Campbell, and Lord Chief Justice Mansfield.

popularity

popularity with the public; whom he assured and convinced, that the protection and defence of Hanover, with an army of seventy-five thousand men in British pay, was the only possible mcthod of securing our possessions or acquisitions in North America. So much easier is it to deceive than to undeceive mankind.

His own disinterestedness, and even contempt of money, smoothed his way to power, and prevented or silenced a great share of that envy which commonly attends it. Most men think that they have an equal natural right to riches, and equal abilities to make the proper use of them; but not very many of them have the impudence to think themselves qualified for power.

Upon the whole, he will make a great and shining figure in the annals of this country, notwithstanding the blot which his acceptance of three thousand pounds per annum pension for three lives, on his voluntary resignation of the seals in the first year of the present king, must make in his character, especially as to the disinterested part of it. However, it must be acknowledged, that he had those qualities which none but a great man can have, with a mixture of those failings which are the common lot of wretched and imperfect human nature.

Chesterfield.

143. Another Character.

Mr. Pitt had been originally designed for the army, in which he actually bore a commission; but fate reserved him for a more important station. In point of fortune he was barely qualified to be elected member of parliament, when he obtained a seat in the house of commons, where he soon outshone all his compatriots. He displayed a surprising extent and precision of political knowledge, and irresistible energy of argument, and such power of elocution as struck his hearers with astonishment and admiration; it flashed like the lightning of heaven against the ministers and sons of corruption, blasting where it smote, and withering the nerves of opposition: but his more substantial praise was founded upon his disinterested integrity, his incorruptible heart, his unconquerable spirit of inde

pendence, and his invariable attachment to the interest and liberty of his country. Smollett.

144. Another Character.

The secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the fea tures of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty, and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. France sunk be neath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accom. plished; always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understand ing animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent were unknown to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; but aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came oc casionally into our system, to counsel and to decide.

A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined, in deed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the in consistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

Nor were his political abilities his only talents: his eloquence was an ara in the

senate,

senate, peculiar and spontaneous, famiTiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed.

Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through the universe. Anonymous.

$145. Another Character.

Lord Chatham is a great and celebrated name; a name that keeps the name of this country respectable in every other on the globe. It may be truly called,

· Clarum et venerabile nomen

speckled; he put together a piece of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically dove-tailed; a cabinet so variously inlaid; such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tesselated pavement without cement ; here a bit of black stone, and there a bit of white; patriots and courtiers; king's friends and republicans; whigs and tories; treacherous friends and open enemies; that it was indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch, and unsure to stand on. The colleagues whom he had assorted at the same boards stared at each other, and were obliged to ask, “Sir, your name, &c." It so happened, that persons had a single office divided between them who had never spoken to each other in their lives; until they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, heads and points, in the same trucklebed.

In consequence of this arrangement having put so much the larger part of his enemies and opposers into power, the confusion was such that his own principles could not possibly have any effect or influence in the conduct of affairs. ever he fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other cause withdrew him from public

If

urbi,

The venerable age of this great man, his merited rank, his superior eloquence, his splendid qualities, his eminent services, the vast space he fills in the eye of mankind, and, more than all the rest, his fall from power, which, like death, canonizes and sanctifies a great character, will not suffer me to censure any part of his conduct. I am afraid to flatter him; I am sure I am not disposed to blame him; let those who have betrayed him by their adulation, insult him with their malevolence. But what I do not presume to censure, I may have leave to lament.

For a wise man, he seemed to me at that time to be governed too much by general maxims: one or two of these maxims, flowing from an opinion not the most indulgent to our unhappy species, and surely a little too general, led him

sure to predominate. When he had executed his plan, he had not an inch of ground to stand upon: when he had accomplished his scheme of administration, he was no longer a minister.

When his face was hid but for a moment, his whole system was on a wide sea, without chart or compass. The gentlemen, his particular friends, in various departments of ministry, with a confidence in him which was justified, even in its extravagance, by his superior abilities, had never in any instance presumed on any opinion of their own; deprived of his guiding influence, they were whirled about, the sport of every gust, and easily driven into any port; and as those who joined with them in manning the vessel were the most directly opposite to his opinions, measures, and character, and far the most artful and most powerful of the set, they easily prevailed, so as to seize

upon

upon the most vacant, unoccupied, and derelict minds of his friends, and instantly they turned the vessel wholly out of the course of his policy. As if it were to insult as well as to betray him, even long before the close of the first session of his administration, when every thing was publicly transacted, and with great parade, in his name, they made an act, declaring it highly just and expedient to raise a revenue in America. For even

then, even before the splendid orb was entirely set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the heavens arose another luminary (Charles Towns hend) and for his hour became lord of the ascendant, who was officially the reproducer of the fatal scheme, the unfortunate act to tax America for a revenue. Edm. Burke,

IT

41. The Story of La Pavaz.

was some time in the summer of that year in which Dendermond was taken by the allies, which was about seven years before my father came into the country, and about as many after the time that my uncle Toby and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in town, in order to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest fortified cities in Europe -When my uncle Toby was one evening getting his supper, with Trim sitting be hind him at a small sideboard;—the landlord of a little inn in the village came into the parlour with an empty phial in his hand to beg a glass or two of sack; 'tis for a poor gentleman, I think, of the army, said the landlord, who has been taken ill at my house four days ago, and has never held up his head since, or had a desire to taste any thing 'til just now, that he has a fancy for a glass of sack, and a thin toast. -I think, says he, taking his hand from his forehead, it would comfort me.

If I could neither beg, borrow, nor buy such a thing,-added the landlord,I would almost steal it for the poor gentleman, he is so ill.I hope in God he will still mend, continued he-we are all of us concerned for him.

Thou art a good-natured soul, I will answer for thee, cried my uncle Toby; and thou shalt drink the poor gentleman's health in a glass of sack thyself, and take a couple of bottles, with my service, and

tell him he is heartily welcome to them, and to a dozen more, if they will do him good.

Though I am persuaded, said my uncle Toby, as the landlord shut the door, he is a very compassionate fellow-Trim,—yet I cannot help entertaining an high opinion of his guest too; there must be something more than common in him, that in so short a time should win so much upon the affections of his host;- And of his whole family, added the corporal, for they are all concerned for him.--Step after him, said my uncle Toby,-do Trim,—and ask if he knows his name.

I have quite forgot it, truly, said the landlord, coming back into the parlour with the corporal,--but I can ask his son again:

las he a son with him then? said my uncle Toby. A boy, replied the landlord, of about eleven or twelve years of age;—but the poor creature has tasted almost as little as his fa ther; he does nothing but mourn and la ment for him night and day: he has not stirred from the bed-side these two days.

My uncle Toby laid down his knife and fork, and thrust his plate from before him, as the landlord gave him the account; and Trim, without being ordered, took away without saying one word, and in a few minutes after brought him his pipe and tobacco.

Stay in the room, a little, says my

uncle Toby. Trim! said my uncle Toby, after he had