truth I believe is, that Addington, who is a kind of empiric, has forbidden him doing the least business, though he lives out of town, and everybody sees him pass in his coach along the street. His case, I should think, is a symptomatic fever, that ought to turn to gout; but Addington keeps him so low that the gout cannot make its effort. Lord Chatham's friends are much alarmed, and so they say is Addington himself; yet, what is strange, he calls in no other help."

May, 1767: "At this period came to my knowledge a transaction, which persuaded me of the reality of Lord Chatham's madness. When he inherited Sir William Pynsent's estate, he removed to it, and sold his house and grounds at Hayes, a place on which he had wasted prodigious sums, and which yet retained small traces of expense, great amounts having been consumed in purchasing contiguous tenements to free himself from all neighbourhood. Much had gone in doing and undoing, and not a little portion in planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and impatient temper could brook no delay. Nor were these the sole circumstances that marked his caprice. His children he could not bear under the same roof, nor communications from room to room, nor whatever he thought promoted noise. A winding passage between his house and the children was built with the same view. When at the beginning of this, his second administration, he fixed at Northend, by Hampstead, he took four or five houses successively, as fast as Mr. Dingley, his landlord, went into them -still, as he said, to ward off the noises of the neighbourhood. His inconsiderate promptitude was not less remarkable at Pynsent. A bleak hill bounded his view: he ordered his gardener to have it planted with evergreens; he was asked, With what sorts?' He replied, 'With cedars and cypresses.' Bless me, my Lord,' replied the gardener, all the nurseries. in this county, (Somersetshire,) would not furnish a hundredth part.' 'No matter; send for them from London:' and they were fetched by land-carriage.

"Yet were these follies committed when no suspicion was had of his disorder. But by these and other caprices, he had

already consumed more than half the legacy of Pynsent. His very domestic and abstemious privacy bore a considerable article in his housekeeping. His sickly and uncertain appetite was never regular, and his temper could put up with no defect. Hence a succession of chickens was boiling and roasting at every hour to be ready whenever he should call.

She who had

"He now, as if his attention to business demanded his vicinity to town, bent his fancy to the re-possession of Hayes, which he had sold to Mr. Thomas Walpole. Lady Chatham, in letters, begged in the most pathetic terms, that he would sell them Hayes again. She urged that it would save her children from destruction; and that her children's children would be bound to pray for him; requesting that he would take some days to consider before he refused. He did; and then wrote to her that he was very averse from parting with the place, on which he had laid out so much money; but if the air of Hayes was the object, Lord Chatham was welcome to go thither directly for a month, or for the whole summer; that he would immediately remove his family, who were there, and Lord Chatham would find it well aired. This she declined accepting. Mr. Walpole then sent to her Nuthall, Lord Chatham's intimate friend and law-adviser. never appeared to have a will or thought of her own, but to act with submission to her lord's nod, now received Nuthall alone, and brought him not to own to her lord, that she had yet received any letter from Mr. Walpole, but to deliver it as just arrived, if Lord Chatham should ask for the answer, and then carried him to her lord. He seemed in health, and reasonable; but asking if Nuthall knew anything about Hayes, and being told the contents of the letter, he said, with a sigh, 'That might have saved me.' Lady Chatham, seeming to be alarmed, said: 'My lord, I was talking to Mr. Nuthall on that subject; we will go and finish our discourse,' and carried him out of the room. She then told me they had agreed to sell the Wiltshire estate, (part of Pynsent's,) and with part of the produce re-purchase Hayes, which, however, they must mortgage, for they owed as much as the sale would amount

to. Mr. Walpole, distressed between unwillingness to part with Hayes, and apprehension that Lord Chatham's ill health would be imputed to him, as that air might have been a remedy, consulted the Chancellor; the latter, on hearing the story, said, 'Then he is mad,' and sent for James Grenville. Asking when he had seen Lord Chatham, Grenville replied: The day before, and had found him much better.' Lord Camden said: 'Did he mention Hayes ?' 'Yes,' said Grenville, and then his discourse grew very ferocious.' No doubt, there was someting in these words of Grenville that had the air of a part acted: one can scarce believe a brotherin-law would have been so frank, had there been no concerted plan in the frenzy; yet what wonder if anything seemed more credible than the fictitious madness of a first minister in no difficult situation?

"From this period the few reports of the few who had access to him, concurred in representing him as sedate, conversible, even cheerful, till any mention was made of politics: then he started, fell into tremblings, and the conversation was broken off. When the session was closed, these reports wore away; and as he remained above a year in close confinement at Hayes, unconsulting, and by degrees unconsulted, he and his lunacy were totally forgotten, till new interests threatened his re-appearance, which, after many delays, at length happened, though with no solution given by any friend of so long a suspension of sense or common sense. Mr. Walpole had yielded Hayes."-(Memoirs of the Reign of George III., vol. iii.)

About the middle of the session of 1767, just as Lord Chatham was seeking a chancellor of the exchequer in place of Charles Townshend, he began to be afflicted by a strange and mysterious malady. His nerves failed him; he became wholly unequal to the transaction of any public affairs, and secluding himself in his own house, he would admit no visitors, and admit no papers on business. In vain did the King address him in repeated messages and letters. In vain did his most trusted colleagues sue to him for one hour's con

versation. As the spring advanced, he retired to a house at Hampstead, and was able at intervals to take the air upon the heath, but was still at all times inaccessible to all his friends. His illness was, of course, no secret to his enemies, who conjectured that he must speedily quit either his post or the world; to them it little mattered which.

The utter secession of Lord Chatham from his own government broke the mainspring by which that government was moved. Even during his earlier periods of office, his ascendancy had been very far greater than most prime ministers possess. The old Duke of Newcastle was wont to describe with comic terror, "the dread the whole Council used to be in lest Mr. Pitt should frown!" His ascendancy had now grown paramount; but his retirement from all business and control loosened the patchwork administration, which Burke afterwards described with so much caustic humour.

When, in 1766, the Duke of Grafton asked Chatham's leave to travel down to his bedside at the Castle Inn, Marlborough, for one hour's conversation-for one gleam of light, he was answered in stately phrase that the same illness which hindered Lord Chatham from proceeding on his journey must likewise disable him from entering into any discussion of

business.

Walpole writes, Sept. 9, 1767: "Lord Chatham is really or intentionally mad,-but I still doubt which of the two. Thomas Walpole has wrote to his brother here (at Paris), that the day before Lord Chatham set out for Pynsent, he executed a letter-of-attorney, with full powers to his wife, and the moment it was signed, he began singing."

Upon this Wright notes, in the Chatham Correspondence, vol. iii., pp. 282, 289: "Lord Chatham's enemies were constantly insinuating that his illness was a political one; for the real state of his health at the time Walpole was penning this uncharitable passage, see Lady Chatham's letter to Mr. Nuthall of the 17th of August, and his lordship's own grateful and affectionate letter to Mr. Thomas Walpole, of the 30th of October."

DR. ADDINGTON, LORD CHATHAM'S PHYSICIAN.

The rise of Dr. Addington in the world was this: Lord Chatham's first coachman being taken ill, the postilion was sent to the town for the family doctor; but not finding him, and not knowing what to do, he returned, bringing with him Mr. A., then a practitioner of the place, and excused himself to Lord Chatham by saying, he hoped his Lordship would not be offended, for everybody told him Mr. A. was a good doctor. Lord Chatham spoke to him, and desired him to go and see the coachman, which he did, and then returned to report what was the matter with him. Lord Chatham was SO pleased with Mr. A., that he took him as apothecary for the servants, then for himself; and finding he spoke good sense on medicine, and then on politics, he at last made him his physician. (Lady Hester Stanhope's Memoirs, vol. i. p. 189.)

Dr. Addington, after practising for some time in London with considerable distinction, retired to Reading, and there, in 1745, married Mary, daughter of the Rev. Haviland John Hiley, of Reading; and in 1757 was born their eldest son, Henry Addington, afterwards Viscount Sidmouth. Hence his Lordship's political sobriquet of "the Doctor;" and in George Cruikshank's clever wood-cut caricatures of the unpopular Minister, made familiar to thousands of readers from their illustration of the political squibs and satirical drolleries of William Hone, "the Doctor" invariably carries his professional insignia of the clyster bag and pipe.

In 1778, Dr. Addington obtained much notoriety by a strange attempt in which he engaged, in conjunction with Sir James Wright, the medical attendant of the Earl of Bute, to bring about a political alliance between that nobleman and Lord Chatham. The negotiation, which of course came to nothing, appears to have originated solely with the two physicians, who afterwards quarrelled upon the subject.

Little (says Cunningham) did Walpole or anybody else foresee that the son of this empiric should, within a very few