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has had a fall upstairs, and has done himself so much hurt that he will never be able to stand upon his legs again. Everybody is puzzled how to account for this step; though it would not be the first time that great abilities have been duped by low cunning. But, be it what it will, he is now certainly only Earl of Chatham, and no longer Mr. Pitt in any respect whatever."

Chesterfield again writes, Aug. 1, 1766: "Everybody is puzzled to account for this step; such an event was, I believe, never heard nor read of, to withdraw in the fulness of his power and in the utmost gratification of his ambition from the House of Commons (which procured him his power, and which alone would ensure it to him), and to go into that Hospital of Incurables, the House of Lords, is a measure so unaccountable, that nothing but proof positive should make me believe it-but so it is."

This third administration of Lord Chatham's is said to have been composed rather of .creatures than of colleagues, the subordinate offices being filled up with very heterogeneous materials. This was the ministry which Mr. Burke described with such profuse pleasantry and truth, saying:

"He (Lord Chatham) made an administration so chequered and speckled; he put together a piece of joinery, so crossly indented and whimsically dovetailed; 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 ?'—' Sir, you have the advantage of me!'-'Mr. Such-a-one, I beg a thousand pardons!' I venture to say it did so happen, that persons had a single office divided between them, who had never spoke to each other in their lives, until they found. themselves, they knew not how, pigging together, heads and

points, in the same truckle-bed."*- Speech on American Taxation.

Lord Chatham's Ministry, it must be allowed, was in every respect liberal, and it is difficult to account for the extraordinary odium which was attached to his election to the peerage. Few attempted to defend the "Great Commoner's" ambition to sit in the House of Lords. An almost solitary epigram, amidst a heap of abuse, made this half apology:

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But the populace looked upon the peerage as a bribe, for which Pitt had sold himself to Bute, who, it was still confidently believed, ruled at court, and that none could be ministers except by placing themselves at his disposal. A caricature in Almon's Political Register for October, 1767,"The Wire-master and his Puppets,"-represents the members of the present ministry as so many puppets moved by wires, directed by the Scotch favourite, Bute, from the palace of St. James's. The gouty Lord Chatham stands prominent in

* Alluding to Lord North and Mr. George Cooke, joint Paymasters. Pitt's first ministry, formed in December, 1756, lasted only until April following, when George II., having taken a decided aversion to his Prime Minister, through his conduct in the affair of Admiral Byng, dismissed Lord Temple from the Admiralty, which act led, as intended, to Mr. Pitt's resignation, and threw the country into a frenzy in his favour. After several unsuccessful negotiations, on June 29, 1757, the King re-appointed Mr. Pitt Secretary of State, this being his second ministry; and the Duke of Newcastle, whom, a few months before, Mr. Pitt had peremptorily excluded, again became First Lord of the Treasury.

front, with one of his crutches broken. On one side, Lord Holland (believed to have had a hand in Lord Bute's secret influence), peeps in, and gives his signal-" A little more to the left, my lord." On the other side, Britannia sits weeping, and exclaims, "It is sport to you, but death to me." Below, those who are out of place, among whom the Duke of Newcastle is conspicuous, are looking on at the performance, while the devil is pulling away the prop of the stage on which the puppets are moving, to make greater diversion for the spectators. Four lines from Swift explain the scene:

The puppets, blindly led away,

Are made to act for ends unknown;
By the mere spring of wires they play,
And speak in language not their own.

ATTACK ON LORD CHATHAM IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS BY THE DUKE OF RICHMOND.

Towards the close of 1766, during the debate on the Bill of Indemnity, Lord Chatham said, that when the people should condemn him, he should tremble; but would set his face against the proudest connexion in the country. The Duke of Richmond took this up with great heat and severity, and said he hoped the nobility would not be browbeaten by an insolent minister. The House calling him to order, he said with great quickness, he was sensible truth was not to be spoken at all times and in all places. Lord Chatham challenged the Duke to give him an instance in which he had treated any man with insolence; if the instance was not produced, the charge of insolence would lie on his Grace. Duke said he could not name the instance without betraying private conversation; and he congratulated Lord Chatham on his new connexion, the Duke looking, as he spoke, at Lord Bute.

The

Walpole says: "Notwithstanding his success, Lord Chatham was stunned by so rough an attack from the Duke of Richmond, a young man not to be intimidated by supercilious nods, or humbled by invective, which his Grace had shown

The silence of the

himself more prone to give than receive. place, and the decency of debate there, were not suited to that inflammatory eloquence by which Lord Chatham had been accustomed to raise huzzas from a more numerous auditory. Argument, at least, would be expected, not philippics. Whether these reflections contributed or not to augment the distaste which the ill-success of his foreign, and the errors he had committed in his domestic, politics had impressed on his mind, certain it is that the Duke of Richmond had the honour of having the world believe that by one blow he had revenged himself and his party, and driven his proud enemy from the public stage; for, from that day, Lord Chatham, during the whole remainder of his Administration, appeared no more in the House of Lords, really becoming that invisible and inaccessible divinity, which Burke has described, and in three months as inactive a divinity as the gods of Epicurus." Upon this passage Sir Denis Le Marchant, the able editor of Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III., notes: "If this supposition be true, it is an extraordinary coincidence that the Duke of Richmond should, eleven years later, have made the speech which unquestionably hastened Lord Chatham's death."

CHATHAM'S LOVE OF OFFICE.

Of Lord Chatham's tenacity of office, and his incapacity or reluctance to execute its duties, we find, in his Correspondence, records extending over a space of two years. A third time First Minister, with an almost dictatorial power, leading a cabinet composed rather of creatures than of colleagues; enenjoying at once the whole confidence of the Crown, and the supreme favour of the people, this great and omnipotent statesman does-nothing-absolutely nothing. The ostensible cause or excuse of this strange desertion of his duties was the gout; but all his contemporaries were of opinion that the gout was a frequent pretext. Mr. Burke hints as much in a speech: "If

ever he (Lord Chatham) fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other cause withdrew him from public cares, when his face was for a moment hid, his whole system was on a wide sea, without chart or compass."

Thus, Lord Chatham entirely and most pertinaciously withdrew himself from all share in his own administration. He would see nobody-write to nobody-hear nothing-do nothing. In vain did the King write to him on every important occasion with the utmost confidence in his counsels, and the greatest tenderness and consideration for his indisposition; in vain did he appeal to a sense of duty and patriotism with an ability and earnestness approaching to eloquence: the crisis, he tells him, on one occasion, “would almost awaken the great men of former ages, and should therefore oblige Lord Chatham to cast aside any remains of his late indisposition."

To a series of similar appeals His Majesty could obtain nothing but such "fustian" answers as this:

"June 25, 1767.

"Under health so broken as renders at present application of mind totally impossible, may I prostrate myself at your Majesty's feet, and most humbly implore your Majesty's indulgence and compassion not to require of a devoted servant what in his state of weakness he has not power to trace with the least propriety for your Majesty's consideration ?" &c.

Pitt's colleagues were equally unsuccessful. On his way from Bath, in February, 1767, he stopped at the inn at Marlborough, and was there confined for a fortnight. There were several most important affairs depending, and the Duke of Grafton, his own special friend, and indeed, nominee, offered to go down to receive his personal "directions;" which proposition Lord Chatham declined with a stately negative. And again, some months after, (May 27, 1767,) Lord Chatham being at Northend, a villa close to London, and the affairs of the Government, both in the Lords and Commons, in a most critical state, the Duke of Grafton solicited, as a

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