How was Warren Hastings ambushed not iation of her friends, through the whole only by undying rancor but by sleepless results of his twenty years' reign, from the humanity? In all these cases too much first rays of favor with which a delighted has been attempted; other opportunities court gilded his early apostasy; to the should have been found for characteriza- deadly glare which is at this moment cast tion; it would have been infinitely better upon his name by the burning metropolis had we been told with unambiguous direct- of our last ally! But may no such immorness that it was proposed that Portland tality ever fall to my lot; let me rather live should succeed Rockingham; that Burke innocent and inglorious; and when at last as well as Parr, that Horner as well as I cease to serve you and to feel for your Rogers, were charmed by Fox; that Pitt wrongs, may I have a humble monument employed his most recent convert to nego-in some nameless stone, to tell that betiate the treaty; that he secured the as-neath it there rests from his labors in your sistance of Thurlow and Howe; that even service an enemy of the immortal statesfrom Burke a eulogy was extorted; and so man a friend of peace and of the people."

on.

But these are blemishes (if blemishes they be, and I am well aware that tastes differ) that lie on the surface; taken as a whole, the volume (especially in these days of unfair and unscrupulous controversy) is surprisingly sound, just, rational, and in the main unanswerable. Adequate justice is done to Pitt. His splendid abilities as orator and statesman are frankly recognized. The book is written by one of the most brilliant and influential members of the Gladstonian party, who yet sees in the great Tory minister much to admire and little to condemn. The whirligig of time brings round its revenges; and the publication of such a volume indicates a profound change in public opinion, which is interesting, and ought to be noted.

Mr. Stapleton informs us that when riding one day with Mr. Canning near Brighton, they heard that Brougham was dangerously ill. "Poor fellow!" said Canning, "I am sorry to hear it;" and then added, "If he should be taken from the House of Commons, there will be no one left to pound and mash." Canning's satiric touch, like Disraeli's, was much lighter, much more deft and dexterous than Brougham's; but the passage I have quoted is a fair specimen of the elaborate invective - the pounding and mashing which was much esteemed in its day.

What may be called the Brougham-Jeffrey-John Russell estimate of Pitt held the field for long. Through the pages of the Edinburgh Review, a score of brilliant The great electoral contest at Liverpool, essayists continued to give it a wide circuwhich took place soon after Pitt's death lation. The vehemence of their dislike between Mr. Canning and Mr. Brougham, indeed made them at times not only grois still remembered by those who write tesquely unscrupulous, but insanely paand by those who read political biogra- triotic. While they damned Pitt, they phies. "To one man while he lived," canonized Napoleon. Blessing the one, Canning declared, "I was devoted with they banned the other. Even the victoriall my heart and all my soul. Since the ous progress of Wellington, the triumphal death of Mr. Pitt I acknowledge no leader; march from Torres Vedras to the Pyremy political allegiance lies buried in his nees, was either coldly condemned or grave." To which Brougham replied: bitterly derided. About the year 1850, "Gentlemen, I stand up in this contest when Lord John Russell's " "Memorials against the friends and followers of Mr. appeared, the Whig tradition of a desperPitt, or, as they partially designate him, ately wicked and incapable minister was the immortal statesman now no more. flourishing vigorously. At the same time Immortal in the miseries of his devoted the Holland House legend - the cult of a country! Immortal in the wounds of her quite fabulous Fox, who was not only the bleeding liberties! Immortal in the cruel most charming of companions, but the wars which sprang from his cold, miscal- most sagacious of statesmen, and the culating ambition! Immortal in the in- most trusted of leaders met with very tolerable taxes, the countless loads of general acceptance. The dissent of a few debt, which these wars have flung upon us obstinate and obsolete Tories did not -which the youngest man among us will count; and Lord John Russell concluded not live to see the end of! Immortal in his memorial volumes with the portentous the triumphs of our enemies and the ruin intimation: "It will be my business, if I of our allies the costly purchase of so should be able to continue this work, to much blood and treasure! Immortal in point out the utter want of foresight by the afflictions of England, and the humil-which the conduct of Mr. Pitt was marked

when he led the people of England into a crusade against the people of France."

wider than a provincial audience. Might not something be done, we inquired tentatively, to mitigate the severity of the sentence which a rather narrow, if austerely virtuous, tribunal had pronounced against those who like ourselves were outside the pale? It was then that a highly speculative friend, whose resources were as slender as his projects were vast, audaciously declared that he was prepared, if properly supported, to give the Dissenters, the rebels, the despised minority, a chance of being heard. "We shall have a weekly paper from which the Whig and the Whig only, shall be severely excluded. The lion shall lie down with the lamb; ultra-Tories and ultra-Radicals shall work harmoniously together; and in fact, gentlemen, you are welcome to ventilate any paradoxes, or heresies, or superstitions you like, so long as you vigorously assail the common enemy."

Edinburgh was at that time one of the shrines of the Whig faith; and it was the good fortune of the writer of this paper as a lad (through James Syme, Andrew Coventry, and other true believers who hailed from Fife and Kinross) to see something of the priests who ministered at its altars. Ebony" has always been as generous as he is just; and he will permit me to say that, during the closing years of his life, Jeffrey, at his pleasant villa of Craigcrook, with his granddaughter at his knee, presented as charming a picture of a serene but vigilant old age as one could wish to see. Sydney Smith years before had said of him when he went on the bench: "His robes, God knows, will cost him little; one buck-rabbit will clothe him to the heels;" and during the interval the wonderful little man had grown even more transparently delicate and fragile. His boyhood had been earnest and passionate, his manhood energetic and distinguished; but there was a peculiar mellowness about his age. The enthusiasm and the passion had not died out, nor the keen and finely discriminating intellect been dimmed. But now, besides and beyond the fastidious taste, the playful irony, the dignified re-tributors were E. S. Dallas (afterwards for serve, there was added an admirable grace and simplicity, a peculiar sweetness and gentleness, which it was difficult to associate with one who had been an unsparing critic and a formidable foe. "A man,' ," Goethe said the year before he died, "has only to become old to become tolerant;" and Jeffrey was a notable example of the mellowing catholicity of advancing years. It was no wonder that such a man should have retained his influence to the last. Outsiders who had found his collected essays rather thin and jejune, might fail to understand wherein the charm consisted; but then, as Pitt once said of his rival, "they had not been under the wand of the magician."

It was about the year 1850- the year of Jeffrey's death-that some of us who were then preparing for active life began to rebel against the prevailing superstition. The Whig tradition was still allpowerful in the city where so many of its high-priests had been bred, and from whence its sacred writings had issued; and John Wilson and his jovial companions of the "Noctes were regarded as outlaws and banditti by the select and privileged caste to whom the true faith had been revealed. 66 Maga" was then as ever true to her colors; but "Maga" appealed to a

On the basis of this elastic confession of faith the Edinburgh Guardian was established about the year 1852. It was published every Saturday, and it lived for four or five years. Spencer Baynes (then Sir William Hamilton's assistant, and afterwards professor of logic at St. Andrews) was the editor, and among the con

many years the leading critic of the Times), Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, Patrick Alexander, the redoubtable Alister of Skye, and "Shirley "-"Shirley" being the nom de plume then assumed for the first time by a half-fledged jurist, who desired for professional reasons (quite unnecessarily, as it turned out) to preserve his anonymity.

There was certainly some admirable writing in the Guardian, - Dallas's theatrical and artistic articles, and Baynes's weekly "Diary of Juniper Agate "being really first-rate. To "Shirley" the department entitled "Things in General " was intrusted, and in the audacity of oneand-twenty he hit so hard all round that more than once the coach threatened to upset. Edinburgh was then a stronghold of the Free Kirk as well as of the Whigs; and when, in addition to defending Disraeli from the onslaughts of the Saturday, and Currer Bell from the insults of the Quarterly, and bribery and corruption (on the ground that if the franchise was an inalienable natural right, a man was entitled to do what he liked with his own) from the political purists, we took to recommending the incomprehensible heresies of Maurice and the muscular latitudinarianism of Kingsley, the paper and its

editor began to get into deep water. | write a reply to an article which appeared, When even a pacific John Brown - the dear and delightful friend of after years was moved to warn us that it was positively sinful to excuse or condone the political peccadilloes of a "splendid scamp like Dizzy, what mercy could we expect from the successors of John Knox and Balfour of Burley? But I suspect that the direst offence we committed against the code then of binding force in the northern metropolis was a series of semihistorical, semi-political articles (suggested no doubt by Lord John Russell's dullest of dull memoirs) designed to show that Fox was from the beginning to the end of his career a persistent failure, and that Pitt, on the other hand, was the pilot who weathered the storm, and brought the laboring vessel into port.

I think, in the Edinburgh Review of that summer. The Edinburgh held that the history of our legislation during a hundred and fifty years proved, and proved conclusively, that the Whig Walpoles had always been right, and that the Tory Pitts had always been wrong. Any "liberal measure passed by a Tory had, of course, been stolen from a Whig. Mr. Disraeli's sarcasm against Sir Robert Peel was turned against his own friends. They had found the Whigs bathing and had run away with their clothes. This, indeed, had been a favorite thesis with Macaulay, who had rather ponderously ridiculed the opposite view on the occasion of a controversy with Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl Stanhope, - a sound if not a brilliant historian. As the fallacy against which we protested has still a certain currency, it may not be amiss to restate as briefly as may be the substance of the argument on which we relied, more especially as two of the letters which the discussion elicited - one from Mr. Disraeli and one from Lord Stanhope - were (and are) so interesting that no apology is needed for putting them in "Maga.'

It was Disraeli himself who first pointed out that the imposing figure which had filled so large a place in the popular imag ination was stuffed with sawdust. Until "Coningsby" appeared, the Whigs had used the Constitutional history of England for the glorification of their own political virtue. Hampden had died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold to enable Mr. Macaulay to write a series of The fallacy rests upon the assumption brilliant essays in the Edinburgh. The that politics is one of the exact sciences. Whigs ever since the glorious Revolution "I cannot but pause to observe," Lord of '88 had been the consistent and persist- Mahon wrote, "how much the course of a ent advocates of civil and religious liberty; century has inverted the meaning of our whereas Bolingbroke and Chatham and party nicknames how much a modern Pitt had no claim, in respect of the public Tory resembles a Whig of Queen Anne's services they had rendered, to the regard reign, and a Tory of Queen Anne's reign of any enlightened patriot. "Coningsby," a modern Whig. Mr. Macaulay promptly which was published in the forties, pricked retorted. The modern Tories resembled this "radiant bubble." It then appeared the Whigs of Queen Anne's reign, because that during the whole or nearly the whole the principles which the Whigs recom. of last century England had been gov-mended had been accepted by the Tories. erned by a Venetian oligarchy as unprincipled as it was corrupt. The great Whig houses had usurped the powers of the crown and invaded the liberties of the people. The monopoly of public virtue on which they had prided themselves turned out to be the merest sham. This novel version of history was at first received with derision; but it made way - slowly but surely; and the claim of the Whig to have been in evil times the one disinterested guardian of civil and religious liberty has ceased to be recognized is in most quarters, indeed, flatly denied.

The old superstition, however, died hard, and those of us who had taken Mr. Disraeli's view from the beginning found considerable difficulty in laying its ghost. As late as 1864, indeed, I was moved to

The Whig had remained consistent; the Tory had gone over to the enemy. The retort cannot be regarded as conclusive. Is it fair to assume that a party must be inconsistent because it adopts a policy which ten or twenty or fifty years before it had opposed? During these fifty years the world has changed. The conditions have altered. Truth, in a political sense, is a relative term. Lord Bolingbroke said quite truly to Sir William Windham: “It is as much a mistake to depend upon that which is true but impracticable at a certain time, as to depend on that which is neither true nor practicable at any time." Thus the party which votes against an extension of the franchise during one century, and which votes in favor of its extension during the next, may be acting consistently as well as sagaciously. Every

the one which I had read as an article in Fraser as to the transmutation of the Whig and Tory parties - the controversy carried on now thirty-five years ago between my lamented friend Lord Macaulay and myself. Your discussion of it was, I thought, very good, and it would have been better still if you had followed it to its final close. For if you will now refer to Lord Macaulay's second article on Lord Chatham, as published in the Edinburgh Review, October. 1841, and since collected in his Essays, you will find from the opening passage-enforced by a most ingenious illustration from Dante's Malebolge that Lord Macaulay's opinion of the point at issue had come to be very nearly the same as mine.

"I ask pardon for having so long detained you; and I am, sir, your very faithful servant,

"STANHOPE."

haps, the most instructive (as showing the stuff of which he was made) as well as the most striking and picturesque in the career of the youthful minister. To treat a general engagement, which was certainly decisive, as a mere affair of outposts "the sheet-lightning of history"— is clearly a mistake.

The conflict was one of the most bitter recorded in the annals of Parliament. That Pitt asserted the doctrine of the constitution when he maintained that ministers were entitled to appeal to the constituencies against the censure of an adverse Parliament, is not now seriously questioned. But in 1784, the Opposition, secure in the support of a majority of the House, determined to guard against a dissolution. The allies were powerful and unscrupulous. Against the minister were arrayed the authority of the most experienced statesmen, and the genius of the greatest masters of debate. He was deI have said enough to show that the nounced at one time as a piratical advenpolitical horizon has sensibly widened turer, who had defied the Commons of during the past thirty or forty years. We England, and desecrated the ark of the live in a new world. The old landmarks constitution; was ridiculed at another as have been removed. Hampden has ceased a foolish boy, who required to be taught to die on the field, and Sidney on the scaf- that the seal of office was not a nursery fold. Fox and Brougham and Jeffrey toy. "The virgin minister," "the heavenand Holland House and the Edinburgh Review have fallen quite into the background; while out of the mists of controversy and above the babble of the crowd, rise the great figures of Pitt and Canning and Disraeli. And nothing can bring the change more vividly home to us than to compare the narrow and conventional prejudices of Lord John Russell in his "Fox" with the masculine independence of Lord Rosebery in his "Pitt."

To Lord Rosebery it is now time to

return.

born youth," ""the infant Atlas of the State," the "new Octavius," was charged with profligate precocity. But Pitt's indomitable pertinacity was not to be shaken. "The drum is beaten, and the word given is, 'Die in the last ditch." So Orde wrote to Shelburne.* Animated especially by the resolute bearing of the king and the Duke of Richmond (a great noble about whom one would like to know more), the premier continued to maintain his position with a proud indifference to insult and obloquy. To the arguments His earlier chapters are by no means of the Opposition he replied in skilful his best; the narrative, which flags at speeches which displayed a profound first, grows in vigor as it proceeds. The acquaintance with constitutional usage. comparative languor of the opening pages When the contest had lasted for months is possibly explained by the few homely when the government had suffered a and touching words of preface: "This little book has been written under many disadvantages, but with a sincere desire to ascertain the truth. My chief happiness in completing it would have been to give it to my wife; it can now only be inscribed to her memory." But for this, the prolonged contest with the House of Commons, when Pitt was only twenty-five, would probably have been treated with greater fulness and spirit. The pictorial effects which were so appreciated by Macaulay do not appeal to Lord Rosebery's severer taste; but this incident is, per

series of "overwhelming " defeats - when argument and invective had been exhausted the majority were forced to admit that they had been worsted in a hand-to-hand conflict by a minister not five-and-twenty! "In all my researches in ancient and modern times," Gibbon emphatically declared, "I have nowhere met with his parallel, who at so early a period of his life discharged so important a trust with so much credit to himself, and so much advantage to his country."

Life of Lord Shelburne, iii. 407.