PARLIAMENT.-SINGLE-SPEECH HAMILTON.

651

selves and their friends justice, and not be the victims of a whisper." Pitt stoutly argued against the system of subsidies. Newcastle talked of the king's honour being engaged to Hesse and to Russia. Let his majesty give, said Pitt, a hundred thousand to one, and a hundred and fifty thousand to the other, out of the fifteen millions he had saved, to be let off these bad bargains.* Fox was more tractable than his rival. He saw promotion at hand, whatever might be his abstract dislike to subsidies, if he would be prudent.

The Parliament met on the 13th of November. The king announced the increase of the naval and land forces, and mentioned the treaties he had concluded with Russia and Hesse. In the Address of each House especial reference was made to Hanover. The Address of the Commons said, "We think ourselves bound in justice and gratitude to assist his majesty against insults and attacks that may be made upon any of his majesty's dominions, though not belonging to the Crown of Great Britain." An amend ment to omit such a pledge was moved in the Lords by carl Tem ple, Pitt's brother-in-law. A similar amendment was proposed in the Commons. These were of course rejected; but they gave occasion to two remarkable orations. William Gerard Hamilton, a young member, made his maiden speech in favour of the original Address-that one harangue, antithetical and familiar, argumentative and declamatory, which handed him down to after times as "Single-speech Hamilton." Pitt made a speech of that famous battle night, of which no fragment remains to us but one which has been preserved by Walpole. The younger Pitt said he would prefer the recovery of a speech of lord Bolingbroke to the restoration of the lost books of Livy or Tacitus. The contemporary accounts of his father's speeches would almost induce a similar wish, even if the recovery were confined to this effort of the 13th of November. Walpole in a letter of the 15th of November to Conway, after rapturously noticing Hamilton's success, says, “You will ask what could be beyond this? Nothing, but what was beyond what ever was, and that was Pitt. He spoke at past one, for an hour and thirty-five minutes. There was more humour, wit, vivacity, finer language, more boldness, in short more astonishing perfections, than even you, who are used to him, can conceive." In a letter of the following day to Bentley, Walpole gives the fragment which, with similar detached passages of various other speeches, enable us to form some idea of the lustre which a rich imagination gave to Pitt's eloquence. "The most admired passage Doddington's "Diary," Sept. 3.

was a comparison he drew of the two parts of the new administra tion." By the new administration Walpole means the coalition between Fox and Newcastle. "It is," said Pitt, "as the conflux of the Rhone and the Saone, which I remember to have seen at Lyons; the latter a gentle, feeble, languid stream, languid but not deep; the other a boisterous and overbearing torrent. But they join at last, and long may they continue united, to the comfort of each other, and to the glory, honour, and happiness of this nation." The next morning Fox received the seals of Secretary of State, as the reward for his support of the ministerial Address. Pitt, on the 20th of November, was dismissed from his office of Paymaster; and Legge and George Grenville were also superseded.

From the agitations of party,-from the impending calamities of war, the minds of men were suddenly turned to a convulsion of nature, upon which all the civilized world looked with dread and wonder. The earthquake at Lisbon was announced to Parliament by a royal message on the 28th of November, desiring the concurrence of the Houses in sending "such speedy and effectual relief as may be suitable to so afflicting and pressing an exigency." The Commons immediately voted a grant of a hundred thousand pounds. It was indeed an event to make men pause in their ordinary career of thoughtless indulgence or selfish ambition. Every church of Lisbon was crowded with worshippers on All Saints Day; and almost every church was shaken to its foundations, and thousands perished in the ruins. One fourth of all the houses in Lisbon fell. The pier of the Tagus was overthrown, with hundreds who had filed to the banks of the river to avoid the falling houses. Fires broke out all over the devoted town. The great granaries were consumed, and the people were without bread. Robbers came forth from their dens, and murdered those who clung to their moveable property. The English people met this terrible inflic tion with the generous relief and sympathy that they have always extended to the sorrows of other nations. They bethought themselves, for a while, of their own sins, which might draw down the vengeance of Heaven. The fashionable world took the necessity of repentence into its earnest consideration, and resolved-to abolish Masquerades.

APPENDIX.

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLe of britisH WRITERS.

In this History the occasional notices of the progress of Literature, have no pretensions to completeness; and are given as illustrative of the general character of an age rather than as expressions of critical opinion. But it may be useful to our readers to have something like a connected view of the British Writers in each century, for purposes of reference. The following able adds to the name of each author, and the dates of his birth and death, as far as they could be ascertained, the title of the work by which he is best known. The names are arranged under three heads-Imagination; Fact; Speculative and Scientific. The first includes the Poets and Novelists; the second, the writers on History, Geography, and other matters of exact detail; the third, those who treat of Philosophy and Science. This division cannot be perfect, for an author is often celebrated in various departments of knowledge. His name will here be found in the division which includes his best known productions.