don, and as he drank in London, so he drank in the country. A letter of Garrick's almost implies that the paymaster fixed his residence among the swamps of Essex in order that he might have an excuse for using brandy as the rest of the world used small-beer. With no lack of mother-wit, and prepared, according to the character of his company, to please by the coarsest jollity or the most insinuating good-breeding, he was a dangerous guide to the sons and nephews of his own contemporaries. When he first appeared as a man about town, he was detected as having been at the bottom of at least one discreditable frolic; and he did not improve with years. At the Pay-office, in which paradise of jobbery he contrived to settle himself as a permanent occupant, he kept open house for the members of several successive administrations, according to his own notions of what open house should mean. But the cup of his excesses, to employ a metaphor which he would have appreciated, was at length full; and he lived to learn, in impoverishment and disgrace, that a purer generation had drawn somewhat tighter than in the halcyon days of Lord Holland the limits within which public money might be diverted to the maintenance of private debauchery.

When the Duke of Grafton was at the Treasury, the seals were held by Lord Weymouth, the son of Earl Granville's daughter. With more than his grandfather's capacity for liquor, he had inherited a fair portion of his abilities; and anybody who cared to sit up with the secretary of state till

1 Sir Charles Hanbury Williams gave George Selwyn a sad account of a young Hobart, whom the latter was trying to keep out of mischief. "The moment your back was turned he flew out; went to Lady Tankerville's drum-major, having unfortunately dined that day with Rigby, who plied his head with too many bumpers, and also made him a present of some Chinese crackers. Armed in this manner, he entered the assembly, gave a string of four-and-twenty crackers to Lady Lucy Clinton, and bid her put it in the candle, which she very innocently did. When the first went off, she threw the rest on the tea-table, where, one after another, they all went off, with much noise and not a little stink. Lady Lucy was very plentifully abused, and Mr. Hobart had his share. Few women will courtesy to him, and I question if he'll ever lead anybody to their chair again as long as he lives."

the hours were no longer small might obtain a fair notion how Carteret used to talk towards the end of his second bottle. It would have been well for Lord Weymouth if his nights had been consumed exclusively in drinking, for he was an ardent and most unlucky gambler, and by the age of one-and-thirty he had played away his fortune, his credit, and his honor. His house swarmed with bailiffs; and when he sought refuge at the club, he found himself among people whose money he had tried to win without having any of his own to lose, and who had told him their opinion of his conduct in terms which he was not in a position, and (as some suspected) not of a nature, to resent. He was on the point of levanting for France when, as a last resource, his grandfather's friends bethought them that he had not yet tried public life. "He must have bread, my lord," wrote Junius; "or, rather, he must have wine;" and, as it was convenient that his first services to the State should be rendered at a distance from the scene of his earlier exploits, he was appointed Lord-lieutenant of Ireland. The Dublin tradesmen, however, did not relish the prospect of having a bankrupt nobleman quartered upon them for five or six years, in order that at the end of that time he might be able to show his face again at White's. The spirit which, fifty years before, had refused to put up with the bad halfpence of the dominant country again began to show itself; Lord Weymouth's nomination was rescinded; and, to console him for the rebuff, he was made Secretary of State for the Northern Department, and intrusted with half the work that is now done by the Foreign Office, and with the undivided charge of the internal administration of the kingdom. He did not pay his new duties the compliment of making the very slightest alteration in his habits. He still boozed till daylight, and dozed into the afternoon; and his public exertions were confined to occasional speeches, which his admirers extolled as preternaturally sagacious, and which his severest critics admitted to be pithy. "If I paid nobody," wrote Walpole, "and went drunk to bed every morning at six, I might expect to be called out of bed by two in the afternoon to save the nation and gov

ern the House of Lords by two or three sentences as profound and short as the proverbs of Solomon."

Lord Weymouth's successor as secretary of state was the most eminent, and possibly the most disreputable, member of the Bedford connection. The Earl of Sandwich was excellent as the chief of a department. He rose about the time that his predecessor retired to rest, and remained, till what then was a late dinner-hour, closely absorbed in methodical and most effectual labor. "Sandwich's industry to carry a point. in view," says Walpole, "was so remarkable that the world mistook it for abilities;" and if genius has been rightly defined as the capability of taking trouble, the world was not far wrong. Like all great administrators, he loved his own way, and rarely failed to get it; but outside the walls of his office his way was seldom or never a good one. He shocked even his own generation by the immorality of his private life, if such a term can be applied to the undisguised and unabashed libertinism that he carried to the very verge of a tomb which did not close on him until he had misspent three quarters of a century. He survived a whole succession of scandals, the least flagrant of which would have been fatal to any one but him. Nothing substantially injured him in the estimation of his countrymen, because no possible revelation could make them think worse of him than they thought already. When he was advanced in age, and at the head of what was just then the most important branch of the public service, he was involved in one of those tragedies of the police-court by means of which the retribution of publicity sometimes overtakes the voluptuary who imagines that his wealth has fenced him securely from the consequences of his sin. But no coroner's inquest, or cross-examination at the Old Bailey, could elicit anything which would add a shade to such a character. The blood had been washed from the steps of the theatre; the gallows had been erected and taken down; the poor creature who had been the object of a murderous rivalry was quiet in her grave;' and the noble earl was still at the

1 "The poor assassin was executed yesterday. The same day Charles

Admiralty, giving his unhonored name to the discoveries of our most celebrated navigator, and fitting out expeditions which might reduce the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Philadelphia, to the necessity of contributing to the taxes out of which he replenished his cellar and his seraglio. Corrupt, tyrannical, and brazen-faced as a politician, and destitute, as was seen in his conduct to Wilkes, of that last relic of virtue, fidelity towards the partners of his secret and pleasant vices, political satire itself tried in vain to exaggerate the turpitude of Sandwich.

"Too infamous to have a friend;

Too bad for bad men to commend,

Or good to name; beneath whose weight
Earth groans; who hath been spared by fate
Only to show, on mercy's plan,

How far and long God bears with man.”

Even this masterpiece of truculence was no libel upon one who had still eight-and-twenty years to pass in living up to the character which Churchill had given him in his wrath.

"Such," cried Junius, "is the council by which the best of sovereigns is advised, and the greatest nation upon earth governed." The humiliation and resentment with which decent Englishmen saw this train of Bacchanals scouring through the high places of the State is a key to the unexampled popularity of that writer who, under twenty different signatures drawn from the pages of Plutarch and Tacitus, lashed the self-will and self-delusion of the king, and the rapacity and dissoluteness of his ministers. The spectacle of "the Duke of Grafton, like an apprentice, thinking that the world should be postponed to a horse-race, and the Bedfords not caring what disgraces we undergo, while each of them has three thousand pounds a year and three thousand bottles of claret

Fox moved for the removal of Lord Sandwich, but was beaten by a large majority; for in Parliament the ministers can still gain victories" (Walpole to Mann, April 20, 1779).

The letter containing this sentence is signed "Atticus;" but it was published among the works of Junius, and is indisputably from his pen.

1

and champagne," did more than his own somewhat grandiose eloquence and over-labored sarcasm to endow Junius with a power in the country second only to that of Chatham, and a fame hardly less universal than the notoriety of Wilkes. But in the eyes of George the Third the righteous anger of his people was only another form of disloyalty. Intent, heart and soul, on his favorite scheme for establishing a system of personal rule, under which all the threads of administration should centre in the royal closet, he entertained an instinctive antipathy to high-minded and independent men of all political parties. He selected his instruments among those who were willing to be subservient because they had no selfrespect to lose. "His Majesty," wrote Burke, "never was in better spirits. He has got a ministry weak and dependent; and, what is better, willing to continue so." Serenely satisfied with his success in weeding out of the government everybody whom the nation trusted and esteemed, he felt it an insult to himself that his subjects should murmur when they saw honest and patriotic statesmen forbidden to devote their talents to the service of the public, while the prosperity and honor of the country were committed to the charge of men not one of whom any private person in his senses would choose as a steward or receive as a son-in-law. According to his Majesty's theory, his favor was a testimonial which the world was bound to accept. The royal confidence could turn Sir Francis Dashwood into a sage and Lord George Sackville into a hero; could make a Cato the censor of the Earl of Sandwich, and a Scipio of the Duke of Grafton. Among the innumerable evil results of George the Third's policy, not the least disastrous was that the supporters of that policy considered themselves bound to maintain that men like Lord Weymouth and Rigby were no worse than men like the Duke of Richmond and the Marquis of Rockingham. Personal morality became a party question; the standard of virtue was

Walpole to Conway, June 16, 1768. The allusion to the Duke of Grafton has been softened by the omission of three words.

2 Burke to the Marquis of Rockingham, August 1, 1767.