perity or distresses, you will, however, enjoy, by public observations on your conduct, the full fame of your administration. An evanescent harpy of the Crown will have no scruples; but the gentleman who means to live in the midst of his tenantry, no doubt, will be a gracious landlord. A resident chief governor labours under a difficulty unknown to some viceroys, and little considered by the last. He is apt to become too jocular a fellow, and to forget the dignity of his office in the Ivity of his person; the delegated crown is too great a weight to be long sustained by every subject. We have seen the paltry actor sink into himself, before the royal mantle was laid aside, and the tragedy of his government concluded.

As to Lord Townshend, I shall say little of him. His spirit, his decorum, his ministry, his manners, all have been discussed, not much to his honour, still less to his reformation. Fortune raised this man to a ridiculous visibility, where the extravagant genius of his character fatally displayed itself. At one time he would elope from his office, and no man could say where the delegated crown had hid itself; at another time, business must follow him from haunt to haunt, and detect him with the most disgraceful company, in the most disgraceful intimacy. The old servants of the court, accustomed to the regularity of former times, looked up with astonishment to a comet that seemed to have broken from one sphere, to introduce confusion into another. With respect to his friendships, it was impossible to say whom he loved, and not easy to determine whether he loved any one; as to bounty, the favour was cancelled before it was conferred, and the object of it hated for ever. It is not strange that such a character should exist; but it is very strange, that in such a character there should be parts and genius; a momentary ray, which, like a faint wintry beam, shot and vanished. He had even starts of good feeling also, absorbed in a moment in the hurricane of his bosom, as his parts were lost in the clouds of his understanding. I speak of his foibles; as to his vices, I shall not dwell upon them. We saw this man arrayed like majesty, and felt indignation; we see him now descend from the throne, and are ashamed that he was ever an object of serious resentment. We leave him to the vacancy of a mind ill suited to retreat, and now accustomed to the farce of state, and the blunder of business. We leave him to a country that his talents will never injure, to an office which we wish he may discharge better, and to a large patronage, from which we hope he may not derive a multitude of enemies.

He was afterwards created Master General of the Ordnance.

CHARACTER OF MR. PITT.*

1772.

THE secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity; his august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns + thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, -his ambition was fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent, those sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarize, were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and decide.

A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

* Lord Chatham.

+ Not George II.

Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence was an æra in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom, not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled, sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray *, he did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtility of argumentation; nor was he, like Townshend +, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed.

Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence; but even then, like the spinning of a cannonball, he was still alive with fatal, unapproachable, activity.

Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through its history.

Lord Mansfield.

† Mr. Charles Townshend. See his character in Burke's speech on American taxation.

OBSERVATIONS

ON THE

MUTINY BILL;

WITH SOME STRICTURES ON LORD BUCKINGHAMSHIRE'S ADMINISTRATION IN IRELAND.-1781.

ADDRESSED TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND.

You have been active in the service of your country; you have been liberal in rewarding individuals; you have set an example of public virtue in your own conduct, and have encouraged it in others by the warmest panegyric. *

You have done this, in a country where patriotism had been timid, infrequent, and treacherous; and in an age when the principle was supposed to have perished; when the hearty intercourse of private life reconciled to state offenders, and clumsy good-humour compromised every public indignity; a great change in a short time has been wrought in the public mind; an alteration has followed in the national condition. I remember the state of this country before you formed your associations; I remember your condition before you took up arms; I see the change, and rejoice at it. It was not your fault that we have not more reason to rejoice; that trade and constitution, so near a happy settlement, should be thrown back into a state of suspense; that the nation has been stung when she began to repose; and that they who are the loudest to preach satisfaction, have been bribed to furnish new grounds of discontent.

The people of Ireland are not ungrateful, nor insatiable, nor seditious; but no people will be satisfied who conceive themselves cheated of a free grant of trade, and see a constitution rescued out of the hands of one parliament to be

• See proceedings and resolutions of the Irish volunteers.

mangled by another. You perceive I allude to the sugar and mutiny bills. I mean to make the latter the subject of this

letter.

I am not afraid of the people of Ireland; I have an opinion of their understanding, and a confidence in their integrity; I do not agree in that vulgar and courtly notion, that political discussion idles a nation. With the examples before me of Great Britain and the north of Ireland, I say the spirit of liberty brings on the spirit of trade, and that our immediate interest is our proper study: arms and liberty, the great securities of acquisition, cannot be inconsistent with the habits of acquiring; the manufacturer does not become weak by discipline, nor is the elector disfranchised by being armed. In every free state, politics should be the study of all; a mystery to the people, they become the trade of the great; the political monopolist is a hardened jobber. That state is indeed prosperous which can produce an armed, disciplined, industrious, vigilant, and constitutional people.

But of all nations, Ireland should apply herself to the study of her own rights, because her constitution is now forming, the nation is moulding; whatever hurt she now receives, we carry that cast of infirmity from the cradle to the grave. Our liberty as yet has received no express acknowledgements, from the resolutions of parliament, from the declarations of judges, or from the assent of the chief magistrate; it depends upon the steady sense which the peopleentertain of their own laws, and upon the power they retain to render that sense efficacious. We obtained trade and liberty in the character of an armed, active community; in that character will we preserve them we will discuss political questions; we will discuss and condemn even such as have obtained, through bribery, the approbation of Parliament ; corruption prevailing in the senate shall not silence the nation. Upon these principles, I submit to you some observations upon the perpetual mutiny bill.

:

I conceive that standing armies in peace are against the principles of the constitution, and the safety of public liberty; they have subverted the freedom of all nations, except in those instances where their numbers were small, or the power of the Sovereign over such an instrument limited in quality or duration; for it is in vain to set bounds to the authority of the chief magistrate in other matters by the general tendency of law, if a specific statute or ordinance shall give him a perpetual and irresistible force. In such a case, the law would invest the king with a power too strong for herself, and would make provision for her own violation; and as the