The American Quarterly Review Part 3

Surely these two considerations--the potent effect of his example, and the almost impossibility of governing others when not able to govern himself--without referring to that paramount one which operates for all men alike, ought to have been sufficient to counteract the tendency of "the peculiar circ.u.mstances of his time," to inflame the "propensities"

of the Prince; or, at least, should be enough to prevent an extenuation on that ground, of his unrestrained indulgence of them, by the historian of his life. What those circ.u.mstances were, we will let Mr. Croly relate.

"The peace of 1782 threw open the continent; and it was scarcely proclaimed, when France was crowded with the English n.o.bility. Versailles was the centre of all that was sumptuous in Europe. The graces of the young queen, then in the pride of youth and beauty; the pomp of the royal family and the n.o.blesse; and the costliness of the fetes and celebrations, for which France has been always famous, rendered the court the dictator of manners, morals, and politics, to all the higher ranks of the civilized world.

But the Revolution was now hastening with the strides of a giant upon France: the torch was already waving over the chambers of this morbid and guilty luxury. The corrective was terrible: history has no more stinging retrospect than the contrast of that brilliant time with the days of shame and agony that followed--the untimely fate of beauty, birth, and heroism,--the more than serpent-brood that started up in the path which France once emulously covered with flowers for the step of her rulers,--the hideous suspense of the dungeon,--the heart-broken farewell to life and royalty upon the scaffold. But France was the grand corruptor; and its supremacy must in a few years have spread incurable disease through the moral frame of Europe.

"The English men of rank brought back with them its dissipation and its infidelity. The immediate circle of the English court was clear. The grave virtue of the king held the courtiers in awe; and the queen, with a pious wisdom, for which her name should long be held in honour, indignantly repulsed every attempt of female levity to approach her presence. But beyond this sacred circle, the influence of foreign a.s.sociation was felt through every cla.s.s of society. The great body of the writers of England, the men of whom the indiscretions of the higher ranks stand most in awe, had become less the guardians than the seducers of the public mind. The 'Encyclopedie,' the code of rebellion and irreligion still more than of science, had enlisted the majority in open scorn of all that the heart should practise or the head revere; and the Parisian atheists scarcely exceeded the truth, when they boasted of erecting a temple that was to be frequented by worshippers of every tongue. A cosmopolite, infidel republic of letters was already lifting its front above the old sovereignties, gathering under its banners a race of mankind new to public struggle,--the whole secluded, yet jealous and vexed race of labourers in the intellectual field, and summoning them to devote their most unexhausted vigour and masculine ambition to the service of a sovereign, at whose right and left, like the urns of Homer's Jove, stood the golden founts of glory.

London was becoming Paris in all but the name. There never was a period when the tone of our society was more polished, more animated, or more corrupt. Gaming, horse-racing, and still deeper deviations from the right rule of life, were looked upon as the natural embellishments of rank and fortune. Private theatricals, one of the most dexterous and a.s.sured expedients to extinguish, first the delicacy of woman, and then her virtue, were the favourite indulgence; and, by an outrage to English decorum, which completed the likeness to France, women were beginning to mingle in public life, try their influence in party, and entangle their feebleness in the absurdities and abominations of political intrigue. In the midst of this luxurious period the Prince of Wales commenced his public career. His rank alone would have secured him flatterers; but he had higher t.i.tles to homage. He was, then, one of the handsomest men in Europe: his countenance open and manly; his figure tall, and strikingly proportioned; his address remarkable for easy elegance, and his whole air singularly n.o.ble. His contemporaries still describe him as the model of a man of fashion, and amusingly lament over the degeneracy of an age which no longer produces such men.

"But he possessed qualities which might have atoned for a less attractive exterior. He spoke the princ.i.p.al modern languages with sufficient skill; he was a tasteful musician; his acquaintance with English literature was, in early life, unusually accurate and extensive; Markham's discipline, and Jackson's scholarship, had given him a large portion of cla.s.sical knowledge; and nature had given him the more important public talent of speaking with fluency, dignity, and vigour.

"Admiration was the right of such qualities, and we can feel no surprise if it were lavishly offered by both s.e.xes. But it has been strongly a.s.serted, that the temptations of flattery and pleasure were thrown in his way for other objects than those of the hour; that his wanderings were watched by the eyes of politicians; and that every step which plunged him deeper into pecuniary embarra.s.sment was triumphed in, as separating him more widely from his natural connexions, and compelling him in his helplessness to throw himself into the arms of factions alike hostile to his character and his throne."

Our readers may compare the above portrait of his royal highness, with that which Mr. Jefferson draws of him in one of his letters.

In 1787, the Prince had involved himself in debt to such an amount, that it was found necessary to solicit Parliament, not only for a sum sufficient to liquidate his obligations, but also for an increase of his income, the salary first granted having proved quite inadequate for his royal propensities. The following account of his debts and expenditure was laid before the House of Commons, and furnishes a teeming commentary on the blessings of hereditary government. In considering this matter, one might be tempted to regard Parliament as a species of eleemosynary inst.i.tution, for the relief of insolvent royalty.

_Debts._

Bonds and debts, 13,000 Purchase of houses, 4,000 Expenses of Carlton House, 53,000 Tradesmen's bills, 90,804 -------- 160,804

_Expenditure from July 1783, to July 1786._

Household, &c., 29,277 Privy purse, 16,050 Payments made by Col. Hotham, particulars delivered in to his majesty, 37,203 Other extraordinaries, 11,406 -------- 93,936 Salaries, 54,734 Stables, 37,919 Mr. Robinson's, 7,059 -------- 193,648

The debate upon the grant was of a highly animated character, and in the course of it the Prince was not spared. He was befriended by the opposition, with Fox at its head, having thrown himself into the arms of that party, who were endeavouring in every way to drive Pitt from his ministerial seat. But in this instance, as in most others, the latter succeeded in carrying his point; in consequence of which, 161,000 were issued out of the civil list to pay the Prince's debts, and 20,000 for the completion of Carlton House, but no augmentation of his income was allowed. "Hopeless of future appeal, stung by public rebuke, and committed before the empire in hostility to the court and the minister, the Prince was now thrown completely into Fox's hands."

Perhaps the two most interesting chapters in Mr. Croly's book, are those ent.i.tled "the Prince's friends," in which he has brought into review most of the princ.i.p.al characters of that period of intellectual giants, whose renown continues to shed increasing l.u.s.tre around the political and literary horizon of England. The world is never tired of reading whatever has reference to those personages, and a book that professes to speak respecting them, may be said to possess a sure pa.s.sport to public favour at the present day. Well may the old man now living in England, the prime of whose life was pa.s.sed in that time, be allowed to be a "laudator temporis acti," without having it imputed to the fond weakness of senility. We shall make copious extracts from this portion of our author's work.

"England had never before seen such a phalanx armed against a minister. A crowd of men of the highest natural talents, of the most practised ability, and of the first public weight in birth, fortune, and popularity, were nightly arrayed against the administration, sustained by the solitary eloquence of the young Chancellor of the Exchequer.

"Yet Pitt was not careless of followers. He was more than once even charged with sedulously gathering round him a host of subaltern politicians, whom he might throw forward as skirmishers,--or sacrifices, which they generally were.

Powis, describing the 'forces led by the right honourable gentleman on the treasury bench,' said, 'the first detachment may be called his body-guard, who shoot their little arrows against those who refuse allegiance to their chief.' This light infantry were of course, soon scattered when the main battle joined. But Pitt, a son of the aristocracy, was an aristocrat in all his nature, and he loved to see young men of family around him; others were chosen for their activity, if not for their force, and some, probably, from personal liking. In the later period of his career, his train was swelled by a more influential and promising race of political worshippers, among whom were Lord Mornington, since Marquess Wellesley; Ryder, since Lord Harrowby; and Wilberforce, still undignified by t.i.tle, but possessing an influence, which, perhaps, he values more. The minister's chief agents in the house of commons, were Mr.

Grenville (since Lord Grenville) and Dundas.

"Yet, among those men of birth or business, what rival could be found to the popular leaders on the opposite side of the house,--to Burke, Sheridan, Grey, Windham, or to Fox, that

"'Prince and chief of many throned powers, Who led the embattled seraphim to war.'"

Without adopting the bitter remark of the Duke de Montausier to Louis the Fourteenth, in speaking of Versailles:--'Vous avez beau faire, sire, vous n'en ferez jamais qu'un favori sans merite,' it was impossible to deny their inferiority on all the great points of public impression. A debate in that day was one of the highest intellectual treats: there was always some new and vigorous feature in the display on both sides; some striking effort of imagination or masterly reasoning, or of that fine sophistry, in which, as was said of the vices of the French n.o.blesse, half the evil was atoned by the elegance. The ministerialists sarcastically p.r.o.nounced that, in every debate, Burke said something which no one else ever said; Sheridan said something that no one else ought to say, and Fox something that no one else would dare to say. But the world, fairer in its decision, did justice to their extraordinary powers; and found in the Asiatic amplitude and splendour of Burke; in Sheridan's alternate subtlety and strength, reminding it at one time of Attic dexterity, and another of the uncalculating boldness of barbarism; and in Fox's matchless English self-possession, unaffected vigour, and overflowing sensibility, a perpetual source of admiration.

"But it was in the intercourses of social life that the superiority of Opposition was most incontestable. Pitt's life was in the senate; his true place of existence was on the benches of that ministry, which he conducted with such unparalleled ability and success: he was, in the fullest sense of the phrase, a public man; and his indulgences in the few hours which he could spare from the business of office, were more like the necessary restoratives of a frame already shattered, than the easy gratifications of a man of society: and on this principle we can safely account for the common charge of Pitt's propensity to wine. He found it essential, to relieve a mind and body exhausted by the perpetual pressure of affairs: wine was his medicine: and it was drunk in total solitude, or with a few friends from whom the minister had no concealment. Over his wine the speeches for the night were often concerted; and when the dinner was done, the table council broke up only to finish the night in the house.

"But with Fox, all was the bright side of the picture. His extraordinary powers defied dissipation. No public man of England ever mingled so much personal pursuit of every thing in the form of indulgence with so much parliamentary activity. From the dinner he went to the debate, from the debate to the gaming-table, and returned to his bed by day-light, freighted with parliamentary applause, plundered of his last disposable guinea, and fevered with sleeplessness and agitation; to go through the same round within the next twenty-four hours. He kept no house; but he had the houses of all his party at his disposal, and that party were the most opulent and sumptuous of the n.o.bility.

Cato and Antony were not more unlike, than the public severity of Pitt, and the native and splendid dissoluteness of Fox.

"They were unlike in all things. Even in such slight peculiarities as their manner of walking into the house of commons, the contrast was visible. From the door Pitt's countenance was that of a man who felt that he was coming into his high place of business. 'He advanced up the floor with a quick firm step, with the head erect, and thrown back, looking to neither the right nor the left, nor favouring with a glance or a nod any of the individuals seated on either side, among whom many of the highest would have been gratified by such a mark of recognition.' Fox's entrance was lounging or stately, as it might happen, but always good-humoured; he had some pleasantry to exchange with every body, and until the moment when he rose to speak, continued gaily talking with his friends."

"Of all the great speakers of a day fertile in oratory, Sheridan had the most conspicuous natural gifts. His figure, at his first introduction into the house, was manly and striking; his countenance singularly expressive, when excited by debate; his eye large, black, and intellectual; and his voice one of the richest, most flexible, and most sonorous, that ever came from human lips. Pitt's was powerful, but monotonous; and its measured tone often wearied the ear. Fox's was all confusion in the commencement of his speech; and it required some tension of ear throughout to catch his words. Burke's was loud and bold, but unmusical; and his contempt for order in his sentences, and the abruptness of his grand and swelling conceptions, that seemed to roll through his mind like billows before a gale, often made the defects of his delivery more striking.

But Sheridan, in manner, gesture, and voice, had every quality that could give effect to eloquence.

"Pitt and Fox were listened to with profound respect, and in silence, broken only by occasional cheers; but from the moment of Sheridan's rising, there was an expectation of pleasure, which to his last days was seldom disappointed. A low murmur of eagerness ran round the house; every word was watched for, and his first pleasantry set the whole a.s.semblage in a roar. Sheridan was aware of this; and has been heard to say, 'that if a jester would never be an orator, yet no speaker could expect to be popular in a _full house_, without a jest; and that he always made the experiment, good or bad; as a laugh gave him the country gentlemen to a man.'

"In the house he was always formidable; and though Pitt's moral or physical courage never shrank from man, yet Sheridan was the antagonist with whom he evidently least desired to come into collision, and with whom the collision, when it did occur, was of the most fretful nature. Pitt's sarcasm on him as a theatrical manager, and Sheridan's severe, yet fully justified retort, are too well known to be now repeated; but there were a thousand instances of that 'keen encounter of their wits,' in which person was more involved than party."

"Burke was created for parliament. His mind was born with a determination to things of grandeur and difficulty.

"'Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem.'"

Nothing in the ordinary professions, nothing in the trials or triumphs of private life, could have satisfied the n.o.ble hunger and thirst of his spirit of exertion. This quality was so predominant, that to it a large proportion of his original failures, and of his unfitness for general public business, which chiefly belongs to detail, is to be traced through life. No Hercules could wear the irresistible weapons and the lion's skin with more natural supremacy; but none could make more miserable work with the distaff.

Burke's magnitude of grasp, and towering conception, were so much a part of his nature, that he could never forego their exercise, however unsuited to the occasion. Let the object be as trivial as it might, his first instinct was to turn it into all shapes of lofty speculation, and try how far it could be moulded and magnified into the semblance of greatness. If he had no large national interest to summon him, he winged his tempest against a turnpike bill; or flung away upon the petty quarrels and obscure peculations of the underlings of office, colours and forms that might have emblazoned the fall of a dynasty."

"Erskine, like many other characters of peculiar liveliness, had a morbid sensibility to the circ.u.mstances of the moment, which sometimes strangely enfeebled his presence of mind; any appearance of neglect in his audience, a cough, a yawn, or a whisper, even among the mixed mult.i.tude of the courts, and strong as he was there, has been known to dishearten him visibly. This trait was so notorious, that a solicitor, whose only merit was a remarkably vacant face, was said to be often planted opposite to Erskine by the adverse party, to yawn when the advocate began.

"The cause of his first failure in the house, was not unlike this curious mode of disconcerting an orator. He had been brought forward to support the falling fortunes of Fox, then struggling under the weight of the 'coalition.' The 'India Bill' had heaped the king's almost open hostility on the acc.u.mulation of public wrath and grievance which the ministers had with such luckless industry been employed during the year in raising for their own ruin. Fox looked abroad for help; and Gordon, the member for Portsmouth, was displaced from his borough, and Erskine was brought into the house, with no slight triumph of his party, and perhaps some degree of anxiety on the opposite side. On the night of his first speech, Pitt, evidently intending to reply, sat with pen and paper in his hand, prepared to catch the arguments of this formidable adversary. He wrote a word or two; Erskine proceeded; but with every additional sentence Pitt's attention to the paper relaxed; his look became more careless; and he obviously began to think the orator less and less worthy of his attention. At length, while every eye in the house was fixed upon him, he, with a contemptuous smile, dashed the pen through the paper, and flung them on the floor. Erskine never recovered from this expression of disdain; his voice faltered, he struggled through the remainder of his speech, and sank into his seat dispirited and shorn of his fame.

"But a mind of the saliency and variety of Erskine's, must have distinguished itself wherever it was determined on distinction; and it is impossible to believe, that the master of the grave, deeply-reasoned, and glowing eloquence of this great pleader, should not have been able to bring his gifts with him from Westminster-hall to the higher altar of parliament. There were times when his efforts in the house reminded it of his finest effusions at the bar. But those were rare. He obviously felt that his place was not in the legislature; that no man can wisely hope for more than one kind of eminence; and except upon some party emergency, he seldom spoke, and probably never with much expectation of public effect. His later years lowered his name; by his retirement from active life, he lost the habits forced upon him by professional and public rank; and wandered through society, to the close of his days, a pleasant idler; still the gentleman and the man of easy wit, but leaving society to wonder what had become of the great orator, in what corner of the brain of this perpetual punster and story-teller, this man of careless conduct and rambling conversation, had shrunk the glorious faculty, that in better days flashed with such force and brightness; what cloud had absorbed the lightnings that had once alike penetrated and illumined the heart of the British nation."

The following investigation of the authorship of Junius will be read with interest.

"The trial of Hastings had brought Sir Philip Francis into public notice, and his strong Foxite principles introduced him to the prince's friends. His rise is still unexplained.

From a clerk in the War-office, he had been suddenly exalted into a commissioner for regulating the affairs of India, and sent to Bengal with an appointment, estimated at ten thousand pounds a-year. On his return to England he joined Opposition, declared violent hostilities against Hastings, and gave his most zealous a.s.sistance to the prosecution; though the house of commons would not suffer him to be on the committee of impeachment. Francis was an able and effective speaker; with an occasional wildness of manner and eccentricity of expression, which, if they sometimes provoked a smile, often increased the interest of his statements.

"But the usual lot of those who have identified themselves with any one public subject, rapidly overtook him. His temperament, his talents, and his knowledge, were all Indian. With the impeachment he was politically born, with it he lived, and when it withered away, his advent.i.tious and local celebrity perished along with it. He clung to Fox for a few years after; but while the great leader of opposition found all his skill necessary to retain his party in existence, he was not likely to solicit a partisan at once so difficult to keep in order and to employ. The close of his ambitious and disappointed life was spent in ranging along the skirts of both parties, joining neither, and speaking his mind with easy, and perhaps sincere, scorn of both; reprobating the Whigs, during their brief reign, for their neglect of fancied promises; and equally reprobating the ministry, for their blindness to fancied pretensions.

"But he was still to have a momentary respite for fame.

While he was going down into that oblivion which rewards the labours of so many politicians; a pamphlet, ascribing Junius's letters to Sir Phillip, arrested his descent. Its arguments were plausible; and, for a while, opinion appeared to be in favour of the conjecture, notwithstanding a denial from the presumed Junius; which, however, had much the air of his feeling no strong dislike to being suspected of this new t.i.tle to celebrity. But further examination extinguished the t.i.tle; and left the secret, which had perplexed so many unravellers of literary webs, to perplex the grave idlers of generations to come.

"Yet the true wonder is not the concealment; for a mult.i.tude of causes might have produced the continued necessity even after the death of the writer; but the feasibility with which the chief features of Junius may be fastened on almost every writer, of the crowd for whom claims have been laid to this dubious honour: while, in every instance, some discrepancy finally starts upon the eye, which excludes the claim.

"Burke had more than the vigour, the information, and the command of language; but he was incapable of the virulence and the disloyalty. Horne Tooke had the virulence and the disloyalty in superabundance; but he wanted the cool sarcasm and the polished elegance, even if he could have been fairly supposed to be at once the a.s.sailant and the defender.

Wilkes had the information and the wit; but his style was incorrigibly vulgar, and all its metaphors were for and from the mob: in addition, he would have rejoiced to declare himself the writer: his well-known answer to an inquiry on the subject was, 'Would to Heaven I had!' _Utinam scripsissem!_ Lord George Germaine has been lately brought forward as a candidate; and the evidence fully proves that he possessed the dexterity of style, the powerful and pungent remark, and even the individual causes of bitterness and partisanship, which might be supposed to stimulate Junius: but, in the private correspondence of Junius with his printer, Woodfall, there are contemptuous allusions to Lord George's conduct in the field, which at once put an end to the question of authorship.

"Dunning possessed the style, the satire, and the partisanship; but Junius makes blunders in his law, of which Dunning must have been incapable. Gerard Hamilton (Single-speech) might have written the letters, but he never possessed the moral courage; and was, besides, so consummate a c.o.xcomb, that his vanity must have, however involuntarily, let out the secret. The argument, that he was Junius; from his notoriously using the same peculiarities of phrase at the time when all the world was in full chase of the author, ought of itself to be decisive against him; for nothing can be clearer, than that the actual writer was determined on concealment, and that he would never have toyed with his dangerous secret so much in the manner of a school-girl, anxious to develop her accomplishments.

"It is with no wish to add to the number of the controversialists on this bluestocking subject, that a conjecture is hazarded; that Junius will be found, if ever found, among some of the humbler names of the list. If he had been a political leader, or, in any sense of the word, an independent man, it is next to impossible that he should not have left some indication of his authorship. But it is perfectly easy to conceive the case of a private secretary, or dependent of a political leader, writing, by his command, and for his temporary purpose, a series of attacks on a ministry; which, when the object was gained, it was of the highest importance to bury, so far as the connexion was concerned, in total oblivion. Junius, writing on his own behalf, would have, in all probability, retained evidence sufficient to substantiate his t.i.tle, when the peril of the discovery should have pa.s.sed away, which it did within a few years; for who would have thought, in 1780, of punishing even the libels on the king in 1770? Or when, if the peril remained, the writer would have felt himself borne on a tide of popular applause high above the inflictions of law.

"But, writing for another; the most natural result was, that he should have been _pledged_ to extinguish all proof of the transaction; to give up every fragment that could lead to the discovery at any future period; and to surrender the whole mystery into the hands of the superior, for whose purposes it had been constructed, and who, while he had no fame to acquire by its being made public, might be undone by its betrayal.

"The marks of _private secretaryship_ are so strong, that all the probable conjectures have pointed to writers under that relation; Lloyd, the private secretary of George Grenville; Greatrakes, Lord Shelburne's private secretary; Rosenhagen, who was so much concerned in the business of Shelburne house, that he may be considered as a second secretary; and Macauley Boyd, who was perpetually about some public man, and who was at length fixed by his friends on Lord Macartney's establishment, and went with him to take office in India.

"But, mortifying as it may be to the disputants on the subject, the discovery is now beyond rational hope; for Junius intimates his having been a spectator of parliamentary proceedings even further back than the year 1743; which, supposing him to have been twenty years old at the time, would give more than a century for his experience.

In the long interval since 1772, when the letters ceased: not the slightest clue has been discovered; though doubtless the keenest inquiry was set on foot by the parties a.s.sailed.

Sir William Draper died with but one wish, though a sufficiently uncharitable one, that he could have found out his castigator, before he took leave of the world. Lord North often avowed his total ignorance of the writer. The king's reported observation to Gen. Desaguiliers, in 1772, 'We know who Junius is, and he will write no more,' is unsubstantiated; and if ever made, was probably prefaced with a supposition; for no publicity ever followed; and what neither the minister of the day, nor his successors ever knew, could scarcely have come to the king's knowledge but by inspiration, nor remained locked up there but by a reserve not far short of a political error.