of wit, who proffered hearty friendship to Goldsmith at this time as a fellow patriot and poet, and maintained ever after an easy intercourse with him. In early life he had written an ode to Pulteney which contains one masterly

verse,

(What though the good, the brave, the wise,
With adverse force undaunted rise,

To break the eternal doom!

Though Cato lived, though Tully spoke,

Though Brutus dealt the god-like stroke,
Yet perished fated Rome,')

and had attached himself to the party of the Prince of Wales, whom he largely assisted with money. In the imaginary Leicester House administrations commemorated by Bubb Dodington, he was always appointed to office; and had held appointments more substantial as comptroller of the prince's household, a lord of the treasury, and vice-treasurer of Ireland. He talked well, though coarsely, and was a great favourite with women. His first wife, Lord Fingal's daughter, brought him a good fortune, and bore him a son; with his second wife, the sister and heiress of Secretary Craggs (Pope's friend), though he had scanty felicity and no issue, he obtained one of the finest domains in Essex and the mansion of Gosfield Hall; and from a third more luckless marriage, with the Countess Dowager of Berkeley, sprang the daughter (its only issue he consented to recognise), in whose later union with the Marquis of Buckingham the names of Grenville and Nugent became blended. Richard Glover (the epic poet of Leicester

House) characterises him briefly as a jovial voluptuous Irishman who had left popery for the protestant religion, money, and widows; but Glover lived to see him surrender these favourites, and, not far from his eightieth year, go back to popery again. When his friendship with Goldsmith began, he was a tall, stout, vigorous man of nearly sixty, with a remarkably loud voice and a broad Irish brogue; whose strong and ready wit, careless decision of manner, and reckless audacity of expression, obtained him always a hearing from the house of commons, in which he had sat for four-and-twenty years. He was now watching with more than ordinary personal interest the turn of the political wheel. So was his new friend Goldsmith, and every member of the Gerrard-street Club.

The ministry which succeeded Bute's (that of George Grenville and the Bedfords, or, as they were called, the Bloomsbury gang) was coming to a close at last, after a series of impolitic blunders without parallel in the annals of statesmen. Early in March of the previous year ('64), after convulsing England from end to end with the question of general warrants and the ignoble persecution of Wilkes, the first attempt was made upon America which roused her to rebellion. In the autumn of that year, all her towns and cities were in loud and vehement protest; and before the year closed, Benjamin Franklin had placed in Grenville's hands a solemn protest of resistance on the part of his fellow colonists to any proposition to tax them without their consent. But as yet, this met with little

sympathy in England, and to the stubborn nature of Grenville, fear was as strange as wisdom. With only one division in the Commons, when the attendance was most paltry, and without a single negative in the Lords, he passed, at the opening of the present year, the act which created the Republic of America. Burke was under the commons' gallery during its progress (it had been his habit for some months to attend almost every discussion), and said, nine years afterward, that, far from anything inflammatory, he had never in his life heard so languid a debate. Horace Walpole described it to Lord Hertford as a slight day on the American taxes.' Barré, who had served in America and knew the temper of the people, was the only man whose language approached to the occasion; and as he had lately lost his regiment for his vote against general warrants, it was laughed at as the language of a disappointed man. Pitt was absent. On occasions less momentous he had come to the house on crutches, swathed in flannel; yet now he was absent. He afterwards prayed that some friendly hand could have laid him prostrate on the floor of the house to bear his testimony against the bill; but it is doubtful if the desire to see Grenville more completely prostrate, had not had more to do with his absence than either gout or fever. The minister's triumph in his Stamp Act, however, was brief. The king had hardly given it his glad assent, when the first slight seizure of the terrible malady which afterwards more sorely afflicted him, necessitated an act of regency; and the

mismanagement of the provisions of that act hopelessly embroiled the minister with the king. Then came the clash and confusion of the parties into which the once predominant old Whig party had been lately rent asunder, and which the present strange and sullen seclusion of Pitt made it hopeless to think of reuniting. In vain he was appealed to; in vain the poor king made piteous submissions to induce him to return to power. Fortunate in legacies, a Somersetshire baronet whom he had never seen had just left him three thousand a year; and it began to be whispered about that he would not take office again. The opposition lost ground, and the ministry did not gain it; the coercion laid upon the king became notorious; the city was shaken with riots, which in the general disorganization of affairs rose almost to rebellion; and while on the one hand a new administration seemed impossible without the help of Pitt, on the other it was plain that Grenville and the Bedfords were tottering to their final fall. The king was intensely grateful to them for their invasion of the public liberties; had joyfully cooperated with them in the taxation of America; but hated them because they hated Bute (who had placed them in power), because they had insulted his mother the Princess Dowager (whose intrigues had sustained them in power), and because they suffered Buckingham Gardens to be overlooked rather than vote him a somewhat paltry grant (which would have secured to the crown what is now Belgravia). It was his own chosen system of government to govern without

party, and solely by the favour of the crown; and here were its four years' fruits. His ministers had become his tyrants, and statesmen held themselves aloof from his service. When his uncle Cumberland came back from Hayes with Pitt's formal refusal, he thought in his despair of even the old Duke of Newcastle; began to make atonement for recent insults to the house of Devonshire; and threw out baits. for those old pure Whigs who had been to this time the objects of his most concentrated hatred. Doubts and distrust shook Leicester House, in which Nugent of course shared largely; and expectation stood on tip-toe in Gerrardstreet, where the Club could hardly avoid taking interest in what affected the fortunes of Edmund Burke.

For Burke, not unreasonably, looked to obtain employment in the scramble. Hawkins said he had always meant to offer himself to the highest bidder; but the calumny is hardly worth refuting. He had honourably disengaged himself from Hamilton, and scornfully given back his pension; nor were his friends kept in ignorance that he had since attached himself to the party of Whigs the most pure and least powerful in the state. Lord Rockingham was at their head: a young nobleman of princely fortune and fascinating manners, who made up for powers of oratory, in which he was wholly deficient, by an inestimable art of attracting and securing friends; whose character was unstained by any of the intrigues of the past ten years; and who had selected for his associates men like himself, less noted for their brilliant talents than