CHAPTER VIII
Walpole in his Sixty-fourth Year.—The Royal Academy.—Tonton.—Charles Fox.—William Pitt.—Mrs. Hobart’s Sans Souci.—Improvements at Florence.—Walpole’s Dancing Feats.—No Feathers at Court.—Highwaymen.—Loss of the Royal George.—Mrs. Siddons.—Peace.—Its Social Consequences.—The Coalition.—The Rivals.—Political Excitement.—The Westminster Election.—Political Caricatures.—Conway’s Retirement.—Lady Harrington.—Balloons.—Illness.—Recovery.
“I never remonstrate against the behests of Dame Prudence, though a lady I never got acquainted with till near my grand climacteric.” So wrote Horace soon after passing the mystic period, compounded of seven and nine, which was once regarded as the topmost round in the ladder of human life. He would have his correspondents believe that his attention to the dame’s commands was not very regular at first. In the spring of 1781, he is able to report to Conway, “My health is most flourishing for me.” Accordingly, he goes about a good deal, and enjoys a sort of rejuvenescence. Of course, he visits the Exhibition of the Royal Academy at Somerset House, where Reynolds’s picture of the Ladies Waldegrave was shown. “The Exhibition,” he writes to Mason, “is much inferior to last year’s;85 nobody shines there but Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. The head of the former’s Dido is very fine; I do not admire the rest of the piece. His Lord Richard Cavendish is bold and stronger than he ever coloured. The picture of my three nieces is charming. Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea, so free and natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed. The back front of the Academy is handsome, but like the other to the street, the members are so heavy, that one cannot stand back enough to see it in any proportion, unless in a barge moored in the middle of the Thames.” The same day, May 6, he writes to Conway from Strawberry Hill:
“Though it is a bitter north-east, I came hither to-day to look at my lilacs, though à la glace; and to get from pharaoh, for which there is a rage. I doated on it above thirty years ago; but it is not decent to sit up all night now with boys and girls. My nephew, Lord Cholmondeley, the banker à la mode, has been demolished. He and his associate, Sir Willoughby Aston, went early t’other night to Brooks’s, before Charles Fox and Fitzpatrick, who keep a bank there, were come; but they soon arrived, attacked their rivals, broke their bank, and won above four thousand pounds. ‘There,’ said Fox, ‘so should all usurpers be served!’ He did still better; for he sent for his tradesmen, and paid as far as the money would go. In the mornings he continues his war on Lord North, but cannot break that bank.…
“I told you in my last that Tonton was arrived. I brought him this morning to take possession of his new villa, but his inauguration has not been at all pacific. As he has already found out that he may be as despotic as at St. Joseph’s, he began with exiling my beautiful little cat; upon which, however, we shall not quite agree. He then flew at one of my dogs, who returned it by biting his foot till it bled, but was severely beaten for it. I immediately rung for Margaret to dress his foot; but in the midst of my tribulation could not keep my countenance; for she cried, ‘Poor little thing, he does not understand my language!’ I hope she will not recollect, too, that he is a Papist!”
Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pinx. A. Dawson. Ph. Sc. S. W. Reynolds. Sc.
Sir Joshua Reynolds.
We have a further anecdote of Charles Fox told a few days later, also in a letter to Conway:
“I had been to see if Lady Aylesbury was come to town: as I came up St. James’s Street, I saw a cart and porters at Charles’s door; coppers and old chests of drawers loading. In short, his success at faro has awakened his host of creditors; but unless his bank has swelled to the size of the Bank of England, it could not have yielded a sop apiece for each. Epsom, too, had been unpropitious; and one creditor has actually seized and carried off his goods, which did not seem worth removing. As I returned full of this scene, whom should I find sauntering by my own door but Charles? He came up, and talked to me at the coach-window on the Marriage Bill,86 with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. I have no admiration for insensibility to one’s own faults, especially when committed out of vanity. Perhaps the whole philosophy consisted in the commission. If you could have been as much to blame, the last thing you would bear well would be your own reflections. The more marvellous Fox’s parts are, the more one is provoked at his follies, which comfort so many rascals and blockheads, and make all that is admirable and amiable in him only matter of regret to those who like him as I do.87
“I did intend to settle at Strawberry on Sunday; but must return on Thursday, for a party made at Marlborough House for Princess Amelia. I am continually tempted to retire entirely; and should, if I did not see how very unfit English tempers are for living quite out of the world. We grow abominably peevish and severe on others, if we are not constantly rubbed against and polished by them. I need not name friends and relations of yours and mine as instances. My prophecy on the short reign of faro is verified already. The bankers find that all the calculated advantages of the game do not balance pinchbeck parolis and debts of honourable women. The bankers, I think, might have had a previous and more generous reason, the very bad air of holding a bank:—but this country is as hardened against the petite morale, as against the greater.—What should I think of the world if I quitted it entirely?”
Again a few days, and we come upon an early mention of the youthful William Pitt: “The young William Pitt has again displayed paternal oratory. The other day, on the Commission of Accounts, he answered Lord North, and tore him limb from limb. If Charles Fox could feel, one should think such a rival, with an unspotted character, would rouse him. What if a Pitt and Fox should again be rivals!” Some time later, Walpole asks Lady Ossory: “Apropos of bon-mots, has our lord told you that George Selwyn calls Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt ‘the idle and the industrious apprentices’? If he has not, I am sure you will thank me, Madam.”
In the summer of 1781, Horace has a touch of rheumatism, but still he keeps up his juvenile tone. Witness the two following letters to Lady Ossory:
“Strawberry Hill, July 7, 1781.
“You must be, or will be, tired of my letters, Madam; every one is a contradiction to the last; there is alternately a layer of complaints, and a layer of foolish spirits. To-day the wind is again in the dolorous corner. For these four days I have been confined with a pain and swelling in my face. The apothecary says it is owing to the long drought; but as I should not eat grass were there ever such plenty, and as my cows, though starving, have no swelled cheeks, I do not believe him. I humbly attribute my frequent disorders to my longevity, and to that Proteus the gout, who is not the less himself for being incog. Excuses I have worn out, and, therefore, will not make any for not obeying your kind invitation again to Ampthill. I can only say, I go nowhere, even when Tonton is invited—except to balls—and yet though I am the last Vestris that has appeared, Mrs. Hobart did not invite me to her Sans Souci last week, though she had all my other juvenile contemporaries, Lady Berkeley, Lady Fitzroy, Lady Margaret Compton, and Mrs. French, etc. Perhaps you do not know that the lady of the fête, having made as many conquests as the King of Prussia, has borrowed the name of that hero’s villa for her hut on Ham Common, where she has built two large rooms of timber under a cabbage. Her field officers, General French, General Compton, etc., were sweltered in the ball-room, and then frozen at supper in tents on the grass. She herself, as intrepid as King Frederic, led the ball, though dying of the toothache, which she had endeavoured to drown in laudanum; but she has kept her bed ever since the campaign ended.
“This is all I know in the world, for the war seems to have taken laudanum too, and to keep its bed.
“I have received a letter to-day from Sir Horace Mann, who tells me the Great-Duke has been making wondrous improvements at Florence. He has made a passage through the Tribune, and built a brave new French room of stucco in white and gold, and placed the Niobe in it; but as everybody is tired of her telling her old story, she and all the Master and Miss Niobes are orderly disposed round the chamber, and if anybody asks who they are, I suppose they answer, Francis Charles Ferdinand Ignatius Neopomucenus, or Maria Theresa Christina Beatrice, etc. Well, Madam, have I any cause to sigh that the pictures at Houghton are transported to the North Pole, if the Tribune at Florence is demolished by Vandals, and Niobe and her progeny dance a cotillon? O sublunary grandeur, short-lived as a butterfly! We smile at a clown who graves the initials of his name, or the shape of his shoe, on the leads of a church, in hopes of being remembered, and yet he is as much known as king I don’t know whom, who built the Pyramids to eternise his memory. Methinks Anacreon was the only sensible philosopher. If I loved wine, and should look well in a chaplet of roses, I would crown myself with flowers, and go tipsy to bed every night sans souci.
“July 25, 1781.
“Poor human nature, what a contradiction it is! to-day it is all rheumatism and morality, and sits with a death’s head before it: to-morrow it is dancing!—Oh! my Lady, my Lady, what will you say, when the next thing you hear of me after my last letter is, that I have danced three country-dances with a whole set, forty years younger than myself! Shall not you think I have been chopped to shreds and boiled in Medea’s kettle? Shall not you expect to see a print of Vestris teaching me?—and Lord Brudenell dying with envy? You may stare with all your expressive eyes, yet the fact is true. Danced—I do not absolutely say, danced—but I swam down three dances very gracefully, with the air that was so much in fashion after the battle of Oudenarde, and that was still taught when I was fifteen, and that I remember General Churchill practising before a glass in a gouty shoe.
“To be sure you die with impatience to know the particulars. You must know then—for all my revels must out—I not only went five miles to Lady Aylesford’s ball last Friday, but my nieces, the Waldegraves, desired me there to let them come to me for a few days, as they had been disappointed about a visit they were to make at another place; but that is neither here nor there. Well, here they are, and last night we went to Lady Hertford at Ditton. Soon after, Lady North and her daughters arrived, and besides Lady Elizabeth and Lady Bell Conways, there were their brothers Hugh and George. All the jeunesse strolled about the garden. We ancients, with the Earl and Colonel Keene, retired from the dew into the drawing-room. Soon after, the two youths and seven nymphs came in, and shut the door of the hall. In a moment, we heard a burst of laughter, and thought we distinguished something like the scraping of a fiddle. My curiosity was raised, I opened the door, and found four couples and a half standing up, and a miserable violin from the ale-house. ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘Lady Bell shall not want a partner;’ I threw away my stick, and me voilà dansant comme un charme! At the end of the third dance, Lord North and his son, in boots, arrived. ‘Come,’ said I, ‘my Lord, you may dance, if I have’—but it ended in my resigning my place to his son.
“Lady North has invited us for to-morrow, and I shall reserve the rest of my letter for the second volume of my regeneration; however, I declare I will not dance. I will not make myself too cheap; I should have the Prince of Wales sending for me three or four times a week to hops in Eastcheap. As it is, I feel I shall have some difficulty to return to my old dowagers, at the Duchess of Montrose’s, and shall be humming the Hempdressers, when they are scolding me for playing in flush.
“Friday, the 27th.
“I am not only a prophet, but have more command of my passions than such impetuous gentry as prophets are apt to have. We found the fiddles as I foretold; and yet I kept my resolution and did not dance, though the Sirens invited me, and though it would have shocked the dignity of old Tiffany Ellis, who would have thought it an indecorum. The two younger Norths and Sir Ralph Payne supplied my place. I played at cribbage with the matrons, and we came away at midnight. So if I now and then do cut a colt’s tooth, I have it drawn immediately. I do not know a paragraph of news—the nearer the minister, the farther from politics.
“P.S. My next jubilee dancing shall be with Lady Gertrude.”
Not long after the date of these letters, Mann sends news of further improvements at Florence. Walpole answers:
“The decree88 you sent me against high heads diverted me. It is as necessary here, but would not have such expeditious effect. The Queen has never admitted feathers at Court; but, though the nation has grown excellent courtiers, Fashion remained in opposition, and not a plume less was worn anywhere else. Some centuries ago, the Clergy preached against monstrous head-dresses; but Religion had no more power than our Queen. It is better to leave the Mode to its own vagaries; if she is not contradicted, she seldom remains long in the same mood. She is very despotic; but, though her reign is endless, her laws are repealed as fast as made.”
The frequency of highway robberies only a century ago sounds surprising to the present generation. Horace recounts to Lady Ossory an adventure of this kind which befell him and his friend and neighbour, Lady Browne, in the autumn of this jovial 1781:
“The night I had the honour of writing to your Ladyship last, I was robbed—and, as if I were a sovereign or a nation, have had a discussion ever since whether it was not a neighbour who robbed me—and should it come to the ears of the newspapers, it might produce as ingenious a controversy amongst our anonymous wits as any of the noble topics I have been mentioning. Voici le fait. Lady Browne and I were, as usual, going to the Duchess of Montrose at seven o’clock. The evening was very dark. In the close lane under her park-pale, and within twenty yards of the gate, a black figure on horseback pushed by between the chaise and the hedge on my side. I suspected it was a highwayman, and so I found did Lady Browne, for she was speaking and stopped. To divert her fears, I was just going to say, Is not that the apothecary going to the Duchess? when I heard a voice cry ‘Stop!’ and the figure came back to the chaise. I had the presence of mind, before I let down the glass, to take out my watch and stuff it within my waistcoat under my arm. He said, ‘Your purses and watches!’ I replied, ‘I have no watch.’ ‘Then your purse!’ I gave it to him; it had nine guineas. It was so dark that I could not see his hand, but felt him take it. He then asked for Lady Browne’s purse, and said, ‘Don’t be frightened; I will not hurt you.’ I said, ‘No; you won’t frighten the lady?’ He replied, ‘No; I give you my word I will do you no hurt.’ Lady Browne gave him her purse, and was going to add her watch, but he said, ‘I am much obliged to you! I wish you good-night!’ pulled off his hat, and rode away. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘Lady Browne, you will not be afraid of being robbed another time, for you see there is nothing in it.’ ‘Oh! but I am,’ said she, ‘and now I am in terrors lest he should return, for I have given him a purse with only bad money that I carry on purpose.’ ‘He certainly will not open it directly,’ said I, ‘and at worst he can only wait for us at our return; but I will send my servant back for a horse and a blunderbuss,’ which I did. The next distress was not to terrify the Duchess, who is so paralytic and nervous. I therefore made Lady Browne go into the parlour, and desired one of the Duchess’s servants to get her a glass of water, while I went into the drawing-room to break it to the Duchess. ‘Well,’ said I, laughing to her and the rest of the company, ‘you won’t get much from us to-night.’ ‘Why,’ said one of them, ‘have you been robbed?’ ‘Yes, a little,’ said I. The Duchess trembled; but it went off. Her groom of the chambers said not a word, but slipped out, and Lady Margaret and Miss Howe having servants there on horseback, he gave them pistols and despatched them different ways. This was exceedingly clever, for he knew the Duchess would not have suffered it, as lately he had detected a man who had robbed her garden, and she would not allow him to take up the fellow. These servants spread the story, and when my footman arrived on foot, he was stopped in the street by the ostler of the ‘George,’ who told him the highwayman’s horse was then in the stable; but this part I must reserve for the second volume, for I have made this no story so long and so tedious that your Ladyship will not be able to read it in a breath; and the second part is so much longer and so much less, contains so many examinations of witnesses, so many contradictions in the depositions, which I have taken myself, and, I must confess, with such abilities and shrewdness that I have found out nothing at all, that I think to defer the prosecution of my narrative till all the other inquisitions on the anvil are liquidated, lest your Ladyship’s head, strong as it is, should be confounded, and you should imagine that Rodney or Ferguson was the person who robbed us in Twickenham Lane. I would not have detailed the story at all, if you were not in a forest, where it will serve to put you to sleep as well as a newspaper full of lies; and I am sure there is as much dignity in it as in the combined fleet, and ours, popping in and out alternately, like a man and woman in a weather-house.”
A few months later he writes to his Countess:
“Strawberry Hill, Aug. 31, 1782.
“It is very strange indeed, Madam, that you should make me excuses for writing, or think that I have anything better, or even more urgent, to do than to read your letters. It is very true that the Duchess de la Vallière, in a hand which I could not decypher, has recommended Count Soltikoff and his wife to me: but, oh! my shame, I have not yet seen them. I did mean to go to town to-day on purpose, but I have had the gout in my right eyelid, and it was swelled yesterday as big as a walnut; being now shrunk to less than a pistachio, I propose in two or three days to make my appearance. Luckily the Countess was born in England, the daughter of the former Czernichew, and she is in such terrors of highwaymen, that I shall be quit for a breakfast; so it is an ill highwayman that blows nobody good. In truth, it would be impossible, in this region, to amass a set of company for dinner to meet them. The Hertfords, Lady Holdernesse, and Lady Mary Coke did dine here on Thursday, but were armed as if going to Gibraltar; and Lady Cecilia Johnston would not venture even from Petersham—for in the town of Richmond they rob even before dusk—to such perfection are all the arts brought! Who would have thought that the war with America would make it impossible to stir from one village to another? yet so it literally is. The Colonies took off all our commodities down to highwaymen. Now being forced to mew, and then turn them out, like pheasants, the roads are stocked with them, and they are so tame that they even come into houses.
“I have just been reading a most entertaining book, which I will recommend to you, as you are grown antiquaries: I don’t know whether it is published yet, for the author sent it to me. Part was published some time ago in the ‘Archæologia,’ and is almost the only paper in that mass of rubbish that has a grain of common sense. It is ‘Mr. E. King on ancient Castles.’ You will see how comfortably and delectably our potent ancestors lived, when in the constant state of war to which we are coming. Earls, barons, and their fair helpmates lived pell-mell in dark dungeons with their own soldiers, as the poorest cottagers do now with their pigs. I shall repent decking Strawberry so much, if I must turn it into a garrison.
“Mr. Vernon was your Ladyship’s informant about the Soltikoffs; but he gave me more credit for my intended civilities than I deserved. The French do not conceive, when they address strangers to us, that we do not at all live in their style. It is no trouble to them, who have miscellaneous dinners or suppers, to ask one or two more; nor are they at any expense in language, as everybody speaks French. In the private way in which I live, it is troublesome to give a formal dinner to foreigners, and more so to find company for them in a circle of dowagers, who would only jabber English scandal out of the Morning Post.…
“Just this moment I hear the shocking loss of the Royal George! Admiral Kempenfelt is a loss indeed; but I confess I feel more for the hundreds of poor babes who have lost their parents! If one grows ever so indifferent, some new calamity calls one back to this deplorable war! If one is willing to content one’s self, in a soaking autumn, with a match broken, or with the death of a Prince Duodecimus, a clap of thunder awakens one, and one hears that Britain herself has lost an arm or a leg. I have been expecting a deluge, and a famine, and such casualties as enrich a Sir Richard Baker; but we have all King David’s options at once! and what was his option before he was anointed, freebooting too?
“Drowned as we are, the country never was in such beauty; the herbage and leafage are luxurious. The Thames gives itself Rhone airs, and almost foams; it is none of your home-brewed rivers that Mr. Brown makes with a spade and a watering-pot. Apropos, Mr. Duane,89 like a good housewife, in the middle of his grass-plot, has planted a pump and a watering-trough for his cow, and I suppose on Saturdays dries his towels and neckcloths on his orange-trees; but I must have done, or the post will be gone.”
At the end of 1782, Mrs. Siddons was the talk of the town. Prejudiced as Walpole was apt to be in his judgments of actors, as of authors, his impressions of this famous actress will be read with interest:
“I have been for two days in town, and seen Mrs. Siddons. She pleased me beyond my expectation, but not up to the admiration of the ton, two or three of whom were in the same box with me.… Mr. Crawford asked me if I did not think her the best actress I ever saw? I said, ‘By no means; we old folks were apt to be prejudiced in favour of our first impressions.’ She is a good figure, handsome enough, though neither nose nor chin according to the Greek standard, beyond which both advance a good deal. Her hair is either red, or she has no objection to its being thought so, and had used red powder. Her voice is clear and good; but I thought she did not vary its modulations enough, nor ever approach enough to the familiar—but this may come when more habituated to the awe of the audience of the capital. Her action is proper, but with little variety; when without motion, her arms are not genteel. Thus you see all my objections are very trifling; but what I really wanted, but did not find, was originality, which announces genius, and without both which I am never intrinsically pleased. All Mrs. Siddons did, good sense or good instruction might give. I dare to say, that were I one-and-twenty, I should have thought her marvellous; but alas! I remember Mrs. Porter and the Dumesnil—and remember every accent of the former in the very same part. Yet this is not entirely prejudice: don’t I equally recollect the whole progress of Lord Chatham and Charles Townshend, and does it hinder my thinking Mr. Fox a prodigy?—Pray don’t send him this paragraph too.”
Again:
“Mrs. Siddons continues to be the mode, and to be modest and sensible. She declines great dinners, and says her business and the cares of her family take up her whole time. When Lord Carlisle carried her the tribute-money from Brooks’s, he said she was not maniérée enough. ‘I suppose she was grateful,’ said my niece, Lady Maria. Mrs. Siddons was desired to play ‘Medea’ and ‘Lady Macbeth.’—‘No,’ she replied ‘she did not look on them as female characters.’ She was questioned about her transactions with Garrick: she said, ‘He did nothing but put her out; that he told her she moved her right hand when it should have been her left. In short,’ said she, ‘I found I must not shade the tip of his nose.’”
The war was now over. Lord North had fallen; his successor, Lord Rockingham, was dead; and Lord Shelburne, who had grasped the helm in spite of Fox, had to meet the demands of the victorious Colonists and their French allies, with the certainty that whatever he arranged would be distasteful to his countrymen, and bitterly opposed by the partisans both of his rival and of North. With the first weeks of 1783 came news of peace. Horace writes about it, in almost the same words, to Mann and Lady Ossory, his two chief correspondents at this time: “Peace is arrived. I cannot express how glad I am. I care not a straw what the terms are, which I believe I know more imperfectly than anybody in London. I am not apt to love details—my wish was to have peace, and the next to see America secure of its liberty. Whether it will make good use of it, is another point. It has an opportunity that never occurred in the world before, of being able to select the best parts of every known constitution; but I suppose it will not, as too prejudiced against royalty to adopt it, even as a corrective of aristocracy and democracy.” He anticipates that highway robberies will grow more daring on the disbanding of troops, and that there will be an inundation of French visitors. In less than six months he was able to boast that both his prophecies had been fulfilled. In June, he describes how, on a dark and rainy night, Strawberry Hill was invaded by the French Ambassador at the head of a large party:
“Of all houses upon earth, mine, from the painted glass and over-hanging trees, wants the sun the most; besides the Star Chamber and passage being obscured on purpose to raise the Gallery. They ran their foreheads against Henry VII., and took the grated door of the Tribune for the dungeon of the castle. I mustered all the candlesticks in the house, but before they could be lighted up, the young ladies, who, by the way, are extremely natural, agreeable, and civil, were seized with a panic of highwaymen, and wanted to go. I laughed, and said, I believed there was no danger, for that I had not been robbed these two years. However, I was not quite in the right; they were stopped in Knightsbridge by two footpads, but Lady Pembroke having lent them a servant besides their own, they escaped.”
Shortly afterwards he writes to Mann:
“We have swarms of French daily; but they come as if they had laid wagers that there is no such place as England, and only wanted to verify its existence, or that they had a mind to dance a minuet on English ground; for they turn on their heel the moment after landing. Three came to see this house last week, and walked through it literally while I wrote eight lines of a letter; for I heard them go up the stairs, and heard them go down, exactly in the time I was finishing no longer a paragraph. It were happy for me had nobody more curiosity than a Frenchman; who is never struck with anything but what he has seen every day at Paris. I am tormented all day and every day by people that come to see my house, and have no enjoyment of it in summer. It would be even in vain to say that the plague is here. I remember such a report in London when I was a child, and my uncle, Lord Townshend, then Secretary of State, was forced to send guards to keep off the crowd from the house in which the plague was said to be; they would go and see the plague!”
Walpole apologises to his diplomatic correspondent for dwelling on such trifling topics. “The Peace,” he says, “has closed the chapter of important news, which was all our correspondence lived on.” The period of dulness and inaction, however, came to an end with the close of the Parliamentary vacation. The Coalition Government of Fox and Lord North, which had superseded Lord Shelburne in the spring, was now fairly brought to the bar of public opinion. Walpole, who had offended Fox’s adherents by the part he had played in the intrigues90 which followed on the death of Lord Rockingham, sought to retrieve his character by an eager support of the new Administration. He was loud in his praises of Fox’s masterly eloquence and strong sense. He now disparages Fox’s chief opponent. “His competitor, Mr. Pitt,” says Horace, “appears by no means an adequate rival. Just like their fathers, Mr. Pitt has brilliant language, Mr. Fox solid sense; and such luminous powers of displaying it clearly, that mere Eloquence is but a Bristol stone, when set by the diamond Reason.” The country at this moment was agitated by the debates on Fox’s celebrated India Bill. This measure was being carried by triumphant majorities through the Lower House, and, as Walpole thought, the Opposition did not expect to succeed even in the House of Lords. He goes so far as to add, “Mr. Pitt’s reputation is much sunk; nor, though he is a much more correct logician than his father, has he the same firmness and perseverance. It is no wonder that he was dazzled by his own premature fame; yet his late checks may be of use to him, and teach him to appreciate his strength better, or to wait till it is confirmed. Had he listed under Mr. Fox, who loved and courted him, he would not only have discovered modesty, but have been more likely to succeed him, than by commencing his competitor.” This was written on the 5th of December, 1783. Ten days later the India Bill was defeated in the House of Lords; the King at once dismissed the Coalition; and before the end of the year Pitt was installed as head of the Government, a position which he retained for the rest of Walpole’s life. The struggle which the new Ministry had to maintain for several weeks against an adverse majority in the House of Commons is matter of familiar history which needs not here be dwelt upon.