mischief-aware of them, generally speaking, from the very first movement in any of their most secret councils. There was not, too, a family in the British dominions whose leanings he was not acquainted with, and whose relations, with the Pretender, if they had any, he did not know. This knowledge he used without ever abusing it: he acted upon it for the safety of the State, without ever once bringing it to bear against the parties, or deriving from it the means of injuring, or of annoying, or of humbling his adversaries. The fact is well known, that he was possessed of proofs which would have ruined more than one of them. Shippen, among others, knew he was in his antagonist's power; but that antagonist never prevented him from honestly pursuing the course of his violent and indeed very factious opposition. It must be further observed, in honour of Walpole's wisdom and firmness, that when the Protestant succession was endangered by foreign movements on the part of the Pretender, his all but invincible repugnance to warlike measures gave way to a provident spirit of wary precaution; and he at once, both in his foreign negotiations with Holland and Germany, and in his vigorous preparations for war with France, showed his resolute determination to defend at all hazards the Revolution Settlement, and to punish those who would molest it.

The financial administration of Walpole has been deservedly commended by all but the zealots of a faction. Every one has admitted the great improvements which he introduced into that department. A single measure by which he repealed above a hundred export duties, and nearly forty on imported articles, was only part of his system; which was clearly before his age, and therefore exposed him to the usual clamour raised against original thinkers on state affairs. He held that raw commodities for manufactures, and articles of necessity for consumption, should be relieved from all taxes; that the impost upon land should be reduced as far as possible; that the revenue collected from the customs, being liable to evasions by contraband trade, should be transferred to the excise; and that articles of luxury should thus be more securely and economically made to bear the burdens of the public ex

penditure. Every one knows the clamour which the great measure of the excise, the principal illustration of his doctrine, encountered. His reason for relinquishing it is not discreditable to him. He had carried it by majorities always decreasing; and, when finally the majority was under twenty, he gave it up on ascertaining that the people were so generally set against it, that the aid of troops would be required to collect it. "No revenue, said this constitutional minister, "ought to be levied in this free country that it requires the sabre and the bayonet to collect." A learned and eminently narrow-minded man, hating Walpole for his Revolution principles, has not scrupled to record his own factious folly in the definition of Excise given in his dictionary. Another, a greater, a more factious, and a less honest man, helped, and much less impotently helped, to clamour down the only other part of Walpole's domestic administration which has ever been made the subject of open attack; though doubtless the extinction of Jacobitism was the real, but hidden, object of all these invectives:—I mean Dean Swift, whose promotion in the church he had prevented, upon discovering the most glaring acts of base perfidy on the part of that unprincipled wit; and whose revenge was taken against the provision made, rather by Walpole's predecessors than himself, for supplying a copper coinage to Ireland, upon terms to the trader perfectly fair, and to the country sufficiently advantageous. The Drapier's Letters,' one of his most famous productions, and by far his most popular, the act of his life, he was accustomed to confess, upon which rested his whole Irish popularity-and no name ever retained its estimation in the mind of the Irish people nearly so long-urged his countrymen to reject these halfpence; it being, the very reverend author solemnly asserted, "their first duty to God next to the salvation of their souls ;" and he asserted, impudently asserted, that the coin was only worth a twelfth of its nominal value. Impudently, I repeat, and why ?-Because a careful assay was immediately made at the English mint, by the Master of the Mint, and the result was to ascertain that the standard weight was justly proved. And who was that Master? None other than Sir Isaac Newton. The calumnies and the ribaldry of the Dean prevailed over the

experiments of the illustrious philosopher, and the coinage was withdrawn from circulation.*

The private character of Walpole is familiarly known; and all contemporary writers join in giving the same impression of it. Open, honest, unaffected, abounding in kindness, overflowing with good-humour, generous to profusion, hospitable to a fault, in his manners easy to excess -no wonder that the ruler of the country should have won all hearts, by qualities which would have made a private gentleman the darling of society. With these merits, however, were joined defects or weaknesses, that broke in somewhat upon the respect which severe judges require a great statesman to be compassed with round about. His mirth was somewhat free, and apt to be coarse; he patronized boisterous hilarity in the society which he frequented, and at the merry meetings which were the relaxation of his life. He regarded not the decorum which sober habits sustain; and he followed, in respect of convivial enjoyments, rather the fashion of his own day than of ours. He indulged, too, in gallantry more than beseemed either his station or his years; and he had, like a celebrated contemporary of his, the weakness of affecting to be less strictly virtuous in this respect than he was, and considerably more successful in his pursuit of such recreations. This mixture of honest openness and scorn of hypocrisy, with some little tendency to boast of fortune's favours, made the only trait like an exception to the wholly plain and unaffected nature of the man. Nor is it easy to define with accuracy how much was affectation, and how much ought to be set down to the account of a merely joyous and frank temper. The delight which all persons, of whatever age or cast, took in his society, is admitted by every witness.

Of Sir Robert Walpole's character as an orator, or rather a great master of debate, it is of course at this distance of time, and with so little help from the parliamentary history

* An Irish writer of incoherent mathematical papers in our own day attacks Sir Isaac Newton as a "Saxon," and a "driveller;" and he is not treated in Ireland with universal scorn.

Louis XIV., when some one was recounting his nephew the Duc d'Orléans's (afterwards Regent's) foibles and vices, said, in language much eulogized by St. Simon, who relates the anecdote,-"Encore est-il fanfaron de vices qu'il n'a point."

of the day, not easy to speak with confidence or discrimination; because we must rely on the estimate formed by others, and handed down to us, with few indeed of the materials on which their judgment rested. That he despised not only all affectation and all refinements, but all the resources of the oratorical art beyond its great "origin and fountain," strong sense, clear ideas, anxious devotion to the object in view, carrying the audience along with the speaker, -may well be supposed from the manly and plain, the homely and somewhat coarse, character of his understanding. Eminently a man of business, he came down to Parliament to do the business of the country, and he did it. He excelled in lucid statement, whether of an argument or of facts; he met his antagonist fearlessly, and went through every part of the question; he was abundantly ready at reply and at retort; he constantly preserved his temper, was even well-natured and gay in the midst of all his difficulties; and possessed his constitutional good-humour, with his unvaried presence of mind, in the thickest fire of the debate, be it ever so vehement, ever so personal, as entirely as if he were in his office, or his study, or the common circle of his friends. He was, too, a lively, and not ever a tiresome, speaker; nor did any man, hardly Lord North himself, more fully enjoy the position-to any debater very enviable, to a minister the most enviable of all -that of a constant favourite with the House which it was his vocation to lead. Such is the general account left us of his speaking, and on this all witnesses are agreed.

His

It may be added, that his style was homely, for the most part; and his manner, though animated and lively, yet by no means affecting dignity. In figures of speech he but rarely indulged, though his language seems to have been often distinguished by point. His personal retorts, though hardly ever offensive, were often distinguished by much force of invective and considerable felicity of sarcasm. description of the factious and motley opposition, moved by the dark intrigues of Bolingbroke, and his portrait of that wily and subtle adversary, appears to have been a passage of great merit, as far as the conception went; for of the execution we cannot in fairness permit ourselves to judge from the only record of it which is preserved, the meagre

parliamentary remains of those days. The excellence of this celebrated speech, which eventually drove Bolingbroke abroad, is greatly enhanced by the important circumstance of its being an unpremeditated reply to a very elaborate attack upon himself, in which Sir William Windham had feigned a case applicable to Walpole's, and under that cover drawn a severe portrait of him.

Notwithstanding the general plainness and simplicity of his style, some speeches remain distinguished by a highly ornamental and even figurative manner; that, for example, in opposition to the Peerage Bill, in which he spoke of the antients having erected the temple of honour behind the temple of virtue, to show by what avenues it must be approached; whereas we were called upon to provide that its only avenue should be an obscure family pedigree, or the winding-sheet of some worthless ancestor. Some idea of his more animated and successful efforts may be formed, and it is a very high one, from the admirable exordium of his speech in reply to the long series of attacks upon him which Sandys's motion for his removal, in 1741, introduced. There remain of this speech only his own minutes, yet even from these its great merits appear clear. "Whatever is the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned. If we maintain ourselves in peace, and seek no share in foreign transactions, we are reproached with tameness and pusillanimity. If we interfere in disputes, we are called Don Quixotes and dupes to all the world. If we contract (give) guarantees, it is asked why the nation is wantonly burdened. If guarantees are declined, we are reproached with having no allies."

In general, his manner was simple, and even familiar, with a constant tendency towards gaiety. But of this his finest speech it is recorded, that the delivery was most fascinating, and of a dignity rarely surpassed. In vehemence of declamation he seldom indulged, and anything very violent was foreign to his habits at all times. Yet sometimes he deviated from this course; and once spoke under such excitement (on the motion respecting Lord Cadogan's conduct, 1717) that the blood burst from his nose, and he had to quit the House. But for this accidental relief, he probably would have afforded a singular instance of a speaker, always good-humoured and easy in his delivery