Chapter XV: Part 15

[Born in 1708, died 1778, one of the most eminent of English
statesmen and orators. Educated at Eton and Oxford, he spent a
short term in the army, but found his true vocation on being
elected to Parliament in 1737. It was not till 1755 that he became
virtual prime minister. Under his control the arms and diplomacy of
England became generally victorious throughout the world. It was
largely owing to his support that Frederick the Great was finally
victorious over his enemies, and that a great and consistent
foreign policy was inaugurated that raised the nation to a lofty
pitch of glory. The elder Pitt was known as the “great commoner,”
and it was thought derogatory to his fame when he accepted a
peerage. He was the firm and eloquent advocate of the American
colonists in their claims against the mother-country.]

It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthusiasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone. The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginativeness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption, his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he turned from a corruption which had till then been the great engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself, in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out. “I know that I can save the country,” he said to the Duke of Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, “and I know no other man can.” The groundwork of Pitt’s character was an intense and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England in their hands. He was the first statesman since the restoration who set the example of a purely public spirit.

Keen as was his love of power, no man ever refused office so often or accepted it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed. “I will not go to court,” he replied to an offer which was made him, “if I may not bring the constitution with me.” For the corruption about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset of his career Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office in his administration, that of paymaster of the forces; but its profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never appeared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude toward the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than “the great commoner,” as Pitt was styled, but his air was always that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs were roaring themselves hoarse for “Wilkes and liberty,” he denounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and when all England went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist on the side of loyalty.

His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which flashed from the small, thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House of Commons far greater than any other minister has possessed. He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of his power his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen members.

His real strength, indeed, lay not in Parliament, but in the people at large. His significant title of “the great commoner” marks a political revolution. “It is the people who have sent me here,” Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the cabinet opposed his will. He was the first to see that the long political inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the progress of commerce and industry had produced a great middle class which no longer found its representatives in the legislature. “You have taught me,” said George II, when Pitt sought to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, “to look for the voice of my people in other places than within the House of Commons.”

It was this unrepresented class which had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom and addresses of confidence. “For weeks,” laughs Horace Walpole, “it rained gold boxes.” London stood by him through good report and evil report, and the wealthiest of English merchants, Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant. The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with its energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its honesty, its moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were drawn by a natural attraction to the one statesman of their time whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life was pure and full of tender affection for wife and child. But there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever since.

He loved England with an intense and personal love. He believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs, her defeats his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all thought of self or party spirit. “Be one people,” he cried to the factions who rose to bring about his fall; “forget everything but the public! I set you the example!” His glowing patriotism was the real spell by which he held England. But even the faults which checkered his character told for him with the middle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in the cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted business with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, genuine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone. It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the House of Commons “the gestures and emotions of the stage.” But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the statesman who was borne into the lobby amid the tortures of the gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last in a protest against national dishonor.

Above all Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence. The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy debates of the long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utterance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry was flung off by the age of the revolution, but in the eloquence of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius, knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the front. That with defects like these he stood far above every orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction, to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. “I must sit still,” he whispered once to a friend, “for when once I am up everything that is in my mind comes out.” But the reality of his eloquence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination, and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high above the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit, the common sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity, a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words were a power, a power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen’s. But it was especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief passionate appeals, that the power of his eloquence lay. The few broken words we have of him stir the same thrill in men of our day which they stirred in the men of his own. But passionate as was Pitt’s eloquence, it was the eloquence of a statesman, not of a rhetorician. Time has approved almost all his greater struggles, his defense of the liberty of the subject against arbitrary imprisonment under “general warrants,” of the liberty of the press against Lord Mansfield, of the rights of constituencies against the House of Commons, of the constitutional rights of America against England itself. His foreign policy was directed to the preservation of Prussia, and Prussia has vindicated his foresight by the creation of Germany. We have adopted his plans for the direct government of India by the crown, which when he proposed them were regarded as insane. Pitt was the first to recognize the liberal character of the Church of England. He was the first to sound the note of parliamentary reform. One of his earliest measures shows the generosity and originality of his mind. He quieted Scotland by employing its Jacobites in the service of their country, and by raising the Highland regiments among its clans. The selection of Wolfe and Amherst as generals showed his contempt for precedent and his inborn knowledge of men.

EDMUND BURKE.

BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[One of the greatest of English statesmen and orators, born in
Ireland in 1730, died 1797. He entered Parliament in 1766, and at
the beginning of the American troubles at once identified himself
with the policy of conciliation and moderation. During his long
parliamentary career Burke distinguished himself in connection with
every political problem which agitated the British Empire, though
he never became prime minister, and was for the most of his life a
member of the opposition. Burke’s speech at the trial of Warren
Hastings is regarded by many critics as the greatest oration ever
delivered in any forum. He was scarcely less distinguished as a
writer on political and philosophical questions than as statesman
and orator.]

There are few men whose depth and versatility have been both so fully recognized by their contemporaries and whose pre-eminence in many widely different spheres is so amply attested. Adam Smith declared that he had found no other man who, without communication, had thought out the same conclusions on political economy as himself. Winstanley, the Camden Professor of Ancient History, bore witness to his great knowledge of the “philosophy, history, and filiation of languages, and of the principles of etymological deduction.” Arthur Young, the first living authority on agriculture, acknowledged his obligations to him for much information about his special pursuits, and it was in a great degree his passion for agriculture which induced Burke, when the death of his elder brother had improved his circumstances, to incumber himself with a heavy debt by purchasing that Beaconsfield estate where some of his happiest days were spent. His conversational powers were only equaled, and probably not surpassed, by those of Johnson. Goldsmith described him as “winding into his subject, like a serpent.” “Like the fabled object of the fairy’s favors,” said Wilberforce, “whenever he opened his mouth pearls and diamonds dropped from him.” Grattan pronounced him the best talker he had ever known. Johnson, in spite of their violent political differences, always spoke of him with generous admiration. “Burke is an extraordinary man. His stream of mind is perpetual.... His talk is the ebullition of his mind. He does not talk for a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full.... He is the only man whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the world. Take up what topic you please, he is ready to meet you.... No man of sense could meet Mr. Burke by accident under a gateway to avoid a shower without being convinced that he was the first man in England.” It is not surprising that “he is the first man in the House of Commons, for he is the first man everywhere.” He once declared that “he knew but two men who had risen considerably above the common standard--Lord Chatham and Edmund Burke.”

The admirable proportion which subsisted between his different powers, both moral and intellectual, is especially remarkable. Genius is often, like the pearl, the offspring or the accompaniment of disease, and an extraordinary development of one class of faculties is too frequently balanced by an extraordinary deficiency of others. But nothing of this kind can be found in Burke.

His intellectual energy was fully commensurate with his knowledge, and he had rare powers of bringing illustrations and methods of reasoning derived from many spheres to bear on any subject he touched, and of combining an extraordinary natural facility with the most untiring and fastidious labor. In debate images, illustrations, and arguments rose to his lips with a spontaneous redundance that astonished his hearers; but no writer elaborated his compositions more carefully, and his printers were often aghast at the multitude of his corrections and alterations. Nor did his intellectual powers in any degree dry up or dwarf his moral nature. There is no public man whose character is more clearly reflected in his life and in his intimate correspondence; and it may be confidently said that there is no other public man whose character was in all essential respects more transparently pure. Weak health, deep and fervent religious principles, and studious habits, saved him from the temptations of youth; and amid all the vicissitudes and corruption of politics his heart never lost its warmth, or his conscience its sensitiveness.

There were faults, indeed, which were only too apparent in his character as in his intellect--an excessive violence and irritability of temper; personal antipathies, which were sometimes carried beyond all the bounds of reason; party spirit, which was too often suffered to obscure his judgment and to hurry him into great intemperance and exaggeration of language. But he was emphatically a good man; and in the higher moral qualities of public as of private life he has not often been surpassed. That loyal affection with which he clung through his whole life to the friends of his early youth; that genuine kindness which made him, when still a poor man, the munificent patron of Barry and Crabbe, and which showed itself in innumerable acts of unobtrusive benevolence; that stainless purity and retiring modesty of nature which made his domestic life so different from that of some of the greatest of his contemporaries; that depth of feeling which made the loss of his only son the death-knell of the whole happiness of his life, may be traced in every stage of his public career. “I know the map of England,” he once said, “as well as the noble lord, or as any other person, and I know that the way I take is not the road to preferment.” Fidelity to his engagements, a disinterested pursuit of what he believed to be right, in spite of all the allurements of interest and of popularity; a deep and ardent hatred of oppression and cruelty in every form; a readiness at all times to sacrifice personal pretensions to party interests; a capacity of devoting long years of thankless labor to the service of those whom he had never seen, and who could never reward him, were the great characteristics of his life, and they may well make us pardon many faults of temper, judgment, and taste.

In Parliament he had great obstacles to contend with. An Irishman unconnected with any of the great governing families, and without any of the influence derived from property and rank, he entered Parliament late in life and with habits fully formed, and during the greater part of his career he spoke as a member of a small minority in opposition to the strong feeling of the House. He was too old and too rigid to catch its tone, and he never acquired that subtle instinct or tact which enables some speakers to follow its fleeting moods and to strike with unfailing accuracy the precise key which is most in harmony with its prevailing temper. “Of all politicians of talent I ever knew,” wrote Horace Walpole, “Burke has least political art,” and his defects so increased with age that the time came when he was often listened to with undisguised impatience. He spoke too often, too vehemently, and much too long; and his eloquence, though in the highest degree intellectual, powerful, various, and original, was not well adapted to a popular audience.

He had little or nothing of that fire and majesty of declamation with which Chatham thrilled his hearers, and often almost overawed opposition, and as a parliamentary debater he was far inferior to Charles Fox. That great master of persuasive reasoning never failed to make every sentence tell upon his hearers, to employ precisely and invariably the kind of arguments that were most level with their understandings, to subordinate every other consideration to the single end of convincing and impressing those who were before him. Burke was not inferior to Fox in readiness and in the power of clear and cogent reasoning. His wit, though not of the highest order, was only equaled by that of Townshend, Sheridan, and perhaps North, and it rarely failed in its effect upon the House. He far surpassed every other speaker in the copiousness and correctness of his diction, in the range of knowledge he brought to bear on every subject of debate, in the richness and variety of his imagination, in the gorgeous beauty of his descriptive passages, in the depth of the philosophical reflections and the felicity of the personal sketches which he delighted in scattering over his speeches. But these gifts were frequently marred by a strange want of judgment, measure, and self-control.

His speeches were full of episodes and digressions, of excessive ornamentation and illustration, of dissertations on general principles of politics, which were invaluable in themselves, but very unpalatable to a tired or excited house waiting eagerly for a division. As Grattan once said, “they were far better suited to a patient reader than an impatient hearer.” Passionately in earnest in the midst of a careless or half-hearted assembly, seeking in all measures their essential and permanent tendencies, while his hearers thought chiefly of their transient and personal aspects, discussing first principles and remote consequences, among men whose minds were concentrated on the struggle of the hour, constantly led away by the endless stream of ideas and images which were forever surging from his brain, he was often interrupted by his impatient hearers. There is scarcely a perceptible difference between the style of his essays and the style of his published speeches; and if the reader selects from his works the few passages which possess to an eminent degree the flash and movement of spoken rhetoric, he will be quite as likely to find them in the former as in the latter.

Like most men of great imaginative power, he possessed a highly strung and oversensitive nervous organization, and the incessant conflicts of parliamentary life brought it at last into a condition of irritability that was wholly morbid and abnormal. Though eminently courteous and amenable to reason in private life, in public he was often petulant, intractable, and ungovernably violent. His friends sometimes held him down by the skirts of his coat to restrain the outbursts of his anger. He spoke with a burning brain and with quivering nerves. The rapid, vehement, impetuous torrent of his eloquence, kindling as it flowed and the nervous motions of his countenance reflected the ungovernable excitement under which he labored; and while Fox could cast off without an effort the cares of public life and pass at once from Parliament to a night of dissipation at Brooks’s, Burke returned from debate jaded, irritated, and soured.

With an intellect capable of the very highest efforts of judicial wisdom he combined the passions of the most violent partisan, and in the excitement of debate these too often obtained the ascendency. Few things are more curious than the contrast between the feverish and passionate excitement with which he threw himself into party debates and the admirably calm, exhaustive, and impartial summaries of the rival arguments which he afterward drew up for the “Annual Register.” Though a most skillful and penetrating critic, and though his English style is one of the very finest in the language, his taste was not pure. Even his best writings are sometimes disfigured by strangely coarse and repulsive images, and gross violations of taste appear to have been frequent in his speeches. It is probable that in his case the hasty reports in the “Parliamentary History” and in the “Cavendish Debates” are more than commonly defective, for Burke was a very rapid speaker, and his language had the strongly marked individuality which reporters rarely succeed in conveying; but no one who judged by these reports would place his speeches in the first rank, and some of them are wild and tawdry almost to insanity.

Nor does he appear to have possessed any histrionic power. His voice had little charm. He had a strong Irish accent, and Erskine described his delivery as “execrable,” and declared that in some of his finest speeches he emptied the house.

Gerard Hamilton once said that while everywhere else Burke seemed the first man, in the House of Commons he appeared only the second. At the same time there is ample evidence that with all his defects he was from the first a great power in the House, and that in the early part of his career, and almost always on occasions of great importance, his eloquence had a wonderful power upon his hearers. Pitt passed into the House of Lords almost immediately after Burke had entered the Commons. Fox was then a boy; Sheridan had not yet become a member; and his fellow-countryman, Barré, though a rhetorician of great if somewhat coarse power, was completely eclipsed by the splendor and the variety of the talents of Burke. Charles Townshend alone, who shone for a few years with a meteoric brilliancy in English politics, was regarded as his worthy rival. Johnson wrote to Langton with great delight that Burke by his first speeches in the House had “gained more reputation than perhaps any man at his first appearance ever gained before.”

“An Irishman, Mr. Burke, is sprung up,” wrote the American General Lee, who was then watching London politics with great care, “who has astonished everybody with the power of his eloquence and his comprehensive knowledge in all our exterior and internal politics and commercial interests. He wants nothing but that sort of dignity annexed to rank and property in England to make him the most considerable man in the Lower House.” Grattan, who on a question of oratory was one of the most competent of judges, wrote in 1769, “Burke is unquestionably the first orator among the Commons of England, boundless in knowledge, instantaneous in his apprehensions, and abundant in his language. He speaks with profound attention and acknowledged superiority, notwithstanding the want of energy, the want of grace, and the want of elegance in his manner.” Horace Walpole, who hated Burke, acknowledged that he was “versed in every branch of eloquence,” that he possessed “the quickest conception, amazing facility of elocution, great strength of argumentation, all the power of imagination, and memory,” that even his unpremeditated speeches displayed “a choice and variety of language, a profusion of metaphors, and a correctness of diction that was surprising,” and that in public, though not in private life his wit was of the highest order, “luminous, striking, and abundant.” He complained, however, with good reason that he “often lost himself in a torrent of images and copiousness,” that “he dealt abundantly too much in establishing general positions,” that he had “no address or insinuation”; that his speeches often showed a great want of sobriety and judgment, and “the still greater want of art to touch the passions.”

But though their length, their excursiveness, and their didactic character did undoubtedly on many occasions weary and even empty the House, there were others in which Burke showed a power both of fascinating and of moving, such as very few speakers have attained. Gibbon, whose sinecure place was swept away by the Economical Reform Bill of 1782, bears testimony to the “delight with which that diffusive and ingenious orator, Mr. Burke, was heard by all sides of the House, and even by those whose existence he proscribed.” Walpole has himself repeatedly noticed the effect which the speeches of Burke produced upon the hearers. Describing one of those against the American war, he says that the wit of one part “excited the warmest and most continued bursts of laughter even from Lord North, Rigby, and the ministers themselves,” while the pathos of another part “drew iron tears down Barré’s cheek,” and Governor Johnston exclaimed that “he was now glad that strangers were excluded, as if they had been admitted Burke’s speech would have excited them to tear ministers to pieces as they went out of the House.” Sir Gilbert Elliot, describing one of Burke’s speeches on the Warren Hastings impeachment, says: “He did not, I believe, leave a dry eye in the whole assembly.” Making every allowance for the enthusiasm of a French Royalist for the author of the “Reflections on the French Revolution,” the graphic description by the Duke de Levis of one of Burke’s latest speeches on that subject is sufficient to show the magnetism of his eloquence even at the end of his career. “He made the whole House pass in an instant from the tenderest emotions of feeling to bursts of laughter; never was the electric power of eloquence more imperiously felt. This extraordinary man seemed to raise and quell the passions of his auditors with as much ease and as rapidly as a skillful musician passes into the various modulations of his harpsichord. I have witnessed many, too many political assemblages and striking scenes where eloquence performed a noble part, but the whole of them appear insipid when compared with this amazing effort.”

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[Commander-in-chief of the American armies during the Revolution,
and first President of the United States, born 1732, died 1799.
Washington’s first notable appearance in public life was in the
Braddock expedition of 1755, when, at the age of twenty-three, as
commander of the provincials in the British force, he saved the
remains of the defeated army. Thenceforward he became one of the
most important figures in Virginia. After five years of military
service he resigned his commission and retired to private life,
except doing his duty as member of the Provincial Assembly. When
the colonies took up arms, in 1775, Washington received the
unanimous call to the chief command. At the close of hostilities
General Washington resigned his commission and retired to Mount
Vernon, shunning all connection with public affairs. He was made
president of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and on the
promulgation of the Constitution, it was his transcendent
popularity which was the most important influence in securing its
ratification by the requisite number of States. He was elected
first President, and served for two terms.]

Perhaps the most difficult question, however, was the appointment of a commander-in-chief; and on no other subject did the Congress exhibit more conspicuous wisdom. When only twenty-three, Washington had been appointed commander of the Virginian forces against the French; and in the late war, though he had met with one serious disaster, and had no opportunity of obtaining any very brilliant military reputation, he had always shown himself an eminently brave and skillful soldier. His great modesty and taciturnity kept him in the background, both in the provincial legislature and in the Continental Congress; but though his voice was scarcely ever heard in debate, his superiority was soon felt in the practical work of the committees. “If you speak of solid information or sound judgment,” said Patrick Henry about this time, “Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man in the Congress.” He appeared in the assembly in uniform, and in military matters his voice had an almost decisive weight. Several circumstances distinguished him from other officers, who in military service might have been his rivals.

He was of an old American family. He was a planter of wealth and social position, and being a Virginian, his appointment was a great step toward enlisting that important colony cordially in the cause. The capital question now pending in America was, how far the other colonies would support New England in the struggle. In the preceding March, Patrick Henry had carried a resolution for embodying and reorganizing the Virginia militia, and had openly proclaimed that an appeal to arms was inevitable; but as yet New England had borne almost the whole burden.

The army at Cambridge was a New England army, and General Ward, who commanded it, had been appointed by Massachusetts. Even if Ward were superseded, there were many New England competitors for the post of commander; the army naturally desired a chief of their own province, and there were divisions and hostilities among the New England deputies. The great personal merit of Washington and the great political importance of securing Virginia, determined the issue; and the New England deputies ultimately took a leading part in the appointment. The second place was given to General Ward, and the third to Charles Lee, an English soldier of fortune who had lately purchased land in Virginia and embraced the American cause with great passion. Lee had probably a wider military experience than any other officer in America, but he was a man of no settled principles, and his great talents were marred by a very irritable and capricious temper.

To the appointment of Washington, far more than to any other single circumstance, is due the ultimate success of the American Revolution, though in purely intellectual powers Washington was certainly inferior to Franklin, and perhaps to two or three others of his colleagues. There is a theory which once received the countenance of some considerable physiologists, though it is now, I believe, completely discarded, that one of the great lines of division among men may be traced to the comparative development of the cerebrum and the cerebellum. To the first organ it was supposed belong those special gifts or powers which make men poets, orators, thinkers, artists, conquerors, or wits. To the second belong the superintending, restraining, discerning, and directing faculties which enable men to employ their several talents with sanity and wisdom, which maintain the balance and the proportion of intellect and character, and make sound judgments and well-regulated lives. The theory, however untrue in its physiological aspect, corresponds to a real distinction in human minds and characters, and it was especially in the second order of faculties that Washington excelled. His mind was not quick or remarkably original. His conversation had no brilliancy or wit. He was entirely without the gift of eloquence, and he had very few accomplishments. He knew no language but his own, and except for a rather strong turn for mathematics, he had no taste which can be called purely intellectual. There was nothing in him of the meteor or the cataract, nothing that either dazzled or overpowered. A courteous and hospitable country gentleman, a skillful farmer, a very keen sportsman, he probably differed little in tastes and habits from the better members of the class to which he belonged; and it was in a great degree in the administration of a large estate and in assiduous attention to county and provincial business that he acquired his rare skill in reading and managing men.

As a soldier the circumstances of his career brought him into the blaze not only of domestic, but of foreign criticism, and it was only very gradually that his superiority was fully recognized. Lee, who of all American soldiers had seen most service in the English army, and Conway, who had risen to great repute in the French army, were both accustomed to speak of his military talents with extreme disparagement; but personal jealousy and animosity undoubtedly colored their judgments. Kalb, who had been trained in the best military schools of the Continent, at first pronounced him to be very deficient in the strength, decision, and promptitude of a general; and, although he soon learned to form the highest estimate of his military capacity, he continued to lament that an excessive modesty led him too frequently to act upon the opinion of inferior men, rather than upon his own most excellent judgment. In the army and the Congress more than one rival was opposed to him. He had his full share of disaster; the operations which he conducted, if compared with great European wars, were on a very small scale; and he had the immense advantage of encountering in most cases generals of singular incapacity.

It may, however, be truly said of him that his military reputation steadily rose through many successive campaigns, and before the end of the struggle he had outlived all rivalry, and almost all envy. He had a thorough knowledge of the technical part of his profession, a good eye for military combinations, and an extraordinary gift of military administration. Punctual, methodical, and exact in the highest degree, he excelled in managing those minute details which are so essential to the efficiency of an army, and he possessed to an eminent degree not only the common courage of a soldier, but also that much rarer form of courage which can endure long-continued suspense, bear the weight of great responsibility, and encounter the risks of misrepresentation and unpopularity. For several years, and usually in the neighborhood of superior forces, he commanded a perpetually fluctuating army, almost wholly destitute of discipline and respect for authority, torn by the most violent personal and provincial jealousies, wretchedly armed, wretchedly clothed, and sometimes in imminent danger of starvation. Unsupported for the most part by the population among whom he was quartered, and incessantly thwarted by the jealousy of Congress, he kept his army together by a combination of skill, firmness, patience, and judgment which has rarely been surpassed, and he led it at last to a signal triumph.

In civil as in military life, he was pre-eminent among his contemporaries for the clearness and soundness of his judgment, for his perfect moderation and self-control, for the quiet dignity and the indomitable firmness with which he pursued every path which he had deliberately chosen. Of all the great men in history he was the most invariably judicious, and there is scarcely a rash word or action or judgment recorded of him. Those who knew him well, noticed that he had keen sensibilities and strong passions; but his power of self-command never failed him, and no act of his public life can be traced to personal caprice, ambition, or resentment. In the despondency of long-continued failure, in the elation of sudden success, at times when his soldiers were deserting by hundreds and when malignant plots were formed against his reputation, amid the constant quarrels, rivalries, and jealousies of his subordinates, in the dark hour of national ingratitude, and in the midst of the most universal and intoxicating flattery, he was always the same calm, wise, just, and single-minded man, pursuing the course which he believed to be right, without fear or favor or fanaticism; equally free from the passions that spring from interest and from the passions that spring from imagination. He never acted on the impulse of an absorbing or uncalculating enthusiasm, and he valued very highly fortune, position, and reputation; but at the command of duty he was ready to risk and sacrifice them all.

He was in the highest sense of the words a gentleman and a man of honor, and he carried into public life the severest standard of private morals. It was at first the constant dread of large sections of the American people that if the old government were overthrown, they would fall into the hands of military adventurers, and undergo the yoke of military despotism. It was mainly the transparent integrity of the character of Washington that dispelled the fear. It was always known by his friends, and it was soon acknowledged by the whole nation and by the English themselves, that in Washington America had found a leader who could be induced by no earthly motive to tell a falsehood, or to break an engagement, or to commit any dishonorable act. Men of this moral type are happily not rare, and we have all met them in our experience; but there is scarcely another instance in history of such a man having reached and maintained the highest position in the convulsions of civil war and of a great popular agitation.

It is one of the great advantages of the long practice of free institutions, that it diffuses through the community a knowledge of character and a soundness of judgment which save it from the enormous mistakes that are almost always made by enslaved nations when suddenly called upon to choose their rulers. No fact shows so eminently the high intelligence of the men who managed the American Revolution as their selection of a leader whose qualities were so much more solid than brilliant, and who was so entirely free from all the characteristics of a demagogue. It was only slowly and very deliberately that Washington identified himself with the revolutionary cause.

No man had a deeper admiration for the British constitution, or a more sincere wish to preserve the connection and to put an end to the disputes between the two countries. In Virginia the revolutionary movement was preceded and prepared by a democratic movement of the yeomanry of the province, led by Patrick Henry, against the planter aristocracy, and Washington was a conspicuous member of the latter. In tastes, manners, instincts, and sympathies he might have been taken as an admirable specimen of the better type of English country gentleman, and he had a great deal of the strong conservative feeling which is natural to the class. From the first promulgation of the Stamp Act, however, he adopted a conviction that a recognition of the sole right of the colonies to tax themselves was essential to their freedom, and as soon as it became evident that Parliament was resolved at all hazards to assert and exercise its authority of taxing America, he no longer hesitated. An interesting letter to his wife, however, shows clearly that he accepted the proffered command of the American forces with extreme diffidence and reluctance, and solely because he believed that it was impossible for him honorably to refuse it. He declined to accept from Congress any emoluments for his service beyond the simple payment of his expenses, of which he was accustomed to draw up most exact and methodical accounts.

MIRABEAU.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Count Gabriel Honoré Riquetti, born 1749, died 1791; distinguished
as statesman and orator in the days preceding the French
Revolution. The heir of a noble name, his early life was one of
wild excess and eccentric adventure, but already marked by the
intellectual daring and brilliancy which afterward made his name
famous. In 1789 he was elected to the States-General from Aix as
representative, however, of the Third Estate (the Commons), not of
the nobility to which he belonged. Already strongly infected by
liberal theories, his energy, intellectual power and eloquence soon
made him the foremost figure in the great legislative body. At
first antagonistic to royal pretension, he finally recognized the
dangers of the coming revolution at an early stage, and attempted
to stem the current. His efforts to reconcile clashing interests
from 1789 to 1791 were characterized by the most splendid powers
of the orator and statesman. His premature death removed the only
barrier to the rising revolutionary tide. He was the idol of the
populace, and it is believed by many historians that, had he lived,
the French Revolution would have flowed in a different channel.]

Which of these six hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their _king_? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have; be their work what it may, there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the _hure_, as himself calls it, or black _boar’s-head_, fit to be “shaken” as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewed, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy--and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is _Gabriel Honoré Riquetti Mirabeau_, the world-compeller; man-ruling deputy of Aix! According to the Baroness de Staël, he steps proudly along, though looked at askance here; and shakes his black _chevelure_, or lion’s-mane, as if prophetic of great deeds.

Yes, reader, that is the type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues, in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man--and intrinsically such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were all different without that one; nay, he might say with the old despot: “The National Assembly? I am that.”

Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood; for the Riquettis, or Arrighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries ago, and settled in Provence, where from generation to generation they have ever approved themselves a peculiar kindred; irascible, indomitable, sharp-cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that sometimes verged toward madness, yet did not reach it. One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfillment of a mad vow, chains two mountains together; and the chain, with its “iron star of five rays,” is still to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti _un_chain so much, and set it drifting--which also shall be seen?

Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has watched over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his grandfather, stout _Col-d’Argent_ (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-and-twenty wounds in one fell day, lie sunk together on the bridge at Casano; while Prince Eugene’s cavalry galloped and regalloped over him--only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head; and Vendôme, dropping his spy-glass, moaned out, “Mirabeau is _dead_, then!” Nevertheless he was not dead: he awoke to breath, and miraculous surgery--for Gabriel was yet to be. With his _silver-stock_ he kept his scarred head erect, through long years; and wedded; and produced tough Marquis Victor, the _Friend of Men_. Whereby at last in the appointed year, 1749, this long-expected rough-hewed Gabriel Honoré did likewise see the light; roughest lion’s whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the old lion (for our old marquis too was lion-like, most unconquerable, kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wondering on his offspring; and determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, oh Marquis! This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw in dogcart of political economy, and be a _Friend of Men_; he will not be thou, but must and will be himself, another than thou. Divorce lawsuits, “whole family save one in prison, and three-score _Lettres-de-Cachet_” for thy own sole use, do but astonish the world.

Our luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle of Rhé and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the castle of If, and heard the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the fortress of Joux, and forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the dungeon of Vincennes--all by _Lettre-de-Cachet_ from his lion father. He has been in Pontarlier jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded before Aix parliaments (to get back his wife); the public gathering on roofs, to see since they could not hear; “the clatter-teeth (_claque-dents_)!” snarls singular old Mirabeau, discerning in such admired forensic eloquence nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant, sonorous, of the drum species.

But as for Gabriel Honoré, in these strange wayfarings, what has he not seen and tried! From drill-sergeants to prime-ministers, to foreign and domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has seen. All manner of men he has gained; for, at bottom, it is a social, loving heart, that wild, unconquerable one--more especially all manner of women. From the archer’s daughter at Saintes to that fair young Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could not but “steal,” and be beheaded for--in effigy! For, indeed, hardly since the Arabian prophet lay dead to Ali’s admiration was there seen such a love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In war, again, he has helped to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious barons. In literature, he has written on “Despotism,” on “Lettres-de-Cachet”; Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities; books on the “Prussian Monarchy,” on “Cagliostro,” on “Calonne,” on “The Water-Companies of Paris”--each book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarm-fire; huge, smoky, sudden! The fire-pan, the kindling, the bitumen were his own; but the lumber, of rags, old wood and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel to him), was gathered from hucksters and ass-panniers of every description under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is _mine_!

Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his; the man himself he can make his. “All reflex and echo (_tout de reflet et de réverbère_)!” snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of qualities for him. In that forty years’ “struggle against despotism” he has gained the glorious faculty of _self-help_, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of _fellowship_, of being helped. Rare union; this man can live self-sufficing--yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him; a born king of men!

But consider further how, as the old marquis still snarls, he has “made away with (_humé_, swallowed, snuffed-up) all _formulas_”--a fact, which, if we meditate it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man, nevertheless, who will glare fiercely on any object, and see through it and conquer it; for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with _logic-spectacles_, but with an _eye_! Unhappily without decalogue, moral code, or theorem of any fixed sort, yet not without a strong living soul in him, and sincerity there; a reality, not an artificiality, not a sham! And so he, having struggled “forty years against despotism,” and “made away with all formulas,” shall now become the spokesman of a nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; to make away with _her_ old formulas--having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will make away with _such_ formulas--and even go _bare_, if need be, till she have found new ones.

Toward such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has got _air_; it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere, too, and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that smoldering, with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory over that--and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and for twenty-three resplendent months pours out in flame and molten fire-torrents all that is in him, the Pharos and wonder-sign of an amazed Europe--and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest of them all; in the whole national deputies, in the whole nation, there is none like and none second to thee.

CHARLES JAMES FOX.

BY WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY.

[An eminent orator and statesman, born 1749, died 1806. Fox was
noted as being the greatest man of his age in parliamentary debate.
He was the son of Sir Henry Fox, afterward Lord Holland, and was
elected to Parliament while scarcely yet of age. Fox was identified
with the Whig party, and contributed greatly to the success and
firm establishment of liberal and reform principles in politics,
though his private life was careless and dissolute. Though peerless
as a debater, Fox was unsuccessful in commanding public respect and
confidence during his short experiment as premier, and was for the
most of his career a leader of the opposition. The memory of Fox is
endeared to Americans by his sympathy with our revolutionary
struggle, his persistent efforts to prevent the war before it
began, and to secure an early concession of American independence
after the beginning of hostilities.]

Charles James Fox was the third son of the first Lord Holland, the old rival of Pitt. He had entered Parliament irregularly and illegally in November, 1768, when he had not yet completed his twentieth year, and in February, 1770, he had been made a lord of the admiralty in the Government of Lord North. The last political connection of Lord Holland had been with Bute, and his son appears to have accepted the heritage of his Tory principles without inquiry or reluctance. His early life was in the highest degree discreditable, and gave very little promise of greatness. His vehement and passionate temperament threw him speedily into the wildest dissipation, and the almost insane indulgence of his father gratified his every whim. When he was only fourteen Lord Holland had brought him to the gambling-table at Spa, and, at a time when he had hardly reached manhood, he was one of the most desperate gamblers of his day. Lord Holland died in 1774, but before his death he is said to have paid no less than one hundred and forty thousand pounds in extricating his son from gambling debts. The death of his mother and the death of his elder brother in the same year brought him a considerable fortune, including an estate in the Isle of Thanet and the sinecure office of clerk of the pells in Ireland, which was worth two thousand three hundred pounds a year; but in a short time he was obliged to sell or mortgage everything he possessed. He himself nicknamed his antechamber the Jerusalem Chamber from the multitude of Jews who haunted it. Lord Carlisle was at one time security for him to the extent of fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds. During one of the most critical debates in 1781 his house was in the occupation of the sheriffs. He was even debtor for small sums to chairmen and to waiters at Brooks’s; and although in the latter part of his life he was partly relieved by a large subscription raised by his friends, he never appears to have wholly emerged from the money difficulties in which his gambling tastes had involved him. Nor was this his only vice.