many things before obscure); had been accompanied by a failure as decisive in respect to the Bedfords, whom the resolute Rigby held together; before significant honours began to gather round Townshend. His brother, Lord Townshend, was made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (I am 'told,' writes Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot, 'Lord Towns'hend openly ascribes his promotion entirely to Lord 'Bute'); his wife was dignified with a peerage, as Pitt's had heretofore been; and the common talk had fixed upon himself for First Minister: when suddenly, on the 4th of September, 1767, being then only forty-two, he died of a neglected fever; in the changes consequent on his death, the compact confederacy of Bedfords, leaving George Grenville in the lurch, marched boldly into office; and the manoeuvrings and intrigues so long in progress, to the disgrace of every one concerned, received their shameless consummation in what was called the Grafton ministry. It was a triumph for royalty, in spite of the Bedfords. 'In a great meeting lately,' writes Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot, 'Lord Bute's health was proposed in a bumper. It will be a surprise to you certainly, if that noble lord should ' again come into fashion, and openly avow his share of 'influence, and be openly courted by all the world!' Chatham had once more retired to Bath, and was in no respect consulted. Conway was to hold office till the beginning of the following year, and then make way for the Bedford nominee, Lord Weymouth; Lord Sandwich and his old friend Dashwood, now Lord Le Despencer, were

to be joint Postmasters-General, Rigby to be Paymaster, and Lord Gower President of the Council: while with these men, so long as the name of Chatham could be kept to conjure with, Camden was to continue to be associated as Chancellor, and Shelburne as Secretary of State. Such ill-omened arrangements, which every other man with a sense of public decency execrated, were precisely what the king desired; and when the Chancellorship of the Exchequer was accepted by Lord North, and Mr. Charles Jenkinson (many years later created Lord Liverpool) was made a Lord of the Treasury, the royal satisfaction may be supposed to have been complete. North was the son of the princess dowager's intimate friend Lord Guildford and scandal had not hesitated to find a reason for the extraordinary resemblance he presented to the king, in his clumsy figure, homely face, thick lips, light complexion and hair, bushy eye-brows, and protruding large grey eyes; which, as Walpole says, rolled about to no purpose, for he was utterly short-sighted. But he was an abler man than the king, and had too many good as well as amiable qualities for the service in which he now consented to enlist them. He was a man of wit and very various knowledge; underneath his heavy exterior, singularly awkward manners, and what seemed to be a perpetual tendency to fall asleep, he conccaled great promptness of parts, and an aptitude for business not a little extraordinary; while the personal disinterestedness of his character, and the unalterable sweetness of his temper, carried him undoubtedly through more

public faults and miscarriages, with less of private hatred or dislike, than fell to any minister's lot before or since his time. If he helped to ruin his country, he did it with the most perfect good humour; and was always ready to surrender the profit as well as the credit of it, to 'the 'king's private junto.' Of that private junto Charles Jenkinson was the most active member. He had belonged to every ministry of the reign, except Lord Rockingham's. Now a year older than Goldsmith, he had started his public career as Goldsmith did, by writing in the Monthly Review; but tiring of the patronage of a bookseller, and discovering that Whiggery was not the way to court, he wheeled suddenly round to Toryism, offered his services to Lord Bute, and became the favourite's private secretary. Men grievously belied him, if he was not thenceforward the secret fetcher and carrier between Bute, the princess, the house of commons, and the king: nor did they scruple to say, that, by the lines of prudent caution in his face, by his stealthy, inscrutable, down-looking eyes (people who had read Gil Blas would call him pious signor Ordonnez), and by the twinkling dark-lanthorn motion of his half-closed eye-lids while he spoke, Nature had seemed to mark him out for precisely such a service. His principles were simply what I have stated those of the junto to be; and were now most pithily expressed by Lord Barrington, the existing Secretary at War, who, while Lord North yet hesitated on the brink of the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, had eagerly consented to take the office. 'The king has

'long known,' said the worthy War-Secretary, 'that I am ' entirely devoted to him; having no political connexion 'with any man, being determined never to form one, and conceiving that in this age the country and its constitution ' are best served by an unbiassed attachment to the crown.' Amen, amen! The monarch is great and we are his prophets, cried Mr. Jenkinson and his followers.

And this was the close. To establish such a system as this, had cost the many public scandals of the last seven years; the disgrace of eminent men, the disruptions of useful friendships, the violation of private as of public honour. For this, had the country been deluged with libels; and men of station put forth against their quondam associates, lampoons unapproachable in scurril violence by the lowest gazetteers of Grub Street or the Fleet. Nor was that part of the mischief to end with the mischief it helped to create. The poisoned chalice was to have its ingredients commended to other lips; and already had significant indication been given that the lesson of libellous instruction would be taught to a wider school. One of Lord Sandwich's libellers, parson Scott, had by the pungent slang of his letters (signed Anti-Sejanus) raised the sale of the Public Advertiser from fifteen hundred to three thousand a-day; but letters of higher and more piquant strain had succeeded his in that worthy journal, and seemed to threaten no quiet possession to the power so lately seized. This new writer had as yet taken no settled signature, nor were his compositions so finished or powerful as those

which made memorable the signature he took some twelve months later; but there was something in his writing, even now, which marked it out from the class it belonged to. There was a strong individual grasp of the matters on which he wrote, a familiar scorn of the men he talked about, and a special hatred of the junto of king's friends. His fervent abuse of the statesmen, such as Chatham, whom he afterwards exalted, has not been sufficiently referred to their existing relations with that faction which he hated with a private as well as public hatred; and which also at this time as bitterly arrayed against Chatham, the brothers-in-law with whom he afterward so cordially acted. It was as clear, from the first three letters of this writer, that he knew the atoms' and their original creating cause,' and that in the thick of its own webs' he had seen the 'venomous spider;' as it seems to me now to be proved, if the strongest circumstantial as well as internal evidence can be held to prove anything, that he was throughout all his correspondence employed in the War Office, under that model king's friend Lord Barrington himself. But be this as it might, his letters, variously and oddly signed, had thus early excited attention; and would sufficiently, with other indications, have foretold the coming storm, even if the arch priest of mischief had not suddenly himself arrived. Coolly, as if no outlawry existed, Wilkes crossed over to London; and his first careless business was to send an exquisite French letter to Garrick with the address of Master Kitely, to ask him how he felt since his reconcilia