It may naturally be asked how it happened that one of his great talents, long experience, and many rare accomplishments, intimately connected as he was with the leading statesmen of his time (the Ministers of the Crown for the last ten years of his life), should never have been brought into public life, nor ever been made in any way available to the service of the country? Nor can the answer to this question be that he had no powers of public speaking, and would, if in Farliament, have been for the most part a silent member; because it would not be easy to name a more unbroken silence than was for many long years kept by such leading Whigs as Mr. Hare, Lord John Townsend, and General Fitzpatrick, without whom, nevertheless, it was always supposed that the Whig phalanx would have been wanting in its just proportions; and also because there are many important, many even high political, offices that can well and usefully be filled by men wholly unused to the wordy war; yet Mr. Allen never filled any place except as Secretary, nay Under Secretary, for a few months, to the Commissioners for treating with America in 1806. Then I fear we are driven, in accounting for this strange fact, to the high aristocratic habits of our Government, if the phrase may be allowed; and can comprehend Mr. Allen's entire exclusion from power in no other way than by considering it as now a fixed and settled rule that there is in this

country a line drawn between the ruling caste and the rest of the community-not, indeed, that the latter are mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, but that, out of a profession like the bar, intimately connected with politics, or out of the patrician circles themselves the monopolists of political preferment, no such rise is in ordinary cases possible. The genius of our system, very far from consulting its stable endurance, appears thus to apportion its labours and its enjoyment, separating the two classes of our citizens by an impassable line, and bestowing freely upon the one the sweat and the toil, while it reserves strictly for the other the fruit and the shade.

APPENDIX.

[Walpole and Bolingbroke do not belong to the reign of George III. But it is impossible well to understand Lord Chatham without considering Walpole also. However, the great importance of continually holding up Walpole to the admiration of all statesmen, and Bolingbroke, except for his genius, to their reprobation, is the chief ground of inserting this Appendix.]

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.

THE antagonist whom Lord Chatham first encountered on his entering into public life was the veteran Walpole, who instinctively dreaded him the moment he heard his voice; and having begun by exclaiming, "We must muzzle that terrible Cornet of horse!" either because he found him not to be silenced by promotion, or because he deemed punishment in this case better than blandishment, ended by taking away his commission, and making him an enemy for ever. It was a blunder of the first order; it was of a kind, too, which none less than Walpole were apt to commit: perhaps it was the most injudicious thing, possibly the only very

injudicious thing, he ever did; certainly it was an error for which he paid the full penalty before he ceased to lead the House of Commons and govern the country.

H

Few men have ever reached and maintained for so many years the highest station which the citizen of a free state can hold, who have enjoyed more power than Sir Robert Walpole, and have left behind them less just cause of blame, or more monuments of the wisdom and virtue for which his country has to thank him. Of Washington, indeed, if we behold in him a different character, one of a far more exalted description, there is this to be said, both that his imperishable fame rests rather upon the part he bore in the Revolution than on his administration of the Government which he helped to create; and that his unequalled virtuė and self-denial never could be practised in cirs cumstances which, like those of Walpole, afforded no temptation to ambition, because they gave no means of usurping larger powers than the law bestowed: consequently his case cannot be compared, in any particular, with that of a prime minister under an established monarchical consti tution. But Walpole held for many years the reins of government in England under two princes, neither of them born or bred in the country-held them during the troubles of a disputed succession, and held them while European politics were com+

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plicated with various embarrassments; and yet he governed at home without any inroads upon public liberty; he administered the ordinary powers of the constitution without requiring the dangerous help of extreme temporary rigour; he preserved tranquillity at home without pressing upon the people; and he maintained peace abroad without any sacrifice either of the interests or the honour of the country. If no brilliant feats of improve< ment in our laws or in the condition of the state were attempted ;-if no striking evolutions of ex-> ternal policy were executed;-at least all was kept safe and quiet in every quarter, and the irrepres sible energies of national industry had the fullest scope afforded them during a lengthened season of repose, which in those days of "foreign war and domestic levy" was deemed a fortune hardly to be hoped for, and of which the history of the country had never offered any example.

Walpole was a man of an ancient, honourable, and affluent family, one of the first in the county of Norfolk, to whose possessions he succeeded while yet too young for entering into the Church; the profession he was destined to had an elder brother lived. Rescued from that humbler fortune (in which, however, he always said he would have risen to the Primacy), he had well-nigh fallen into one more obscure the life of a country gentleman, in which he might have whiled away his time like