making for one moment. Yet we cannot believe that Chesterfield was by any means the monster of ugliness and selfish levity whom his enemies, and some who called themselves his friends, have painted for posterity. He was, says Hervey, short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, roughfeatured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a Polyphemus. One Ben Ashurst, who said few good things, though admired for many, told Lord Chesterfield once that he was like a stunted giant, which was a humorous idea and really apposite.' His portraits do not by any means bear out the common descriptions of his personal appearance. Doubtless Court painters then as now flattered or idealised, but one can scarcely believe that any painter coolly converted a hideous face into a rather handsome one and went wholly unreproved by the public opinion of his time. The truth probably is that Chesterfield's bitter, sarcastic, and unsparing tongue made him enemies who came in the end to see nothing but deformity in his person and perfidy in his heart. It is easy to say epigrammatically of such a man that 'his propensity to ridicule, in which he indulged himself with infinite humour and no distinction, and with inexhaustible spirits and no discretion, made him sought and feared, liked and not loved, by most of his acquaintance;' it is easy to say that 'no sex, no relation, no rank, no power, no profession, no friendship, no obligation, was a shield from those pointed, glittering weapons that seemed only to shine to a stander-by, but cut deep in those they touched.' But.

1733.

A RISING MAN.

9

to say this is not to say all, or to paint a fair picture. It is evident that Chesterfield delighted in passing himself off on serious and heavy people as a mere trifler, paradox-maker, and cynic. He invited them not to take him seriously, and they did take him seriously, but the wrong way. They believed that he was serious when he professed to have no faith in anything; when he declared that he only lived for pleasure and did not care by what means he got it; that politics were to him ridiculous, and ambition was the folly of a vulgar mind. We now know that he had an almost boundless political ambition, and we know, too, that when put under the responsibilities that make or mar statesmen he showed himself equal to a great task, and proved that he knew how to govern a nation which no English statesman before his time or since was able to rule from Dublin Castle. If the policy of Chesterfield had been adopted with regard to Ireland, these countries would have been saved more than a century of trouble. We cannot believe the statesman to have been only superficial and worthless who anticipated in his Irish policy the convictions of Burke and the ideas of Fox.

The time, however, of Chesterfield's Irish administration is yet to come. At present he is still only a rising man; but everyone admits his eloquence and his capacity. It was he who moved in the House of Lords the Address of condolence, congratulation, and thanks' for the Speech from the throne on the accession of George the Second. Since then he had served the King in diplomacy. He had been Minister

6

to the Hague; and the Hague then was a very different place in the diplomatist's sense from what it is now or is ever likely to be again. He had been employed on special missions and had been concerned in the making of important treaties. He was rewarded for his services with the Garter, and was made Lord Steward of the Household. He had distinguished himself highly as an orator in the House of Lords; had taken a place among the very foremost parliamentary orators of the day. But he chafed against Walpole's dictatorship, and soon began to show that he was determined not to endure too much of it. He secretly did all he could to mar Walpole's excise scheme; he encouraged his three brothers to oppose the Bill in the House of Commons. He said witty and sarcastic things about the measure, which, of course, were duly reported to Walpole's ears. Perhaps Chesterfield thought he stood too high to be in danger from Walpole's hand. If he did think so, he soon found out his mistake. Walpole's hand struck him down in the most unsparing and humiliating way. Public affront was added to political deprivation. Lord Chesterfield was actually going up the great stairs of St. James's Palace on the day but one after the Excise Bill had been withdrawn, when he was stopped by an official and bidden to go home and bring back the white staff which was the emblem of his office, of all the chief offices of the Household, and surrender it. Chesterfield took the demand thus ungraciously made with his usual composure and politeness. He wrote a

1734.

'NOT WELL DONE.'

11

letter to the King, which the King showed to Walpole, but did not think fit to answer. The letter, Walpole afterwards told Lord Hervey, was 'extremely laboured, but not well done.' Chesterfield immediately passed into opposition and became one of the bitterest and most formidable enemies Walpole had to encounter. Walpole's friends always justified his treatment of Chesterfield by asserting that Chesterfield was one of a party who were caballing against the Minister at the time of the excise scheme, and while Chesterfield was a member of the Government. Chesterfield, it was declared, used actually to attend certain private meetings and councils of Walpole's enemies to concert measures against him. There is nothing incredible or even unlikely in this; but even if it were utterly untrue we may assume that sooner or later Walpole would have got rid of Chesterfield. Walpole's besetting weakness was that he could not endure any really capable colleague. The moment a man showed any capacity for governing, Walpole would appear to have made up his mind that that man and he were not to govern together.

Walpole made a clean sweep of the men in office whom he believed to have acted against him. He even went so far as to deprive of their commissions in the army two peers holding no manner of office in the Administration, but whom he believed to have acted against him. To strengthen himself in the House of Lords he conferred a peerage on his AttorneyGeneral and on his Solicitor-General. Philip Yorke, the Attorney-General, became Lord Hardwicke and

Chief Justice of the King's Bench; Charles Talbot was made Lord Chancellor under the title of Lord Talbot. Both were men of great ability. Hardwicke stood higher in the rank at the bar than Talbot, and in the ordinary course of things he ought to have had the position of Lord Chancellor. But Talbot was only great as a Chancery lawyer, and knew little or nothing of common law, and it would have been out of the question to make him Lord Chief Justice. So Walpole devised a characteristic scheme of compromise. Hardwicke was induced to accept the office of Lord Chief Justice on the salary being raised from 3,000l. to 4,000l., and with the further condition that an additional thousand a year was to be paid to him out of the Lord Chancellor's salary. This curious. transaction Walpole managed through the Queen, and the Queen managed to get the King to regard it as a clever device of his own invention. It is worth while to note that the only charge ever made against Hardwicke by his contemporaries was a charge of avarice; he was stingy even in his hospitality, his enemies said a great offence in that day was to be parsimonious with one's guests; and malignant people called him Judge Gripus. For aught else, his public and private character was blameless. Hardwicke was the stronger man of the two; Talbot the more subtle and ingenious. Both were eloquent pleaders and skilled lawyers, each in his own department. Hervey says that no one could make more of a good cause than Lord Hardwicke, and no one so much of a bad cause as Lord Talbot.' Hardwicke