The papers are full of nothing but O’Connell’s progress in Scotland, where he is received with unbounded enthusiasm by enormous crowds, but by no people of rank, property, or character. It is a rabble triumph altogether, but it is made the most of by all the Ministerial papers. The Opposition papers pour torrents of invective upon him, and he in his speeches is not behindhand with the most virulent and scurrilous of them; he is exalted to the bad eminence at which he has arrived more by the assaults of his enemies than by the efforts of his friends. It is the Tories who are ever insisting upon the immensity of his power, and whose excess of hatred and fear make him of such vast account that ‘he draws the rabble after him as a monster makes a show.’ However mean may be his audiences in Scotland, he has numbers to boast of, and that will serve his purpose; he will no doubt render this reception instrumental to the increase of his authority in Ireland. He now avows that he has abandoned Repeal, and all other projects, in order to devote himself to the great task of reforming the House of Lords.
I have finished Mackintosh’s Life with great delight, and many painful sensations, together with wonder and amazement. His account of his reading is utterly incomprehensible to me; he must have been endowed with some superhuman faculty of transferring the contents of books to his own mind. He talks in his journals of reading volumes in a few hours which would seem to demand many days even from the most rapid reader. I have heard of Southey, who would read a book through as he stood in a bookseller’s shop; that is, his eye would glance down the page, and by a process SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH. partly mechanical, partly intellectual, formed by long habit, he would extract in his synoptical passage all that he required to know. (Macaulay was, and George Lewis is, just as wonderful in this respect.) Some of the books that Mackintosh talks of, philosophical and metaphysical works, could not be so disposed of, and I should like much to know what his system or his secret was. I met Sydney Smith yesterday, and asked him why more of the journals had not been given. He said because the editors had been ill advised, but that in another edition more should be given; that Mackintosh was the most agreeable man he had ever known, that he had been shamefully used by his friends, and by none more than by Brougham. So, I said, it would appear by what you say in your letter. ‘Oh no,’ he said, laughing and chuckling, and shaking his great belly, ‘you don’t really think I meant to allude to Brougham?’ ‘Mackintosh’s son,’ he said ‘is a man of no talents, the composition (what there is of it) belongs to Erskine, his son-in-law, a sensible man.’ To be sure there are some strange things said by Mackintosh here and there; among others, that Lord Holland only wanted voice—not to be impeded in his utterance—to be a greater orator than Canning or Brougham! If he had not been a man ‘whom no sense of wrongs could rouse to vengeance,’ he would have flung the India Board in Lord Grey’s face when he was insulted with the offer of it.[3] What are we to think of the necessary connection between intellectual superiority and official eminence, when we have seen the Duke of Richmond invited to be a member of the Cabinet, while Mackintosh was thrust into an obscure and subordinate office—Mackintosh placed under the orders of Charles Grant! Well might he regret that he had not been a professor, and, ‘with safer pride content,’ adorned with unusual glory some academical chair. Then while he was instructing and delighting the world, there would have been many regrets and lamentations that such mighty talents were confined to such a narrow sphere, and innumerable speculations of the greatness he would have achieved in political life, and how the irresistible force of his genius and his eloquence must have raised him to the pinnacle of Parliamentary fame and political power. Perhaps he would have partaken in this delusion, and have bitterly lamented the success which had deprived him of a more brilliant fortune and a loftier fame; for it may reasonably be doubted whether all his laborious investigations of the deepest recesses of the human mind, and his extensive acquaintance with the theory of mental phenomena, would have enabled him accurately to ascertain the practical capabilities of his own mind, and to arrive at those just conclusions which should indicate to him that path of life on which it was most expedient for him to travel, with reference to the strength of his understanding, and the softness, not to say feebleness, of his character.
[3] Sir James Mackintosh was a member of the Board of Control under Lord Grey’s Government. He never held any other office in England.
CHAPTER XXX.
Emperor Nicholas’s Speech at Warsaw — His respect for opinion in England — Burdett proposes the expulsion of O’Connell from Brookes’s — Club law — George Villiers at Madrid — Lord Segrave Lord-Lieutenant of Gloucestershire — Dispute between France and America — Allen’s account of Mackintosh and Melbourne — Prolongation of a Patent — Should Dr. Arnold be made a Bishop? — Frederic Elliot — O’Connell’s mischievous influence — Bretby — Chesterfield MSS. — The Portfolio — Lord Cottenham and Lord Langdale — Opening of Parliament — The Judicial Committee — Poulett Thomson at the Board of Trade — Mr. Perceval’s interviews with the Ministers — Prospects of the Tories — Lord Stanley’s relations to them — Holland House Anecdotes — Mischievous Effects of the division on his Address — The youth of Macaulay — Brougham and Macaulay — Lord William Bentinck — Review of Sir R. Peel’s conduct — Dr. Hampden’s appointment — The Orange Lodges.
November 17th, 1835
Since I have been in London, on my return from the Newmarket meetings, I have had nothing to note. The O’Connell and Raphael wrangle goes on, and will probably come before Parliament. It appears to make a greater sensation at Paris than here; there, however, all other sensations are absorbed in that which the Emperor of Russia’s speech at Warsaw has produced, and which indicates an excitement, or ferocity, very like insanity.[1] Melbourne mentioned at dinner on Sunday that it was not only quite correctly reported—rather understated—but that after he had so delivered himself, he met the English Consul in the street, took him by the arm, walked about with him for an hour, and begged him not to be too hard upon him in his report to his Government. I was not present, but Henry de Ros was, who told it me. I am thus particular from, as it seems to me, the exceeding curiosity of the anecdote, evincing on the part of the autocrat, in the midst of the insolence of unbridled power, a sort of consciousness of responsibility to European opinion, and a deferential dread of that of England in particular.
[1] [This was the first time the Emperor Nicholas had visited Poland since the Revolution of 1830, and he took the opportunity to express himself in language of excessive severity to the municipality of Warsaw, threatening to lay the city in ruins if the Poles rebelled again.]