The lessons of wisdom, so dearly purchased by this scheme of Continental interference, have not been thrown away on a nation which spent so much to gain so little. The second French revolution was followed by England granting Parliamentary Reform, to prevent a revolution at home. The third revolution, which prostrated a monarchy, and reared a republic in a day, was promptly recognized and respected by England, whose Premier declared that she heartily accorded to the people of France the right to ordain for themselves such a system of Government as they might choose! Men may prate eternally about the virtues of Louis XVI, the grasping ambition of Napoleon, the far-seeing sagacity of Burke, and the wisdom and firmness of Pitt, and it will still remain true, that the principles thrown up with the fire and blood of the great French eruption will yet work out the regeneration of Europe.
Mr. Sheridan was as steady a supporter of freedom, and as inflexible an opponent of Pitt, as a man of so volatile a temperament could well be. This gentleman is best known on our side of the Atlantic as the author of the comedy the "School for Scandal," and of a speech on the trial of Warren Hastings. The comedy still holds a deservedly high place on the stage. The speech, which once claimed a position at the head of English forensic oratory, is no doubt much overrated. The intense interest pervading the public mind in respect to the impeachment of the conqueror and ruler of a hundred millions of the people of India—the august character of the tribunal, the peers and judges of the realm—the imposing talents of the committee by whom the Commons sent up the articles of impeachment, consisting of Burke, Fox, North, Grey, Wyndham, Sheridan, with other lights worthy to shine in such a constellation—the romantic branch of Hastings's administration, the opening of which was assigned to Sheridan—the gorgeous colors which he spread upon the oriental canvas—the theatrical style in which he pronounced his oration before a learned, fashionable, and sympathizing audience, all conspired to give to his effort a temporary fame alike extraordinary and undeserved. Nor was the immediate effect of his two days' coruscation diminished by the tragical manner in which he contrived, at its close, to sink backward into the arms of Burke, who, transported beyond measure, hugged him as unaffectedly as if his generous and unsuspecting nature had not been duped by a mere stage trick.
But though he occasionally used the clap-traps of the theater, Sheridan was a debater to be shunned rather than encountered. Pitt dreaded him. Lying in wait till the Minister had addressed the House, the Drury Lane manager used to let fly at him such a cloud of stinging arrows, pointed with sarcasm and poisoned with invective, that the stately Premier could not conceal his mortification, nor hardly retain his seat till the storm had passed away. No Parliamentarian ever inspired so much dread in his opponents, and won so much applause from his friends, with so scanty a stock of statesmanlike acquirements. His political knowledge was gathered from the columns of the current newspapers and the discussions in the club-rooms, and his literary stores were made up from the modern poetry and drama of England. True, he was educated at Harrow, but he threw aside Demosthenes and Cicero for Congreve and Vanburgh, and wrote comedies when he should have studied mathematics. He never claimed to be a statesman, and only aspired to be an orator. To shine as a dazzling declaimer, he bent all the powers of his intense and elastic mind. He attended debating clubs, and caught up the best sayings—practiced attitudes and tones in the green-room—set down every keen thought which occurred to him in a note-book—conned his lesson—then entered the House, and rushing into the arena of debate with the bound and air of a gladiator, won the reputation of being the readiest wit, the most skillful off-hand disputant, and the most gorgeous orator of the day. And it was the day of Burke, Pitt, Fox, Erskine, Grattan, and Wyndham! Lord Chesterfield was not so very wrong when he told his son that, even in Parliament, more depended upon the manner of saying a thing, than upon the matter of which it was composed. Though his taste was formed on the flashy model of the modern drama, and in the composition of his numerous tropes and metaphors he did not always distinguish between tinsel and gold, between painted glass and pure diamonds, yet he generally succeeded in doing what he intended—producing a tremendous sensation. His rockets set the hemisphere in a blaze; nor was he always careful on whose head the sticks fell; for he spared neither friends nor foes, if he must thereby lose a good hit.
Though Sheridan regarded the color of the husk more than the character of the kernel, he uttered much that will perish only with the English tongue. In an attack on Ministers, who were attempting to carry a bill against the freedom of the press, he exclaimed, "Give them a corrupt House of Lords; give them a venal House of Commons; give them a tyrannical Prince; give them a truckling Court—and let me but have an unfettered press, and I will defy them to encroach a hair's breadth upon the liberties of England"—a passage worthy of Chatham. During the treason trials, in 1794, he poured a torrent of ridicule upon the proceedings, which did not a little toward restoring a panic-stricken public to its senses. An extract will give an idea of his sarcasm. In replying to Pitt, he said, "I own there was something in the case; quite enough to disturb the virtuous sensibilities and loyal terrors of the right honorable gentleman. But, so hardened is this side of the House, that our fears did not much disturb us. On the first trial, one pike was produced. This was, however, withdrawn. Then a terrific instrument was talked of, for the annihilation of his Majesty's cavalry, which, upon evidence, appeared to be a te-totum in a window at Sheffield. But I had forgot—there was also a camp in a back shop; an arsenal provided with nine muskets; and an exchequer, containing exactly the same number of pounds—no, let me be accurate, it was nine pounds and one bad shilling. * * * * The alarm had been brought in with great pomp and circumstance on a Saturday morning. At night, the Duke of Richmond stationed himself, among other curiosities, at the Tower, and a great municipal officer, the Lord Mayor, made an appalling discovery in the East. He found out that there was in Cornhill a debating society, where people went to buy treason at sixpence a head; where it was retailed to them by inch of candle; and five minutes, measured by the glass, were allowed to each traitor, to perform his part in overturning the State. In Edinburgh an insurrection was planned; the soldiers were to be corrupted: and this turned out to be—by giving each man sixpence for porter. Now, what the scarcity of money and rations may be in that part of the country, I cannot tell; but it does strike me that the system of corruption has not been carried to any great extent. Then, too, numbers were kept in pay; they were drilled in a dark room, by a sergeant in a brown coat; and on a given signal they were to sally from a back kitchen, and overturn the Constitution."
Though this celebrated orator was wayward in his pursuits, and habitually intemperate, yet, from the time he entered Parliament in 1780 till his sun began to decline, he ever sustained the liberal cause, and his rare talents bore with striking effect against the Continental policy of Pitt, and in favor of Irish Regeneration, Parliamentary Reform, the freedom of the press, and the rights of the people.
I have spoken of Edmund Burke, than whom, no man could afford a stronger contrast to Sheridan. He had an original, daring genius, but it was sustained by a broad and comprehensive judgment. His imagination was as gorgeous as ever plumed the wing of eloquence, but it was enriched and invigorated by learning vast and varied. Until his mind became engrossed, not to say possessed with the subject which occupied the latter years of his great life, (the French revolution,) he was the advocate and ornament of progressive freedom. He first led and then followed Fox in all the lines of policy which the liberal party pursued from 1765 to 1790, when they separated, and Burke became not so much the advocate of Pitt and his Tories, as the opponent of France and its Republicans; choosing thereafter, as he expressed it, to be a Whig, "without coining to himself Whig principles from a French die, unknown to the impress of our fathers in the Constitution." He left Parliament in 1794, and died in 1797. During the last six years of his life he seemed almost diseased by the excesses of the French revolution; and whatever subject he surveyed, on whatever ground he looked, he appeared to see naught but the convulsions of that tragedy. The vivid impressions which he received he transferred to publications which glowed with his fervid soul, and produced a prodigious sensation amongst the higher orders of his countrymen. But take him all in all, his was the most magnificent mind of modern England. If called to designate the most remarkable name which adorns its later annals, to whose would we so unhesitatingly point as to his? Is he not entitled to a place among the five most extraordinary men which that kingdom has produced—Bacon, Shakspeare, Newton, Milton, Burke? He possessed the multifarious learning of our Adams, the intellectual grasp of our Marshall, the metaphysical subtlety of our Edwards, the logical energy of our Webster, the soaring imagination of our Wirt, the fervid glow of our Clay; and he was the equal of each in his most cultivated field. As a Parliamentary leader, he was inferior to Fox and Pitt. His essay-like style was not adapted to so popular a body as the House of Commons. His speeches wore the air of the academy rather than the forum; and much of his discourse was too elaborate, too learned, too philosophical, too ornate, to be appreciated by the general run of commonplace sort of men that drift into the halls of legislation. During the thirty years he participated in affairs, there fell from his lips and pen an amount of political sagacity, far-seeing statesmanship, philosophical disquisition, and oratorical display, all set off and adorned by an amplitude of learning, a majesty of diction, and a brilliancy of imagery, the fourth of which would have carried their author's name to posterity as one of the remarkable men of his time. He who thinks this eulogium extravagant has only to find its confirmation in the mines of intellectual wealth which lie embedded in the sixteen volumes of the works he has given to his country and the world, to his cotemporaries and to posterity. True, there will be found, mingled with these strata of pure gold, veins of impracticability, sophistry, prejudice, extravagance, and violence. His later writings, and in many respects his most grand and beautiful, are disfigured by a morbid dread of change, and obscured by a gloomy distrust of the capacities of man for self-government; proving, that though gifted with genius beyond most mortals, he was not endowed with the Divine spirit of prophecy. But it is equally true, that while the English language is read, the speeches and writings of Edmund Burke will be classed with the richest treasures of the statesman, the philosopher, and the scholar.
Next to the curse of a military chieftain attempting to adapt the tactics of the camp to the regulations of the cabinet, is the nuisance of a narrow-minded lawyer carrying the prim rules of the bar into the councils of the State, and aiming to be a statesman when he is only capable of being a pettifogger. On the downfall of the Grenville-Fox ministry, Mr. Perceval took the leading place in his Majesty's Government. He was a lawyer with a keen intellect, and a soul shriveled by the most limited views and bigoted prejudices. When ruling England, he looked upon her position in reference to Continental affairs, and the part she was to perform in the drama of nations, much as he was wont to regard the ten-pound case of a plaintiff whose brief and retainer he held. He argued the great questions which nightly agitated the House of Commons, and whose decisions were to affect not only his own time, but coming ages, like a mere lawyer struggling for a verdict. His weapon was sharp, and he applied its edge in the same way, whether analyzing the title of James Jackson to a ten-acre lot in Kent, or of Louis XVIII to the throne of France. He discussed a financial scheme in Parliament to raise twenty millions sterling to carry on the war, just as he argued the consideration of a twenty-pound note before a jury of Yorkshire plowmen. Yet he was a good tactician; saw a point readily and clearly, though he saw nothing but a point; knew how to touch the prejudices of bigots; was great at beating his opponents on small divisions; rarely lost his temper under the severest provocations; was quick at a turn and keen at a retort; and spoke in a lively, colloquial, straight-forward style, which pleased the fat country gentlemen much better than the classical allusions and ornate periods of Mr. Canning. He kept on the even tenor of his way till assassinated by a madman in the lobby of the House, in 1812.
And this is the man who shaped the financial policy of England during six of the most eventful years of her existence, and whom she permitted to plunge her into debt to the amount of £150,000,000! "How could this be?" The answer is plain. Mr. Perceval stood firmly by the King and the Bishops, flattering the prejudices of the one and the bigotry of the other; and never flinched from eulogizing royalty, when the rude hand of popular clamor drew the vail from the immoralities of the Prince Regent and his brother of York. Then he was a thorough business man; never alarmed "Church and State" by wandering, like Canning and Peel, out of the beaten Tory track; and, so far from giving up a bad cause in the worst of times, he raised his voice the more sternly as the storm of public discontent whistled louder, and cheered his flagging comrades to their daily round of degrading toil. Such a minister was fit to be beloved by a bigoted king and his profligate heir.