The truth of the case, however, is, that travelling is not the source of the injury done to the habits and principles of the English: it is residence abroad that does the irreparable mischief. Travelling enlarges the mind; residence abroad narrows, degrades, and vitiates it. No Englishman who has long resided in a foreign city, (except, perhaps, in a university, for the pursuit of learning,) is ever fit for any thing when he returns: he is a practical idler, and pitiful lounger round coffee-houses and gaming-tables. He discovers that his “feelings are too refined” for the roughness of English life—that his frame is “too delicate for anything but a southern climate”—boasts of his sensibilities, while he is leading a life of the most vulgar and gross vice—until, beggared by debauchery, or worn out with disease, he drops into the tomb, without leaving a regret or a manly recollection behind him. For all the higher purposes of life he had long been ruined—without country, without public spirit, without a sense of duty, he has lived only to eat and drink, to retail the gossip of the hour, and yawn through the day. He has abandoned all religion, and professes to think all creeds alike. His morals are of the same quality with his religion, and he creeps through society as worthless as the worm that shall soon feed on his better half—his body—in the grave.
Lord Hardwicke had now full opportunity for the display of all his talents; and their combination in one man was certainly an extraordinary evidence of the powers of discipline and nature. He was at once a first-rate lawyer, a first-rate statesman, and a first-rate public speaker. Any one of those high attainments might bring sufficient to make the business of a life—in him they were the easy attributes of a master-mind.
His oratory was not of the school which afterwards gave such eminence to Chatham. It had none of the brilliant impetuosity of that Demosthenes of English orators; but it had a captivation—the captivation of eloquence and grace—which gave interest even to the driest details of the tribunal. Lord Camden, himself a powerful public speaker, thus described Hardwicke on the bench:—
“In the Court of Chancery, multitudes would flock to hear the Lord Chancellor, as to hear Garrick. His clearness, arrangement, and comprehension of his subject, were masterly. But his address in the turn which he gave to all, whether he was in the right, or was ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ was like magic.”
His high employments now brought opulence with them; and he purchased from Lord Oxford the fine estate of Wimpole, in Cambridgeshire, which had come into the Oxford family by marriage with the Duke of Newcastle’s heiress. In 1740, Philip Yorke, the Chancellor’s eldest son, married the daughter of Lord Breadalbane, and grand-daughter of the Duke of Kent. Horace Walpole, in his correspondence with Conway, thus smartly sums up the good fortune of this most prosperous family:
“Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so great a man. But then, in accidents. He is made Chief Justice and Peer, when Talbot is made Chancellor and Peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth, and leaves him the Seals, at an age when others are scarcely made solicitors. Then he marries his son into one of the first families of Britain, obtains a patent for a marquisate, and eight thousand pounds a-year, after the Duke of Kent’s death. The Duke dies in a fortnight, and leaves them all! People talk of fortune’s wheel that is always rolling; troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled along with it.”
The present attempt to give legislative power to the Jews, an attempt whose success would inevitably change the Christian character of the legislature, gives a revived interest to the following decision of the great Chancellor. A legacy of £12,000 having been left by a Jew, “for establishing an assembly for reading and improving the Jewish law,” and the case having been brought into court, the Chancellor decided against the application of the legacy. The note of this judgment, recorded in his own note-book, is as follows:—
“I was of opinion, that this appeared to be a charitable bequest or fund for promoting and propagating the Jewish religion, and consequently contrary to law. For that the Christian religion is part of the law of the land, and involved in the constitution of this kingdom, according to my Lord Hale in Taylor’s case, 1 Ventr., and my Lord Raymond in Wolston’s case; and that it differed widely from the cases of charitable benefactions to the meeting-houses or congregations of Protestant dissenters, which are tolerated, and regulated by the Toleration Act. Therefore, I refused to decree for this charity.”
In March 1745, died the celebrated Sir Robert Walpole: of all the ministers of George the Second the most trusted, and of all the ministers of England the most unpopular; of all the statesmen of his day the most successful, and certainly, of all the public men of England, regarded, in his own time, as the most unscrupulous. If it be doubted that he was personally more unprincipled than other ministers, to him unquestionably was due the practice of corruption as an established principle of government. That any minister could have dared to adopt such a system in England, is to be accounted for only by the rapid changes of party since the beginning of the century, the changes of the Succession, the timidity of the press, yet but in its infancy, and the unsettled nature of the Brunswick throne.
In late years, Burke, inflamed with the love of splendid paradox, and delighting in the novelty of imagining personal virtue in the midst of public vice, amused his genius with throwing a factitious lustre over the memory of Walpole. But the voice of contemporary writers has been since amply echoed by the judgment of history. Walpole was a corrupter; and, if the progress of his system had not been broken short by his fall, and by the hurried successions of ministers from each side of the House alternately, the government would perhaps have perished, or could have purified itself only by a revolution.