We now revert to the curious, inquisitive, and gossiping historian of the time. Walpole, fond of French manners, delighting in the easy sarcasm, and almost saucy levity, of French "Memoirs," and adopting, in all its extent, the confession, (then so fashionable on the Continent,) that the perfection of writing was to be formed in their lively persiflage, evidently modelled his "History" on the style of the Sevignés and St Simons. But he was altogether their superior. If he had been a chamberlain in the court of Louis XV., he might have been as frivolously witty, and as laughingly sarcastic, as any Frenchman who ever sat at the feet of a court mistress, or whoever looked for fame among the sallies of a petit souper. But England was an atmosphere which compelled him to a manlier course. The storms of party were not to be stemmed by a wing of gossamer. The writer had bold facts, strong principles, and the struggles of powerful minds to deal with, and their study gave him a strength not his own.
Walpole was fond of having a hero. In private life, George Selwyn was his Admirable Crichton; in public, Charles Townshend. Charles was unquestionably a man of wit. Yet his wit rather consisted in dexterity of language than in brilliancy of conception. He was also eloquent in Parliament; though his charm evidently consisted more in happiness of phrase, than in richness, variety, or vigour, of thought. On the whole, he seems to have been made to amuse rather than to impress, and to give a high conception of his general faculties than to produce either conviction by his argument, or respect by the solid qualities of his genius. Still, he must have been an extraordinary man. Walpole describes his conduct and powers, as exhibited on one of those days of sharp debate which preceded the tremendous discussions of the American war. The subject was a bill for regulating the dividends of the East India Company—the topic was extremely trite, and apparently trifling. But any perch will answer for the flight of such bird. "It was
on that day," says Walpole, "and on that occasion, that Charles Townshend displayed, in a latitude beyond belief, the amazing powers of his capacity, and the no less amazing incongruities of his character." Early in the day he had opened the business, by taking on himself the examination of the Company's conduct, had made a calm speech on the subject, and even went so far as to say, "that he hoped he had atoned for the inconsiderateness of his past life, by the care which he had taken of that business." He then went home to dinner. In his absence a motion was made, which Conway, the secretary of state, not choosing to support alone, it being virtually Townshend's own measure besides, sent to hurry him back to the House. "He returned about eight in the evening, half drunk with champagne," as Walpole says, (which, however, was subsequently denied,) and more intoxicated with spirits. He then instantly rose to speak, without giving himself time to learn any thing, except that the motion had given alarm. He began by vowing that he had not been consulted on the motion—a declaration which astonished every body, there being twelve persons round him at the moment, who had been in consultation with him that very morning, and with his assistance had drawn up the motion on his own table, and who were petrified at his unparalleled effrontery. But before he sat down, he had poured forth, as Walpole says, "a torrent of wit, humour, knowledge, absurdity, vanity, and fiction, heightened by all the graces of comedy, the happiness of quotation, and the buffoonery of farce. To the purpose of the question he said not a syllable. It was a descant on the times, a picture of parties, of their leaders, their hopes, and effects. It was an encomium and a satire on himself; and when he painted the pretensions of birth, riches, connexions, favours, titles, while he effected to praise Lord Rockingham and that faction, he yet insinuated that nothing but parts like his own were qualified to preside. And while he less covertly arraigned the wild incapacity of Lord Chatham, he excited such murmurs of wonder, admiration, applause, laughter, pity, and scorn, that nothing was so true as the sentence with which he concluded—when, speaking of government, he said, that it had become what he himself had often been called—the weathercock."
Walpole exceeds even his usual measure of admiration, in speaking of this masterly piece of extravagance. "Such was the wit, abundance, and impropriety of this speech," says he, "that for some days men could talk or enquire of nothing else. 'Did you hear Charles Townshend's champagne speech,' was the universal question. The bacchanalian enthusiasm of Pindar flowed in torrents less rapid and less eloquent, and inspired less delight, than Townshend's imagery, which conveyed meaning in every sentence. It was Garrick acting extempore scenes of Congreve." He went to supper with Walpole at Conway's afterwards, where, the flood of his gaiety not being exhausted, he kept the table in a roar till two in the morning. A part of this entertainment, however, must have found his auditory in a condition as unfit for criticism as himself. Claret till "two in the morning," might easily disqualify a convivial circle from the exercise of too delicate a perception. And a part of Townshend's facetiousness on that occasion consisted in mimicking his own wife, and a woman of rank with whom he fancied himself in love. He at last gave up from mere bodily lassitude. Walpole happily enough illustrates those talents and their abuse by an allusion to those eastern tales, in which a benevolent genius endows a being with supernatural excellence on some points, while a malignant genius counteracts the gift by some qualification which perpetually baffles and perverts it. The story, however, of Charles Townshend's tipsiness is thus contradicted by a graver authority, Sir George Colebrook, in his Memoirs.
"Mr Townshend loved good living, but had not a strong stomach. He committed therefore frequent excesses, considering his constitution; which would not have been intemperance in another. He was supposed, for instance, to have made a speech in the heat of wine, when that was really not the case. It was a speech in which he treated with great levity,
but with wonderful art, the characters of the Duke of Grafton and Lord Shelburne, whom, though his colleagues in office, he entertained a sovereign contempt for, and heartily wished to get rid of. He had a black riband over one of his eyes that day, having tumbled out of bed, probably in a fit of epilepsy; and this added to the impression made on his auditors that he was tipsy. Whereas, it was a speech he had meditated a great while upon, and it was only by accident that it found utterance that day. I write with certainty, because Sir George Yonge and I were the only persons who dined with him, and we had but one bottle of champagne after dinner; General Conway having repeatedly sent messengers to press his return to the House."
This brings the miracle down to the human standard, yet that standard was high, and the man who could excite this admiration, in a House which contained so great a number of eminent speakers, and which could charm the caustic spirit of Walpole into the acknowledgment that his speech "was the most singular pleasure of the kind he had ever tasted," must have been an extraordinary performance, even if his instrument was not of the highest tone of oratory. A note from the Duke of Grafton's manuscript memoirs also contradicts, on Townshend's own authority, his opinion of the "wild incapacity of Lord Chatham." The note says:—
"On the night preceding Lord Chatham's first journey to Bath, Mr Charles Townshend was for the first time summoned to the Cabinet. The business was on a general view and statement of the actual situation and interests of the various powers in Europe. Lord Chatham had taken the lead in this consideration in so masterly a manner, as to raise the admiration and desire of us all to co-operate with him in forwarding his views. Mr Townshend was particularly astonished, and owned to me, as I was carrying him in my carriage home, that Lord Chatham had just shown to us what inferior animals we were, and that as much as he had seen of him before, he did not conceive till that night his superiority to be so transcendant."
Walpole writes with habitual bitterness of the great Lord Chatham. The recollection of his early opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, seems to have made him an unfaithful historian, wherever this extraordinary man's name comes within his page; but at the period of those discussions, it seems not improbable that the vigour of Chatham's understanding had in some degree given way to the tortures of his disease. He had suffered from gout at an early period of life; and as this is a disease remarkably affected by the mind, the perpetual disturbances of a public life seem to have given it a mastery over the whole frame of the great minister. Walpole talks in unjustifiable language of his "haughty sterility of talents." But there seems to be more truth in his account of the caprices of this powerful understanding in his retirement. Walpole calls it the "reality of Lord Chatham's madness." Still, we cannot see much in those instances, beyond the temper naturally resulting from an agonizing disease. When the Pynsent estate fell to him, he removed to it, and sold his house and grounds at Hayes—"a place on which he had wasted prodigious sums, and which yet retained small traces of expense, great part having been consumed in purchasing contiguous tenements, to free himself from all neighbourhood. Much had gone in doing and undoing, and not a little in planting by torchlight, as his peremptory and impatient habits could brook no delay. Nor were those the sole circumstances which marked his caprice. His children he could not bear under the same roof, nor communications from room to room, nor whatever he thought promoted noise. A winding passage between his house and children was built with the same view. When, at the beginning of his second administration, he fixed at North End by Hampstead, he took four or five houses successively, as fast as Mr Dingley his landlord went into them, still, as he said, to ward off the houses of the neighbourhood."
Walpole relates another anecdote equally inconclusive. At Pynsent, a bleak hill bounded his view. He ordered his gardener to have it planted with evergreens. The man asked "with