In language like this, we are not abasing the national courage. We are paying the fullest homage to the substantial claims of the English heart. It is only by the severest national struggles that the superiority of national powers can be developed; and without doubting the qualities of the Marlboroughs and Chathams—or even without doubting, that if thrown into the battle of the last fifty years, they would have exhibited the same intellectual stature and powerful adroitness which distinguished their actual displays—yet they wanted the strong necessities of a time like ours, to place them on a similar height of renown. Still their time continues in admirable study. But it is like the story of the Volscian and Samnite combats, read in the day when the consul, flying through the streets of Rome, brought the news of Cannæ.
The wars and politics of the eighteenth century were the manœuvres of a garde du corps, and the intrigues of a boudoir. Our fathers saw no nation of thirty millions rushing to the field; frantic with the passion for overthrow, no Napoleon thundering at the head of vassal Europe against England; no conspiracy of peoples against thrones; no train of crouching sovereignties, half in terror and half in servility, ready to do the wildest will of the wildest despot of the world; no army of five hundred thousand men ready to spring upon our shores, and turning off only to the overthrow of empires. All was on a smaller scale; the passions feebler, the means narrower, the objects more trivial, the triumphs more temporary, the catastrophe more powerless, and the glory more vanishing.
All has since subsided; and the mind of man is turned to efforts in directions totally new. All now is the rigid struggle with the physical difficulties of society. The grand problems are, how to level the mountain, and to drain the sea: or, if we must leave the Alps to be still the throne of the thunder, and suffer even the Zuyder-zee to roll its sullen waves over its incorrigible shallows; yet to tunnel the mountain and pass the sea with a rapidity, which makes us regardless of the interposition of obstacles that once stopped the march of armies, and made the impregnable fortresses of kingdoms. But the still severer trials of human intelligence are, how to clothe, feed, educate, and discipline the millions which every passing year pours into the world. The mind may well be bewildered with a prospect so vast, so vivid, and yet so perplexing. Every man sees that old things are done away, that physical force is resuming its primitive power over the world, and that we are approaching a time when Mechanism will have the control of nature, and Multitude the command of society.
There are many families in England which, without any change of circumstances, without any increase of fortune, or any discoverable vicissitudes, have existed for centuries, in possession of the same property, generally a small one, and handed down from father to son as if by a law of nature. The family of Lord Sidmouth is found to have held the proprietorship of the small estate of Fringford, in Oxfordshire, from the year 1600, and to have had a residence in Bannebury about a century and a half before;—the first descendant of this quiet race who became known beyond the churchyard where "his village fathers sleep," being Dr Addington, who died in 1799. Genealogies like those give a striking view of the general security of landed possession, which the habits of national integrity, and the influence of law, must alone have effected, during the turbulent times which so often changed the succession to the throne of England.
Dr Addington, who had been educated at Winchester school, and Trinity College, Oxford, having adopted medicine as his profession, commenced his practice at Reading, where he married the daughter of the Rev. Dr Niley, head-master of the grammar-school. The well-known trial of the wretched parricide, Miss Blandy, for poisoning, in which he was a principal witness, brought him into considerable notice; and probably on the strength of this notice, he removed to London, and took a house in Bedford Row, where the late Lord Sidmouth, his fourth child, but eldest son, was born. He next removed to Clifford Street, a more fashionable quarter, which brought him into intercourse with many persons of distinction. Among these were Louth, Bishop of London, the Duke of Montagu, Earl Rivers, and, first of the first, the great Earl of Chatham. With this distinguished man, Dr Addington seems to have been on terms of familiar friendship, as the following extracts show:—Chatham writes from Burton Pynsent, in 1771.
"All your friends here, the flock of your care, are truly sensible of the kind attentions of the good shepherd. My last fit of the gout left me as it had visited me, very kindly. I am many hours every day in the field, and, as I live like a farmer abroad, I return home and eat like one. * *
"Ale goes on admirably, and agrees perfectly. My reverence for it, too, is increased, having just read in the manners of our remotest Celtic ancestors much of its antiquity and invigorating qualities. The boys all long for ale, seeing papa drink it, but we do not try such an experiment. Such is the force of example, that I find I must watch myself in all I do, for fear of misleading. If your friend William saw me smoke, he would certainly call for a pipe."
Lord Chatham died May 11th, 1788, which event was thus notified by Dr Addington to his son Henry.
"You will be grieved to hear that Lord Chatham is no more. It pleased Providence to take him away this morning, as if it were in mercy that he might not be a spectator of the total ruin of a country which he was not permitted to save."