We cannot indulge ourselves with any more of this loyal lucubration—we think that the slur at the Regency was not quite fair; we were by no means aware that the moon was so mischievous; and, as our general conclusion, we must admit that, if his lordship did not gain the Laureateship, he amply deserved it. However, better times were at hand. Pitt, like all other eminent men, had a keen insight into character, and he had long known the especial qualities of Addington. This solves the difficulty of accounting at once for his continued personal intercourse, and yet his apparent official neglect. He knew him to be well-informed, intelligent, and honest; although his retiring habits had already given full evidence of his indisposition to face the storms of party.
On Mr Grenville's promotion to the Home department, in 1789, Addington was proposed for the Speaker's chair, and was elected by two hundred and fifteen to one hundred and forty-two, who voted for the Opposition candidate, Sir Gilbert Elliot. In the private correspondence which was so frequent between him and the minister, various suggestions had been thrown out by Pitt of the Irish secretaryship, a seat at the treasury, &c. But the man and the place were now found together, incomparably adapted to each other. The place implies an honourable neutrality, and Addington was true to the trust. It requires the favourable opinion of the House to the man as well as the officer; and Sheridan's first address to him, as the spokesman of the Opposition, was, "we were all very sorry to have voted against you." It required considerable knowledge of general and parliamentary law, and the new Speaker had devoted years to their acquisition. Even the minor merits of a grave and commanding presence were there; for Addington, in his early years, was of as striking a countenance and figure as in old age he was gentle and amiable.
Characteristic anecdotes are scattered through the volumes: these we think their most attractive portion; and of such Addington's memory was full in his later years. One night, on his crying out, in the usual form, to hush some chattering in the House, "Order, order, or I shall name names!" Charles Fox, then standing beside the chair, told him that Wilkes once asked the Speaker, Onslow, what would be the consequence of his naming names? "Heaven above only knows," was the solemn reply.
One night Fox himself put the same question to Sir Fletcher Norton (the Speaker,) who nonchalantly answered, "Happen! hang me, if I know or care!"
A substantial proof of the general approval was given to the new official, in the addition of £1000 a-year to his salary; thus giving him £6000 a-year—which, besides a house, with some other emoluments on public and private bills, and the sale of certain clerkships connected with the business of the Commons, is generally calculated as equivalent to about £10,000 yearly. For this, however, the Speaker is expected to keep up considerable state, to give occasional banquets during the session to successive parties of the members; to have evening receptions and levées; and, in general, to lead a rather laborious life; the least part of whose labour is in the Speaker's chair. He has also the appointment of a chaplain to the House, which is equivalent to the disposal of valuable church patronage, the chaplain being always provided for, after a few years' attendance, by a request of the House to the crown. To complete this accumulation of good things, the Speaker who exhibits intelligence, is frequently promoted to the higher offices of the cabinet, and generally receives a peerage.
But those were the "piping times of peace;" times of trouble and terror were at hand. The French democracy had already burst on Europe; and every throne was heaving on the surge which it had raised. Pitt alone, of all the great ministers of Europe, seemed to disregard its hazards. Customary as it is for the pamphleteers of later times to assail his memory, as the promoter of hostilities, the chief outcry against Pitt in the year 1790, was his tardiness in thinking that those hostilities could ever force England to take a share in the struggles of the Continent. The whole aristocracy, the whole property, the whole mercantile interest, and even the whole moral feeling of the empire, had become from hour to hour more convinced that a war was inevitable. Even the Opposition, whose office it was to screen the atrocities of every national enemy, and who, for a time, had looked to Jacobinism as an auxiliary in the march to power, had at last shrunk from this horrible alliance—had felt the natural disgust of Englishmen for an association with the undisguised vice and vileness of the Republic, and had at last sunk into silence, if not into shame. Burke had published his immortal "Reflections," and their sound had gone forth like the tolling of a vast funeral bell for the obsequies of European monarchy. Still, nothing could move Pitt. By nature, a financier, and by genius the most magnificent of all financiers, he calculated the force of nations by the depths of their treasuries; and seeing France bankrupt, conceived that she was on the verge of conviction, and waited only to see her sending her humbled Assembly to beg for a general loan, and for a general peace at the same moment.
But those were days made to show the shortsightedness of human sagacity. The lesson was rapidly given; it was proved in European havoc, that utter powerlessness for good was not merely compatible with tremendous power for evil, but was actually the means of accumulating that power; that the more wretched, famishing, and haggard a nation might become at home, the more irresistible it might prove abroad: that, like the madman, it might be fevered and tortured by mental disease, into preternatural strength of frame, and might spring out of the bed where it had lain down to die, with a force which drove before it all the ordinary resistance of man. Pitt had still to learn, that this was a war of Opinion; and had to learn also, that Opinion was a new material of explosion, against whose agency all former calculation was wholly unprovided, and whose force was made to fling all the old buttresses and battlements of European institutions like dust and embers into the air.
It is not worth the trouble now to inquire, whether Pitt's sagacity equally failed him in estimating the probable effect of the French Revolution on England. His expression at a dinner party, where Addington, Grenville, and Burke formed the guests, "Never mind, Mr Burke, we shall go on as we are until the day of judgment;" shows his feeling of the stability of the constitution. As we have no love for discovering the
"Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise,"
we are gratified by thinking that both were partly in the right: Burke, in regarding the Revolution as destined to sweep the Continent with long and tremendous violence, and Pitt as believing it likely to make but little permanent impression on the habits, the power, or the heart of England. Burke argued from the weakness of the Continental governments; Pitt from the strength of the British constitution: the former having no connexion with the national interests, the latter being formed from those interests, for those interests, and being as much supported by them as a tree by its roots. There was not a portion of that stately tree, from its solid trunk to the highest ornament of its foliage, which was not fed from the ground. The truth was, that the Jacobinisim of England was confined to adventurers, and never obtained any hold on the great body of the proprietors and the people. Its spirit evaporated in tavern harangues, to which the multitude went to listen, as to the chattering and grimaces of a mountebank.