Henry Fox, Esq., (afterwards Lord Holland,) was the father of the late celebrated C. J. Fox. Perhaps the reader may be able to trace some resemblance in their manner of speaking; the same close consecutive mode of reasoning, and the same disposition to go round his subject, and view it in its various aspects and bearings.
Mr. Grenville.—The following is a neat, clear, logical, and I think masterly speech on the subject. Nothing could be put in a more simple or forcible manner.
William Murray, (Earl of Mansfield,) was the fourth son of the earl of Stormont, and born at Perth in 1705. He was educated at Westminster school, and afterwards at Oxford, where he took his degrees. On being called to the bar, his eloquence gained him many admirers; and he was called by Pope ‘the silver-tongued Murray.’ In 1742, he became solicitor-general, and was elected member of parliament. In 1754, he was made attorney-general, and in 1756, chief justice of the king’s bench, soon after which he was created baron Mansfield. He resigned his office in 1788, owing to his infirmities, and died in 1793. The reputation which he acquired, both as a lawyer and a speaker, was not unmerited. I believe his character has been in all respects as justly appreciated as that of most men. He was undoubtedly a man of great abilities and great acquirements; but he was neither a very great nor a very honest man. He was a man of nice perceptions, of an acute and logical understanding, of a clear and comprehensive mind, as far as the habits of his profession and his pursuits in life would suffer him to be so. Indeed it is difficult to say, what are the capacities of a man of this character, whose views are cramped and confined by the servility of office; who adjusts the dimensions of his understanding according to the size of the occasion; whose reason is constantly the puppet of his will; whose powers expand in the gleam of popularity, or shrink and shrivel up at the touch of power. There was a natural antipathy between his mind and lord Chatham’s. The one was ardent and impetuous: the other was cool, circumspect, wary, delighting in difficulties and subtlety, proud rather of distrusting its natural feelings and detecting errors in them, than impatient of any thing that thwarted their course, and exerting all its powers to prove them to be right. The manner in which lord Chatham always spoke of Mansfield was the most pointed that could be: Junius did not treat him with more sarcastic bitterness and contempt. Indeed there is a striking coincidence between the opinions and sentiments of that celebrated writer, and those of lord Chatham, in many respects. They had the same political creed and the same personal prejudices. Chatham had not only the same marked dislike to lord Mansfield, but he had evidently the same personal dislike to the king, always directing his censures not so much against his measures, as the man; always tracing them beyond his ministers to the throne itself, and connecting them with a deliberate plan to overturn the balance of the constitution, and undermine the liberties of the people. He has expressed the same unpopular opinion respecting the impressing of seamen that Junius has done; which is rather singular in two men professing so strong an attachment to the liberty of the subject, and who so generally appealed to popular feelings. It is to be remembered, also, that Junius speaks of certain mysterious arrangements, and expresses himself concerning certain characters, in a tone of confidence and with a degree of asperity which could hardly be expected in any one who was not personally acquainted with the secrets of the cabinet. As to the differences of stile between Junius’s letters and lord Chatham’s speeches, though they are very great, I do not think they are so great but that they may be accounted for from the mere difference between writing and speaking. The materials themselves are not essentially different: the difference is in the manner of working them up. There is none of that pointed neatness, that brilliant contrast, that artificial modulation, and elaborate complexity in the style of lord Chatham’s speeches that there is in Junius; and there is a flow, a rapidity, a vehemence and ardour in them, that is totally wanting in Junius. At the same time, I can easily conceive that a man like lord Chatham, who has gained the highest reputation as an orator, and was satisfied with the proofs he had given of the force and solidity of his mind, should take a pride in exciting the admiration of the public by the neatness and elegance of his compositions, by adding delicacy to strength, by the minute refinements and graceful ornaments of style: as your bold, dashing designers have generally (to shew the versatility of their talents) executed their small cabinet pieces in a style of the most highly finished correctness. On the other hand, it is not at all likely that lord Chatham, even supposing him to have been master of all the subtlety and exactness of Junius, would have spoken in any other manner than he did. It would have been nearly impossible to speak as Junius writes; and besides, he was a man of too much sense to forego the advantages which his person, voice, and manner afforded him in that impressive, simple, manly style which he adopted, and which they could not have afforded him equally in any other, for the reputation of an elegant speaker. As to the character which Junius gives of lord Chatham, it is just such a character as a man would give of himself. Both his silence and his praise are suspicious. Though I do not, on the whole, think it probable that lord Chatham was the author of Junius, yet I think that he was by far the most likely person that has been named. He was about equal to the task. He had the same pith and nerve, the same acuteness and vigour: he worked in the same metal as Junius, with a little less sharpness and fineness in the execution, and more boldness in the design. Burke was above it, Dunning was below it. It was physically impossible that Burke should have been the author. He could no more have written Junius, from the exuberance and originality of his mind, than Dunning could have written it, from the poverty of his. The speeches of the latter are ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’ No human art could have moulded his stiff set meagre sentences, with all the technical formality and servile exactness of a legal document, into the harmonious combinations and graceful inflections of Junius’s style. It is most likely that it will never be known who Junius really was, and I do not wish it ever should; it is a sort of singular phenomenon, and curious riddle in the history of literature. It is better that it should remain a secret, and be something to wonder at, than that by it’s being explained, every one should become perfectly satisfied and perfectly indifferent about it.
Charles Pratt, (Earl Camden,) was the son of Sir John Pratt, and born in the year 1713. He was educated at Cambridge. He made little figure for many years after he was called to the bar; but at length, by the interest of the chancellor Henley, he obtained considerable practice, and was recommended by him to the friendship of Mr. Pitt, afterwards lord Chatham. By this means, he successively rose to the stations of attorney-general, chief justice of the common pleas, and lord chancellor. He distinguished himself in the latter situations by taking a decided part against the government, in favour of Wilkes. For this, he had the freedom of the city of London voted him in a gold box, and his portrait was stuck up in Guildhall. He was made president of the council after the American war, which situation he held till his death, in 1794. He appears to have been a mere party man, without any abilities whatever, and without that sense of his own deficiencies which atones for the want of them. He was the legal mouth-piece of Chatham, the judicial oracle of the party, who gravely returned the answers that were given him by the political priesthood, of whom he was the organ. He was one of those dull, plodding, headstrong, honest men, with whom so large a part of the community naturally sympathise, and of whom it is always convenient to have one at least in every administration, or antiministerial party. To the generality of mankind, dulness is the natural object of sympathy and admiration; it is the element in which they breathe; it is that which is best fitted to their gross capacities. The divinity of genius is itself too dazzling an object for them to behold, and requires the friendly interposition of some thick cloud to dim its lustre, and blunt the fierceness of its rays. The people love to idolize greatness in some vulgar representation of it, and to worship their own likeness in stocks and stones. Lord Camden was just the man to address those who can only assent, but cannot reason. With men of this character, the strength of the reasoning always weakens the force of the argument; their heads will only bear a certain quantity of thought, and by attempting to enlighten, you only confound their understandings. Any thing like proof always operates as a negative quantity upon their prejudices, because it puts them out of their way, and they cannot get into any other. Nothing can be more feeble than the following reply of his to lord Mansfield, in which he had pledged himself to prove—I know not what. He was more ready to throw down his pledges than to redeem them, (to speak in the parliamentary style). This was of little consequence. Though often foiled, it did not abate his ardour, or lessen his confidence: he was still staunch to his cause, and (no matter whether right or wrong in his argument,) he was always sure of his conclusion. The less success a man has in maintaining his point, the more does he shew his steadiness and attachment to his object in persevering in it in spite of opposition; and the proof of fortitude which he thus gives must naturally induce all those of the same sanguine disposition, who have the same zeal and the same imbecility in the defence of truth, to make common cause with him. Such was lord Camden; of whom, however, (lest I should seem to have conceived some hasty prejudice against him,) I must confess that I am by no means convinced that he was not quite as great a man as the generality of those who have risen by the same gradations to the same high offices that he did, either before or since his time.
Colonel Barre.—He was one of the most strenuous opposers of lord North’s administration. Junius says, ‘I would borrow a simile from Burke, or a sarcasm from Barre.’ There is a vein of shrewd irony, a lively, familiar, conversational pleasantry running through all his speeches. Garrit aniles ex re fabellas. His eloquence is certainly the most naïve, the most unpremeditated, the most gay and heedless, that can be imagined. He was really and naturally what Courteney (afterwards) only pretended to be. [Hazlitt adds in a note]—I am sorry that I can give no account of this celebrated character. Indeed, I have to apologize to the reader for the frequent defects and chasms in the biographical part of the work. I have looked carefully into the dictionaries, but unless a man happens to have been a nonconformist divine in the last century, a chymist, or the maker of a new spelling and pronouncing dictionary, his name is hardly sure of obtaining a place in these learned compilations. The writers seem, by a natural sympathy, more anxious to bring obscure merit into notice, than to gratify the idle curiosity of the public respecting characters on which a dazzling splendor has been shed, by the accidental circumstances of situation, by superficial accomplishments, and shewy talents. In giving the history of illustrious statesmen or politicians, they are very uncertain helps; but if any one had to make out a list of antiquarians, schoolmasters, or conjurors, he would find them complete for his purpose. The Barres, the Grenvilles, and the Townshends, are forgotten; while the Dyches, the Fennings, the Lillys, and the Laxtons, vie with the heroes and sages of antiquity, in these motley lists of fame, which like death, level all ranks, and confound all distinctions.
Frederick, Lord North, (afterwards Earl of Guildford,) was born in 1732. He succeeded Mr. C. Townshend as chancellor of the exchequer, and in 1770 was made first lord of the treasury, in which situation he continued till the close of the American war. He died in 1792. His speeches are in general, like the following, short, shrewd, and lively, and quite free from the affectation of oratory. He spoke like a gentleman, like a man of sense and business, who had to explain himself on certain points of moment to the country, and who in doing this did not think that his first object was to shew how well he could play the orator by the hour. The following masterly character is given of him by Burke. ‘He was a man of admirable parts; of a general knowledge; of versatile understanding fitted for every sort of business; of infinite wit and pleasantry; of a delightful temper; and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and spirit of command that the time required.’
The following Speech is a most masterly defence of himself. It is a model in its kind.
Mr. Burke was born at Dublin, January 1, 1730. His father was a respectable attorney, and a Protestant. He received his school education under Abraham Shackleton, a Quaker; and whenever Mr. Burke afterwards visited Ireland, he always went to see his old tutor. In 1746, he entered as a scholar at Trinity College, which he left, after taking his bachelor’s degree, in 1749. Not long after, he became candidate for the professorship of logic, at Glasgow, but did not succeed. In 1753, he entered himself of the Inner Temple, but he did not apply very closely to the study of the law, and supported himself by writing for the booksellers. In 1756, he published his Vindication of Natural Society, and in 1757 his Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful. He was first brought into parliament for the borough of Wendover, by the interest of lord Rockingham, to whom he had been private secretary. He soon after published his Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents. In 1774, he was invited by the citizens of Bristol to become one of their representatives; but at the next election, he was rejected by them, for having supported the free trade of Ireland and the Catholic claims, and was returned for Malton, in Yorkshire. The rest of his political life is too well known to need recapitulating here. The part he took against the French revolution was the most important and memorable event of his life. He withdrew from parliament in 1794, leaving his seat for Malton to his son, who died shortly after. This hastened his death, which happened in July, 1797. The best character of him, and perhaps the finest that ever was drawn of any man, is that by Goldsmith, in his poem of Retaliation.
The Honourable C. J. Fox was born Jan. 13, 1748. He was educated first at Eton and afterwards at Hertford College, Oxford. He was returned to Parliament for Midhurst in 1768. He was at first on the side of ministry, but declared himself on the side of opposition on the dispute with America. He became secretary for foreign affairs in 1782, and again in 1806, when it was too late for his country and himself. He died September, 1806. Of this great man I shall speak more at large when I come to his later speeches. The following boyish rhapsody, on a question relating to the Lowther estate, is remarkable only for its contrast to the speeches which he made afterwards—for its affectation and bluster and imbecility. It may be easily believed, as is reported of him, that at the time he made this and other speeches like it, he wore red heels and blue powder, and was distinguished as the greatest coxcomb in Europe. He was not then the same figure that I afterwards beheld in the Louvre, with hairs grown grey in the service of the public, with a face pale and furrowed with thought, doing honour to the English character as its best representative, conciliating by his frank, simple, unaffected manners, the affection and esteem of strangers, and wandering carelessly and unconsciously among those courts and palaces, whose profound policy and deep-laid machinations he alone, by his wisdom and the generous openness of his nature, was able to resist. His first acquaintance with Burke seems to have been the æra of his manhood; or rather, it was then that he first learned to know himself, and found his true level. A man in himself is always the same, though he may not always appear to be so.
Sir W. Meredith.—This speech discovers true zeal and earnestness. It seems to belong to an earlier period of our history.