The important features of Shelburne's and Windham's careers can be briefly summarised. Shelburne, the greatgrandson of the notable Sir W. Petty, was born in 1737, a year before George III. After a short period at Christ Church, Oxford, he entered the army, served under Wolfe, to whose influence and personality he owed much, and acquitted himself with much distinction in the continental campaigns of the Seven Years War, subsequently, which is not often remembered, rising to the rank of major-general. He sat for a few months for Wycombe in the House of Commons until in 1761 he succeeded his father in the Irish earldom of Shelburne and the British barony of Wycombe. He was President of the Board of Trade in the Grenville ministry of 1763, but shortly resigned, and in 1766 was Secretary of State in Pitt's Ministry until 1768, when he was dismissed. Until 1782 when he took office in the Second Rockingham Ministry he was a prominent member of the Opposition, being generally regarded as belonging to the Chatham group. On Rockingham's death he became Prime Minister, with the younger Pitt as his Chancellor of the Exchequer, until the defeat in 1783 of the administration by the Coalition of North and Fox, under the nominal leadership of the Duke of Portland. He never again held ministerial office. His political position after 1784 is not easy to define; but until the outbreak of the French Revolution he acted as an independent supporter of Pitt's ministry. From 1793 onwards he joined hands with the opposition under Fox and was one of the tiny minority in the Upper House who condemned and resisted the home and foreign policy both of Pitt's and Addington's administrations. He died in 1805.

Windham, born in 1750, was thirteen years his junior, and came of a house of the landed gentry established at Felbrigg in Norfolk as far back as 1460. Educated at Eton (from which he had to be withdrawn), after a year at Glasgow University he spent three years at University College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1771. Until 1784, when he entered the House of Commons, his time was spent on his estate at Felbrigg and in London, where he became a prominent member of Brooks and the famous Literary Club, and made the friendship of Johnson, Burke and other memorable persons. Until

1792 he spoke and acted with the Whig opposition to Pitt, and achieved such distinction that he was chosen one of the managers of the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The French Revolution, which drove Shelburne into opposition, drove Windham with the Portland Whigs on to Pitt's side; and in 1794 his acceptance of a seat in the Cabinet and the office of Secretary of War was part of the bargain which finally broke up the Whig party and brought the 'old Whigs' into concert with the Ministry of Pitt. He resigned with Pitt in 1801 on the Irish question, and the resignation marked a final rupture with Pitt and Pitt's party. Events brought him once more into sympathy with Fox, and in 1806 he became Secretary for War in the Cabinet of all the Talents,' resigning with his colleagues in 1807, again on the question of Roman Catholic Emancipation. Until his death in 1810 he was out of office. The confused condition of political parties in these years makes it difficult to define his position; but he refused to serve under Portland, and he was demonstrably opposed to the policy and creed alike of Perceval, Canning and Castlereagh.

This bald summary of salient facts serves to bring out two points common to the careers of both statesmen. Shelburne and Windham are remarkable for their apparent inconsistencies. Both served in office with men whom they subsequently strenuously opposed; both were more than once allies in opposition of parties which they subsequently left. Shelburne was in turn the friend, the critic, the rival and the follower of Henry Fox, of Bute, of Chatham, of Charles Fox and of the younger Pitt. Windham no less conspicuously attacked Pitt, served in his Cabinet, and ultimately opposed him; fought by the side of Fox, left his party, opposed his policy, rejoined him, served in his Cabinet and resigned with his party. Eighteenth century politicians did not attach an exaggerated value to the doubtful virtue of consistency, but the kaleidoscopic series of changes in the careers of Shelburne and Windham provoked their attention and baffled their cynicism. Permutations, so obviously against the interests of those who made them, furnished a mystifying problem. Was it due to the caprice of the political weathercock or the sinister but mistaken profundity of a Machiavelli? Or was it the astonishing

example of an honest and hopelessly impracticable 'independence,' the sublimated name for what plain men dubbed an obstinate and thrawn perversity? Or did Shelburne and Windham belong to that rare but always fascinating class of men, morbidly sensitive to a querulous conscience, who only begin to doubt the rectitude of their conduct and the sincerity of their convictions when their action is endorsed by popularity and supported by a majority?

The inference is justifiable that, if Shelburne and Windham are underrated, forgotten or 'suppressed characters in history '-to use Disraeli's famous description of the former in 'Sybil '-it was not from lack of opportunity to reveal their capacity for statesmanship, nor from poverty of ideas, ignorance, and failure to frame definite aims, strong and clear-cut convictions and an ordered system of policy. Both were born into the governing class, and from early manhood both were in the forefront of the narrow but dominant political world; both had an assured social position, ample means, genuine intellectual gifts and interests, influential friends, and cabinet rank in critical times which demanded and tested character and ability. Neither had the weary fight of Chatham against a hostile sovereign and a jealous and exclusive aristocratic oligarchy; both started and ended with much more in their favour than Mansfield, Burke, Wilberforce or Canning. In the reign of George III statesmen did not fail simply because they were rakes, as the example of Grafton proves, nor because they were gamblers and politically unpopular, as that of Charles Fox proves; nor did they succeed simply because they were the sons of a Prime Minister, as was shown in the case of the younger Pitt. Yet, judged by any adequate standard of achievement, Shelburne and Windham failed. They did not realise what their abilities and opportunities suggested they should have realised, and they were neither rakes, nor gamblers, nor adventurers. They disappointed their contemporaries; they disappointed themselves. The failure was a problem to their own age; it is a problem still.

Shelburne's personality, character, and ambition, the deeper the analysis is pushed, are found to be extraordinarily complex. No figure in our modern political

history suggests at first sight more definite and measur able qualities and acts, and on closer examination more puzzling inconsistencies and baffling questions. In the instructive fragment of an autobiography printed by Lord Fitzmaurice we have, as with Windham and his Diary, a skylight into his mind. Throughout a long career, he touched, at many of its best and most remunerative points, the life of an epoch singularly rich in its achievements and failures, in its contribution to thought and literature, richer still in the raw material of ideas and ideals and the maturing of mighty social and economic forces. If his early education was neglected and impoverishing, he made good the deficiencies by industry and insight. From early manhood he came into contact with the generals and staff-officers of the governing class the Newcastles, the Graftons, the Rockinghams, the Grenvilles, the Rigbys and Calcrafts; he came, too, under the influence of the piercing genius of the redhaired, chinless and sickly Wolfe; he knew and cultivated the intellectuals, Adam Smith, Price, Priestley, Mirabeau; he fought with or against the great captains, Chatham, Burke, Fox, Pitt. He had seen war at Minden; the possession and management of Irish estates taught him to know Ireland; he had been Bute's 'young man' and Lord Holland's agent; he had at the Board of Trade and as Secretary of State dealt with the American problem at first hand; as Prime Minister he made the Treaty which ended the war in 1783. He was besides a master of penetrating irony, and an effective speaker in the House of Lords.

But in every respect he was singularly different from the typical aristocrat or country gentleman who filled the benches in the Lower House. He was not, like Newcastle or Dundas, a trained political organiser with a passion for managing men and controlling political machinery; nor a frequenter of the social and political clubs; nor, like Chesterfield, a leading figure in the salons of his day. The hall-marked forms of recreation or dissipation-hunting, shooting, prize-fighting, racing, gambling, drinking, mistresses-do not figure in the picture. It is as difficult to imagine Shelburne defying public opinion by occupying a box at the opera with Nancy Parsons, or declining to deal with a despatch because

the horses that were to take him to Newmarket could not be kept waiting in the street, as to imagine Chatham kissing saucy Mistress Kitty Fisher, or Wilberforce, full of claret, ordering straw to be laid down in St James' Street in order that he might hold the bank, undisturbed by the hackney coaches, while the guttering candles flung a weary challenge to the fragrance of a summer dawn. Shelburne bought pictures for Lansdowne House and Bowood; like everyone of importance who could afford it he was painted by Reynolds; he took a chilly interest in 'sepulchral monuments' and wrote a chilly paper on them, but it was not the interest of Isaac Disraeli, still less that of the Hydrotaphia. Art and letters were uneasy guests in the mansions of his mind. Garrick, Mrs Siddons, Perdita Robinson, Fanny Burney, Johnson, Goldsmith, Burke, did not enter there; nor in his later days did Godwin, Paine, Cartwright, or Cobbett.

In his attitude towards his fellow men Shelburne reveals an independence positively inhuman in its egoism. To Windham, the man in Johnson and Burke (the two supreme masters whom he loved and was proud to serve) was greater and more satisfying than the scholar and the statesman. Shelburne, Bentham profoundly observes, 'had a sort of systematic plan for gaining people.' Men were interesting or necessary in his scheme of life in proportion as they could impart truth and power, or meet an intellectual demand or a political purpose. But he neither desired nor felt the need of friendship for its own sake with those to whom living was a finer achievement than even authorship of a Dictionary or the 'Reflections on the French Revolution.' Shelburne desired and sought the secrets of truth; he missed the secrets of life that alone can make truth an instrument of humanity.

His intellectual life and moral purpose centred in the problems of government, of commerce, and of economics. He was a patient student of political institutions; the autobiography reveals him as a penetrating if soured critic of the system and principles of the 18th century, an earnest reformer who would unfrock the Levites of the establishment, cut down the groves of the Whig priests, and grind to powder the Idols of the Tribe. Shelburne was an intellectual pur sang in a limited but