House of Lords, on this occasion, assert their even from the master-mind of Tacitus, the dignity by doing their duty. If they con- Panegyric instead of the Life of Agricola; ceive that matters have gone too far for them and with a kindred pen we may be well to be safe in rejecting the bill, let them at satisfied, if it fulfils the first portion of the least do what there can be no risk whatever celebrated precept-Ne quid falsi dicere in doing-let them insist on the bill being, in audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. We shall the first instance, of temporary authority be therefore less disposed to complain of the only-let them limit the ministerial experi- natural and amiable bias under which the ment, say to two years. That a most daring Dean of Norwich writes, than to endeavour experiment it is, its authors will not venture candidly and amicably to correct it. to deny a full sense of that fact is implied But there is another defect, very minor in every official speech that has yet been de- indeed, but still prominent enough on the livered; and we are certain that the propo- face of these pages to deserve some notice. sition to limit the operation until it can be Horace Walpole says, 'I love the light tested by some experience, will be at heart parts of a great character.' But there is no approved by every member either of the late part of a biographer's duty so difficult as to or the present Government who has had any discriminate among these lighter matters, considerable personal acquaintance with Ire- and to select quod tollere velis, from the land-excepting, of course, those (if such variety of trifles which float along the surthere be in high places) who have seriously face of human life. In this selection a fastimade up their minds that, for a mere dious reader may, perhaps, think that the chance of benefiting the most barbarous Dean-influenced, no doubt, by his recolclass of the Irish people, it is consistent lections of Lord Sidmouth's own conversawith duty and justice to incur the all but tion-has not always been successful. It certainty of destroying every class above has been observed that the Chair of the them.

ART. IX.-The Life and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Henry Addington, Viscount Sidmouth. By the Hon. and Rev. George Pellew, D.D., Dean of Norwich. 3 vols. Svo. London. 1847.

House of Commons seldom fails to impart to its occupants a certain florid stateliness of diction and demeanour, like what would be called in common life pomposity—a sort of theatrical air, which, assumed at first as a duty of their public station, becomes a habit of their private life. To this Lord Sidmouth was no exception; and indeed his natural temperament was so genial, and his affections so warm, that he was additionally disposed to assign a too emphatic value to the WE have on former occasions stated some persons and incidents with whom and which general objections to biographies written by he happened to be connected. With this very near relations, and published before amiable weakness his biographer shows too personal interests and passions can have so much sympathy, and has swelled his work far subsided as to afford a sufficient freedom-perhaps to the extend of a third-with of judgment to either the biographer or the minor circumstances, and above all with a critic. It is scarcely possible that a work of complimentary correspondence, which few this class should not be marked by a too readers will think worth the space they strong partiality of the writer to his subject: occupy. In another edition we should venand our readers will not expect that the Life ture to suggest the omission of all these of Lord Sidmouth by his son-in-law has testimonia obscurorum virorum, which, howovercome the difficulties and disadvantages ever kindly intended, certainly add nothing to which such a biography is essentially lia- to Lord Sidmouth's reputation. ble, and from which those of Mackintosh, In the last preliminary point on which we Romilly, and Wilberforce, were not exempt. shall touch-delicacy towards the survivors But we must take the good and evil together. or near friends of those who were actors If we are not to have biographies thus fa- with or against Lord Sidmouth in the convourably coloured, we shall have few, if flicts of the times-it must be admitted that any, that are worth having. Families will the Dean of Norwich has conducted his not communicate their papers and commit narrative with great delicacy and discretion. the characters of their relations to unfriendly, This reserve, however-so becoming the or even indifferent, hands; and it must be character and station of the Dean and his confessed, and especially as to politicians, relation to the Addington family-could not, that the temple of Truth would be a very it is obvious, be maintained in the history precarious and perilous passage to the tem- of a life essentially polemic without some ple of Fame. We are content to accept, sacrifice of vivacity and vigour, and-may

once.

But be- much as we can find room for of the more prominent points of his personal history, and of such political circumstances as receive any new light from this publication.

:

we not add ?-of historical justice. sides the natural good feeling of the author, there is another motive which must have tended to restrain the freedom of his pen it happened from a strange concurrence and Henry Addington was born on the 30th complexity of circumstances, that there was of May, 1755, the elder of two sons of Dr. no public man of Lord Sidmouth's time- Anthony Addington, an eminent physician, Pitt or Fox-Grey or Grenville-Sheridan and the familiar friend of the great Earl of or Tierney-Perceval or Ponsonby-Liver- Chatham, who-as our readers will recolpool or Wellesley-Castlereagh or Canning lect (Quart. Rev., June, 1840), and as these with whom it was not Lord Sidmouth's volumes further show-was occasionally peculiar fortune to stand in the successive employed by Lord Chatham in those little and alternate relations of ally and antagonist. souterrain negotiations to which, by a strange It was once pleasantly said (we are not contradiction, that high and haughty mind quite sure whether by Windham or by Can- was willing to stoop. This created an early ning) that Addington was like the small-pox, acquaintance between their sons; but of and that every administration must have him this, says Dr. Pellew, 'very few particulars Of that text these volumes are a cu-have been preserved:' and we see many rious and copious exposition. Everybody reasons to doubt whether it was so very inknows or knew the scattered facts; but we timate as has been supposed. Pitt was prethink this concentration into one view of pared under the prophetic eye' of his father Lord Sidmouth's political alliances will sur- for Cambridge. Addington, after passing prise the ordinary reader, as it has certainly four years at Winchester School and two startled us; and, what is still more curious, years more under Dr. Goodenough, afterit appears that, in all these schisms and wards Bishop of Carlisle, who prepared a amalgamations, Lord Sidmouth was himself few pupils for the university, proceeded to most conscientiously persuaded-and that Oxford. At Winchester he formed some of goes a great way in persuading the rest of the closest connexions of his after-life; parmankind-that he acted with the most per- ticularly with Huntingford, one of the assistfect consistency and on one undeviating line ant-masters, whose worth and learning his of principle. We shall discuss this curious grateful pupil, long after, rewarded with the problem in more detail hereafter; we only bishopric of Gloucester - and Charles notice it here to account for the couleur de Bragge, who subsequently assumed the rose which tinged so remarkably his own, name of Bathurst, married Addington's and consequently tinges also his biographer's youngest sister, became a member of his retrospect of himself and of all his contem-government, and was, after his elevation to poraries, except perhaps if indeed it the peerage, the spokesman of his small but amounts to a distinct exception-Mr. Pitt. not unimportant party in the House of ComMr. Canning would have been a more vivid mons. At Oxford began his friendship with one, but that the gentle temper and delicacy Lords Wellesley, Stowell, and Colchester, of the Dean of Norwich keep that hostile which with the two latter grew into very figure so entirely in the back-ground as to close alliance, and lasted (as indeed it seems be scarcely visible, unless, indeed, to use to have done with all his early friends but Tacitus's famous Hibernicism, he becomes one) undiminished to the tomb. more conspicuous by his unaccountable ab- He was so early designed for the bar as sence. This interesting point, also, will be to be admitted to Lincoln's Inn while yet further examined in the course of the sum- at school-not, however, in January, 1771, mary which we shall now proceed to give as the Dean states, but in 1772-still unacof the more important portion of these countably soon. There, about 1780, he bevolumes, which, amidst some superfluity of gan to reside for the closer pursuit of his minute circumstances, contain much original legal studies, and then it probably was that and valuable information on the state of his childish acquaintance with Pitt, now parties, and what we may call the arcana of following the same object in the same place, personal politics, hitherto imperfectly or may have been renewed and ripened into partially known. intimacy. Pitt, though two years younger,

We must begin by apprising our readers, outran his friend, was called to the bar and once for all, that we do not profess to follow went the circuit in 1781; while Addington's the details of Lord Sidmouth's public life. studies were interrupted in the September We take for granted that they already know, of that year by his marriage, and in 1783 better than any sketch of ours could trace, finally abandoned, as is stated (vol. i., p. the chief historical events of the period; we 30), for the political views opened to his must content ourselves with noticing as ambition by Pitt's precocious advancement

to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord the main sources of the ridicule and disreShelburn's short administration. There spect which prepared that catastrophe: but seems, however, to be here some anachro- of this too we shall see more hereafter. nism or error, for we find (though it is not noticed by the Dean) that Addington was called to the bar in May, 1784, five months after Mr. Pitt had become Prime Minister, and just a month after his own election for Devizes-a borough in which Mr. Sutton, who had married his second sister, had the predominant influence; and this seat he fill-gency crisis (9th June, 1789), was to aped till his peerage.*

In December, 1792, occurred what is old age!' (vol. i., p. 144.) His heart was called the dagger scene, in which Mr. Burke broken, but, towards Hastings, not softproduced and threw down on the floor of the ened.* House a dagger, which had been sent from France to Birmingham as a pattern for a large order, and which had been put into his hands as he was coming down to Westminster. The Opposition (as Addington related, and as we heard from one of themselves) endeavoured to raise a titter at this exhibition, which Burke, collecting himself for an effort, at once extinguished, recalling the seriousness of the House by a few brilliant sentences, of which Lord Sidmouth's memory preserved the conclusion.

"Let us," said Burke, "keep French principles from our heads, and French daggers from our hearts; let us preserve all our blandishments in life, and all our consolations in death-all the blessings of time, and all the hopes of eternity." Vol. i., p. 68.

In the part of his work at which we are now arrived the author introduces some of Lord Sidmouth's anecdotes of Mr. Pitt, which we are surprised to find so few, and some of them hardly worth telling. But we know so little of Mr. Pitt's private life, that we are glad to lose no drop of that immortal man. Lord Sidmouth himself, as was the fashion of the time, was of a very convivial turn, and would say of his great friend, what might be said of himself, he liked a glass of port wine very well, but a bottle better'

Narratur et prisci Catonis
Sæpe mero caluisse virtus.

On one celebrated and single occasion Mr. Pitt came into the House with Dundas, both under some influence of wine; for which On the 29th of June, 1793, Addington, the Speaker's decorum gently chided him attending a levee, first saw Sir Edward Pel- next morning, by saying that it had so dislew, who that day received the honour of turbed the clerk at the table as to give him knighthood for the first and one of the most a violent headache. Pitt replied, that he brilliant of our naval triumphs-an earnest thought it an excellent arrangement that he of the still higher services which led that should have the wine and the clerk the headgreat officer to the successive honours of the ache' (vol. i., p. 153). This was the occabaronetcy and two peerages. Addington, sion of one of the epigrams of the 'Rollike a true-hearted and well-judging English-liad :'man, was an enthusiastic admirer of the naval service. His acquaintance with Pellew ripened into a cordial friendship, political as well as personal, which was in after years knit still closer by the alliance of Lord Exmouth's third son, the author of this work, Exmouth's third son, the author of this work, with Lord Sidmouth's second daughter.

It is new to us that about this time he was

P.-I cannot see the Speaker!-Hal, can you?
D.-Not see the Speaker? hang it, I see two.'

Pitt was, Sidmouth thought, the most fascinating companion he had ever met with, and had a peculiar talent of improving the sentiments of any one he talked with, and

offered the Secretaryship of State, but Ad-returning them to him in a better dress. dington very wisely declined exchanging a position in which he was an object of general respect and favour for the difficulties and anxieties of political office.

*From the fatras of Madame d'Arblay's Memoirs we are glad to be able to extract one discriminating passage. Dr. Burney had attended Mr. Burke's funeral, and his daughter writes to him::

'How sincerely I sympathize in all you say of That his enemies say he that truly great man! mense superiority over all those who are merely was not perfect is nothing compared with his imexempted from his peculiar defects. That he was upright in heart, even when he acted wrong, I do truly believe; and that he asserted nothing he had being the most rapacious of villains to the King's not persuaded himself to be true, from Mr. Hastings' being incurably insane.

In 1795 the House of Lords concluded the trial of Warren Hastings by a general acquittal. Concerning this defeat of what Mr. Burke strangely thought the most important labour of his life (Burke's Cor., iv., 343), he addressed to the Speaker half-adozen letters in a strain of indignant regret, marked, like all his proceedings from first to last in this affair, with an extravagance, an enthusiasm of hostility to Hastings, for which we have always felt ourselves unable satisfactorily to account, and which contrasts "Though free from all little vanity, high above strangely with the general benignity of that envy, and glowing with zeal to exalt talents and pure heart and bright intellect, and sadly merit in others, he had, I believe, a consciousness with his pathetic allusions to the recent loss of his own greatness, and shut out those occasional and useful self-doubts which keep our judgments in of his son, which has left him, he says, ' a order by calling our motives and our passions into poor, feeble, undone creature, in a desolate account!'-Mem., vol. vi., p. 215.

'He was as generous as kind, and as liberal in his sentiments as he was luminous in intellect and extraordinary in abilities and eloquence.

Once, he said, he dined at Pitt's with Dundas | line we talked over will bring us speedily to a and Adam Smith, when the latter said to him after prosperous issue. 1 I am going next Thursday, for dinner, "What an extraordinary man Pitt is?-he a week or ten days, to Walmer, and hope to remakes me understand my own ideas better than before." "Vol. i., p. 151.

Adam This we can very well believe. Smith said once to Sir Joshua Reynolds, in his pompous, dictatorial way, that he made it a rule never to talk of what he understood

turn with my budget prepared to be opened before Christmas; and if that goes off tolerably well, it will give us peace before Easter. Ever yours,

'W. P.'

Did a great and wise man indulge in a more rash prediction. At that period the blessing of a Permanent peace was at the distance of twenty years.'-Vol. i., pp. 156, 157.

(Boswell's Johnson, vol. iv., p. 356); and as he talked, so there seems reason to suspect that he sometimes wrote, what he did not himself very clearly comprehend. It is too droll and too characteristic to be omitted, that after this dinner Mr. Speaker wrote a sonnet, yea, a sonnet to Dr. Adam Smith on his Essay on the Wealth of Nations-the sonnet being, as might be expected, about as poetical as the subject (vol. i., p. 151). Paris, Mr. Pitt's expectations would pro

'Mr. Walker, a large cotton-manufacturer, Lord Stanley, and Mr. Blackburn, M. P., once waited on Mr. Pitt, as a deputation on the state of the cotton-trade, when Pitt so succeeded in reconciling them to his own views, that Walker said to Black burn, on leaving Downing Street, "One would suppose that man had lived in a bleaching-ground all his life."'-Vol. i., p. 151.

Yet, Lord Sidmouth remarked,

Mr. Pitt was undoubtedly mistaken. But, in justice to his sagacity, it should be recollected that, while he was writing, the great crisis of Vendémiaire was in suspense, and that, but for the victory obtained on the very next day by Barras over the Sections of

bably have been fulfilled. That day-the celebrated 13 Vendémiaire, one of the most important in its results that the world has ever seen-produced Buonaparte, and with him a long series of consequences that no human foresight could have anticipated.

On the 27th of September, 1796, a new parliament assembling, Addington was, for the third time and without a dissentient voice, elected Speaker; and a short session How Pitt got his mass of knowledge no one closed with gloomy prospects, which the It was ever knew. He was hardly ever seen after his ensuing year awfully confirmed. accession to power with a book in his hand; sat cheered, indeed, at its outset by the victory late at table; and never rose till eleven, and then of St. Vincent, and at its close by that of Camgenerally took a short ride in the park.' 'He perdown; but the failure of Lord Malmesmust, therefore,' adds Dr. Pellew, have extracted bury's negotiation at Lisle, the rapid sucinformation from those he conversed with, as cesses of Buonaparte in Italy, and the displants imbibe nutriment from the air around graceful peace imposed on Austria—the fithem.'-Vol. i., p. nancial crisis that suspended the cash pay

1795:

151.

3,

One of the most characteristical features ments of the Bank, the mutiny in the fleet, of Pitt's mind was its hopeful spirit. Ad- and, in short, the portentous darkness of the dington writes to his brother, Aug. horizon in every quarter at home and abroad, during this eventful year, 1797,- were enough to confound the wisest and terrify the And here we meet a short and The accounts from Quiberon and the West bravest. Indies are deplorable in the extreme. If it be a apparently slight passage, which we feel it truth, that " magni est animi semper sperare," to be our duty to examine. From a letter which I believe it is, Pitt is an illustration of it, as to the Speaker from Pitt, when setting out I have ample reason for saying, from a letter for a short holiday at Walmer, is quoted this which I received from him yesterday.'

sentence:

As a still stronger instance of the sur- Meanwhile, I will write to you as fully as I prisingly hopeful temperament' of Pitt's can respecting public prospects, and particularly mind the Dean gives us the following let- finance, on which, as the essential point, I have been lately working most.'—Vol. i., p. 183.

ter:

On this the author observes

Downing Street, Sunday, Oct. 4th, 1795. My dear Sir,-By the last Paris papers, which 'Of the fulfilment of the above promise unforreach to the 1st, I rather think the Convention tunately no epistolary proof remains; but probawill carry its point, though it is not yet clear that bly this was the period to which Lord Sidmouth it will be without a convulsion. The accounts alluded in the following statement, which many from Sir J. Warren [off Quiberon] do not promise years afterwards he made to the author. Pitt much on that side, and those from the empire grow told me, as early as 1797, that I must make up my worse every day; but I am still sanguine that the mind to take the Government.'-Vol. i., p. 183.