the sake of effect which had always been ingredients in his character and were now stimulated by disease.[1]
To this opinion Shelburne himself seems to have inclined.[2] He in any case keenly felt the invidiousness of his own position: the representative of Chatham in the Cabinet, yet unable to obtain even the shortest interview with him; anxious himself to resign, yet desired to stay, and called upon to decide questions of great difficulty, yet without any certainty that he would not be thrown over by his principal. The bitter remembrance of this passage in his career, when unsupported and alone he had on the one hand to resist the attacks of the King and the intrigues of his colleagues, and on the other to suffer under the obstinate silence or empty declamations of his leader,[3] made him in the evening of life paint his picture of the great Earl in darker colours than the facts justified, and without adequate recognition of those great qualities which once had saved and once again might have saved the country,—qualities which he either thought too well known to need detailed description, or would have described had he lived to revise his own work.[4]
The ministerial changes did not actually take place till January, when Hillsborough entered on the administration of the American Colonies, and Weymouth succeeded to the management of Home Affairs and of the Northern
- ↑ Subsequently to the publication of the first edition of this book, I had some conversation with the eminent physician Sir Andrew Clark, as to the nature of Lord Chatham's complaint. Suppressed gout he said probably disordered the whole nervous system, and drove him into a state of mental depression varying with attacks of excitement almost equivalent to insanity. But there was no specific brain disease. It was after a bad attack of external gout that the patient for a time entirely recovered his force of mind.
- ↑ See the Chapter of Autobiography, supra, 55-60.
- ↑ In a paper by the Abbe Morellet, "English Parties in 1784," among the Lansdowne MSS., the following passage occurs: "Lord Shelburne has whispered it in my ear, and Mr. Franklin has told me a fact completely justifying this reproach. After several fruitless conferences with Lord Chatham on the Stamp Act, he asked for an interview in the country, that he might propose certain modifications in the Act of Parliament Lord Chatham intended to introduce. … Franklin arrived at eight. Lord Chatham perorated till two o'clock without comprehending or concluding anything, and sent away the American deputy son papier à la main comme il était venu."
- ↑ Lord Chesterfield to the shorter but in many respects not dissimilar picture of Lord Chatham in his Characters added this sentence: "However it must be acknowledged that he had those qualities which none but a great man can have with a mixture of those failings which are the common lot of wretched and imperfect human nature."—Letters (ed. Bradshaw), iii.
