His want of early education had deprived him, like Shelburne, of all opportunity of acquiring knowledge of the details of business, nor had he attempted to supply the defects of his own early training, either by himself acquiring a store of positive knowledge, or by gaining associates who could do for him what Price and Dunning were able to do for Shelburne. It would have been impossible for Walpole to describe the latter, as he described Chatham, as asserting during one of the debates of 1770, that Androgeus the Lord Mayor of London had defended the liberties of the city against Julius Cæsar.[1] Besides his want of acquired knowledge, Chatham laboured under the misfortune of having entered public life at a period when political morality was at a lower ebb than it had been at any time since the reign of Charles II. Base objects were being compassed by base men through still baser means. It was the age of Henry Fox and Bubb Dodington, of Rigby and Lady Yarmouth, of personal politics tempered by public corruption. To all this Chatham personally rose superior, but while despising the example before him, he did not scruple in some measure to follow it, when necessary for his own ends. There was however this difference between his conduct and that of his contemporaries. His ends were invariably noble, and even his impostures were carried out with dignity. He might flatter Lady Yarmouth, but it was not in order to retain the Pay Office; he might come down to the House of Lords, robed like some ancient senator about to die for his country, but he never threw down a dagger on the floor of the House of Commons. Ambition was the lodestar of his life, but it was ambition associated with worthy objects; the reputation of his country abroad, the integrity of her free institutions at home. And precisely in proportion as his countrymen recognized this to be the fact, they forgave the affectation and the mystery, the waywardness and the contradictory conduct, and all the other
- ↑ Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George III., iv. 122.
