a week after the conversation with Sir Richard Phillips, on the 7th May 1805, Dumont wrote to a friend: "There is no longer any information to be asked. The last event took place this morning at six o'clock. The two last days have been passed in a state of exhaustion or insensibility."[1] Lord Lansdowne had ended his stormy and chequered career. If life and health had been continued to him a little longer, he would probably have been a member of the Coalition Ministry formed in 1806 by Lord Grenville and Fox, or perhaps he would have been satisfied with seeing Lord Henry Petty filling the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-six. His remains were interred in the church of High Wycombe, in the county which has given five Premiers to Great Britain—Mr. Grenville, Lord Shelburne, the Duke of Portland, Lord Grenville, Lord Beaconsfield. No tasteless monument nor fulsome inscription disfigures his grave, but if any epitaph were needed to mark where he rests, it might be found in the words attributed to Bentham, that alone of his own time, the first Lord Lansdowne was "a Minister who did not fear the people."[2]
